Lockdowns’ High Costs and Murky Benefits
“WE’RE NOT GOING to put a dollar figure on human life,” Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who was then New York’s governor, declared four days after he imposed a statewide COVID-19 lockdown last year. The goal, he explained, was to “save lives, period, whatever it costs.”
Ryan Bourne’s Economics in One Virus offers a much-needed rejoinder to that morally obtuse position. Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, highlights considerations that politicians like Cuomo too often ignored as they decided how to deal with a public health crisis more serious than any the country had faced since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Eschewing unwarranted confidence, Bourne takes no firm position on the cost-effectiveness of mass business closures or stay-at-home orders. But he does insist, pace Cuomo, that cost-effectiveness matters, and he deftly shows how economic reasoning illuminates such issues.
If legislators were determined to “save lives, period, whatever
