On Tuesday, April 21 at 6:00 p.m. EDT, I’ll be debating Justin Wolfers about whether the lockdowns should be ended immediately. I’m arguing in the affirmative–they should end. Professor Wolfers, whom I’ve never met but whose work I’ve been impressed with, is arguing the negative.
Details are here.
READER COMMENTS
Arnold S Kling
Apr 19 2020 at 8:08pm
If it were me I would start with this. http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/sooner-or-later-mild-or-severe/
Mark Bahner
Apr 19 2020 at 10:03pm
Hi David,
I’d be happy to help you with your debate arguments.
In particular, I have a fair amount of data on:
1) the effectiveness of masks, even homemade masks;
2) the number of DALYs (disability adjusted life years) lost from COVID-19;
3) I have day-by-day curves of cases and deaths per unit of population for every country in the world and every state in the U.S. These can show that other countries that are not shutting down are doing as well or even much better than the U.S.:
Like Taiwan!
Matthias Görgens
Apr 19 2020 at 10:58pm
Mark, for the sake of argument I would paint Taiwan as the compromise solution: let the private sector decide on how much lockdown they need.
The US also had some good examples, for example their major sports leagues shut down before their government showed any understanding at all.
Lots of other countries also showed good private sector responses.
Mark Brady
Apr 19 2020 at 10:55pm
The motion reads, “The US economy should be liberated from the governments’ lockdowns right away.”
If I understand the motion correctly, the affirmative is that all lockdowns at every level of government–federal, state, city, county–should be lifted immediately. That’s what the position of the apostrophe after “the governments” implies, or is the apostrophe misplaced?
And what about government schools, colleges, and universities that have closed their doors? Are their actions examples of “the governments’ lockdowns”?
David Henderson
Apr 20 2020 at 12:20am
You do understand correctly.
Phil H
Apr 20 2020 at 12:36am
One of the questions that is standardly asked, and I assume Prof Wolfers will, is what will you do if you’re wrong?
It seems possible that there was a way to contain coronavirus with effective tracking and isolation early on. It seems overwhelmingly unlikely that that approach would be possible now, and even more unlikely that the US is capable of executing it. If that’s right, then ending the lockdowns will cause a lot more deaths. What would the anti-shutdown side do in that case? To me, this argument looks utterly irresponsible. How can accountability be introduced?
robc
Apr 20 2020 at 7:37am
Ending the lockdown wont cause more deaths…it will cause more deaths soon.
I wouldnt entirely end the lockdown, I would unwind and watch hospital utilization…if it gets above, say, 80%, pause.
Deflatten the curve.
Michael
Apr 20 2020 at 8:29am
The lag between infection and peak healthcare demand would have to be factored in somehow.
robc
Apr 20 2020 at 9:52am
Agreed, that was the purpose of the 80%, maybe it should be 60%? The idea was to pause in time that the peak doesn’t get to 100%.
I don’t know the exact number that should be the limit, but my state is at 15% ICU utilization, which is plenty of room to loosen up.
Fred_in_PA
Apr 21 2020 at 6:42pm
Phil H;
You say, “then ending the lockdowns will cause a lot more deaths”.
I largely agree with robc that this would cause a lot more deaths soon. With the follow-on that continuing the lockdowns will cause a lot more deaths later.
Unless you want to keep the economy shut down for the 18-24 months it takes to develop an effective vaccine, whenever you let up before that, all those people who haven’t caught it yet will get their turn. Lockdowns to “flatten the curve” (and thus prevent the healthcare system from getting overwhelmed) make sense. But trying to forestall the disease forever may not.
There is an older school of public health & economics that implies mortality levels due to economic destruction that will rival those of the virus. (See esp. M. Harvey Brenner’s 1984 report to the Joint Economic Committee of the 98th Congress ) That work implies that, if unemployment approaches the 25% peak of the Great Depression (and we’re near 20% and climbing) we can expect an extra 1.3 million deaths over the next six years brought about by the economic destruction of people’s lives.
Even more recent public health & economics research (see, for example Christopher Ruhm’s 2013 working paper for the NBER, Recessions, Healthy No More?) while still implying a fall (sic) in mortality, admit an immediate effect of rising suicides and accidental poisonings (mostly drug overdoses). If this is twice as bad as the 2008-9 downturn (and it appears to be judging by unemployment rates) we’ll have roughly an additional 10,000 suicides.
I have not read Case & Deaton’s latest book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, but my understanding from reviews is that they lay much of the blame at the doorstep of rising inequality. The coronavirus lockdowns are severely aggravating that inequality: The elderly (who typically have some accumulated wealth) are mostly retired and thus insulated from lockdown’s unemployment effects. The people who can work (and draw a paycheck) from home are largely the college educated who deal in information. They, too, were among the more advantaged of our society.
