Caring about health: "good"! Caring about the economy: "evil, selfish and greedy"!

[Warhertisuff]

I'm fed up of people, generally liberal types whose situation means they aren't especially impacted from any economic impact of lockdown and restrictions saying stuff like "Boris is only opening up the country as he only really cares about the economy so he and his fat cats can get richer", as though the impact of restrictions on society doesn't impact directly onto the economic welfare of millions!

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Boris, but this sanctimonious drivel winds me up.

@herecomesthsun

I'd agree we should avoid lockdowns. Caution now would help reduce the need for them in the future (and frankly, who knows what the winter will be like)

The cautious approach is to infect everyone now to reduce winter NHS burden.

If you have more restrctions now you increase the need for a lockdown later on.

I noticed at the beginning of the pandemic (before furlough and SEISS grant details were released) the friends most in favour of a lockdown were either public sector workers who could, in the main wfh, self employed who wfh anyway or SAHP with partners who could wfh!!

I didnt vote conservative (and wouldnt any time soon either) but I'm also a bit about the black and white argument about it being caring about health/people or caring about "the economy" (with the assumption that "the economy" is fat cats and city bankers) We need to generate money to pay for the NHS (and teachers, police etc)

And the whole issue of who is selfish. Ultimately humans are selfish...partly for survival. Not many people go to work for nothing, or turn down a payrise. If you only had enough money to pay for rent/mortgage would you give it away for "the greater good"? Last year there was a mum (possibly a single parent) who had waited 8 days for the result of covid test for one of her DC. She was really concerned about affording to take more (unpaid) time off work to wait for the test result which may well have been negative. So many people called her selfish and irresponsible....for basically wanting to work to be able to provide for her children.

By the way I'm not anti lockdown at all but just frustrating that it's a lot of peoples "go to" answer, usually because they can comfortably wfh and go about life in a way that's financially beneficial (saving money on no eating out, no holidays and no commute)

We have a right-wing government led by an anti-lockdown libertarian, and we have had months of lockdowns and restrictions and about 130,000 deaths because they screwed up more or less everything except ordering the vaccines, an advantage outweighed by allowing Delta to take off. Why are you whinging about the left?

I think the argument that controlling covid is good for the economy needs real examination.

The argument has some merit if you are talking about NZ / Australia and then you get into a whole debate about whether that is plausible here and what the exit plan is etc.. But if you are talking about European countries most of which have been in and out of lockdowns for over a year and where there has been a devastating economic impact and huge level of government spending, I don't think it really holds.

I agree that if the population is afraid of catching covid this will damage consumer confidence and have an economic impact. Reduced consumer confidence always damages markets.

But that has to be compared against what has actually happened which is most businesses which consumers would use being shutdown and / or operating at such a limited capacity that they aren't profitable for 16 months.

If you run a pub and covid rates are high, maybe fewer people will come to it. If you run a pub and it has been shutdown by law, no one will come. Same for hotels, leisure businesses, beauty services, to a slightly lesser extent retail etc, even dentists in the first lockdown. I don't see that the profits of these businesses could possibly have been lower if there had been less lockdown.

And it is not like the constant cycle of lockdowns or restrictions in between times have kept cases consistently low anyway so as to give people the confidence to go out and spend. In periods where cases have been low businesses have mostly been closed anyway. In periods where we have partially opened up, cases have gone up quickly. So "controlling the virus" has led to very few periods where cases are low enough for people who are worried about covid to feel confident. The UK isn't alone in that - the same pattern has occurred across Europe so it can't just be blamed on our government.

In terms of people being ill having an economic impact, of course it will, but again this ignores the extent to which this has happened anyway and overestimates how ill the majority of people get with covid. Around 30% of the population have had covid. For most it is a mild and short illness or has no symptoms at all (particularly for the group most likely to be out at the businesses which have been closed). We can see now that self-isolation of contacts is a much bigger issue than actual illness - logically it has to be because most people with covid have more than one close contact. On that basis, self-isolation of close contacts is a more damaging economic policy than more people getting covid.

There is also the issue of the very high level of government spending needed to support lockdowns. We are starting to see signs that this is causing inflation. If we had borrowed this amount and spent it on almost anything else we could almost certainly have saved or improved more lives.

The question of what would have happened economically if we hadn't locked down or had done much less of it is really complicated (even for top economists) and I don't think anyone should be calling people on the other side of the argument stupid. I think there are plenty of valid and interesting arguments to be had about it.

I do think that people intuitively understand more about health than economics though (unsurprisingly given the education system and what is in the media etc) and that once numbers get into billions or trillions people can't always process them or understand the impact. I have seen it argued on here that businesses selling masks could counteract the loss the the economy caused by hospitality being closed and that adding 1% to income tax for higher rate tax payers would pay for covid.

