On August 23, in an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Fox’s Neil Cavuto asked if the school shutdowns had “forever damaged” kids. Fauci answered, “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”
If only that were true. But a large amount of accumulated evidence contradicts Fauci’s rosy claim. Moreover, not only did the school shutdowns damage millions of children, even worse, those shutdowns will shorten their lives. Keeping schools open would have saved lives. School closings caused losses in learning, which will lead to long-term losses in income, which, in turn, will lead to lost and shortened lives.
This is from David R. Henderson and Ryan Sullivan, “Contra Fauci, School Closings Will Shorten Lives,” AIER, September 5, 2022.
Co-author Ryan is the father of two young kids whom he loves very much. That motivates him a lot to write these things.
And:
Other estimates put the shortening of lives caused by the school shutdowns at much higher levels. A paper by Dimitri A. Christakis, Wil Van Cleve, and Frederick J. Zimmerman published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated 13.8 million years of life were lost due to the school closures. This number was estimated from a standard analytical model that examined the association between school closures and reduced educational attainment and the association between reduced educational attainment and life expectancy. It was based on data from the CDC, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Dividing 13.8 million years of life lost by a normal life expectancy of 78 years in the U.S. indicates that the school shutdowns were responsible for the equivalent of about 177,000 deaths.
Economists often use the term “invisible graveyard” to refer to deaths such as these. The idea is that these deaths are not yet identified, but they will take place in the future. That’s a tragic outcome regardless of whether we see them in the obituaries.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
JFA
Sep 7 2022 at 9:51am
While I was no fan of school closures and vociferously advocated against them, I think your argument is a bit overstated. 1) (Assuming schooling is effective in human capital development) your argument assumes that learning loss will not be made up. Scott Alexander did a post on the effect of missed schools and most of the research he reviewed showed little permanent effect. Now those papers were not in the context as Covid, but that would also be a critique of the estimates provided by you. 2) As you note briefly (and dismiss rather quickly), much of education is likely to be signaling rather than skill development. You dismiss it by referencing the interactions that kids would otherwise have had and (implicitly) assume (like in the learning loss case) that the damage would be permanent. I fully recognize the damage that school closures wrought, but I’m more skeptical about the permanence of that damage.
If the previously measured value of education was mostly due to signaling, then I don’t think there is much reason to put any stock into the estimates predicting loss of future life years. If the value of education is mostly signaling, then education is mostly signaling the characteristics of the student *and* the student’s family. If education is mostly signaling, for the school shutdowns to cause a significant loss of future life years, you would have to argue that student and family characteristics were forever changed. That’s a harder argument to make.
Two minor points: 1) relating to the claim “The main reason is that lost income is closely linked with lower life expectancies and death”: in many studies, education (which is highly correlated with income) is as at least as good a predictor (if not better) as income for a person’s health. So if education is mostly signaling, we shouldn’t expect massive future life years lost unless the underlying characteristics of the people permanently changed. 2) When you discuss the lost income due to people losing their jobs, you don’t distinguish how much of that is due to lockdown and how much is due to people voluntarily engaging in less market activity. I would also note that there was a lot of research that showed people’s balance sheets (at every income decile) in January 2021 were at least as healthy (if not more so) as they were in January of 2020. That was one reason stated explicitly by Larry Summers for his opposition to the Biden stimulus in March 2021 and why he thought it would be inflationary.
And I’m not one to defend Fauci, but when you say “Dr. Fauci may believe that the shutdowns didn’t harm anyone”, I think you are misrepresenting his statement that you are referencing. His claim was about “forever irreparably damaged” kids. Whether kids were irreparably damaged is an open question, but in the statement you referenced, he was arguing against school shutdowns causing irreparable damage not general or temporary harm.
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 10:34am
You indicate that one reason school closures are not as damaging as some claim because “most of the value in education is likely to be from signaling and not skill development”.
Granted, your comment refers to “mostly”; however, I’m curious: what is the signaling value of successfully completing grades 1-6, or even 6-12th grade? When I think of “school closures” what comes immediately to mind are primary and secondary schools and not colleges and universities. One of the reasons completing grade school or even high school doesn’t carry a significant positive “signal” is because (sadly) kids seem to be learning less and less at those grade levels.
