The value of lives saved by social distancing outweighs the costs

Enlarge / Economic activity vs. social distancing is a careful balancing act. (credit: Mata Hitij)

As Ars reported recently, evidence from the 1918 flu pandemic suggests that cities with more aggressive lockdown responses had stronger economic recoveries.

There's more than one way to think about the economics of lockdowns, and a paper due to be published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis has an entirely different approach. It accepts that lockdowns will hurt the economy compared to business-as-usual but calculates whether that cost is outweighed by the lives that will be saved by social-distancing measures.

The answer is yes-by $5.2 trillion. That's an estimate that changes based on a range of different assumptions, but it represents what the authors consider the most realistic scenario.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments