1. Getting people to be rational about politics is an uphill battle during the best of times. During a global hysteria, it’s hopeless.
2. Due to this doleful realization, I refrained from discussing the lockdown when it first emerged. The best course, I deemed, was to wait for readers to simmer down.
3. Since many have now simmered down, here’s what I was thinking three months ago.
4. I was convinced that coronavirus was a dire threat by early March, but I opposed the lockdown from day 1.
5. Why? Because per Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority, I accept a strong presumption in favor of human liberty. You cannot rightfully shut businesses and order people to “stay at home” out of an “abundance of caution.” Instead, the burden is on the advocates of these policies to demonstrate that their benefits drastically exceed their costs – by at least 5:1. Almost no one even tried to discharge this burden.
6. Telling government to “err on the side of caution” is a recipe for severe oppression. Individuals, in contrast, have every right to personally “err on the side of caution.” In early weeks of the crisis when risk information was scarce, erring on the side of caution was reasonable.
7. Nevertheless, I was initially moderately optimistic that lockdown policies would, in hindsight, at least pass an ordinary cost-benefit test. I no longer think so. Even draconian measures have mostly failed to put R0 far below 1.
8. Due to the absence of Paid Voluntary Human Experimentation, we still lack definitive answers to almost every crucial coronavirus question. Over the last two months, though, I have raised my best estimate of the Infection Fatality Rate from .3% to .6%.
9. During the same time, initial claims about the age and especially the pre-existing health status gradient of mortality have been confirmed even more strongly than I expected. Near-zero people known to have no underlying conditions have died of coronavirus. There is a middle category of “underlying conditions unknown” with fairly high mortality. I wish we knew more about such people, but my best guess that 90% have underlying conditions (versus about 40% for the general population).
10. Roughly 5% of survivors seem to have long-run problems, but risk of serious long-run problems almost certainly correlates highly with risk of death. (And of course a wide variety of other risks, like car accidents, commonly maim survivors. Coronavirus is not remotely a sui generis package of dangers).
10. Am I saying that I don’t care if old and sick people die? No, but I confess that I would care even more if young and healthy people died. I know this sounds terrible, but my view is not eccentric. It’s implied by the standard notion of QALYs, and almost everyone I surveyed agrees with me.
Suppose the main people who died from coronavirus were children rather than the elderly.
How much morally worse would the pandemic be?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) May 1, 2020
11. QALYs aside, the extreme heterogeneity of risk highlights a cheap, humane alternative to the status quo: Healthy people should return to approximately normal life, while people with underlying ailments should maintain elevated to extreme caution.
12. Why “approximately normal” rather than “fully normal”? Because healthy people should make reasonable efforts to protect vulnerable people. This obligation should be legally enforceable in extreme cases, like deliberately coughing on others. Otherwise, we should trust to conscience and social pressure.
13. Why “elevated to extreme caution”? Because though the data on underlying conditions is binary, the actual severity of conditions like diabetes varies widely.
14. Following this dual path would get us to herd immunity with few deaths, especially when combined with multiple other layers of reasonable precaution. Hopefully I’m wrong, but waiting around for a vaccine seems like wishful thinking. Nor should we forget that unemployment is a grave evil.
15. What’s my risk of death if infected? Being a 49 year-old gives me roughly the average risk; being white and male roughly cancel. Since I have no underlying conditions, I estimate my risk at about 5.4% of the base risk of 0.6%. That comes to about 1 in 3000.* That’s about three times my annual risk of dying in an auto accident. That gives me pause – I’ve long told my kids that driving is the most dangerous thing we do. When choosing my behavior, however, I have to remember that I might still contract the disease despite exercising extreme caution, and might avoid the disease despite exercising merely reasonable caution. I’d put the former probability at about 15%, and the later probability at about 40%. So the marginal cost of hewing to reasonable (versus extreme) caution is only a 1 in 12,000 risk.
16. Driving, moreover, imposes roughly equal risks on all my family members. Coronavirus, in contrast, poses near-zero risk to my children.
17. The U.S. has ample state capacity to follow the advice of a few reasonable economists. But no wise policies will be adopted, because we have bipartisan dysfunctional state priorities. You might think a crisis would bring demagoguery under control. Alas, it hasn’t and it won’t.
18. Alex Tabarrok is wrong to state, “Social distancing, closing non-essential firms and working from home protect the vulnerable but these same practices protect workers in critical industries. Thus, the debate between protecting the vulnerable and protecting the economy is moot.” Moot?! True, there is a mild trade-off between protecting the vulnerable and protecting the economy. But if we didn’t care about the vulnerable at all, the disease would have already run its course and economic life would already have strongly rebounded. Wouldn’t self-protection have stymied this? Not if the government hadn’t expanded unemployment coverage and benefits, because most people don’t save enough money to quit their jobs for a couple of months. With most of the workforce still on the job, fast exponential growth would have given us herd immunity long ago. The death toll would have been several times higher, but that’s the essence of the trade-off between protecting the vulnerable and protecting the economy.
* The rough math: In NYC data for my age bracket, (deaths with no underlying conditions + .1*deaths with unknown conditions)/total deaths=3.4%. 40% of the adult population has underlying conditions, so their risk is 1.5*.966/.034=42.6 times as high as mine. Setting my risk equal to x, we have .6x+.4*42.6x=.006, so x=2940.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 1 2020 at 9:42am
#4 Lockdowns were undesirable because they were no the least cost way to keep cases of Covid-19 from overwhelming the health-care system.
#5 The rationale for any mandatory response is the externality involved. If every individual acts only in their self-interest, they will not incur sufficient cost to avoid passing the infection to others.
#8 I wonder if the volunteers would need to be paid.
#18 Precisely zero of the “unemployed” “quit their jobs for a couple of months.”
Stephen McKinney
Jun 3 2020 at 6:41am
Regarding #5: I don’t see an externality here. Who is the third party upon whom the non-voluntary cost is being imposed in this scenario? The way I see it is that everyone who goes out in public (or interacts with others who have done so) are in a kind of mass distributed mutually voluntary transaction (trading the infection risk for the benefits of social interaction).
(I am ignoring more indirect potential externalities, like the risk of the health system being overrun, etc. I’m just interested here in the most direct example, where an individual going out in public risks infecting other people.)
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 3 2020 at 11:41am
Each person who interacts with others runs a risk of becoming infected and the risk that they will infects one or more other people, imposing a non-compensated cost on them. If they reason in the way that Caplan analyses, they will not take steps to reduce the risk of infecting others.
Stephen McKinney
Jun 3 2020 at 8:37pm
Person A goes outside, which imposes a cost (infection risk) on Person B. But isn’t the cost compensated by the fact that Person B also gets to go outside? Person B is an equal and voluntary party in this transaction. An externality requires a third party; who is the third party here?
Todd Ramsey
Jun 1 2020 at 9:53am
Honest question: can someone please explain the math to me? Where do some of the numbers come from?
The .1 in “deaths with unknown conditions”/total death=3.4%.
The 1.5 and the .966 in “1.5*.966/.034=42.6 times as high as mine”
The .6 and the .4 in “.6x+.4*42.6x=.006, so x=2940.”
Thanks in advance!
BenjiC
Jun 1 2020 at 10:55am
.1, .4, and .6 come from Bryan’s bullet #9. He’s guessing that 90% of people with underlying condition unknown have one, so 10% don’t. 40% of the general population have underlying conditions, so 60% don’t.
The .966 comes from his previous calculation of 3.4%: 1 – .034 = .966.
I’m not sure about the 1.5.
Frank
Jun 2 2020 at 8:25pm
1.5=60/40?
Harry Hawk
Jun 1 2020 at 10:36am
#16. Less risk for children, but would put greater risk on older family members?
Esp. in their 40s+ many adult children are significantly involved in elder care (for their parents or older relatives).
__
Time spent providing eldercare, 2015–16. Sixteen percent of the civilian noninstitutional population age 15 and over (41.3 million people) provided unpaid eldercare during the 2-year period of 2015 and 2016. On days they provided eldercare, caregivers spent an average of 2.8 hours in caregiving activities.Sep 27, 2017
Bureau of Labor Statistics (.gov) › ted
Time spent providing eldercare, 2015–16 – Bureau of Labor Statistics
Christian Bjørnskov
Jun 1 2020 at 11:39am
Re your point 9), the Danish Serum Institute released a report a couple of days ago. Of the roughly 570 Danes who died with corona until then, only 24 (4 %) had no known, pre-existing chronic diseases. Of those 25, only 7 were below 70 years of age. At least in Denmark, your 90 % guess is actually too cautious!
Oleg
Jun 2 2020 at 6:10pm
It seems “pre-existing chronic diseases” covers a wide range of malady. I have hypertension. It’s very common in people over 50, yet I don’t think of myself as having a chronic disease, or even as having a disease, as I live my life precisely in the same way as “healthy” people my age live theirs (not overweight, btw, and a serious long-distance runner until recently). Unfortunately, Covid-19 sees things differently.