The word “signal” in this context strikes me as incomplete–signals can be justified or not justified. I recommend that perhaps we use the term “false signal” to refer to the idea that a positive signal sent by education is not fully merited. Which leads me to the following question: Does closing primary and secondary schools increase the possibility that getting a diploma sends a false signal or, alternatively, does it weaken the positive signal?
Regardless of the terms used, I cannot think of any positive outcome for kids who are excluded unnecessarily from school during those crucial formative years.
Even the New York Times seems to agree but can’t seem to admit that the reason was not the “pandemic” but the response to the pandemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/us/national-test-scores-math-reading-pandemic.html
MarkW
Sep 7 2022 at 11:09am
Elementary education is not about signaling. Getting an ‘A’ in a university science or foreign-language course (material that you’ll subsequently forget almost completely) may be no more than signaling. Learning to read and perform basic math (and at increasing level of proficiency) is about gaining essential skills, not signaling.
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 11:13am
That was exactly my point so of course I agree!
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 12:01pm
“This would surely lead you to think that school closures would not have a significant effect on future health.”
Well, I think the data is starting to come in (see NYT link and others in David’s piece) and, to use an idiomatic phrase, we are going “from bad to worse”.
JFA
Sep 7 2022 at 11:41am
“what is the signaling value of successfully completing grades 1-6, or even 6-12th grade?” I think the human capital developed through basic literacy and numeracy are very valuable, but that is completed by 8th grade for most people. Given the near universal completion rate through 6th grade, there is no signal. The US high school graduation rate by state ranged from 74% to 94%, so high school graduation remains a good signal of something.
Stepping back from the signaling issue, the argument in David’s piece (that school closures will lead to early death for many people) hinges on 1) schools actually imparting useful skills (not just allowing students to display skills they already have or would develop outside of school and not just acting primarily as daycare) that (through whatever chain of causation) will have an impact on future health and 2) (if point 1 is true) that school closures will have a *permanent* detrimental effect on that skill development (i.e. students won’t recover the skills they missed out on). Like I said, basic literacy and numeracy are important and are skills that students develop at school (usually by 8th grade), but I don’t think school closures put a permanent halt to students developing those skills, and those older students who graduated during the closures would have already develop whatever skills education actually imparts.
Also, “One of the reasons completing grade school or even high school doesn’t carry a significant positive “signal” is because (sadly) kids seem to be learning less and less at those grade levels.” This would surely lead you to think that school closures would not have a significant effect on future health.
“Regardless of the terms used, I cannot think of any positive outcome for kids who are excluded unnecessarily from school during those crucial formative years.” I agree (except for the case of kids who got a reprieve from bullying), but that doesn’t mean school closures will have a noticeable (if any) effect on future health.
Matthias
Sep 7 2022 at 8:41pm
It’s enormous.
Signalling value of any behaviour always has to be evaluated compared to some alternative.
Most of the time the implied alternative is the ‘average person’. But in our case: most average people finish those grades too nowadays.
So we need to be a bit more explicit: the comparison would be with someone who dropped out of those grades.
High school dropouts don’t have high status in society. Grade school dropouts perhaps even less so.
Of course, you still need to disentangle how much of that is pure signalling vs signalling of a loss in human capital.
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 12:21pm
This number was estimated from a standard analytical model that examined the association between school closures and reduced educational attainment and the association between reduced educational attainment and life expectancy
What the last part of this sentence, very likely, means is “the association between reduced educational credentials attainment and life expectancy“. Since schools, open or close, will keep providing among the same amount of “credentials” we should not expect any impact on life expectancy.
See Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 12:37pm
I suggest that we eliminate all public and private schools and issue GED credentials to infants at birth. That should be much cheaper and have zero effect on economic welfare or life expectancy!
Daniel
Sep 7 2022 at 12:43pm
Ah, but according to the analysis, years of schooling would decline drastically, with ruinous linear effects on years of life. Such a policy would be tantamount to infanticide, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 billion children from each annual cohort. These HIGHLY PLAUSIBLE numbers from this RIGOROUS analysis say so!
