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Co-blogger Scott Sumner recently responded to co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s critique of Scott’s earlier post in which Scott stated “On a list of regulatory overreaction, these mandates [on masks, vaccines, etc.] don’t even make my ‘top 100’.”
Bryan agreed with Scott that the ratio of costs to benefits for many other regulations is higher than the cost/benefit ratio for Covid regulations in the United States. But, argued Bryan, the difference between costs of Covid regulation and benefits of Covid regulations was much greater than the difference between costs and benefits for the other regulations Scott referred to.
Scott’s recent response meets Bryan on this territory and he argues that Bryan substantially understates the benefits of Covid regulations and overstates the costs.
My view is that Bryan is closer to being right than Scott, although, like Scott, I don’t have Bryan’s confidence that he can use survey data on how people value years under Covid regulations versus years under Covid life. (By the way, a criticism Scott could have made, and maybe implicitly made, is that that’s the wrong comparison. We had “Covid life” with various degrees of regulation. I think the survey, to be useful for this discussion, should have been years of life under Covid with no regulation versus years of life under Covid with some degree of regulation. Admittedly, this is hard to get at because you’re getting not just people’s subjective valuations of life but also people’s subjective estimates of probabilities.)
This will not be a complete response to Scott but here are the major areas on which I agree and disagree with Scott.
I have one major agreement with Scott on his statement about risks:
When I read critics on Covid caution (not Bryan), I see a lot of innumeracy. People talk about a 1% chance of dying as if it’s a small risk.
I agree and I thought that as early as March 2020. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the economics of safety legislation in underground coal mines. In the late 1960s, if I recall correctly, the risk of dying for coal miners in underground mines was about 1 in 10,000. That’s a 0.01 percent chance of dying in a year. And we thought (and thought correctly) that coal mining was a very dangerous occupation. Not like logging, by the way. When I worked in an underground nickel mine in 1969, older fellow workers (and they were all older than me) told me never to work as a logger. So a 1% chance of dying is huge.
A key number in Scott’s analysis is the infection fatality rate. Scott claims that it’s 0.6, but the number I recall (I can’t find the source offhand) over the whole U.S. population is less than half as much, at about 0.25. That’s a big difference.
Another area of contention is the fatality rate for people with pre-existing conditions. Scott writes:
Some talk about the risk for the under 65 group being merely people with pre-existing conditions, as if those people are sickly invalids. But I often see pictures in the media of healthy looking cops who have died of Covid. On closer inspection, some of them looked a bit overweight. And of course obesity is a major a pre-existing condition. I’m rather thin, and play tennis three times a week. So I’m healthy, right? Actually I’ve had crappy lungs my entire life, with several bad cases of pneumonia in my 30s. (If I’d been born before antibiotics, I doubt I would have lived to age 40.) So am I at higher risk? I honestly don’t know. But I really don’t see the point of people saying Covid is only a problem for the old and those with pre-existing conditions. Lots of people have at least one pre-existing condition. Obesity is not exactly rare in America.
Scott notes that he has a pre-existing condition, namely “crappy lungs.” But that’s just one. My reading of the Italian data in March 2020 was that disproportionately the people who died of Covid-19 were not just old but also had 2 or more pre-existing conditions.
One big difference between Scott, on the one hand, and Bryan and me, on the other, is over how hard it is to be masked. Scott writes:
Wearing a mask is a pain? All I can say is if you think that’s a major problem, I wish I could have your life!!
But that’s not analysis; that’s just Scott telling us his own subjective valuation. As I noted above, Scott rightly is skeptical of Bryan’s use of survey data to measure people’s attitudes to life under Covid. But at least Bryan had a sample size of 476. That’s 475 more than Scott’s sample size. In a comment responding to “DeservingPorcupine,” Scott says, “And when people talk about the awful suffering involved in wearing a mask, all I can do is roll my eyes.” In other words, Scott admits that he really doesn’t take seriously people’s thoughts and feelings about wearing masks. What matters is his subjective valuation.
One commenter on Scott’s recent post, Mark Bahner, writes:
Not only are most of the 800,000 dead old and sickly, but many of the deaths (approximately one-third, per the NY Times in June 2020) have occurred in nursing homes, where COVID restrictions did nothing to help them.
This is a relevant point. And understated. Not only did Covid restrictions do nothing to help them, but also governors in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania actively hurt them by requiring that people with Covid be placed in nursing homes. Scott doesn’t reply to this point.
Scott also seems to vacillate about what his topic is. I took it to be about both regulation and private responses to Covid. After all, Bryan was addressing Scott’s original post about regulation. But in a response to Todd Kreider, Scott writes:
This has absolutely no bearing on anything in my post, as I’m sure you must know. My post is not about government policies.
And then Scott elaborates further to Todd:
You still don’t get it. You are talking about no government actions, I was talking about no attempts by the private sector to avoid Covid. (That’s also what Bryan Caplan was talking about.)
But that’s not what Bryan Caplan was talking about. He was talking about both private sector actions and government actions. Bryan referred to “America’s strange experiment in federalist dictatorship,” for example. And he mentions Scott’s earlier statement, “I’m surprised the regulations aren’t far worse.”
This is a discussion of government actions.
UPDATE: I’m glad I don’t have to rely on my memory of data I gathered 44 years ago. I was off by an order of magnitude in my note above about coal mine fatalities in the U.S. in the late 1960s. Coal mining was far more dangerous than I claimed above. Take 1964, a fairly typical year. There were 150,761 miners and 242 fatalities. That’s a fatality rate of 1 in 623, not, as I claimed above, 1 in 10,000. Big difference. It’s true that it’s not as much as 1 percent, but it’s 1/6 of 1 percent, not the 0.01 percent that I implicitly claimed.
READER COMMENTS
Andrew_FL
Dec 21 2021 at 7:57pm
Interesting aside on occupational fatality risk: Logging remains one of the most dangerous occupations, but it seems that “Fishing and Hunting” is now the most dangerous industry to work in-mostly fishing. If one should avoid a job in the logging industry, one should even more avoid a job in the fishing industry!
Scott Sumner
Dec 21 2021 at 8:11pm
David, Good point about Bryan’s survey.
“A key number in Scott’s analysis is the infection fatality rate. Scott claims that it’s 0.6, but the number I recall (I can’t find the source offhand) over the whole U.S. population is less than half as much, at about 0.25. That’s a big difference.”
I’ve seen that figure as well over the past year and a half, sometimes from people trying to minimize the problem. I’ve never trusted that estimate, and now we know that it’s wrong. Indeed more than 0.25% of the US population has already died of Covid, despite many never getting infected, and many more being saved by vaccines. I’d say that 0.6% is if anything too low, at least for 2020, when most of the Covid deaths would have occurred if we had not taken any precautions to avoid the virus. I believe my figure is accepted by experts. (BTW, Bryan’s post is obviously merely academic, as some precautions were inevitable. The major debate is over government mandates.)
I strongly disagree with your interpretation of Todd’s comment. My post was about the effect of all precautions—private and governmental—as you say. Todd’s comment said my estimate of 2 million dead with no precautions (public or private) was wrong, and cited a study with no bearing on my claim. Here’s what Todd said in direct response to my claim:
“This is still far-fetched along with your even higher estimates. SAGE forecast 2.2 million American Covid-19 deaths by June 2021 if nothing was done by the government – meaning locking down”
That’s irrelevant.
I agree that the 2.2 million claim was excessive, and I have never made any claim of that sort. Indeed I’ve done numerous posts over the past two years suggesting private behavior was the key, and that government regulations were often not particularly effective.
But Todd’s post had absolutely no bearing on my claim that 2 million would have died with no precautionary measures by either the public or private sector. Voluntary social distancing and masks were the main factor holding down deaths in 2020. Government mandates played a smaller role. Yes, in the comment section I should have said “private and governmental”, not “private”. But either way Todd’s comment had no bearing on my post.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose someone claimed that earthquakes and volcanos kill 40,000 people each year, on average. And suppose someone challenged that claim by saying “that’s wrong, volcanos only kill 15,000 people each year” implicitly ignoring earthquakes. Obviously their criticism would be baseless.
