“Old Lives Matter.” I fully agree with the title of Jeremy Horpedahl’s latest reply on the value of life. To say that the life of an 80-year-old is worth 1% or .1% as much as the life of a 10-year-old is not deny the high value of elderly lives, because 10-year-old lives are immensely valuable.
However, I disagree with almost all of Jeremy’s arguments. To wit:
Let’s start with Caplan’s three reasons, which he calls “iron-clad”: young people have more years to live, those years are generally healthier, and young people will be missed more when they are gone. The first in undeniably true on average, the second is probably true almost all the time, and I’m not sure on the third, but I’m willing to admit it’s not a slam dunk either way.
So how can I disagree? These are only three things. There are many other considerations, and we can imagine other reasons that old lives are valued as much or more than younger lives! I’ll call mine 4-6 to go with Caplan’s 1-3:
- Old age spending is the largest component of public budgets in developed countries (and this is unlikely mostly due to rent seeking or the self interest of younger generations).
- The elderly possess wisdom which is highly valuable and that the young benefit from.
- The last years of your life are, on average, worth a lot more — you are usually very wealthy, have no employment obligations, you have grandchildren you love (without the responsibilities of parenting), and are (until the very end) generally healthy too.
Taken as a whole, I think these three reasons present a strong counterargument to Caplan’s three reasons. And I think we could certainly come up with more! My point being that Caplan has picked three areas where clearly young lives have the advantage, but ignored all the good reasons why old lives are more valuable.
I deny that any of these reasons are even in the same ballpark as mine. Using Jeremy’s numbering:
4. As I explain in The Myth of the Rational Voter and elsewhere, government policy is largely based on what people feel comfortable publicly saying. Ugly truths are politically impotent, which is the central reason why public policy is so terribly inefficient. And “The lives of the elderly are worth much less than the young’s” is a quintessential ugly truth.
5. A few elderly people are wise, but they were almost certainly even wiser a couple decades earlier. By any standard measure, their elderly’s cognitive abilities are in severe decline. Their non-verbal IQ plummets, and their IQ on timed tests is especially low. More to the point, the elderly score low on psychometric tests of common sense, also known as “wisdom.” Unlike IQ, common test rises into middle age; after that, though, common sense gradually declines to tragically low levels. Which is why the elderly are so vulnerable to scams, fail to pay their bills, back up their cars without checking their mirrors, and so on.
6. Even if the last years of life had especially high marginal value, I’d still be right that the total value of the last years of your life must be worth much less than the total value of your entire life. But Jeremy’s arguments that your “golden years” have high marginal value are also weak. Yes, being a grandparent is great; I’m really looking forward to it. But it’s consumption, not mere wealth, that people enjoy – and the elderly have low consumption. People normally like working, if only for the social component. And the idea that the elderly are “generally healthy” is absurd. About half of people 80+ say their health is “fair” or “poor” – and they’re obviously grading on a curve. A 20-year-old with the health of a “healthy” 80-year-old would be considered severely ill.
Jeremy then covers a lot of empirical research on estimates of the value of life by age. A great literature review, but the main thing it shows is that my view is less aberrant than Jeremy initially suggested. Many papers do not reach the insane conclusion that the total value of life rises as time slips through your fingers.
He closes with:
For my last point, let me zoom out and mention again why we are discussing this question in April 2021. It’s related to COVID-19. If indeed Caplan is correct, and an elderly life is only worth 1/1,000 of a young life, not only are “lockdowns” not justified, we would be foolish to take any steps to protect the elderly. In this case, we not only need to junk Social Security and Medicare, we need to junk the Great Barrington Declaration too. Focused Protection of the elderly? What foolishness, those lives aren’t worth more than a few pennies!
