Thread by @phl43

The long term impact of school closures, not the temporary income drop of their parents, accounts for 90% of children’s overall welfare loss. The effect is concentrated on low-income families and closures also result in a substantial fall of government revenues in the long run.

https://twitter.com/voxeu/status/1326852877457915905

Now, you can quibble about the model, but it should be clear that, if you only look at their immediate effects (which is what most pro-lockdown people do), you’re going to vastly underestimate the long term impact of lockdowns.

Everyone is making this dumb argument that, because a vaccine is coming, lockdowns are obviously the way to go. But this changes *nothing* unless you thought that the cost of keeping the epidemic contained for another 3-6 months but not for 1-2 years passed a cost-benefit test.

Thanks to spontaneous behavioral changes, R is currently low enough that, even according to the unrealistic model that pro-lockdown people are using, incidence will start falling before it reaches the absurdly high levels people freak out about.

So you will likely have more deaths, but you will also avoid many of the negative consequences of lockdowns. My view is that people both overestimate how many lives lockdowns save and underestimate their negative consequences.

In any case, if you think the choice is *obvious* now that we have very good reasons to think a vaccine will arrive in a few months, the only thing that is obvious is that you haven’t thought this through.

Yes, that’s a good point, this debate about lockdowns is largely pointless anyway because there is no way we’re going to do the same thing as in the Spring. This cuts both way though, since it also means the cost of whatever lockdown we could realistically do won’t be as large.

https://twitter.com/rcafdm/status/1326903092797968384

What this means, in my opinion, is that the difference in outcomes between countries that go down the lockdown path and the others won’t be as large as people on either side assume, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be one and that it’s easy to figure it out.

For instance, France has closed most small businesses, which is very doubtful has more than a very small effect on transmission, but it’s going to ruin this part of the economy. I think it’s complete madness.

It’s probably better to move the debate to this kind of specific policies, where it’s actually meaningful. I think closing small businesses and schools is stupid. I’m also against closing bars and restaurants, but at least I think here it’s not obvious.

To be clear, nobody is denying that a longer lockdown is costlier than a shorter one, but this is beside the point *if* you think that the cost of shorter one is still not worth the benefit it will bring about. I don’t even understand why such an obvious point is controversial.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1326899297087070212

And please don’t tell me that everybody understands that. If everybody did, my timeline wouldn’t have been full of people cricizing anti-lockdown advocates for not admitting the vaccine news had proven them wrong, when in fact it changes nothing for the vast majority of them.

Similarly, if the target is not sophisticated opponents of lockdowns but people who believe they literally make no difference on health outcomes, then it doesn’t make sense, because it’s perfectly rational for people who believe that not to be moved by the vaccine news 🤷‍♂️

This is fair. The vaccine news does make a view that was once not implausible, i. e. everyone will eventually be infected everywhere, pretty implausible, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the debate for the reasons I give above.

https://twitter.com/DanMKervick/status/1326915884066148368