Ethically Void and Intellectually Inept. A Tough Combination to Pull Off, Especially for an Amateur.
It seems too easy and somewhat repetitive to pile on lawyer Scott McMillan who apparently agrees with President Trump that the cure to the COVID-19 pandemic might be worse than the virus itself, and suggested on twitter that:
This degree of heartlessness is a realm typically reserved for economists, so I’d first like to suggest that Mr. McMillan stay in his lane. Lawyers get a pretty bad rap for being calculating, mercenary, and generally callous, but compared to economists, they are largely amateurs (though McMillan is clearly hoping to get called up to the pros).
For proof of this, consider that we economists have gone through the trouble of figuring out, in dollar terms, the value of a human life. In our defense, that exercise is a little like being an undertaker: it's distasteful, but it has its place. In particular, this number, called the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) is used in setting regulations and things like that. The idea is that if we are considering some safety regulation that will cost money, we as a society would want to know if it’s worth it. If the regulation would only ever save one life, but it only cost $100, it would be worth it. On the other hand, if it cost $100 billion, we might think twice.
So the value of a statistical life (i.e. of someone chosen at random, not any one person in particular) is probably somewhere within this wide range, and economists set themselves to figuring out what it is. The details of how are mildly complicated and mostly not all that interesting. Cutting to the chase, the US Department of Transportation set their VSL at $9.6 million in 2015, which is also used by the US Department of Homeland Security. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s number is roughly the same.
So as far as the US government is concerned, we know what a life is worth in dollar terms, which is exactly what you would want to know if you were going to decide whether or not we are over reacting to COVID-19. Without going through the (relatively minor) trouble of updating the VSL for inflation and the value of increased income since 2015, putting an economic value on the loss of life that McMillan is willing to sacrifice is a pretty straightforward exercise: $79 trillion, or about three and a half years’ worth of GDP.
This, of course, is far worse than the projected economic costs of the COVID-19 response. Even if it results in a drastic economic slowdown, like a 25% reduction in GDP for the remainder of the year, the cost would be roughly $4 trillion. Even if we only save half of these people, and even if they were only “worth” half as much as the average person, since McMillan thinks their lack of economic productivity means they’re not as worthy as saving as the rest of us, the benefits of shutdown would still be almost 20 times the cost.
All of this is a little silly, of course. McMillan, thankfully, isn’t in a position to make policy around this. At the same time, this line of reasoning has been popping up lately, including from President Trump. Setting aside the heartlessness of it, it’s woefully incomplete: Repealing the shutdown is only likely to avoid a relatively small part of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. But even if we take it at face value, the analysis is just mathematically wrong.
Which brings us back to the start: if you are going to try to be this callous, you should really be sure that you check your math. Otherwise, please leave it to the professionals.