Denver
Jun 1 2020 at 2:10pm
On points 4 and 7. I wish you would have been more vocal, I would have definitely been willing to propose a bet.
From my experience, people have a far greater tendency to overestimate a threat than to underestimate it (especially when said threat is being hyped up by the news).
So I was conservative about the coronavirus response from the beginning, and was severely disappointed when very smart, otherwise rational, people rushed to fear mongering.
Weir
Jun 1 2020 at 10:44pm
If kids aren’t getting their vaccinations, and their parents aren’t getting the operations they need, and whole countries are putting their malaria programs on hold, and their tuberculosis programs on hold, then the flipside of overestimating the threat from one source is underestimating the threat from every other source.
So the tendency is simultaneously in both directions within the same people’s heads.
Denver
Jun 2 2020 at 9:47am
“Sure, we might have overestimated Iraq’s WMD threat, but what if the US didn’t separate ourselves from the British, and refused to invade the South thus perpetuating slavery, and whole countries remained passive to Nazi occupation, and put their anti-terrorism programs on hold, then the flipside of overestimating the threat from one source is underestimating the threat from every other source.”
I never said legitimate threats don’t exist. Merely, a heavy dose of small-c conservatism in the face of fear mongering goes a long way.
Keep in mind, Bryan has a long and successful betting record specifically because he conservatively bets against hyperbole.
Mr. Econotarian
Jun 2 2020 at 3:45pm
At first, I thought Covid-19 was not going to be a big issue…
Then my mother-in-law died from it.
It seemed like a bigger issue after that. But I’m probably reasoning from the tails, right?
Oleg
Jun 2 2020 at 6:01pm
When I say “it’s not a big issue,” that’s really shorthand for “it’s not a big enough issue to justify bringing about a second Great Depression in a (mostly futile) effort to stop its spread.” It’s a matter of putting it in perspective. It will take many more of our older relatives than any of us expected 6 months ago. Viewed on its own, it is a very serious illness that’s taking far more lives than even (or so it appears) a very serious flu like the one in ’57 or ’68. Serious as it is, however, there are not as many things worth trading for its avoidance (meaning effective avoidance) as most people suppose.
Mike
Jun 2 2020 at 8:22pm
perhaps the perspective should be “would you revert back to the wealth of the early 2000s to save a couple hundred-thousand lives & 5x that number with severe illness?”
robc
Jun 4 2020 at 7:34am
But it didnt save them.
Is it worth it to stretch the deaths out over 6 months vs 2 months?
AMW
Jun 1 2020 at 4:41pm
Looking forward to your thoughts on police homicide and rioting right around Thanksgiving.
A Country Farmer
Jun 1 2020 at 6:27pm
To add to #5, another great Huemer paper which argues for burden of proof: In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 3 2020 at 11:53am
The problem with advocating “passivity” is that it may not work and you end up with policy X that is worse than Policy Y that you might have advocated. You have to look at the opportunity costs.
Mark Bahner
Jun 1 2020 at 6:55pm
I’d be interested to know where you came up with the 15% and 40%. 🙂
Thomas Knapp
Jun 1 2020 at 8:04pm
Shutting down major portions of the economy and placing hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest was the exact OPPOSITE of “erring on the side of caution.” It was throwing caution completely to the winds and acting in headlong panic.
blink
Jun 1 2020 at 8:15pm
I will have to remember this quip: caution is the opposite of panic.
blink
Jun 1 2020 at 8:14pm
5. More important here is whether our actions put *others* at risk. I am unsympathetic to paternalistic restrictions, but take seriously those based on externalities. For example, if opening kindergartens risks asymptomatic kids infecting their parents, neighbors, or older relatives who are at high risks, then we ought restrict this.
10. Your poll results suggest that the Spanish Flu was even worse (morally) than I ever imagined.
15. I am not sure NYC is the best data to computing our current mortality risks. First, they likely had unusually high viral loads because of the subway and extremely high population density. Second, their mortality data reflects early fumbling with treatment which has improved now at least modestly. From these two points alone, I suggest cutting your estimate in half.
Mark Z
Jun 2 2020 at 6:15am
New York also botched it pretty bad with the nursing homes, which make up a large fraction of deaths, so that likely inflated the estimated fatality rate.
