Simple-Mindedness in the Age of Covid

To our credit we have peppered our discussions of the Covid pandemic restrictions with observations about their costs. Surely, we derive a benefit from locking down the nation-- or so it seems-- but we also hurt businesses, hurt the economy and certainly hurt schoolchildren.

In fact, as we have been reporting, American children who have been deprived of in-person schooling have certainly suffered, cognitively and emotionally. How do you balance the cost of the shutdowns with the benefit that accrues to those children who do not catch the virus?

It’s a question of cost-benefit analysis. Glenn Greenwald reports on the calculus of decision making in his Substack column. (via Maggie's Farm) He notes in passing that cost-benefit analysis requires more advanced thinking than does the relatively primitive and simple-minded solution-- shut it all down; force everyone to wear a mask; upbraid your neighbors when you see them without a mask.

The benefits of mask-wearing are dubious; they are not a scientific certainty. And the World Health Organization has stated that wearing a mask while exercising is detrimental to health. 

Greenwald suggests that we normally use cost-benefit analysis in making policy:

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

He takes the obvious example. Considering the number of deaths and injuries caused by automobiles, why have we not banned them altogether?

Given how many deaths and serious injuries would be prevented, why is nobody clamoring for a ban on cars, or at least severe restrictions on who can drive (essential purposes only) or how fast (25 mph)? Is it because most people are just sociopaths who do not care about the huge number of lives lost by the driving policies they support, and are perfectly happy to watch people die or be permanently maimed as long as their convenience is not impeded? Is it because they do not assign value to the lives of other people, and therefore knowingly support policies — allowing anyone above 15 years old to drive, at high speeds — that will kill many children along with adults?

We do not do it because we weigh the costs against the benefits provided by automobiles:

It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days). 

Whereas today’s Covid scolds insist on an absolutist approach to policy making, Greenwald points out that we never do this:

This framework, above all else, precludes an absolutist approach to rational policy-making. We never opt for a society-altering policy on the ground that “any lives saved make it imperative to embrace” precisely because such a primitive mindset ignores all the countervailing costs which this life-saving policy would generate (including, oftentimes, loss of life as well: banning planes, for instance, would save lives by preventing deaths from airplane crashes, but would also create its own new deaths by causing more people to drive cars).

What is special about Covid?

It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies. Thus, this mentality insists, we must keep schools closed to avoid the contracting by children of COVID regardless of the horrific costs which eighteen months or two years of school closures impose on all children.

The most important cost involves children, especially minority children. They are at the least risk for the virus and they have been the most directly damaged by the school shutdowns. We will note that in some American states schools have remained open and that in many countries around the world the teachers’ unions have not succeeded in damaging children.

It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID. Entire books could be written, and almost certainly will be, on the multiple levels of damage children are sustaining, some of which — particularly the longer-term ones — are unknowable (long-term harms from virtually every aspect of COVID policies — including COVID itself, the vaccines, and isolation measures, are, by definition, unknown). 

We have reported on several studies of the damage to children. Greenwald adds a BBC report from the beginning of the year:

But what we know for certain is that the harms to children from anti-COVID measures are severe and multi-pronged. One of the best mainstream news accounts documenting those costs was a January, 2021 BBC article headlined “Covid: The devastating toll of the pandemic on children.”

The “devastating toll” referenced by the article is not the death count from COVID for children, which, even in the world of the Delta variant, remains vanishingly small. The latest CDC data reveals that the grand total of children under 18 who have died in the U.S. from COVID since the start of the pandemic sixteen months ago is 361 — in a country of 330 million people, including 74.2 million people under 18. Instead, the “devastating toll” refers to multi-layered harm to children from the various lockdowns, isolation measures, stay-at-home orders, school closures, economic suffering and various other harms that have come from policies enacted to prevent the spread of the virus:

Greenwald explains that he is not arguing for or against any specific policy. He is arguing against an absolutist approach to policy making. 

Put another way, this is not an argument in favor of or against any particular policy undertaken in the name of fighting COVID. What it is, instead, is an attempt to highlight the pervasive and deeply misguided refusal to assign any costs to the harms caused by anti-COVID policies themselves.

Whatever is true about motives, what is unacceptable — sociopathic, really — is the insistence on assigning severe costs to just one side of the ledger (harms from COVID itself) while categorically refusing to recognize let alone value the costs on the other side of the ledger (from severe, enduring anti-COVID disruptions to and restrictions on life). Given the reflexive rage that is produced when one tries to make this argument — what immediately emerges are accusations that one is indifferent to COVID deaths — I wanted to walk through the evidence and rationale demonstrating why this approach is reckless, immoral and irrational.

Again, cost-benefit analysis is complex. Perhaps Americans, having suffered the influence of our educational establishment, are no longer capable of complex thought. Simple is as simple minded people do. Absolutist thinking appeals to the uneducated and to those who wish to manipulate the ill-formed minds of the undereducated.