My views on masks are obviously subjective, as you say. All I’m saying is that government mask mandates (while a bad idea) seem to me to be a trivial problem compared to lots of other stuff, such as bans on kidney markets, restrictive zoning laws, drug laws, etc. I understand that others may feel differently.
Ryan M
Dec 22 2021 at 1:15pm
The existence or banning of kidney markets would not be culturally transformative. I think you are viewing the issue of masks in an extremely narrow manner. Fauci honestly stated, in 2020, in agreement with all of the data, that masks were useless. He changed his mind and claimed to have lied only when it became politically expedient to do so.
Knowing, as we do, that masks are not of any real medical value, why is it so important to force them on people?
If your focus is on convenience and comfort, I think you are missing the most important issues with forced masking.
Scott Sumner
Dec 22 2021 at 2:06pm
Masks are partially effective, that’s why doctors wear them.
Jeff Singer
Dec 22 2021 at 2:51pm
Are masks partially effective? As a surgeon who wears them to work everyday, I can tell you first hand that many things we do as ritual are not based on evidence, but on intuition. For example, for years we were taught to remove a melanoma of the skin with a 5cm margin (which requires a skin graft for closure). One day in the mid-1970s, some surgeons began to ask “why do we need a 5 cm margin for melanoma but a much smaller one for other skin cancers?” The issue had never been studied. The answer was: “That’s what Professor Clark recommended in the early 20th century.” (Clark was a surgeon with a great interest in treating melanoma.) So studies were undertaken in the 70s and 80s and now we know the 5 cm margin was unnecessary-a 1-2 cm margin is sufficient. (How many people were needlessly disfigured after melanoma surgery?) The same goes for masks. It INTUITIVELY makes sense to wear them. Yet I don’t wear them when I do minor surgery in the office and I have no infection problems. Recently, a Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis was performed on masks in the operating room (Cochrane analyses are among the most rigorous and widely respected) and it found no evidence that masks make a difference in the surgical infection rate. Bottom line: just because doctors do it doesn’t mean it is evidence-based. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138271/
Scott Sumner
Dec 23 2021 at 9:37am
Fair point, but there are numerous studies indicating that mask wearing reduces the spread of Covid.
Todd Moodey
Dec 23 2021 at 11:55am
Scott–
Knowing that you believe that masks are effective–at least to some degree–in reducing the spread of Covid, I’ve wondered about a comment you made in another post. You said you followed Matt Yglesias’ approach in looking in the window of stores and wearing a mask if those in the store are wearing them, but not wearing one otherwise. This seems like a decision rule that I would adopt, as I really don’t believe masks are effective, but don’t necessarily want to make waves. But if you believe in the efficacy of masks, why would your behavior in this regard be determined by what others do?
Regards,
Todd
Richard A.
Dec 21 2021 at 8:44pm
There is strong correlation between vitamin d deficiency and the probability of dying from covid and this has been known for the past year and a half–yet our government has been ignoring this. A vitamin d3 supplement of a few thousand I.U.s a day costs a few cents a day.
Matthias
Dec 23 2021 at 12:18am
Vitamin D is cheap and legal to buy. What do you expect the government to do about it?
robc
Dec 23 2021 at 1:50am
Use the bully pulpit. Let people know and loudly.
Dylan
Dec 23 2021 at 7:36am
You have to scroll down past a few paragraphs of snark, but eventually you get to an overview of the “deeply unimpressive” work done on vitamin D and Covid.
https://forbetterscience.com/2020/09/28/we-reached-the-stage-where-vitamin-d-is-the-cure-for-covid-19/
Todd Moodey
Dec 21 2021 at 9:25pm
On the IFR…My hunch is that the ***current*** IFR is quite low, maybe even less than 0.25%. That the total number of people that have died in the U.S. as a percentage of the population is close to 0.25% is likely due to a much higher rate early on, especially with the poor care provided to the elderly.
Also, a minor point about a”1% chance of dying”. In the context of Covid, whatever the IFR is, it seems reasonable to discount it for the chance that you’ll contract Covid in the first place; the overall chance of dying from Covid is a function of both factors.
Regards,
Todd
Dylan
Dec 23 2021 at 7:39am
Sure, that makes sense but in the case of Scott’s original thought experiment, the idea was that no behavior change was made on an individual level, in which case it would be pretty likely that the vast majority of us would catch covid, and in a pretty short period of time.