The people who the lockdown prevents from working are mostly those younger and less educated. Who — even before we took away their paychecks — were the less advantaged.
The NY Times reports that 30% currently can’t pay their rent (it’s 40% in NYC). Many of them may soon be homeless. Watch the evening news: people are having trouble getting food, and the foodbank lines run dry every day. 20% homeless and hungry is a recipe for social revolution. The survivalist crackpots who’ve been stocking up on guns and ammunition may soon start to look prescient.
Larry Campbell
Apr 20 2020 at 12:50am
What about accountability for the shutdown side — that is, accountability for the pain, suffering, and death caused not by the disease but by the policy response to the disease? What will you, meaning those who support the shutdown, do if you’re wrong, and it turns out that you’ve caused far more damage than was necessary?Will your own argument then look utterly irresponsible?
Vivian Darkbloom
Apr 20 2020 at 5:03am
While this is a debate between two economists, the issue is not limited to the economic consequences of the lockdowns and/or “stay-at-home” orders. I am much more concerned about the non-economic consequences of these measures. First, I strongly question the constitutionality of these orders and the restrictions on individual liberties.
As far as the Constitution is concerned, what (police) powers there are rest mainly at the state and local levels. The federal government is one of specified and limited powers and the residual powers rest with the states and “the people”. The federal government has the ability to quarantine or isolate persons at the federal borders. The states may generally do the same within their borders. However, note that “quarantine” has always been understood to mean limiting the movements of persons who are known or reasonably suspected of having had contact with someone who is highly contagious. “Isolation” is limiting the movement of a person who is known to actually have a contagious disease. Both require demonstrating the appropriate level of proof at the *individual* level. This is a fundamental principle of due process. Neither allow limiting the movements of entire populations of persons (and/or closing of businesses) without regard to proof at the individual level. Even if such powers were to exist, the exercise of them would require extraordinary proof. I doubt that under the present circumstances the limitations heretofore imposed would even pass the weakest “rational basis” test due to the division of opinion among the public health “experts”.
I am very concerned about the dangers these actions have on our civil liberties. It is particularly so given that these actions have been taken unilaterally by executives far outside any deliberative process within the democratic systems. It is the executive who has in his or her sole discretion decided there is a public health emergency and there appears to be no effective check against them. This is a recipe for authoritarian takeover, particularly by an unpopular executive. History is replete with examples of executives creating public panic against assumed enemies (what could be better than an unseen virus?) in order to consolidate authoritarian rule. As Henderson has stated elsewhere, I do not want my ability to leave my house, visit my neighbors and friends, etc., to be made illegal at the sole discretion of a handful of bureaucrats. Are citizens to be treated as children, as subjects or as adults who are capabable of managing their own lives and the risks that living entails?
The constitutional issues aside, one of the things that I hope comes from this experience is legislation that requires a super-majority vote to impose the types of restrictions that are actually not prohibited by the Constitution. The War Powers Act, while not perfect, might be a starting point for crafting such limits and checks.
In short, how do we value not only the economic costs but also the liberty of freedom of movement, private property rights and the risk of authoritarian takeover against the estimated public health risks? Last year, 2,813,503 persons died in the US of all causes. Our economy did just fine and “the People” were allowed to actually conduct our normal lives “and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” in the face of dangers that have always been present and considered inevitable.
David, your article at AIER (“Liberation from Lockdown Now”) was excellent and is a good foundation for this debate. I am confident you will present your (our) case effectively.
Michael
Apr 20 2020 at 6:22am
I disagree that there is no effective check. Both the Covid-19 problem and state/local response are unprecedented in my lifetime (~50 years). Even though state/local authorities have presumably been able to order such responses for that whole time, they haven’t actually done anything comparable until now.
Under normal circumstances, no one wants states and cities to be locked down. That so many states have successfully imposed such measures is an indication that there is a lot of public support for them, which would, under normal circumstances not exist. That support is essential for lockdowns to happen, and when it wanes states will reopen.
It continues to dissappoint me that relatively little effort is going into “ways to safely reopen.” People don’t want to be locked down but they also do not want to die or cause their loved ones to die.
Vivian Darkbloom
Apr 20 2020 at 6:34am
“I disagree that there is no effective check.”
You begin with this statement and then provide absolutely no support for it.
“Even though state/local authorities have presumably been able to order such responses for that whole time;”
“Even though…*presumably*…?
That’s it? Your argument is that because they have not used such power in the past (and therefore unprecedented) they now suddenly have it? I would think the presumption would be the opposite.
By the way, I’m 65 plus and there have been numerous endemics and pandemics during my lifetime and never a hint that these vast powers were necessary and/or available. I don’t want to die, either. For that reason, as a rational adult and presumably free to make adult choices, I’m voluntarily choosing to take the precautions I deem appropriate to the situation.