Greatly overstated. If 10-year-old lives are worth $20M, and 80-year-old lives are worth 1% as much, they’re still worth $200,000, not “pennies.” Moderate COVID caution for non-vaccinated individuals is in order, as I’ve been saying all along. But yes, reasonable estimates of the value of elderly lives do greatly undermine the case for the totalitarian COVID crusade of the last year. Indeed, even if we count all years of life equally (not lives, but years of life), the totalitarian COVID crusade badly fails a cost-benefit test.
P.S. What if I were elderly? Since I’m only slightly past my peak IQ and common sense, I wish to state for the record that if there is ever a similar pandemic when I am elderly, my considered judgment is that (a) I do not want my family or friends to greatly disrupt their lives to protect me, and (b) I absolutely do not want to be isolated from family or friends for “my own protection.” Indeed, since I plan to still be working at 80, I would like to continue teaching in-person during this future pandemic, though I would reluctantly choose to wear a mask when doing so.
P.P.S. Tyler claims to agree with me over Jeremy, but I don’t think he’s going to retract this.
READER COMMENTS
Eric Schoenberg
Apr 22 2021 at 11:19am
This is a strong claim, do you have any evidence to support it? Carroll in “Why do the rich save so much?” (2000) argues to the contrary.
”But it’s consumption, not mere wealth, that people enjoy”
Andrew M
Apr 22 2021 at 9:30pm
I have a different concern. If consumption is just consumer spending, then a lot of enjoyable activity gets left out that’s relevant to the quality of one’s life. When I listen to my CDs, or re-read (or just read!) already-purchased books, or play my long-owned piano, I’m consuming.
Matthias
Apr 23 2021 at 6:56am
That’s a matter of accounting.
When a company buys an asset, they don’t immediately mark it down as consumed, ie to zero value. They consume it over time.
For your CDs, similar considerations would apply, wouldn’t they?
Mark Brophy
Apr 24 2021 at 4:36am
I value wealth over consumption because it gives me freedom, peace of mind, and returns on investment. It has been especially valuable during the current totalitarian state because my house is more enjoyable than other peoples’ houses. I enjoy reading and playing piano and guitar because I have the time to do so rather than working at a job that requires me to wear a mask for 8 hours each day. I also have time to walk and keep fit.
zeke5123
Apr 22 2021 at 11:28am
I imagine if most grandparents were faced with the choice of them dying or their grandkids dying they would choose to die themselves. Obviously, they’d rather no one dies. But I bet for most it isn’t really much of a decision.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 1:22pm
That’s obviously the case, but how many other grandparents (along with themselves) would they sacrifice/kill/withhold treatment from in order to save the one grandchild? Bryan thinks it is at least 100, probably 1000.
zeke5123
Apr 22 2021 at 3:39pm
Well, I don’t have grandkids. But being the moral monster I am, I would easily sacrifice thousands of grandparents to save my child.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 11:32am
From Caplan’s first post: “All things considered, I’d say that a reasonable value of X is at least 100. Probably more like 1,000.” That seems more “grossly overstated” than anything in Jeremy’s post. If he actually believes his 1000 times estimate, the value of old people’s lives are closer to being worth pennies than the $200k Bryan is suggesting in this post. Seems like Bryan put out an estimate for the value of old people relative to young people and his estimate was not close to correct. Are Jeremy’s 4-6 good critiques? Not really… I’d recommend Bryan engage with the observations from the comments section on his original post. Lots of critiques of his views there.
Additionally, whenever we think about VSL for children’s lives from a willingness to pay perspective, we are always using parents’ valuations more than the child’s (they are the ones paying for the kid’s stuff, no?). Caplan always wants to use Social Desirability Bias to down weight the many things he disagrees with. Could any of the VSL estimates for children be driven of by the SDB?