Todd Moodey
Dec 23 2021 at 8:33am
Dylan–
Anecdotal I know, but I have caught it, and the “vast majority” of people I know haven’t, and we’re two years into this. The CDCs website shows 146.6 million total estimated infections. So I’m not sure your points holds. Even if you grant that the majority has been infected in a pretty short period of time, the IFRs are still lower than 1% for everyone except the elderly, most substantially so.
Regards,
Todd
Todd Moodey
Dec 23 2021 at 8:37am
Sorry, I meant to write “I haven’t caught it” in the first sentence!
Dylan
Dec 23 2021 at 2:45pm
Todd,
I don’t know about where you live, but around here there have been some pretty dramatic changes in behavior over the last two years… And still, nearly half of Americans are estimated to have caught Covid. Do you not think that if we carried on completely as normally, meaning packed stadiums at sporting events and concerts, continued going to bars and restaurants, continued to go into work even when we weren’t feeling well… That we wouldn’t have a much higher number of total infections?
This isn’t a realistic scrape scenario of course, people would and did react to the pandemic by changing behavior even without government mandates. However, I think Scott’s thought experiment is a “what if” behavior didn’t change, how many deaths would we expect? This is relevant, because you need to understand the correct counterfactual to interpret Bryan’s claim of damages.
Todd Kreider
Dec 23 2021 at 3:30pm
The CDC estimated earlier this year that 30% of the U.S. or 100 million Americans had been infected in 2020 and I’ve read a more recent estimate that 60% have been infected and that at least half of them wouldn’t have had symptoms.
steve
Dec 21 2021 at 11:30pm
“Not only did Covid restrictions do nothing to help them, but also governors in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania actively hurt them by requiring that people with Covid be placed in nursing homes.”
This always bothers me as it does not match what we did in our hospitals in Pennsylvania. Nursing homes were asked, not required to take back covid pts who were stable. They could refuse if they did not think they had adequate facilities. We thought that most if not all of the pts we were sending back were no longer infectious since they had lengthy stays. We also realized that if we sent a pt back who we thought might be infectious to an ill prepared nursing home we would just be creating more work for ourselves. So in PA they have a hearing on this every couple of weeks but last I checked they had not found a nursing home that says it was forced to take a Covid pt when they thought they were unable to care for that pt.
Nursing home deaths mostly correlated with how active it was in the community in the early months. LA is about the same as PA and the PA governor was not telling LA how to handle nursing home pts. For the last year they have correlated more with vaccination rates among both pts and staff.
Steve
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 22 2021 at 8:18am
This doesn’t sound to me like “asking”:
“Nursing care facilities must continue to accept new admissions and receive readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable to alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings. This may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus.”
https://pahomecare.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/FINAL%20FOR%20DISTRO_Interim%20Nursing%20Facility%20Guidance%2003192020%20at%201500.pdf
steve
Dec 22 2021 at 1:48pm
You are reading a piece of paper. I am telling you what we really did. If we were putting in 80 hour weeks, much of that wearing full PPE which is fairly uncomfortable, watching half of our patients die, do you really think we wanted to send sick pts to nursing homes to create more patients for us? This is a libertarian site correct? Thought people believed in incentives.
AFAICT this was largely to give nursing homes cover for taking back patients. First, it says “may” include Covid pts so the nursing homes always had an out if they wanted. Second, some families didnt want any pts coming back from a hospital but they weren’t able or willing to take the pt themselves. If a pt was more than a couple weeks out from onset of symptoms, no fever for several days and otherwise stable the nursing homes wanted them back. They need to get paid. This gave them some cover.
As I said, I stopped following this but there were several hearings on this and they never found a nursing home that says they were forced to take a pt they were not prepared to handle.
Steve
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 22 2021 at 4:48pm
Steve,
“You are reading a piece of paper. I am telling you what we really did.”