Michael
Apr 20 2020 at 8:27am
No. My argument is that we are in the midst of a global pandemic that has taken, at minimum, 40,000 American lives in the span of 6 weeks, and that absent anything analogous to that, state and local governments have neither the desire nor the public support needed to implement large scale shutdown orders.
There are 40,000 reasons why this one is different.
The precautions you choose to take or not take affect not just your own risk but that of the general public as well. And vice versa.
Larry Campbell
Apr 20 2020 at 11:45am
“There are 40,000 reasons why this one is different.”
You mean milder? An estimated 100,000 US deaths in the 1968 “Hong Kong flu”. 70,00 to 116,000 US deaths in the 1957-58 flu pandemic. In neither of those cases was much of the entire national economy, not to mention the entire global economy, shut down.
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 20 2020 at 12:57pm
As one who lived through the 1957-58 pandemic, there was not the pressure on the healthcare system that has been evidenced with this outbreak. I cannot remember anyone in our San Diego area being hospitalized or dying. CRF in the UK was 0.33%, higher than the normal seasonal flu. The mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown.
Michael
Apr 21 2020 at 6:36am
The point you are trying to make here refutes itself. We are not out of the woods yet on this one (there are still many deaths yet to come) and the official death count of ~40,000 is almost certainly an undercount, since only deaths in patients who tested positive were being counted. A better estimate of Covid-19 related deaths will come after the fact, when 2020 all-cause mortality is compared to previous years.
The interventions that have been taken have reduced the death count. Had we done nothing at all, or taken measures more like what was done in prior pandemics, there would already be many more deaths than 40,000.
A key difference between flu and Covid-19 is that there is no immunity to Covid-19 in the world population as this is a “new pathogen”, meaning that more people are at risk and the virus itself can spread through the population far more readily.
Larry Campbell
Apr 21 2020 at 6:44pm
That wasn’t much of a refutation. You used the 40,000 figure to try to show why this pandemic is worse than previous, and the simple point is that it doesn’t. You can predict that this one eventually will, and you may eventually be right, or you may be wrong, but either way it won’t show that the interventions that have been taken have reduced the death toll, since other jurisdictions have declining death curves without taking such interventions. More important than that is the enormous economic and human damage that such interventions have caused as collateral damage, and a proper accounting after the fact should show those too — not just all-cause mortality (some, years later), but livelihoods ruined, life-savings gone, families broken, and lives sunk in substance abuse. You can’t suddenly halt most of an entire national, not to mention global, economy and not expect society to be severely harmed.
Michael Byrnes
Apr 22 2020 at 6:48am
The number of known Covid-19 related deaths is now 45K, which is almost certainly a substantial underestimate. All of the death in under 2 months, and still ongoing.
That is with the interventions that have reduced spread.
I agree there are costs to the preventive measures being taken now, and that there is a point somewhere where the options (continue shutdown vs reopen) are in balance.
People seem to be deciding where exactly that point of balance is based on their ideology rather than on facts. Comparisons to past flu pandemics – other than perhaps 1918 – are specious, because this disease behaves very differently than even virulent strains of flu.
The other, and most personally frustrating to me, issue is that wherever that balance point is, it can be shifted by public policy, which is failing in a spectacular and unprecedented way. The more capable we are to identify and aggressively contain local outbreaks, the more quickly we can move towards normalization of activities without paying as high a price in lives lost and economic growth lost. Instead we are going to handle this in the worst possible way and accept the worst possible tradeoffs.
Vivian Darkbloom
Apr 22 2020 at 7:16am
See table 1
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
Larry Campbell
Apr 22 2020 at 8:49am
We can at least agree that there is a point where the options, whatever they are, are in balance, but that’s always true. The point in this case is that, by all the evidence we have to date, we’ve overshot that balance by a considerable margin. Your reference to 45k deaths seems more like a scare tactic than evidence, since, as many others have pointed out, if you accumulate national statistics on death you can amass much larger numbers from lots of other causes. Describing this disease as an “unknown pathogen” seems also to appeal more to fear than reason, since it’s a strain of a known corona virus family, and by now researchers have had time to assess many of its novel features. On the other side of the balance we have a degree of economic, social, and personal upheaval that has no precedent apart from actual world wars. Some part of that is no doubt unavoidable — but the whole point of public policy should be to lessen, not exacerbate, that upheaval.
