LOCKDOWN LUNACY.

• Author: Bourne, Ryan
• Position: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

"...We ordinarily are wise to oppose government control over our everyday lives and choices."

IN AN INTERESTING op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Philippe Lemoine, a Cornell University PhD. candidate in philosophy, writes: "The coronavirus lock-downs constitute the most extensive attacks on individual freedom in the West since World War II. Yet not a single government has published a cost-benefit analysis to justify lockdown policies--something policymakers are often required to do while making far less consequential decisions. If my arguments are wrong and lockdown policies are cost-effective, a government document should be able to demonstrate that. No government has produced such a document, perhaps because officials know what it would show."

There is a more-charitable explanation for their reticence: doing a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of a lockdown actually is incredibly difficult, especially before the lock-down is implemented. Libertarians, in particular, would appreciate all the uncertainties, knowledge problems, and difficulties in aggregating very subjective values at play.

To be clear: these are not reasons to avoid doing a cost-benefit analysis of a lockdown. I think given the consequential nature of the policies, an attempt--even with a bunch of uncertainties and caveats--would have been clarifying about the trade-offs incumbent in any major decision, but we should not pretend such a task is straightforward.

To delineate all of the issues that would need to be addressed to do a cost-benefit analysis of a lockdown well, there are major challenges on both the benefit and cost sides, and indeed in using the results to inform policy.

On the benefits side, one would have to:

* Place a value on the reductions of the statistical risk of dying from COVID-19. Economists commonly use the "value of a statistical life" for this, but these values tend to be derived from labor market studies assessing very minor risks facing working-age people at their jobs. These are unlikely to be appropriate for older people facing much higher fatality risks from COVID-19, and whom are likely to have more varied preferences on how much they would pay to avoid death risks.

* Estimate how many lives would be saved by lockdown policies. "Defining the counterfactual" here is hard. The alternative to lockdowns was not normality, but quite a lot of voluntary social distancing that already saved lives--and, as Lemoine writes in the op-ed, people's...