Phil H
Jun 1 2020 at 8:22pm
“the burden is on the advocates of these policies to demonstrate that their benefits drastically exceed their costs – by at least 5:1.”
In retrospect, I think this is fairly easy: if the government had intervened early and effectively like New Zealand, you could have had close to zero deaths, like New Zealand.
In the absence of an effective government, that argument is much harder to make; in the absence of good information, the argument was much harder to make back in January (though it seems like the good information was out there for those who were willing to listen).
This argument for preventative measures is, I think specifically an argument for *government* action. Because I can’t see how individuals (and/or companies) could possibly take the kind of organizational, collective action required for a Taiwan/NZ style preventive program, particularly in the absence of a visible threat. It would require some national coordination, and the word for “national coordination” is government.
Lliam Munro
Jun 1 2020 at 9:57pm
In New Zealand, we have, like Australia, the advantage of being rather isolated from the rest of the world and having been in summer when the virus arrived.
These advantages would have been difficult to immigrate.
Unlike Australia, however, our government opted to shut down all non-essential business including those they were advised by officials could operate safely.
Our rate of infection meanwhile is slightly worse than Australia’s. The heavy-handed lockdown has led to one known suicide of a 38-year-old business owner whose business was destroyed unnecessarily.
One of our largest industries, tourism, is effectively destroyed, with no hope of recovery until a vaccine is developed, which is an uncertain hope at best. According to the government’s optimistic forecasts, our debt will skyrocket to over 50% of GDP, but this requires a recovery considerably quicker than that in 2008 so will likely be far worse, given we cannot reopen our borders until the rest of the world has eliminated the disease.
Unemployment, previously sub-5%, will likely exceed 20%, which as Bryan points out is a considerable evil.
From a constitutional perspective, our government ignored advice that their lockdown was not legal, and enforcement agencies such as police cheerfully enforced with illegal arrests the will of the government rather than that of parliament, which sets a rather dangerous precedent.
If it is not clear from the above, I cannot recommend following our example.
Oleg
Jun 2 2020 at 7:07pm
I’ve often wondered why Acern has been heaped with so much praise, while no one seemed to even notice that NZ’s much larger neighbour has done comparatively better, despite the fact that its vastly larger population inherently makes disease spread more difficult to control. Still wondering.
Lliam Munro
Jun 2 2020 at 9:37pm
We wonder the same. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that it’s because she’s young, female and left wing, whereas Scott Morrison is old, male and right wing.
Kyle Walter
Jun 1 2020 at 9:03pm
Professor Caplan, I’d like to know your thoughts on this.
Kyle Walter
Jun 1 2020 at 9:09pm
Sorry I didn’t add the link properly the first time.
Lance
Jun 2 2020 at 4:23pm
A big flaw in Bryan’s reasoning is the lack of a counterfactual. Suppose there was no lockdown and the CDC, governors, etc. simply recommended all non-essential people stay home. What would have happened? Who knows? But there’s substantial evidence to suggest people would have stayed home anyway, as people were starting to do this before the lockdown started. Likewise, people have started to venture out before the lockdowns were lifted. Thus, the monetary cost of the lockdown is not the difference between the economy now and what is was like in February, we have to compare the economy now to what it would look like with a voluntary lockdown.
Also, don’t underestimate the size of the vulnerable population. High rates of obesity, diabetes, etc., when combined with the elderly put the size of the vulnerable adult population at about 40%. If you add in people who live with elderly or with poor health and perhaps those without health insurance who may want to be cautious, and you have 50% of the population.
Tom DeMeo
Jun 2 2020 at 4:49pm
Younger people might not die as often, but to use a well known example, consider what Chris Cuomo went through. I believe he is exactly the same age as Bryan, and quite fit for his age. Extrapolate several tens of millions of people going through something of that nature at the same time. Quite a few would be left with permanent damage. There a a lot of humans walking around with “pre-existing conditions”.
This notion that we could have let this rip among the healthy, or that we could segregate the unhealthy is poorly thought through. I’m pretty sure it would have produced a greater negative economic impact for at least a year than what we are doing now, even if it somehow didn’t kill well over a million extra people. It would have induced extreme panic.
Irfan Khawaja
Jun 2 2020 at 7:13pm
Why do lockdown measures have “to put R0 far below 1″ to count as successful? And how far is “far”? Why isn’t it sufficient that they put R0 at or below 1?
Jim Birch
Jun 2 2020 at 8:42pm
If the fatality rate is 0.6% that’s 1.x million deaths in the US if most people get it. And that seemed to me to be the curve countries were on before the social distancing “panic”. Or am I missing something?
