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Comment by rbritton | Hacker News Reader

At what cost? When do you factor in the additional deaths and other consequences from suicides, domestic violence, increased substance abuse, and so on? There are two sides to the equation.

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Perhaps when the data starts showing it.

There is dated data (from 1981) showing a 37,000 increase in deaths for each percentage-point rise in the unemployment rate. It comes from a book called “Corporate Flight: The Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation” by Barry Bluestone, Bennett Harrison and Lawrence Baker.

From the article citation below:

> Here’s the paragraph from Thomas’ book that applies: “According to one study [the one by Bluestone et al.] a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate will be associated with 37,000 deaths [including 20,000 heart attacks], 920 suicides, 650 homicides, 4,000 state mental hospital admissions and 3,300 state prison admissions.”

The data is stale, for sure, but the correlation (economic downturn->increase in deaths) is arguably proven.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/explaining-the-link-between-un...

(I was unable to find an online version of the book to link to in Google Books or openlibrary.org; I bought the book used from Amazon, it's headed to the Internet Archive for scanning).

Then what's happening right now is a refutation of that data, right? Because we have sky-high unemployment and nothing resembling those numbers. It's almost as if unemployment in ordinary circumstances is not the same as unemployment caused by a discrete, universally-applicable crisis.

I will not dispute that you could be right. We'll only know for sure looking back from the future (lagging indicators and such).

I think the "harm from unemployment will swamp harm from C19" argument will get stronger the longer lockdown lasts, but that the ~month we've had widespread lockdown orders is not close to long enough to make the argument without clear data. We have strong evidence that explosive C19 case growth kills lots of people; that's a hard data point to overcome.

If you want to be frustrated with the unbounded nature of the crisis, I think the right place to focus that anger is on testing; in Illinois, we have something like a 22% positive rate on PCR testing, suggesting we're not testing nearly enough people.

I drove passed a testing center in Aurora at the Premium Outlet Mall (I-88 & Farnsworth) twice this weekend, both Saturday and Sunday morning. They opened at 8am each day, and had reached capacity shortly after. I agree that testing efforts deserve the ire of the populace.

This study suggests that the resulting rise in deaths isn't immediate. That it isn't measurable now does not mean it isn't coming.

>1 %-point rise in the unemployment rate raises the risk of dying next year by 6%.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...

There's always "other consequences" you can point to for whatever policy. What about the upside that many can now work from home with flexible hours, and avoid the 996-ICU workweek.

And those consequences matter. You can't handwave them away and pretend they don't exist.

Don't forget that you work in a fairly unique field. Many, many occupations cannot work from home.

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