Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

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He specifically says "less damaging" ... "on human capital", implying a workforce/economic perspective.

I would suggest you consider toning down your outrage. It's important and necessary to be able to compare and contrast tragedies without devolving into arguments about the incommensurability of human life. Such discussions may appear cold and calculating ("inhumane") but we must have them - ignoring a part of reality because it hurts does not make it go away.

I have seen reactions similar to yours around people unused to discussing issues like medical triage. If we truly want to understand a phenomenon, mitigate its impact, and do the actual most good, we need to be able to analyze and compare things from all angles: social, economic, political, moral, emotional, etc.

So long as such discussions are conducted in a shared context of understanding how weighty and intense these issues are (as it seems to me the parent was doing), they are for the good.

It's also the case that "the economy" is what's paying for all our advanced healthcare that is saving lives and enabling people to live longer, healthier, happier lives. Recessions destroy lives as well, everything is a trade-off, a balance.

And people were clearly happy to make this trade-off every single day pre-corona. We don't lower the speed limit to 30mph, even though that would almost eliminate every single traffic accident. We don't ban certain pesticides that are really bad for the environment, because they work really well and increase the yield. We allow dangerous jobs where people can be maimed or killed, because someone needs to do it. We allow people to go parachuting, we allow smoking, unhealthy food, we allow people to own and use guns, even though all of these things let people injure and kill themselves and others.

Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment, we undervalue known risks and overvalue unknown risks, and that's clearly what's going on with the lockdown hysteria, because the response is so clearly disproportional compared to how we're handling similar threats with similar risk profiles.

I don't like putting a dollar value on a human life so find it impossible to weigh damage to the economy and deaths.

I haven't seen much discussion about at what point damage to the economy means we can't feed ourselves and medicine stops flowing. I have always wondered if we could "pivot" fast enough to feed everybody if the economy literately died.

I did read somewhere that Australian cities have 7 days of clean water after international shipping stops (in war for example). We are dependent on international shipping for chemicals that clean our water.

> I don't like putting a dollar value on a human life

In the US the value of a human life is about $10 million, or about $150k per QALY.

Every single developed nation has put a dollar value on human life, and continues to do so, because without it you can't possibly allocate scarce resources like healthcare to achieve the greatest good. It helps save more lives than the alternative strategy you propose, i.e. sticking your head in the sand to avoid thinking about it because it's unpleasant.

I think there is a really giant leap between comparing an economists statistical value of a persons life, and some number that we guess might be the "damage to the economy".

What I'm suggesting is that we make sure we have food security, make sure we can provide medial care to the best of our ability, then pay whatever it costs to save peoples lives.

I would pay every sent I have to stay alive. I think most people would. I think the governments should take the same approach.

And yes, sure, most of the time it's super hard to decide what to do, but for this virus, we know all you have to do it isolate from each other for a few months. It's not even that hard.

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As a side note I can't wait till somebody uses that 10m figure and applies it to deaths as a result of obesity. You think social isolation is hard, you should try giving up sugar, now that is hard!

Update: I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, Obesity linked to "100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year" or at 10m a life 10-40 Trillion Dollars a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

Wise words. Wish more people took this measured approach to complex issues.

United States economically gained on WWII. So at least economically, that was not bigger loss.

So I don't think he meant economic loss from the event.

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