As we quickly approach the ⅔ mark of the current public health order (which ends on June 30th), we should expect that the levels of displayed anxiety within society will reach their absurd peak; sometime around 31st of May. Especially in Australia where the number of deaths has been so low, we should expect the economic rightist media to scream blue murder¹ at the mythical thing called 'the economy'; despite demonstrative examples from the past where the destruction wrought upon the economy caused by pandemics is massive.
I think that it should be obvious to all and sundry now, that News Corp and their doyenne The Australian in particular, is a screaming death cult of a media organisation that is willing to literally sacrifice people's lives in order to return profits to the upper classes. These are people who feel as though they have no responsibility to the nation whatsoever and will call for the absolute privatisation of any and all public services, but then expect the general public to bail them out should they be in trouble. It is socialism for the rich at the expense of rampant Darwinist capitalism for everyone else.
Yet if you probe any of these people who claim to be supporters of the capitalist right as though it were a religion all of its own, you very quickly find out that their justifications are as rationally and as logically sound as if you napalmed a house made of tissue paper. Speaking as a creature of the economic left who is perfectly aware of my own hypocrisies, it is nice to see that the economic right is as full of hypocrises and stupidities as myself.
This whole discussion about what price that we should pay for the lives of people, stems from two of the central questions of economics; namely:
- What to produce?
- Who to produce it for?
It also relates to the opportunity cost of doing one thing as opposed to another. That is, what the cost is of doing one set of actions is, compared with the cost of doing another set of actions.
The thing about economics though, is that it is one of three incredibly stupid brothers. Economics is always asking questions but doesn't really care what the value of those questions are. Accounting knows what the price of everything is but is too stupid to ask any questions. Actuary is to stupid to ask questions and doesn't know what the price of anything is but it can tell you in detail what has happened. All three brothers are deeply mistrustful of each other but will always try to rain on each other's parade.
You should always expect to get different answers about the central questions of economics depending on which of the brothers you talk to. The one thing that is the same about all of them is that they are all completely heartless. As they are heartless, they are by extension, cruel.
Knowing all of this, we now lay out two of the three basic parts which relate to the opportunity costs associated with COVID-19:
a) The Case Fatality Rate across the general population is 2.9%, across the OECD. That includes older people who can run as high as 11% and people of prime working age who can run as low as 0.03%.
b) There are 25 million people in Australia.
The cost in lives of COVID-19 assuming that we do nothing is 725,000.
Now I mention that because this is where our three brothers want to have an argument and the argument that they will have, comes down to that third leg of the calculations.
Specifically it all comes down to that one question of:
What dollar value do you place on a human life?
The really curious thing about asking that question is that it makes practically everyone recoil in horror. The economic left hates it because they have to come to grips with the hypocrisy that the government can't actually control everything (and the unwritten leftist horror that it isn't actually advisable for it to do so). The economic right hates it because they have to confront their hypocrisy of demanding that the market should decide the value of everything and then their internal cruelty that that they actually don't care about people when you call their bluff on it.
As an accountant and someone who has worked in the dark arts of insurance valuation, I am prepared to admit that everyone has their price and my faith and my base assumption that all of humanity is basically terrible, informs me that people will name their price far quicker than they care to admit.
For the record, I think that the value of a human life as compared with the calculable amount of sorrow caused if that life was suddenly cut short, should be about three times AWOTE multiplied by that person's unique life expectancy at any given date. I don't have a particularly good methodology for determining this other than the ripple effect caused by someone suddenly dying, on the lives of other people.
I ran this assumption with the life expectancy tables as compared with the last census and I came up with a value of human life at about $6.7m; which is more than the Prime Minister's Office which sets it at about $4.5m. Either way, the price of not putting everyone into lockdown is still more than the price of completely trashing the nation's GDP for the duration of the crisis²; which is why I think that the government was sensible to enforce a public health lockdown.
On the other side of the argument is the IPA which has already called for a 100% lifting of the public health lockdown; which if you want to run their numbers, means that they actually value a human life at way way less than the Federal Government does. I have long suspected that they are a strange kind of right-wing economic terrorist organisation which is akin to a death cult and now I have the numbers to prove it.
I freely admit that I am a horrible monster who is prepared to state my dollar value of a human life; yes, it is vulgar and gauche. However, it is probably more than what most other people are actually prepared to state, when the cold blue light of hypocrisy shines down upon them. I am prepared to think that thought experiment through. Are you?
¹Blue Murder comes from the French "mort bleu" which is a minced oath of "mort dieu"; which itself is "death of God"
²25m x 2.9% x $4.5m = $3.262tn
Australia's GDP was $1.434tn in 2018.
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