Well, excuse me, Steve, that I was merely quoting “a piece of paper.” which directly contradicts what you wrote. And, you speak for what “we” did, which is whom? The entire health care system of Pennsylvania? If so, it is indisputable that the “we” whom you speak of sent hundreds if not thousands back to nursing homes to infect those most vulnerable to the virus, a disproportionate number of which met their unnecessary deaths due to that. You seem to be saying that “we” did it of our own volition, not because “that piece of paper” directed us to. Sorry for my mistake, Steve.
VIV
Rob Rawlings
Dec 22 2021 at 9:48am
Bryan comes up with a way of measuring covid costs in terms of life years and suggests that the costs of mitigation were 15 times the costs of lives saved.
I am not convinced this a valid way of evaluating things.
Lets say a community faces an epidemic that will last a year. The average person has 25 life years left and a 1 in 2500 chance of dying in the epidemic. This community therefor faces a loss of 1% of a life year per person. Bryan would conclude that any costs with a utility value of greater than this would fail a societal utilitarian cost/benefit test.
But I don’t think that is how it would work at the individual level. A person who expected to live another 25 years would very likely give up more than 1% of his utility for 1 year in order to avoid a 1/2500 chance of dying. It would not surprise me if the average person would give up more than 15% of a years’ utility and if so the costs of covid mitigation start to seem more reasonable even using Bryan’s calculations.
Matthias
Dec 23 2021 at 12:20am
You could look at fatality rates for driving or living in dangerous neighbourhoods etc to see what people are willing to trade off.
zeke5123
Dec 22 2021 at 9:54am
I don’t think it makes sense to speak of a single IFR.
The rate is just so radically different depending on age group. For a 10 year old, it is practically 0, for a 30 year old around 0.03%. These are pretty small numbers in the grand scheme of things (yes, 0.01% per year is smaller but that is per year over what a 20 year career!). But of course for a 70 year old the IFR is much higher.
Re masks — I think there are a lot of indication that *some* people really hate masks.
Politicians generally are pretty locked into what their base wants — masks wouldn’t become a political issue unless it was important to bases.
Numerous parents wouldn’t take time to go to school board meetings all over the country complaining about masks unless it was really important to them.
There are many people flaunting “rules” in a very visible way and often times getting into confrontations.
Dylan
Dec 22 2021 at 1:09pm
Agree on both points. On IFR though, I think it is also a mistake to look solely at IFR and ignore the other potentially bad effects of covid, Personally, I only know 3 people that have dies of covid, one old, one middle-aged, and one under 30. (the middle aged one, for the record had no known underlying health issues). I know a lot more people, many of them young to middle-aged and previously in excellent shape, that have had symptoms that have lasted for multiple months. Marathon runners that 6 months after recovery who were still getting winded walking around the block. Not acknowledging this, or the huge unknown aspect of it, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, in our mitigation efforts seems like a mistake.
On masks, I’d also like to suggest that there is a big difference in the way that different people have to wear masks. For many people, it is simply a matter of wearing one for a few minutes while you’re in the grocery store. For others, they are wearing them for hours on end while working, sometimes in hot and strenuous conditions. One of these seems more burdensome then the other, and not on a linear scale.
David Henderson
Dec 23 2021 at 2:26pm
Good point. Are there any aggregate data on this?
Dylan
Dec 23 2021 at 2:59pm
David,
If you’re referring to long covid, there have been some studies that show it is quite prevalent. However, I’m fairly skeptical of them because all the ones I’ve seen rely on self reported data and include such a broad class of symptoms as to be kind of useless, particularly given the environment we’ve lived in for the last couple of years could by itself be responsible for a number of these. That being said, there seems to be enough there to warrant caution and further study.
David Henderson
Dec 23 2021 at 5:04pm
Thanks.
Ryan M
Dec 22 2021 at 1:09pm
If being forced by governments to cover your face is, in Scott’s opinion, “no big deal,” then we are living in different realities. That it is uncomfortable is borderline irrelevant when compared with the degree to which it is dehumanizing. You might envy my life, but not because it is easy; rather, because I derive value from people’s faces, from smiling at people and interacting with them. I wonder what city Scott lives in.
The problem with totalitarianism it’s not that it is uncomfortable or inconvenient. Comfort and convenience wouldn’t, in other words, make totalitarianism suddenly ok. Masks not only represent something much larger, they breed a mindset of acceptance and subjugation, which is extremely dangerous to any free society.