AMT
Apr 22 2021 at 12:10pm
I agree with these points. The 1000 times estimate would give a value of $20,000. Generally, Bryan seems far too dismissive of arguments which point towards the utility of life for the elderly being at least within the same ballpark as that of the young. Since there are about 10x as many years of life, for Bryan’s estimate, youth years of life are worth 100 times that of elderly years of life, which just seems absurd. I cannot imagine how you get to a multiple into the double digits. Apparently hedonic adaptation is absolutely 100% false? Seriously…
robc
Apr 22 2021 at 12:31pm
Double digits is easy. If you value every year of life equally, then someone with a life expectancy of 50 is worth 10x someone with a life expectancy of 5.
You can only get into the low double digits, but you can get there.
If you think the value of the years are worth more earlier, you could get to 100, but 1000 just seems entirely out of the ballpark, but somewhere between 10 and 100 seems the right order of magnitude.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 1:43pm
“If you think the value of the years are worth more earlier”
How the value of the later years change also comes into the equation. Bryan has already said we shouldn’t value the old years as much due to health concerns. Pick an index year (maybe 60 years old) that has a value of X, then find the multipliers on each year before and after. Looking back on my life thus far (almost 36 years old), I can’t say that I would value one much more highly than the next. There’s a lot of hedonic adaptation out there. Maybe when I’m older, I will be just utterly miserable, but I can’t see the “value” of the life of a 10-year-old being much more than 20x that of an 80-year-old based on the relative value of each year of life.
Heck, if you look at from a biological perspective (and maybe from the view of someone like Derek Parfit) with the 80-year-old not having anymore children, the “value” of the 10-year-old relative to the 80-year-old is only the expected number of offspring that 10-year-old causes to come into existence. Unless that 10-year-old grows up to save the lives of lots and lots of young people (who would go on to have children), then the value of the life of the 10-year-old might only be 2-5 times that of an 80-year-old.
AMT
Apr 22 2021 at 5:28pm
robc you are completely misunderstanding my point. I was not at all saying it’s hard to imagine one life being 100x more valuable than another in total, because obviously life expectancy is extremely important. I disagreed with Bryan’s assumption that “youth years of life are worth 100 times that of elderly years of life.” Meaning the 365 days someone spends as a ten year old compared to the 365 days that one spends as an 80 year old.
Jazi Zilber
Apr 22 2021 at 12:36pm
why wear a mask only reluctantly?
isn’t the cost/benefit math of masks pretty positive?
PS. I fully agree that the cost benefit math even with generous assumptions makes most lockdowns an absolute luancy.
QALY per average death vs QALY directly lost via lockdown + economic losses + lifetime income losses of some. absolute lunacy
zeke5123
Apr 22 2021 at 3:45pm
CDC Europe somewhat recently posted a lit review. They found weak to moderate evidence that surgical masks provide a small benefit. They stated there was scant evidence on cloth masks, but recommended them anyway.
There are numerous costs to masks, including:
Harder for people to understand others, especially if the listener is hard of hearing.
Many people find them very uncomfortable.
They signal “be afraid.” This can cause people to act in other ways we don’t want.
This doesn’t include costs to kids which wouldn’t be relevant in BC’s old age.
It isn’t obvious that masks are net-net positive sum. It is obvious that masks are net-net negative sum when the wearer are small kids.
Ryan McPherson
Apr 23 2021 at 1:16pm
Exactly. There is arguably zero benefit, and an extremely high cost. This would be slightly mitigated if mask-usage was voluntary, but add in the loss of liberty, the shredding of our constitution and the rule of law, and the private enforcement (where I live, in WA state, the gov employs truly fascist – and I don’t use that word lightly – strategies for enforcement. Don’t punish the person who refuses to wear the mask, punish the business that doesn’t kick this person out of the store/restaurant/whatever…). The social damage is astronomical.
Additionally, the damage to the psyche of children is astronomical. I can only verify this anecdotally with a handful of cases, but I have also read that young people (under 20) have a vastly exaggerated view of their own risk. We are teaching kids (falsely) that they are highly at risk, that they themselves constitute a risk to others, and that human interaction is something to be avoided.
The costs are enormous.