Michael
Apr 22 2020 at 12:48pm
Scare tactic? It seems like 45K is pretty widely reported. The official counts, eg, from CDC, are based on reporting that is known to lag, as noted on the CDC death tracking page:
The animation shown here (for past year pneumonia deaths) shows the reporting lags in action:
https://twitter.com/TylerMorganMe/status/1247706877145776129?s=20
Moreover, we are still in the middle of this. New York seems to have hit its peak death counts over the past week or so. It remains to be seen what happens after the peak. Gradual decline from here or steep one? The eventual total number of deaths will be much higher if the decline is gradual.
There’s a lot we do not know still. What we DO know is that we don’t have the infrastructure in place to identify and contain new outbreaks as they happen, and that means higher to reopen cost no matter when we do it.
Michael
Apr 22 2020 at 12:57pm
Here, by the way, is what Johns Hopkins reports:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
As of yesterday (Apr 21), they reported, for the US, 823,786 confimed cases and 44,845 deaths, for a case fatality rate of 5.4%. 13.71 deaths per 100,000 population.
Larry Campbell
Apr 22 2020 at 1:59pm
It’s not the number itself (which I’m not disputing) that’s the “scare tactic”, it’s the use of the number. Even worse is the use of a “case fatality rate” that virtually everyone accepts is a serious exaggeration of the real infection mortality rate. The infrastructure to manage new outbreaks varies greatly from region to region, both in terms of what’s needed and what’s available, and it’s just more fear-mongering to say that we know we don’t have such infrastructure in general.
Vivian Darkbloom
Apr 22 2020 at 6:38am
I’m still waiting for you to answer the simple question as to what the effective limits are on an executive self-declaring a “public health emergency” and imposing the kind of limitations on civil liberties that are being imposed. Your answer is not at all an answer. It seems to be “trust them”. What is your limit on the number of lives that are supposed to be at risk? Would a bad flu season qualify? Should the government ban driving? Drinking? Smoking? All those activities entail (every year) more loss of lives than the corona virus has to date.
Of course, even adults are going to make bad choices that affect the rest of society. But, the ability to make bad choices is also what makes us free. I believe that the vast majority of adult citizens are rational and responsible. I submit that the proper way to view the appropriateness of government imposed “lockdowns” and “stay-at-home” orders is to compare the likely effectiveness of government-imposed restrictions and the effectiveness of adult citizens voluntarily doing what is necessary and appropriate. I submit that in this case, the difference is not very great and almost certainly not worth the damage that the government dictated “overkill” does to our liberties (both present and future) and the damage to our economy (both present and future).
Michael
Apr 20 2020 at 8:31am
I’m glad that 2 reputable economists are going to debate this.
But at the same time, I’d like to see more effort going into the question of “how can we safely reopen?” rather than “should we reopen immediately?”
Tyler Wells
Apr 20 2020 at 8:50am
First, a strong summary needs to be made for the costs of the lockdown, which would encompass both economics and sociology. The stress on families of the economic uncertainty is compound the stress of being together in small quarters. Emphasis needs to be put on the more fragile families, including the undocumented immigrants. These are the people that the “lockdown until vaccine” crowd normally claim to champion, but whom they have abandoned or discounted in this crisis.
Second, it needs to be pointed out that, even if a long-term lockdown was presumed to be optimal, it would not be enforceable with our current legal structure. The young will meet up and socialize. Only draconian enforcement that is probably not legal and definitely not desirable can prevent this.
Third, an easement of the lockdown need not imply that no prevention should exist at all. The elderly and infirm are overwhelmingly at risk, with little to no risk for the young and healthy. An easement of the lockdown would enable us to concentrate resources on those who are truly at risk. See Sweden’s policy and John Giesecke and Anders Tegnell.
Good luck Dr. Henderson, and thank you for championing all of those who are much more affected by the response to Covid than by the virus itself.
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 20 2020 at 11:31am
Hi David – Will the debate be recorded? I have a Zoom Board of Directors meeting at about the same time that will preempt me watching. Good luck!!
David Henderson
Apr 20 2020 at 11:20pm
Yes. And thanks.
David Henderson
Apr 20 2020 at 3:07pm
To all the commenters above:
I appreciate all the suggestions offered. I have only about 17 minutes to make my case and so I won’t be able to use them all. But I do appreciate it.
Chris H
Apr 20 2020 at 8:16pm
My advice is, practice your argument with a Swedish accent. Those guys seem to have this down.
Mark Bahner
Apr 20 2020 at 10:44pm
Hi David,
Or if you don’t have enough time to perfect your Swedish accent, at least listen to this interview (if you haven’t already):
Explanation of why lockdowns aren’t worthwhile (by man with a Swedish accent ;-))
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 21 2020 at 9:26am
But there IS no nationwide “lockdown.” Different cities and states have different degrees of restrictions on movement of people and operation of firms. Some are too restrictive or restrictive sub optimal ways and others may not be restrictive. What procedures should they use to modify their policies?
Comments are closed.