With the possible exception of the president, everyone acknowledges that social distancing only buys time; it is not, by itself, an end game. So what happens after the curve has been bent?
Going where few would dare to tread, this week’s issue of The Economist features a discussion of the potential trade-offs between additional deaths and a healthy economy. The writers admit that the current social distancing regime is cost-effective, but wonder how long it can be sustained in the future. Painful decisions are inevitable, they maintain.
If you insist in engaging in such a brutal and crass exercise, the key question is how to value the social contributions made by elderly people who are not technically part of the labor force. Do you just view them as unproductive members of society who should die and decrease the surplus population, or do you try to put a dollar figure on the value that they bring with unpaid labor within families?
Two facts are pertinent. First, The Economist notwithstanding, the trade-off is not, in the final analysis, up to the US government, or any government, for that matter; it is a question for each individual person as a producer and a consumer. The government cannot effectively order anyone to go out and spend money in bars if they don’t feel comfortable with the state of public health. Second, there are only two scenarios here. The first is consistent with Ross Douthat’s column in Sunday’s NYT: a half-open world with high unemployment and continued, but milder, social distancing until the vaccine comes. The second involves segregating, with confidence, the people who have the virus from the people who don’t, and letting the latter group get on with their lives. THAT CAN ONLY WORK WITH A VASTLY BETTER TESTING REGIME THAN WE HAVE NOW AND A STATIC POPULATION. Unfortunately, I see no evidence that it is being implemented, or even contemplated, today, so Douthat’s purgatory is by far the more likely option.