Mark Brophy
Apr 24 2021 at 4:53am
No, the cost/benefit math of masks is not pretty positive. The non-medical masks that most people wear are useless so Germany requires medical masks on public transport and Fauci recommends wearing two masks. In 2018, a dispute arose in Canada between nurse and hospital managers in which the managers gave the nurses the option of wearing masks or getting vaccinated. The court ruled that masks are useless, even medical masks, in preventing virus transmission so the managers were coercing the nurses into taking vaccines. Masks are useful for surgeons who are expecting body fluids to spray their face but do not prevent virus transmission. Masks prevent virus transmission to the extent that they obstruct breathing but completely stopping breathing results in suffocation and death. The breathing obstruction in a medical mask is so severe that a surgeon wearing one will suffer headaches that destroy as many brain cells as a surgeon who gets drunk on Saturday night after working.
MarkW
Apr 22 2021 at 12:36pm
But it’s consumption, not mere wealth, that people enjoy
I think most enjoy both. Wealth means freedom from worry and most older people I have know care quite a lot about being able to make gifts and leave bequests to their children and grandchildren.
People normally like working, if only for the social component.
‘University professor’ is an atypically pleasant, interesting job which people are willing to do for very low wages (plenty of adjuncts make little more than minimum wage). And most early retirees I’ve known have been quite social (I actually have a relative who went back to work after retiring in Florida because he couldn’t take all the partying). But when others got into their late 80s and 90s, loneliness did become more of a problem because so many of their spouses, friends, and relatives had already died.
And you still have not addressed the point that happiness is particularly high among the older population — surely that matters more than health or consumption, no?
Let’s do a 10-year-old vs a 50-year old. Life expectancy difference is about 72 at age 10 and 33 at age 50, which gives us a little over 2:1 ratio. And then consider that the 10-50 period contains the least happy middle-aged years, where the post-50 years contain the happiest ones after childhood. Bottom line, I’d say the life of a 10-year-old is worth no more than 2 times that of a 50-year-old.
Philo
Apr 22 2021 at 12:54pm
The idea that the old have precious wisdom is a relic of the preliterate ages. When there was little or no historical record people had to rely on memory, and old people could remember events further back in time. Also, the lessons they had learned from experience were almost unavailable to less experienced people. But with writing, and reading, these advantages were greatly reduced, while the mental decline caused by aging has remained in full force. The pace of new developments in the modern world is clearly leaving the slow-witted old (and even middle-aged) people behind.
Mark Brophy
Apr 24 2021 at 4:56am
How do you explain the fact that most people earn the most money after age 50?
Pat
Apr 22 2021 at 1:30pm
You wouldn’t have made the common test mistake twice in your forties.
(I’m right behind you 4 years away, so I make my jokes now while I can still think of them.)
Tyler Wells
Apr 22 2021 at 1:41pm
Is it at all applicable that, if you fail to make it to old age, then you don’t enjoy any of the benefits that Jeremy expounds upon? It would seem incredibly difficult to argue that a young life isn’t worth at least as much as an old one.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 2:27pm
Rough calculation for a gut check: and 80-year-old has a life expectancy of 9 years. Let’s say the 10-year-old will live until she’s 110 (I think that’s generous). Just from the difference in years left, the 10-year-old has ~11 times the number of years left than the 80-year-old. So for the value of the life of the 10-year-old to be 100 times that of the 80-year-old, I’d have to value each of the 9 years left for the 80-year-old at 11% of the value for each of the 100 years left for the 10-year-old. That’s assuming that all those 100 years that the 10-year-old has left have the same value and no discounting.
Thinking about my life, I can’t imagine the utter misery I would have to endure for a year to be worth the equivalent of 50% of (say) my 30th year, let alone 11%. Maybe the last year would be like that, but I can’t imagine all the 9 years left for the 80 year old having 11% of the value of a normal year.
With even the slightest bit of introspection, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere close to Bryan’s 100x estimate and certainly nowhere near his 1000x estimate.