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 1:01pm
I do believe this policy will have a positive effect on economic welfare (for many reasons, one of the most relevant being that it will force a very significant amount of professionals to do something economically useful for a living).
But I will settle for a middle of the road solution. How many hours do you think are required to teach and average kid how to read, add, substract, multiply and divide? (these are about all the useful things they are learning in k12 since trigonometry is totally useless and they don’t learn anything about french amortization, for instance)
Sure you don’t need the more than 15,000 hours they will spent attending 12k.
I would say that around 1/10th of this should be more than enough, Particularly if you focus those 1,500 hours on teaching these particular skills and not in providing something to do to as many professionals as possible.
robc
Sep 7 2022 at 2:29pm
Trig is totally useless? I disagree.
But then again, I skipped Trig in High School and went straight to Calculus my Junior Year (My algebra II teacher recommended it to my parents, said the year of Trig/Pre-Calc would be a total waste for me – she was right, although in college, the lack of formally learning some of the trig identities became an issue at times).
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 7:25pm
Yeah, trig can be useful in the self-contained world 0f college (I was meaning more like “in real life”), understanding photosynthesis is also key, and even more so learning how to work out the area of a trapezoid or how to say “good morning” in French … 15,000 hours of truly useful knowledge!! (Not taking into account homework and studying for tests which, at least, amount to half of that time)
More than 22,000 hours!, that’s more than 12 years of full employment!! .. and yet, you miss some months of that, and you are done? … I don’t know …
Closing down on-the-job training programs during the pandemic should have had a bigger impact, or impairing, for months the sexual lives of young adults (if I have to pick one, I bet this one has had the worst impact)
Daniel
Sep 7 2022 at 12:32pm
The study assumes the days of school closures are just lopped off educational attainment. That is, instead of achieving on average 13.7 years of schooling, these kids would achieve .15 (boys) or .12 (girls) fewer years of schooling. Obviously the relationship between educational attainment and life outcomes is nonlinear, and not really about getting those juicy extra 54 days of school. I would take the resulting estimates and assumed causality with a giant grain of salt. It was a fun exercise for the researchers but wow.
To drive the point home of how absurd this is, one implication of the analysis is that summer vacation is killing our kids as much per year as the lockdown, only it happens EVERY YEAR (2.5 mo * 30 days – 20 weekend days = 55 days lopped off educational attainment). Going from 13.7 years of schooling to 13.55 years is associated with 177,000 deaths, but what about the genocide of going from counterfactual 15.5 years to 13.7 years? About 193 million years of life lost, or 2.5 million children from each annual cohort murdered by statistics because we don’t mandate summer school.
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 12:49pm
Yeah!! … I find very difficult to believe that shortening the school day by an hour (15% less schooling) will kill hundreds of thousand of people.
Particularly if the hour left out of the curricula following this shortening is “foreign language” or “critical thinking”
I would recommend using this extra-hour learning something about the Spanish or Italian way of living, since they get some of the world higher live expectancies with some of the worse average scores in math, science and reading (even worse than the US). Even learning about Australia will work (average score around the same that in the US).
Afterall, what you do when you are not “not learning anything” at the school, seems to have a more significant influence on your life expectancy.
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 1:15pm
“The study assumes the days of school closures are just lopped off educational attainment.”
As even your own comment demonstrates, the paper doesn’t assume that. To be sure, I agree that one can be skeptical of any specific estimates. On the other end of the spectrum, if you don’t think reduced school attendance has any negative effects, as I suggested above to Pablo, we should just close the schools and assume no negative effects. This extreme is indeed something that you that you also find ridiculous. So, we are left, I think, with the rather unstartling conclusion that the results are negative nonetheless.
I’d also put forward the following hypothesis: primary education is foundational. Missing 54 days of school (not university) doesn’t simply have the effect of reducing your education proportionately by 54 days. It has a negative effect on all learning that follows. The authors of that study took a much, much more conservative approach.
