The noble Don Boudreaux builds on my ageless hypothetical:
To avoid the many challenges with calculating the value of a statistical life, think of the matter in the following way: Suppose that a society, identical to ours, will – with 100 percent certainty – be stricken with one of three deadly pathogens. But this society can choose which of the three to suffer. Each pathogen will kill the same number of persons, with this number being significant, potentially as high as 0.15 percent of the society’s total population.
Pathogen A will kill only people 80 years old and older.
Pathogen B will kill only people 30 years old and younger.
Pathogen C will kill indiscriminately across all age groups.
The Fates give the society 24 hours to choose which of these three pathogens to endure. Perhaps it’s true that a surprisingly large number of very selfish and frightened people 80 and older will argue for pathogen B, while many other elderly people, being a bit less selfish, will argue for pathogen C.
But surely the great majority of citizens – including, I suspect, elderly citizens – would argue for pathogen A. And this stance is the one that’s ethically agreeable. To see why, suppose further that just before voting on the pathogen is conducted, each person is given a shot that, for a few minutes, puts that person behind a veil of age-ignorance, causing each person to temporarily lose all knowledge of whether he or she is old, young, or middle-aged. Surely the great bulk of these age-blind people would vote for pathogen A over pathogen B or C.
The age profile of Covid’s fatalities, of course, isn’t quite as stark as that of pathogen A. But it’s much closer to pathogen A than to pathogen B or C.
Because pathogens B and C would each be regarded as far more devastating, heartbreaking, and frightening than pathogen A, if society were nevertheless stricken with B or C rather than with A, society would reasonably expend more effort and resources protecting against the pathogen than it would spend protecting against pathogen A. This point I cannot prove, but it does seem to me to follow firmly from the ranking of the three pathogens.
But even if the amount of effort and resources spent combatting pathogen A would be as great as that spent combatting either of the other two pathogens, surely the pattern of this use of effort and resources would differ. Surely efforts would be made to focus protection on its victims (namely, people 8o and older). Surely younger people would not be treated as if they are as at much risk from the pathogen as are the elderly.
The magnitude of Covid lockdowns and other indiscriminate, often draconian policies strikes me as what people would be more likely to endorse if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C. Yet Covid is much closer to pathogen A. If the responses that we’ve endured over the past 14 months are acceptable in light of the very obvious and steep age profile of Covid’s victims, what, I ask, would acceptable responses look like if Covid were akin to pathogen B or C? It’s terrifying to contemplate.
READER COMMENTS
Davide
Apr 27 2021 at 1:06pm
Hindsight is 20/20. I don’t think we knew about the age-discrepancy at the start of the COVID pandemic. And I don’t think we will ever know this in advance of future pandemics. So I don’t think this argument will help with pandemics. But I agree that it’s relevant for your “decaying value of life” theory.
robc
Apr 27 2021 at 1:19pm
We did by April 2020. I did calculations at the time based on the age distribution of deaths at that point and how it was next to impossible for any kind of lockdown to pass a cost/benefit analysis because of it.
Raf
Apr 27 2021 at 1:19pm
It’s true that, at the beginning, we didn’t know very well what the age profile was. However, we had a fairly good idea by summer 2020 yet the lockdown approach has changed very little (perhaps a slightly milder approach, but not much more).
JFA
Apr 27 2021 at 2:40pm
I don’t think Boudreaux hypothetical can rectify Bryan valuing an 80 year old’s life at 1/1000 that of a 10 year old (nor have we been living in some kind of totalitarian dystopia as Boudreaux suggests (though I’m not arguing things have been optimal either)), but we knew the age distribution of deaths really early on. Here’s one instance from February 2020: https://www.statista.com/chart/20860/coronavirus-fatality-rate-by-age/.
One thing that has characterized discussion of the pandemic since it started, experts and public officials constantly talked about the new things we were learning about how Covid spread and what its risks were to various categories of people, when in reality most “new” pieces of information were confirming what we already knew.
Davide
Apr 28 2021 at 9:01am
Nice, it seems I was wrong. That’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
I do wonder what we would expect a theoretical “Pathogen C” to show for death rates. Even if the pathogen itself is somehow indifferent to age, I would imagine the elderly are more likely to have complications and pre-existing conditions that would raise their death rate anyway. Particularly if you can’t sharply determine the cause-of-death.
Jens
Apr 28 2021 at 3:18am
Nonsense.
Of course, more should be done about a pathogen that kills hundreds of thousands of young people in first world countries over a few months than what has been done about SARS2. There is nothing “terrifying” about the idea. A world where people don’t do that would be “terrifying”. It would be “draconian” to get rid of the infectious as quickly as possible.
Apart from that, there is a lot of explicit and implicit nonsense in this character cloud.
What is -potentially- attributed to the pathogen is an order of magnitude that Covid-19 -actually- has.
In addition, the individual behavior in a pandemic that only affects young people so severely would – without further countermeasures – be much more extreme and perhaps also more irrational. In other words: Many people would simply go nuts and / or misinterpret risks.
There is a high probability that the health system would be much more stressed by a large number of young people because older people die faster.
The risk of Covid-19 is very progressive in terms of age. But that doesn’t mean that Covid-19 is just safe for people under 80. Covid-19 is not A. https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
Cynicism is not nobility. Try to translate: Wohlstandsverwahrlosung.
Character clouds like DBs bury libertarianism in a coffin deep down below.
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