Matthias
Apr 23 2021 at 7:01am
I suggest the relevant thought experiment is:
Ask an 80 year old, how many of her remaining years she would sacrifice to experience another year as a 30 year old.
JFA
Apr 23 2021 at 7:36am
Well, the numbers in my rough calculation suggest that if the 80-year-old valued their lives like Bryan values them, then at best those 80-year-olds would give up all 9 years they have left to experience one year as a 30-year-old (presumably you mean at the same health status/physical ability of a 30-year-old… I don’t think many (some, probably) would give up any of their remaining years if it meant not having that time with their kids and grandkids and retirement).
If they really only have 9 years left, they’d actually give up ~8 years and 1 month to get ~11 months as a 30-year-old.
DeservingPorcupine
Apr 23 2021 at 5:14pm
This tradeoff seems totally reasonable to me. Imagine spending that year with your grandkids with the prowess of a 30yo. I’d much rather have them remember me as vital and fun for a year than 9 years of memories of a person who needs a toilet all the time and has to “rest” every 100 yards.
Don Boudreaux
Apr 22 2021 at 3:15pm
Bryan:
You’re correct that the steep age profile of Covid-19 fatalities matters greatly for assessing the reasonableness of policy responses to the disease. And I applaud your eloquence and care at explaining the problems with Jeremy Horpedahl’s and others’ resistance to what truly does seem to be an irresistible conclusion.
To avoid the many challenges with calculating the value of a statistical life, think of the matter in the following way: Suppose that a society, identical to ours, will – with 100 percent certainty – be stricken with one of three deadly pathogens. But this society can choose which of the three to suffer. Each pathogen will kill the same number of persons, with this number being significant, potentially as high as 0.15 percent of the society’s total population.
Pathogen A will kill only people 80 years old and older.
Pathogen B will kill only people 30 years old and younger.
Pathogen C will kill indiscriminately across all age groups.
The Fates give the society 24 hours to choose which of these three pathogens to endure. Perhaps it’s true that a surprisingly large number of very selfish and frightened people 80 and older will argue for pathogen B, while many other elderly people, being a bit less selfish, will argue for pathogen C.
But surely the great majority of citizens – including, I suspect, elderly citizens – would argue for pathogen A. And this stance is the one that’s ethically agreeable. To see why, suppose further that just before voting on the pathogen is conducted, each person is given a shot that, for a few minutes, puts that person behind a veil of age-ignorance, causing each person to temporarily lose all knowledge of whether he or she is old, young, or middle-aged. Surely the great bulk of these age-blind people would vote for pathogen A over pathogen B or C.
The age profile of Covid’s fatalities, of course, isn’t quite as stark as that of pathogen A. But it’s much closer to pathogen A than to pathogen B or C.
Because pathogens B and C would each be regarded as far more devastating, heartbreaking, and frightening than pathogen A, if society were nevertheless stricken with B or C rather than with A, society would reasonably expend more effort and resources protecting against the pathogen than it would spend protecting against pathogen A. This point I cannot prove, but it does seem to me to follow firmly from the ranking of the three pathogens.
But even if the amount of effort and resources spent combatting pathogen A would be as great as that spent combatting either of the other two pathogens, surely the pattern of this use of effort and resources would differ. Surely efforts would be made to focus protection on its victims (namely, people 8o and older). Surely younger people would not be treated as if they are as at much risk from the pathogen as are the elderly.
The magnitude of Covid lockdowns and other indiscriminate, often draconian policies strikes me as what people would be more likely to endorse if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C. Yet Covid is much closer to pathogen A. If the responses that we’ve endured over the past 14 months are acceptable in light of the very obvious and steep age profile of Covid’s victims, what, I ask, would acceptable responses look like if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C? It’s terrifying to contemplate.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 3:59pm
“resistance to what truly does seem to be an irresistible conclusion”
It seems that the resistance is against the certainty with which Bryan claims the life of a 10-year-old is worth at least 100 times or “Probably more like 1,000” times that of an 80-year-old.
