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> lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent Maybe some people are arguing this, but certainly not all anti-lockdown folks. The more compelling (and more s

> lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent Maybe some people are arguing this, but certainly not all anti-lockdown folks. The more compelling (and more subtle) argument is that Covid NPIs don’t save enough lives to be worth their high costs. Contrary to most people’s intuition, the value of saving one life is not infinite — it’s something like the integral with respect to time of the happiness they would have had for the remainder of their lives (plus second-order effects like their death making their loved ones sad, etc.) Since this quantity is finite, it’s in fact possible that making N people’s lives worse by x for duration D is worse than shortening M people’s lives by duration E, depending on the values of the variables involved. But most people refuse to even attempt to estimate the values, because human intuition (wrongly, IMO) tends to reject quantifying the value of life in this way.

xorcist 5y ago
> the value of saving one life is not infinite Nowhere is this more clear than in traffic. There has been an overwhelming research all around the world on this since the 60s. We know fairly well how many lives are saved by policy changes, including installing railings, ice removal, the lowering of speed limits, lower blood alcohol levels, and so on. Yet we ended up doing it partially and in controlled increments. Money talks.
- couchand 5y ago
  This is a good point to bring up but kind of lands in a different place than the GP's argument. Cars aren't boosted because a rational analysis has determined that the negative externalities are worth it; rather, cars are boosted despite the evidence that the measures you mention are cost-effective ways to save lives. The continued subsidy of cars is proof that emotion trumps reason.
civilized 5y ago
I've got no problem with debating this sort of reasonable thesis. I only have a problem when people push extreme conspiratorial meme narratives designed to gin up and spread partisan emotion while being systematically immune to disproof like a religion. If you point out their thesis has an issue because of some government mortality statistics, they immediately move to conspiratorial doubt of the validity of those statistics. These folks are just a baby step away from the mental diarrhea of 5G COVID, Bill Gates vaccine chips, etc. FWIW, in my ideal world, the government would have had a stockpile of a couple dozen N95s for each person, and we would have distributed them immediately after the initial outbreak and enacted some serious rules with teeth about wearing them. That probably would have been good enough to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. NPIs could perhaps have been limited to sit-down restaurants and similar activities. I also think that, while anti-lockdown types may be right about some government mandates, they may be over-estimating the impact of those mandates. Most of the socioeconomic impact of COVID has been from individual people choosing to avoid their normal activities because they don't want to get COVID.

xorcist 5y ago

> the value of saving one life is not infinite Nowhere is this more clear than in traffic. There has been an overwhelming research all around the world on this since the 60s. We know fairly well how many lives are saved by policy changes, including installing railings, ice removal, the lowering of speed limits, lower blood alcohol levels, and so on. Yet we ended up doing it partially and in controlled increments. Money talks.

couchand 5y ago
This is a good point to bring up but kind of lands in a different place than the GP's argument. Cars aren't boosted because a rational analysis has determined that the negative externalities are worth it; rather, cars are boosted despite the evidence that the measures you mention are cost-effective ways to save lives. The continued subsidy of cars is proof that emotion trumps reason.

civilized 5y ago

I've got no problem with debating this sort of reasonable thesis. I only have a problem when people push extreme conspiratorial meme narratives designed to gin up and spread partisan emotion while being systematically immune to disproof like a religion. If you point out their thesis has an issue because of some government mortality statistics, they immediately move to conspiratorial doubt of the validity of those statistics. These folks are just a baby step away from the mental diarrhea of 5G COVID, Bill Gates vaccine chips, etc. FWIW, in my ideal world, the government would have had a stockpile of a couple dozen N95s for each person, and we would have distributed them immediately after the initial outbreak and enacted some serious rules with teeth about wearing them. That probably would have been good enough to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. NPIs could perhaps have been limited to sit-down restaurants and similar activities. I also think that, while anti-lockdown types may be right about some government mandates, they may be over-estimating the impact of those mandates. Most of the socioeconomic impact of COVID has been from individual people choosing to avoid their normal activities because they don't want to get COVID.