Abstract
Apart from failing to tackle the pandemic, lockdowns caused serious side effects. In fact, policy makers did not take into account the fundamental tradeoff between the lives that are threatened by the mitigation measures and the lives that are threatened by the virus and claimed that the tradeoff was between the lives that are threatened by the virus vs. the money that some will lose and the fewer chances for entertainment and social activity. The money lost and the restricted socialization were considered as innocuous outcomes, and they could have been so if they were not linked to reduced lifespan. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons in support of the proposition that the mitigation measures that were in place, especially the economic shutdown as well as the school closures, reduced the longevity of people that would have hardly died from the virus. The years of life lost (YLL) and the hazard ratios (HRs) help us estimate the consequences of this policy.
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Notes
- 1.
Perhaps social desirability bias could be applied one more time to explain the fact that economists took for granted that the tradeoff is lives vs money. Indeed, if one attempted to object that this tradeoff is not compatible with some well-established knowledge from economics and social sciences they could be libeled and so they tried to show that lockdowns do not worth their cost by postulating premises similar to the three false ones discussed above so that their proposal would appear socially-friendly. Of course, genuine misunderstanding of the situation as a result of mass hysteria also explains their stance.
- 2.
While QUALYs allow for the possibility that quality of lives is taken into account, which suggests that if the inputs are altered then there is perhaps a pathway to estimate the side effects in terms of reduced quality of life, in my view this hardly applies to circumstances whereby mass hysteria governs the population’s attitude for, as we have seen, people make distorted risk-estimates (hence, they are not sober-minded when estimating “years in perfect health”) and thus are mostly unaware of the damage inflicted on them.
- 3.
It can also be equally described as a negative correlation between mortality and education.
- 4.
However, it should be noted, that other findings suggest that compulsory educational reforms are of zero effect (Clark & Royer, 2013), though this does not alter the conclusion that schooling is strongly linked to a healthier life; it simply suggests that reforms of compulsory schooling do not necessarily improve health outcomes but it does not follow that the correlation between school attendance and longer lifespan no longer holds. Low school attendance can be a matter of fact even when schooling is compulsory—which it is in nearly all countries on earth—and thus while compulsory schooling is a good indicator to estimate school attendance, it does not rule out the possibility that the law is not enforced in many cases and that many children do not go to school.
- 5.
A report published in mid-2022 by the OECD (2022) makes the case against school closures by providing evidence suggesting that closing schools was one of the biggest policy mistakes during the Covid-19 crisis.
- 6.
In some places like in Netherlands and in Austria, lockdowns were enforced even in early 2022 and in China in mid-2022.
- 7.
While the correlation between economic development and mortality may not be equally strong for all causes of death—for cardiovascular-related deaths are strongly procyclical but cancer-induced deaths may be unrelated to economic downturns or even countercyclical (Ruhm, 2013)—the association between higher income and longer life expectancy remains robust (Chetty et al., 2016).
- 8.
The spike in lockdown-induced unemployment rates lasted approximately from March 2020 till summer-fall 2021 (that’s the period of time in which repeated lockdowns were mostly implemented), while the unemployment mortality risk in Sweden lasted for four years. This suggests that individuals were exposed to the 3% unemployment mortality risk for a shorter period of time than people who suffered the Swedish recession, which could lead to fewer excess deaths in the period after the lockdown-induced recession than the ones recorded after the recession in Sweden. However, the case remains that they have been exposed to higher mortality risk than the risk posed by the virus.
- 9.
Katz et al. (2021) try to make such a case in a publication in the BMJ. They recognize that there may be health-related lockdown-induced toll, though they suggest that an unmitigated epidemic would pose far greater harm. Their argument hinges on the three mistaken pro-lockdown premises discussed in Chap. 2, and as for the side effects of the mitigation measures, they claim that it is difficult to evaluate which side effects are to be attributed to lockdowns. However, as I show in this chapter, by having established knowledge as guiding principle and by paying attention to the data that emerged, we can be confident about the damage inflicted by the lockdowns and make causal claims thereof.
- 10.
This is in contrast with the Austrian theory of economics which suggests that individuals are the ones who have the knowledge and the motivations to bring the economy to equilibrium. I do not attempt a comparison, let alone an evaluation, of the two theories here. I simply stress that Keynesian economics are irrelevant to the Covid-19 pandemic and thus those who advocate a public-interest approach to the covid-crisis do not make a well-thought through assessment if they rely on Keynes’s writings as a confirmation of their theory.
- 11.
Milton Friedman famously said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon (Friedman, 1956).
- 12.
Services such as hospitality are lagging behind, reversing the trend that lasted until 2019. The reason is that increased money supply shifted consumer demand into goods and lesser into services which consolidates the distinction between relative price changes and the overall inflation rate. This trend is similar in the USA and the Eurozone while in the UK prices in services increase alongside prices in goods. This is due to the blurred boundaries between goods and services in the UK, which is quintessential to the UK’s economy, for example, many goods are sold as “bundled” services, such as “services” in the supermarket (Greenwood & Hanke, 2022, 44).
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Karadimas, P. (2023). Tradeoffs and Knock-On Effects. In: The Covid-19 Pandemic. Studies in Public Choice, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24967-9_4
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