David Henderson
Dec 22 2021 at 1:22pm
I think you said it well, especially this line:
A huge part of my life is my face to face interactions with people, not mask and eyes to mask and eyes.
zeke5123
Dec 22 2021 at 1:56pm
I think you are right — there is an element of Haval’s green grocer and “workers of the world unite” with masking. We have been told “this highly visible thing is what good citizens do to protect others” so part of the mask reaction is saying “you the government don’t get to decide what makes someone a good citizen.”
Henri Hein
Dec 22 2021 at 1:30pm
I agree with Scott about masks. I hate them as much as the next guy. Especially every time I walk up to a place with my hands full and realize I need to done one. Scott’s comments make me remember it’s a petty complaint, though.
I wonder how much the controversy over masks is more symbolic than real. It’s a tangible and visible thing that we all have to deal with.
David Henderson
Dec 22 2021 at 3:07pm
Henri,
You’re contradicting yourself.
You say that hate them [masks] as much as the next guy.”But then you say that it’s a petty complaint. If you really think it’s a petty complaint, and I don’t question your judgment, then you don’t “hate them as much as the next guy.” You, in fact, hate them way less than many guys–and gals.
zeke5123
Dec 22 2021 at 4:17pm
I would add that it makes sense to hate something for the symbolism.
Many people would find this trite, but let’s assume masks provide some protection. But the public health authorities issue a diktat to wear masks. It might put me (and maybe those around me) in a worse place if I don’t wear a mask. But the principle there is that a public health authority cannot simply by diktat require me to do something that heretofore was unheard of.
Why is this important? Isn’t it cutting off my nose to spite my face?
Life is an iterative game. If we are playing an iterative game and the prize after R1 is $100 and you get to split the cash but we only get the cash if I accept your split, then it makes sense for me to reject a $99.99 / $.01 split. Sure, getting one penny would be better off compared to status quo ante. And if the game was one-off, then I would be foolish to reject the offer. But the game is not one-off. By accepting, I am rewarding future unfair offers while rejecting encourages future cooperation.
Likewise, by rejecting the symbolism (i.e., that governors and public health authorities can simply command at whim that I must wear a mask) I am saying: I don’t trust that power. *Maybe* they are using that power appropriately today (I don’t think so but that isn’t important). However, once you create the technology (both in terms of the means of implementing the diktat and the cultural willingness to abide by such diktats) it never stops at just that use. Are you sure the next diktat will be NPV positive?
I am not and therefore I resist. I wouldn’t be as adamant about it if there weren’t mandates and there was a bit more humility about these matters because that is less dangerous.
Dylan
Dec 22 2021 at 4:30pm
I dislike mask mandates, but I don’t really see most of the pressure coming from the government in the end. I live in NYC and the pressure seems entirely from the type of place I go to, rather than any government enforcement. Hipster coffee shop, everyone wears a mask while waiting in line to get their coffee, and then sits down at the communal and crowded table for a couple of hours working on their laptop, and when I visit I do the same. Bodega across the street, most patrons and workers either don’t wear a mask at all, or wear it around their chin, and when I pop in to pick up a drink, I do the same.
I did see a cop come in to the bodega at one point and very condescendingly lecture to the owner about the mask mandate and signs and all of that for a considerable period of time, and that was super-obnoxious, but didn’t actually change the behavior of anyone in the store, as patrons c0ntinued to walk in unmasked the entire time the cop was there.
I’m with Scott that most of the reaction to the pandemic was cultural and the local government responses were a lagging indicator. That’s not perfect, especially when you’re looking at statewide mandates, but even there, in places where there isn’t popular support they seem to be weakly enforced at best.
Henri Hein
Dec 22 2021 at 5:58pm
I agree with this concern, but for me, there is also a flip side. Many individual people want us to wear masks. So there is a positive externality from my mask, in that people around me feel safer, whether they are actually safer or not. Since many of my friends are in this category, that’s not irrelevant to me. For that reason, I might wear a mask even absent mandates.
Ryan M
Dec 26 2021 at 1:10pm
Well put, Zeke.