No one seems to be claiming that 80-year-olds are worth more than 10-year-olds (though there is some debate over the value of middle-aged folks relative to 10-year-olds), so your hypothetical probably won’t draw much debate.
You can disagree with Bryan’s (almost obviously?) ridiculous claim about the value of an 80-year-old’s life while also arguing against “lockdown” as practiced in some places.
JFA
Apr 22 2021 at 4:28pm
“If the responses that we’ve endured over the past 14 months are acceptable in light of the very obvious and steep age profile of Covid’s victims, what, I ask, would acceptable responses look like if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C? It’s terrifying to contemplate.”
I’m gonna push back on the view that lockdown (at least as practiced in the US) has been some totalitarian dystopia. I’m not going to deny that there have been large costs associated with it. There have. But most of the papers that show no effect of lockdown on Covid mostly argue that they don’t have an effect because lockdown violations mostly go unenforced and in places that don’t have “lockdown” their is enough change in behavior that the effects overall between lockdown and not are broadly similar. So where lockdowns don’t show an effect, it’s mostly because lockdown wasn’t complete. Lockdown like they did in China and you probably see an effect.
Note that under “lockdown” unemployment was back to around 6% by August/September. No doubt super painful for people who have lost their jobs, but not really evidence that people are trapped in their homes. The area that could have been improved was the response in school closures.
If the scenario were more akin to B or C, I’d hope there would be a lot more effort to actually control the spread of the virus.
Jens
Apr 23 2021 at 3:33am
You have to live on another planet. I haven’t seen any draconian measures in Central Europe in the past 14 months. I’ve seen a lot of things that got on my nerves. Partly because the state did something, partly because it did not do something (and the same applies to almost all other actors). And for all I know, the difference to North America wasn’t that complete in terms of quality. I wonder how you would describe really draconian measures.
This whole line of reasoning reminds me a bit of those people who use a long multiplication term of probabilities to “prove” that extraterrestrials must exist or cannot exist. The more multiplicands you have, the easier it is to estimate each multiplicand a little bit too high or too low, whereby each step still somehow seems halfway acceptable on its own. But if you always do this with the same tendency for 29 multiplicands, you get a result that has no contact with reality.
We had a totally harmless pandemic, with totally worthless victims and totally draconian punishments, ergo, we are experiencing a totalitarian development. q.e.d.
Ryan
Apr 23 2021 at 7:50pm
I saw this cross-posted on cafe-hayek and replied thusly. On econlog, I can actually leave comments instead of sending emails, though!
___________
I think I can give you a somewhat simpler explanation of what is happening now, but also some reason to suspect that our response to pathogens B or C might not be terribly different.
Quite simply, most people are ignorant. If they are not willfully ignorant, they are somehow unmotivated to get out there and educate themselves. Case-in-point, I had 2 conversations in the past 2 days, one with a neighbor in his 70’s and one with a client who is 17. The neighbor made a lot of claims about covid, with which I did not feel terribly inclined to argue, but I did push back a little bit.
First, he claimed that the only explanation for a low 2020/21 flu season was masks. I didn’t argue with this, except to say that it isn’t supported by any data, but I would propose the following. Why do you think there is a challenge for vaccine-manufacturers to accurately guess which will be the dominant strain of covid for the purposes of that year’s vaccines? Simply put, flu numbers are generally the same. Sometimes one strain is dominant and sometimes another is dominant, but it is never the case that last years Flu-X numbers are added to this year’s Flu-Y numbers and we have double the numbers overall. And nobody says “gee, I wonder why flu-X, which was so dominant last year, is not nearly as dominant this year?” I don’t know the full answer, but I think it is probably more reasonable to say that covid was dominant rather than saying that the measures, which apparently had no discernable impact on covid, somehow entirely stopped the flu in its tracks.