I also think that the idea of “there is no problem, we’ll just play catchup” woefully ignores reality. Our governments and teachers unions (and, in an indirect way, folks like Bryan Caplan) have sent a message that education doesn’t matter. The precedent has been set and I fear that the effect will be that the negative trend will far outweigh this specific instance. Test scores are one relatively objective standard which you apparently also think “should be taken with a grain of salt”, such as those the NYT’s cite in the link I provided above.
And, of course, absent so far from this discussion is—what *good* did those school closures do?
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 2:10pm
Vivian, what I don’t get is how your “model” works. The “model” behind your interpretation of the data assumes:
a) Less hours of schooling across every grade of the k-12 curriculum will result on adults with a lesser command on abilities relevant for making a living
[That’s very difficult to believe since “abilities relevant for making a living” is not what you learn in k-12, except for extremely basic ones that they hammer year after year on k-12 students with very poor results anyway in most cases]
b) This lesser command on abilities relevant for making a living will result in lower incomes for these adults with less hours of schooling
[Again, since this less hours are happening to every “adult” (or at least to most of them) it is difficult to see what are the mechanism for this to happen. It would be the same that implying that because of these less hours of schooling the whole American (and world!) economy will be smaller. Since there is no known correlation between pisa scores and gdp per capita this is, again difficult to believe.
Minimum wage legislation, for instance, will, very likely, have a higher impact since directly affects the much more efficient “learning on the job” process for the less educated (and I have never seen this argument against minimum wage as a “killing machine”)
Since even graduating from college does not allow you to repay a $10,000 debt it is very difficult to believe that skipping a year of “learning the same thing” at the school has this significant effect. I don’t really see how]
c) lower incomes will result in lower life expectancy.
[This seems to contradict the data regarding life expectancy and pisa scores which shows no correlation among developed countries]
If the relevant variable is life expectancy it seems to be much more efficient ways of improving that than thru more hours at the school … boredom also kills, I am sure
Jose Pablo
Sep 7 2022 at 2:12pm
“the data regarding life expectancy and GDP PER CAPITA (no Pis scores) which shows no correlation among developed countries”
JFA
Sep 7 2022 at 2:36pm
“if you don’t think reduced school attendance has any negative effects,” No one is arguing that. People are arguing that 1) the negative effects are not permanent and 2) the estimates of life loss is not grounded in reality. Just because someone thinks those estimates don’t reflect reality doesn’t mean they don’t see that closing schools had a negative effect.
“I’d also put forward the following hypothesis: primary education is foundational. Missing 54 days of school (not university) doesn’t simply have the effect of reducing your education proportionately by 54 days. It has a negative effect on all learning that follows.”
No one is missing out on primary education. They may be getting it later than otherwise, but no one is missing out (so long as districts actually address the issue). There’s loads of evidence that suggests kids can actually make up learning. The amount of instruction time that goes on in a school day in primary school is a small percentage of what they do all day. And if you are concerned about the knock on effects (which I think are overblown), then universal summer school for a couple of summers would make up for it. Or as Daniel mentioned, maybe just go to school every summer so people can stop falling over dead.
Vivian Darkbloom
Sep 7 2022 at 2:47pm
Study after study disagrees with you:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/05/27/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-student-achievement-and-what-it-may-mean-for-educators/
Not to mention recent test scores and common sense.
The idea that this will be made up in the future through longer school terms or more concentrated effort also flies in the face of experience. Good luck convincing those teachers unions (and students) to give up their summer vacations to make up for lost instruction. I’d give higher odds to schools being closed again this winter than I would that they are open longer into the summer.
JFA
Sep 7 2022 at 3:36pm
“Study after study disagrees with you:” The study you posted doesn’t disagree with me. It was a projection made in May of 2020. If this were not 2022, I might give it more weight. This was a better review of the evidence. I peaked into the links when Alexander posted it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
Yes, test scores fell. NO ONE IS DENYING THAT! 2021-2022 was the first normalish school year since spring of 2020. I don’t think anyone expected scores to not drop. What you and David are proposing is that that drop in learning cannot be recovered from. That is an extreme viewpoint.
