Truth and Dare

Aesop over at the Raconteur Report takes umbrage at those arguing that we need to lift the shut downs over the Wuhan virus before it crashes the economy (if it hasn't already done so). To do so, he falls into the trap of a false equivalence. Specifically, he asks:

How many people are you willing to kill?
Where's the line in the sand where we finally hit too many dead?
Is it one?
Or shall we just leap straight to mass murder?

Of course, opening up the economy is not mass murder, and certainly is not the equivalent of Adolf Hitler having herded the Jews and other undesirables into death camps (something he also suggests with his inclusion of a Hitler meme).

      Another problem I have with his post is his implicit argument that there is no point at which the economic gains outweigh the costs in human life, because, I presume, he believes a human life is of infinite worth. He doesn't explicitly say this, but it is implicit in his argument because he wants the readers to believe they are bastards if they try to answer the question of how many are you willing to kill (or more accurately, how many deaths would you tolerate) to allow the economy to be reopened.

      An actuary or economist, given data on what the economic impact would be, probably could come up with an accurate number of deaths that would be tolerable. I'm neither, but I can point out some things. For instance, we as a society tolerate an incredible amount of death and mayhem in order to have motor vehicles. From the statistics I came across in a quick Google search, it appears that there are approximately 6 million auto accidents per year just in the United States. These accidents result in 4.4 million injuries and 38,000 deaths. Just so we can freely drive when and where we want to. Are we mass murderers because we support the private ownership of automobiles? I think not. Is preventing the economy from crashing worth at least a number of additional deaths equal to allowing automobiles? Probably.

     But it isn't even as simple as this because the question isn't 0 deaths if we keep the economy closed versus 1,000s of deaths if we open the economy. We may not know the numbers, but we know that if the economy crashes there will be many, many deaths: people will die of despair--suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction; people will die of desperation due to increased crime and violence (for instance, we have already seen an increase in domestic violence); people will die because of hunger, lack of health insurance, and on and on. World wide, the death toll will be even much larger, and we will see mass starvation and the collapse of health systems in third world countries due to increasing costs and reduced international aid, and the resulting increase in war and internal violence.

    I've seen estimates that the 2008-2010 financial crises resulted in 260,000 excess cancer-related deaths just within the OECD (the 34-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) member nations, and over 500,000 worldwide. Another study found 4884 excess suicides in just 2009 in the European and American countries included in the study. (See also here and here). A study just focusing on suicides prompted by housing distress found that suicides doubled in the Great Recession. Another study "suggest[ed] 28,000-50,000 excess infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa in the crisis-affected year of 2009." Research focused on Ireland found "a 17.2 per cent increase in cardiovascular deaths on average across both genders in the year after the 2008 crash compared to the previous year." A UCLA study looking at the impact of the great recession on blood pressure and blood glucose levels found:

... that blood pressure increased significantly among all groups during the time period, and blood glucose did too, among certain groups. The authors speculate the reason for the spike was stress—potentially different stressors for different generations. The younger people in the cohort were either unemployed, or those still working were likely wondering how on Earth they would be able to retire. The older people may have owned their own homes and watched the housing market collapse. All of this, they found, likely drove up their stress levels, and blood pressure.

More generally, the Preston Curve demonstrates a positive correlation between income and life expectancy; thus, as incomes decline among laid off workers and their families, life expectancy will also fall.

    So, the decision to reopen is a calculation of which option has the highest costs. We do it all the time. For instance, since I believe Aesop is in a medical field, let's look at the cost in human lives of medical mistakes. A 2017 paper related that "[r]ecent studies of medical errors have estimated errors may account for as many as 251,000 deaths annually in the United States (U.S)., making medical errors the third leading cause of death." Would Aesop countenance Nuremberg style trials to convict and execute the thousands of doctors, nurses, EMT's, etc., that caused this mass murder? I doubt it. Why? Because despite this truly awesome level of death, it is far outweighed by the number of lives that are saved or improved by the medical system.

     So, in the end, the appropriate answer to Aesop's question is to echo it: "How many are you willing to kill to keep the economy closed? How many ruined lives are worth it? Is it just one, or should we just jump to mass murder?"