Thread by @t0nyyates

This article doesn't quite make the point clearly enough IMO. The contention is that if you get close enough to the best policy, you can improve both economic and health outcomes. theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…

In which case the 'price of a life' - while an interesting and difficult convsersation we have all the time - is not relevant.

What the article does not dwell on is the counterfactual path for the *economy* if the virus were to be let loose. Much of the econometric research shows that the major portion of the 'damage' is done by the virus, not lockdown restrictions.

Of course the flip side is that lockdowns do do some 'harm' - they have to restrain contacts - but that is more akin to an 'investment'. Up front £ that pays a return in health AND £ later.

The article gets close to saying this but not close enough, framing the idea in terms of the ability to 'eliminate' covid.

I think this is unfortunate as it's tempting to conlcude, if you are sceptical that 'elimination' is possible, that you are back in the world of putting a value on life. [Repeat, we always do this in social policy, but for covid it may not be necessary].

Yet there might be many states of the world post covid that fall short of elimination - we could rank them by recorded cases per unit of time, say - that still leave us, relative to doing nothing, both better off and healthier.

All THAT said, the price of life is still something we have to deal with in tackling covid. It will crop up in figuring out the fine details of the best policy, where we are, having broadly suppressed, working out how much more to squeeze.

It also comes up because there are important inter-group 'exchanges' going on. Eg the young and healthy locking down, giving up continuous employment and education, to save the old and ill. [Broadly].

I put 'exchanges' in quotes because this may not be a one off. The current young and healthy may get their turn in a repeat pandemic or similar crisis.

Even if they don't, IMO you can think of the policy response to covid as the realization of a social insurance payout. Behind the Rawlesian veil of ignorance one did not know who was going to have to hide from covid, who would die, and who would need £ from the govt.

The implied price of life is useful because it will express the tensions that will emerge, because not everyone will consent to the social insurance scheme, and not everyone will believe, even if they do consent, that it will hold for long enough that it is worth the premium.

Finally, although there is the clear theoretical case for policies that make the price of life irrelevant, because they improve both £ and health, and strong circumstantial evidence for them in the examples of the success countries [NZ, Taiwan, SK...]....

...many things can stop you getting there. Poor understanding of the epidemic and the economy; poor and lagging information [about cases, variants, deaths]. Politics and ideology. Govts failing to protect themselves and their ability to execute [see April 2020].

Maybe for some countries, achieving the outcome that improves both health and wealth is too hard, as they are too dysfunctional, and sceptics that misunderstand the epidemic have too tight a hold. Far away from the optimum, trade-offs start to become relevant again.

This is pretty much a summary of my talk at the @NIESRorg worshop organized by @toxvaerd1 on Friday last week.

One thing I'll add is that there is another at work. Particularly the trade-off between the present and the future.

Locking down, and supporting it with borrowed money is an investment in a post covid future. Made by those who get locked down, and paid for by those whose taxes ultimately make good the debt.

Something today is given up, in exchange for a return tomorrow. One thing is traded off against another. This trade off is extremely favourable financially, because real interest rates are so low.

That the investment will be capped, and will generate the extra life years hoped for, has also got progressively more certain as we made it through 2020, as the news of the vaccine trials progressed.

This ought to have made the authorities more determined to make the lockdown investment. Sadly, the opposite seemed to happen in the UK. Most UK people died after we found out that the vaccine was going to happen for sure.

Pfizer announced 18 Nov 2020. AZ on 23 Nov. At that point the confirmed death toll was about 57k. Cumlative total is now about 117k.

The vaccine has been a great global collaborative sucess. And there were definite UK successes in investment, nurturing and procurement to celebrate. But it is tragic that they accompanied a failure to understand how to trade off today against the future.

Right at the moment when foregone education and employment was going to translate for definite to covid deaths avoided, not just postponed, we decided, because we did not grasp this trade off, to give up and kill 60k people anyway.

At least one has to hope that it was a misunderstanding. Amidst the euphoria and MBA type articles about the vaccine procurement, I hope as much energy is devoted to understanding this trade-off blunder and holding those who made it to account.