The neighbor just spouted this off as conventional wisdom, when in my opinion it doesn’t really pass even the simplest logical sniff-test.
The next claim my neighbor made was that “covid is killing young people!” This in response to my suggestion that we have vastly overestimated the risk of covid in relation to other risks we deal with every day. I only countered that, for people under 70, the risk of complications from covid appears to be statistically less than the risk of complications from the “ordinary” flu.
In the conversation with my 17 year old client, similar claims were made. One in particular: she stated that covid is most dangerous to the very young and to the very old. She believed (as she was likely told) that covid is just as deadly for children as it is for people in their 80’s and 90’s. So, we’re not just protecting grandmas and grandpas, we are protecting children as well. I have no idea where she got this – maybe from the knee-jerk closures of our schools? But I told her that for people between the ages of 0 and 20, the risk of death/complications from covid approaches 0%. While we can say that there are examples of young people dying from covid (or at least with it), this is statistically misleading in exactly the same way that the evidence of blood clots from vaccines is misleading, where the percentage of vaccinated individuals getting blood-clots is nearly the same as what we’d expect to see in the general population, regardless of blood clots. Most of the examples of young people dying include various other factors that would contribute strongly to chances of dying even absent any virus.
My overall point, here, though, is that I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people in our population right now who are generally on board with our various governments’ responses to covid, likely view covid as being the Pathogen C in your example. This stems from ignorance of the basic facts, which (given the extreme amount of censorship and stifling of discussion that we have seen over the past year) is another conversation entirely.
Knut P. Heen
Apr 23 2021 at 11:12am
I think it is useful to think like this.
Suppose we ask the young (people in their twenties for example) the following question: How many days in lockdown will you pay for living one year extra at the end of your life with certainty?
I have a strong suspicion that the market price would be quite low. Moreover, I think the price will fall with an increase in supply. That is, the longer you are expected to live, the less you are willing to pay to live even longer. If people think 80 years is “long enough”, then the answer will be close to zero.
The lockdown debate should be a debate about exchanging life quality for life quantity. Unfortunately, the focus of the political debate is (as always?) about interpersonal comparison of utility.
Guest123
Apr 23 2021 at 6:14pm
I am not surprised, but it is unfortunate that the vast majority of people (including everyone here on this “freedom/markets friendly” blog) go along with these collectivist arguments.
The basic premise in this discussion (and in many other “public issues”) is that “we” as a society need to come together and decide what policy/action “we” should do regarding COVID. And, in order to decide if “we” should have strict lockdowns, no lockdowns, or somewhere in between, “we” need to (among other things) evaluate the relative importance of an 80-year old vs 10-year old’s life. Once “we” have decided on this relative importance, then “we” can decide what amount of lockdown measures are justified.
The problem is that this premise completely ignores the property rights of individuals. *Furthermore, property rights make this entire discussion irrelevant / moot*.
When you ignore property rights, and treat other’s property as your own (to regulate or seize), then conflict will almost always exist. Your consequential arguments about the efficacy of such a lockdown are irrelevant. Violating your neighbor’s property rights will just lead to division and resentment in our society.
Michael Gray
Apr 23 2021 at 8:53pm
Only economists would reduce the value of human life to these tawdry metrics.
andy
Apr 24 2021 at 2:32am
These things are likely to occur once or twice during your life. You just don’t know when. So it’s only a matter of choosing a package:
1) If it happens when you are 30, you get what you got. If it happens when you are 80, you have ~ 15% lower probability of dying that year.
2) If it happens when you are 30, you are free to do what you want. If it happens when you are 80, you have to isolate yourself from the rest of the ‘young’ world, otherwise you get 15% higher probability of dying. You have to put up with full ICUs and news about lots dying people.
What are you going to choose?
Dzhaughn
Apr 25 2021 at 12:55am
I think Caplan overestimates the value of a 10 year old life. Mercatus could offer a subsidy of $1M per healthy and sane child and be swimming in them–in 10 years.
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