Costs of Coronavirus, Costs of Lockdown

A friend recently sent me this article by Heather MacDonald, discussing the various lockdown efforts being taken in response to the coronavirus outbreak. I don't know whether I agree with it, but I do know that I plan to use it the next time I teach "In Search of Justice." Students who have taken that class will recognize the issue of trade-offs in MacDonald's piece.

She argues, in brief, that the damage being caused by extreme measures to halt the spread of the virus--essentially shutting down large sectors of the US economy, causing unemployment, small business closings, lost revenues, and slowed growth in the future--are disproportionate to the actual severity of the epidemic. More lives are lost to the flu, she writes, or even to traffic accidents, yet we don't bring the country to a halt because of them.

As I say, I'm not sure I agree. This virus spreads so quickly that the extreme measures may be our only way of ensuring that medical providers are not overwhelmed. This is a good example of the challenges of making policy under conditions of insufficient information. But MacDonald's arguments are interesting (she can always be relied on for good policy analysis) and are worth pondering.

Comments

E-mail Wit on a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

It seems as though practically every business where I've ever bought anything in the past decade sends me e-mails about their products, specials, deal-of-the-week, etc. Normally I delete them immediately, without a second glance. But one this afternoon made me hesitate. I received a "Walgreens Weekly Ad" e-mail. Its subject line read as follows: "We can't stop lowering prices." So instead of hitting "delete," I sent a quick reply: "In that case, I think I'll wait and shop next week." I have no idea whether or not that reply will go to a real e-mail address and be read by an actual human being. But I hope so.

Non capisco!

About once a week I get an e-mail from something called the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. I don't know why. I know nothing about them and have no idea how I got on their mailing list. But I generally take a quick look at the e-mail, because every now and then I see something interesting. The other day I got one of these and saw what appeared to be a potentially interesting lecture today. It was by a professor named Stefano Jossa, currently at Royal Holloway, the University of London. He was going to be speaking on his new book, in Italian, but the title of which in English would be The Most Beautiful in the World: Why Love the Italian Language . It sounded intriguing, it was free, all you had to do was register and get a Zoom link. So I did. It turned out that the lecture was actually being sponsored not by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, but rather by the one in Montreal. But who cares, right? As long as it's not in French, which didn'

The Blessing and Curse of E-mail

I am, in fact, deeply grateful for e-mail. It allows me to be in ready contact with colleagues both in this country and abroad, and to pursue opportunities I would otherwise never be able to. But then there are days like today. My e-mail has been increasingly difficult to keep up with for the last year or so. But just before supper this evening, I looked at how many e-mails I had written and sent today. The total: exactly 100. By now, of course, it's a bit more than that. I spent much of the day trying to reschedule a student trip to Germany that was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. We were going to travel over Easter; now we will try it next fall instead. Probably about half of the e-mails were related to that. I don't even want to know how many words I wrote today. If they were a book.... Now it's back to real work, reading the first half of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther so that I can put together a mini-lecture for my Humanities students

Plague Time

Search This Blog