If social distancing is dropped or fades we may get to firm up the 0.6% guesstimate.
Todd Kreider
Jun 2 2020 at 8:57pm
I spoke out after a week of our lockdown wondering if there was any remote plan to end it. I have a Ph.D. in economics but not an academic like Bryan, who must have felt afraid to speak out or otherwise he would have two months ago.
I disagreed with Bryan that there was a chance that benefits would outweigh costs except possibly in a few isolated cases based on what epidemiologists had been saying from the start. I also was sure that nowhere near 1.5 million Americans would die by June 2021 based on knowing how wildly off that type of prediction was in 2009 with H1N1, although didn’t realize both were Neil Ferguson’s models being used. I did think between 50,000 to 500,000 Americans could die from the virus and probably under 250,000 by June 2021, using less extreme mortality rate and percent infected numbers.
I thought in March that the mortality rate would be between where Germany was at the time, 0.2% and South Korea, 0.7%, because I assumed they were adequately testing, which probably wasn’t true. Two days later a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist told Sam Harris he thought South Korea at 0.6% would be the upper bound.
I’m curious why Bryan now thinks it will be around 0.6% instead of 0.3%. I now think it will be below 0.4% based in part on the Germany study released three weeks ago.
Rhonda
Jun 3 2020 at 10:49am
Regarding the statement: “Individuals, in contrast, have every right to personally “err on the side of caution.”
Without a government imposed “shut-down” it would be very costly for individuals to err on the side of caution and so very few of them would do so. Imagine telling your boss you’ve decided to work from home when the business is still operating as usual.
Impossible for most workers.
robc
Jun 4 2020 at 7:40am
My company switched to wfh before the shutdowns. And despite my state being relatively open now, we are still wfh.
Charlie
Jun 3 2020 at 11:25am
Given the numbers for children (8 died, 7 w/ conditions, 1 w/o), i think your kids are more likely to die than you. Or are the numbers too small to trust? Or since we don’t know what population of kids has underlying conditions, we can’t do the same math?
(deaths with no underlying conditions + .1*deaths with unknown conditions)/total deaths=12.5%. 40% of the adult population has underlying conditions, so their risk is 1.5*.875/.125=10.5 times as high as mine. Setting my risk equal to x, we have .6x+.4*10.5x=.006, so x=800.
1 in 800 vs your risk of 1 in 2940.
Terry
Jun 10 2020 at 7:16am
“Telling government to ‘err on the side of caution’ is a recipe for severe oppression. Individuals, in contrast, have every right to personally ‘err on the side of caution.’”
But there is a problem with leaving precautions up to “the individual”. If the right precautions for individual, family, or community safety—such as closing businesses or operating those deemed essential in a limited capacity or with PPE and plastic barriers, staying home from work, withdrawing one’s children from school or daycare, etc. are VOLUNTARY, businesses and individuals choosing to “err on the side of caution” will incur various COMPETITIVE and ECONOMIC disadvantages without compensation. For instance, if hair salon A closes and B doesn’t, many of A’s customers will go to B and maybe never return—therefore A is incentivized to also remain open, whether or not the owners believe it safe (for themselves, employees, customers, and everyone whom any of the above may go on to infect). What’s more, all workers whose EMPLOYERS remain open must show up or risk being fired (or passed up for promotion) if they stay home to protect themselves and their families from infection, or to supervise their children who now won’t be in school (by parents’ choice or otherwise). Also, if employers or employees must pay for PPE and other materials without reimbursement—because they’re not required—guess what? Those things won’t happen.
If on the other hand the various measures above are REQUIRED, no one who takes them will be at a competitive disadvantage because everyone will take them; and any economic losses will (or should be) mostly compensated by the insurance coverage and various government programs that kick in when widespread disaster is declared and the right actions become mandatory.
This is similar to the problem with making hurricane evacuations or closures voluntary. As long as doing (what may well turn out to be) the right thing is VOLUNTARY, businesses and individuals hesitate to do it. And by the time disaster is declared, evacuation is required, reimbursement is promised, transportation and lodging provided, and so forth—it may be too late.
William Ehlhardt
Jun 17 2020 at 12:21am
In case others were having trouble understanding it: I reproduced Bryan’s calculation in this spreadsheet. Hopefully the formulas and commentary make it clear exactly what he did.
Note that I’m not sure where he got the 0.6% baseline 49-year-old death rate, but it doesn’t seem erroneous to me.
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