Henri Hein
Dec 22 2021 at 5:50pm
David,
I agree that I contradicted myself. I was trying to express a dual sentiment. On the one hand, at their most inconvenient, I really do hate the masks, and I think I do so as much as the next guy. Then when I’m in front of the computer and reading Econlog, I see Scott’s comments. They put my travails in perspective and I realize that on the whole, masks are a pretty small inconvenience for me.
David Henderson
Dec 22 2021 at 5:54pm
In other words, you have two thoughts dueling within your head. I’ll be interested in what equilibrium thought you reach. 🙂
Todd Kreider
Dec 23 2021 at 6:51am
Another problem with Scott’s response to Bryan’s post:
The CDC shows 27% of Americans 65 and older were vaccinated by March 1, 2021 and 52% of Americans were vaccinated by April 1. These are very high proportions?
Also note that Covid deaths fell 35% from 3,100 a day in the first half of January 2021 2,000 a day with hardly anyone vaccinated then and this was seen in other countries in the Northern Hemisphere as well. Sweden has hardly had any benefit from vaccinations since 97% of its Covid deaths occurred before 3% of its population was vaccinated. In Germany, 80% of Covid deaths occurred before vaccinations could have had much of an effect.
KevinDC
Dec 23 2021 at 8:01am
Like most things in life, this reminded me of something Scott Alexander wrote, in this case about the Typical Mind Fallacy – the tendency to assume your experiences are representative of everyone else’s experiences. I think Scott Sumner is committing that fallacy here – since he experiences masks as a minor inconvenience at worst, that must be how everyone else experiences them as well. Therefore, if masks make them upset, it must be because they have amazing lives with nothing else to worry about so they don’t realize how insignificant masking “really” is. Here’s Scott Alexander talking about friction between him and a former roommate due to the Typical Mind Fallacy:
I think this issue is especially fraught for Scott Sumner, due to his particular advocacy of his particular brand of utilitarianism. He’s often claimed utilitarianism is “true” according to the pragmatic theory of truth, where true just means “useful.” Even if the pragmatic theory of truth was itself true (which it’s not, in either the pragmatic or correspondence sense of truth, funnily enough), utilitarianism fares particularly poorly according to pragmatism. Other people’s utility experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to us – and when a high profile advocate of the “usefulness” of utilitarianism for public policy responds to other people’s reports of their own utility by rolling his eyes at them, the “usefulness” of utilitarianism seems nonexistent.
David Henderson
Dec 23 2021 at 2:29pm
Interesting and well-expressed thoughts, as is typical of you.
My statement of your and Scott Alexander’s point is less nuanced but more succinct: Values are subjective. I look around and I see people who love watching UFC. I think it’s vicious. But the people involved are there voluntarily. To each his (and increasingly her) own. Ditto with heroin. Ditto with prostitution.
Ryan M
Dec 26 2021 at 1:37pm
I’m with you only partially with respect to Heroin and Prostitution. We’ve argued about this in the past – I am of a dual mind, because there remain a handful of questions that cannot be easily answered. We generally agree that there exist some issues (not Covid, though this is pretty much the #1 justification for draconian covid policies) where one’s actions impose such a cost on others that those actions need to be curbed. Firing cannon in town is a favorite law-school example.
Certain drugs border on this. As I work in a field that experiences these consequences first hand, I can give all sorts of examples.
But the second consideration is the one that has become most painfully clear with respect to covid; namely, whether government intervention causes more harm than it does good. This is something that is increasingly becoming apparent in my own job, which deals with department agencies who are charged with taking children out of “bad” situations (this is CPS/Foster care) and either fixing those situations or placing them in better situations. Yet, more often than not, it is the blind leading the blind. I am not at all convinced that department involvement results in a net improvement, and sometimes it is obviously the opposite.
When I look at this situation, I do not conclude that people are making voluntary transactions or involving themselves in voluntary behavior that concerns only themselves. The costs of their actions on unwitting third parties are often quite high – what I do observe, though, is that we have yet to devise a way to meaningfully mitigate those costs in many situations. And, of course, as with drugs, there is a wide variance in costs. Some kids are literally physically in danger of losing their lives, and intervention can only result in a net improvement.
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