“Good luck convincing those teachers unions (and students) to give up their summer vacations to make up for lost instruction.” Many school districts held expanded summer school this year in order to help with the learning loss. Tennessee also has an initiative to pay for tutoring for students that has shown promising results. It won’t happen immediately, but I see no reason to pessimistic about learning recovery. Just as an example, in Virginia, pass rates for the state exams tanked for the test taken in the spring of 2021 relative to 2019 (no test were taken in 2020), but by spring of 2022, pass rates had recovered half the ground they lost. That suggest a fair amount of recovery in just 1 year.
Jon Murphy
Sep 7 2022 at 2:21pm
Good stuff, David.
One thing else to consider: I wonder to what extent the lockdowns and everything has hindered children’s ability to adequately calculate risk. The heavy-handed reactions for little or no benefits, coupled with the incessant mantra of “we must stop the spread at any cost!” could impress on a whole generation extreme risk aversion. That could, in turn, lead to reduced social networking, reduced institutional learning, and entrepreneurial risk-taking which reduce future wealth even more. We are already seeing this in the adult numbers: more people are opting for Work-From-Home (for any number of reasons). While it hasn’t lead to a deterioration like with children, labor economist have noticed stagnating productivity rather than a general increase we have seen prior.
Of course, my point is entirely speculative.
Ryan Sullivan
Sep 7 2022 at 5:46pm
While I agree with the signaling argument made by some of the commentors here, I don’t buy that these learning losses will be easily made up. The covid shutdowns were unlike (or mostly unlike) anything we have seen in our lifetime. It isn’t just a matter of looking at past studies that simply regress wages on years of education with a vector of control variables. For this kind of disruption, we should be looking at natural experiments that somewhat resemble what has taken place over the last two years. The closest thing we have in my eyes are teacher strikes and on the more extreme end – war.
Using these examples, historical evidence suggests that these learning losses or most of them are likely to be permanent. A 2019 article published in the Journal of Labor Economics analyzed the effect of teacher strikes in Argentina on students’ long-term outcomes in that country. The authors found that experiencing the average number of days of strikes during primary school reduced labor earnings of males and females by 3.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively.
In another study, researchers from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics analyzed long-term outcomes from one of the most extreme examples of learning disruptions – war. In that study, the authors compared Austrians and Germans who were 10 years old during World War II with their counterparts in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden. The authors found that earning losses persisted into the 1980s.
In short, I think these learning losses will be much harder to make up than what most people realize. If that is true, then they will lead to lower incomes and lost statistical life years. Most of the literature (although not all) indicates that we should anticipate lower life expectancies from these disruptions. We can debate by how much, but suggesting that there is no effect is not accurate.
JFA
Sep 7 2022 at 7:00pm
Thanks for sharing the papers. I might also suggest that perhaps strikes in Argentina and outcomes from being in a war might also not be applicable to the US during Covid, though I do think the Argentina might be somewhat applicable. With the Argentina paper, I’d think that teachers might not be that interested remediating the learning loss experienced by students from the strikes, whereas right now everyone in the US was expecting some learning loss and there have been 100s of millions of dollars distributed to help recover that learning loss.
john hare
Sep 8 2022 at 4:36am
From the standpoint of one that did drop out of sixth grade, the learning loss can be made up. Whether or not it is has more to do with the respect that one has for learning than the actual class hours. I was shocked when I went back to night school at 19 to find that I was not behind those (in the four classes I took) that had dropped out of 11th and 12th grades. I passed a GED before finishing the semester.
The larger problem in retrospect was that I was in an environment without respect for formal education. My parents and the people I was working with saw no use in higher education. I ended up with about a years worth of college credit (engineering) going at night while working full time. I was in my forties when I got internet and discovered talents that should have been developed decades earlier.
No idea where this puts me on the lockdown problem scale. IMO, the effectiveness of education is only loosely tied to hours in class. Properly done, observed education K-12 could be done in a very few hours per week.
Jose Pablo
Sep 8 2022 at 7:49pm
Yes
BS
Sep 11 2022 at 12:48pm
Learning to learn is important. I suppose that takes time. I suppose if I’d known exactly where I wanted to go in life I could have skipped some subjects. Surely one purpose of school is to open many paths.
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