I also think the health impact of recessions is ignored and debates about lives saved end up being about covid vs suicides (where suicide numbers are small in absolute terms though obviously devastating when they occur). Recessions and particularly unemployment provably shorten peoples lives (with most impact on the poor) due to a complex network of factors like nutrition, housing, access to healthcare, addiction, poor mental health, needing to work longer hours or until an older age in physical jobs etc). My opinion has always been that over time the lives lost as a result of those factors will outweigh lives that would have been lost to covid (particularly in a time where the government will have less to spend on mitigating them because they spent it all on locking everyone in their houses).

I don't really understand the view that the current conservatives are neoliberal or anti-lockdown. They have kept the country in lockdown or something approaching it for around 15 months, including going much further than other countries in banning contact between families and are now talking about vaccine passports (probably the least liberal policy you could conceive of). There was a study which found that the UK's lockdown has been the 5th harshest in the world. The view that we have had a light lockdown is not backed by the evidence.

I consider myself a liberal and am generally anti-lockdown. I use liberal in the traditional sense that I am pro individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, free trade and freedom of speech etc - I'd characterise it as "live and let live" . I am also generally pro welfare state, which now tends to go alongside liberalism. I find that no political party really represents my views.

@Chessie678

I think the argument that controlling covid is good for the economy needs real examination.

The argument has some merit if you are talking about NZ / Australia and then you get into a whole debate about whether that is plausible here and what the exit plan is etc.. But if you are talking about European countries most of which have been in and out of lockdowns for over a year and where there has been a devastating economic impact and huge level of government spending, I don't think it really holds.

I agree that if the population is afraid of catching covid this will damage consumer confidence and have an economic impact. Reduced consumer confidence always damages markets.

But that has to be compared against what has actually happened which is most businesses which consumers would use being shutdown and / or operating at such a limited capacity that they aren't profitable for 16 months.

If you run a pub and covid rates are high, maybe fewer people will come to it. If you run a pub and it has been shutdown by law, no one will come. Same for hotels, leisure businesses, beauty services, to a slightly lesser extent retail etc, even dentists in the first lockdown. I don't see that the profits of these businesses could possibly have been lower if there had been less lockdown.

And it is not like the constant cycle of lockdowns or restrictions in between times have kept cases consistently low anyway so as to give people the confidence to go out and spend. In periods where cases have been low businesses have mostly been closed anyway. In periods where we have partially opened up, cases have gone up quickly. So "controlling the virus" has led to very few periods where cases are low enough for people who are worried about covid to feel confident. The UK isn't alone in that - the same pattern has occurred across Europe so it can't just be blamed on our government.

In terms of people being ill having an economic impact, of course it will, but again this ignores the extent to which this has happened anyway and overestimates how ill the majority of people get with covid. Around 30% of the population have had covid. For most it is a mild and short illness or has no symptoms at all (particularly for the group most likely to be out at the businesses which have been closed). We can see now that self-isolation of contacts is a much bigger issue than actual illness - logically it has to be because most people with covid have more than one close contact. On that basis, self-isolation of close contacts is a more damaging economic policy than more people getting covid.

There is also the issue of the very high level of government spending needed to support lockdowns. We are starting to see signs that this is causing inflation. If we had borrowed this amount and spent it on almost anything else we could almost certainly have saved or improved more lives.

The question of what would have happened economically if we hadn't locked down or had done much less of it is really complicated (even for top economists) and I don't think anyone should be calling people on the other side of the argument stupid. I think there are plenty of valid and interesting arguments to be had about it.

I do think that people intuitively understand more about health than economics though (unsurprisingly given the education system and what is in the media etc) and that once numbers get into billions or trillions people can't always process them or understand the impact. I have seen it argued on here that businesses selling masks could counteract the loss the the economy caused by hospitality being closed and that adding 1% to income tax for higher rate tax payers would pay for covid.

I also think the health impact of recessions is ignored and debates about lives saved end up being about covid vs suicides (where suicide numbers are small in absolute terms though obviously devastating when they occur). Recessions and particularly unemployment provably shorten peoples lives (with most impact on the poor) due to a complex network of factors like nutrition, housing, access to healthcare, addiction, poor mental health, needing to work longer hours or until an older age in physical jobs etc). My opinion has always been that over time the lives lost as a result of those factors will outweigh lives that would have been lost to covid (particularly in a time where the government will have less to spend on mitigating them because they spent it all on locking everyone in their houses).

I don't really understand the view that the current conservatives are neoliberal or anti-lockdown. They have kept the country in lockdown or something approaching it for around 15 months, including going much further than other countries in banning contact between families and are now talking about vaccine passports (probably the least liberal policy you could conceive of). There was a study which found that the UK's lockdown has been the 5th harshest in the world. The view that we have had a light lockdown is not backed by the evidence.

I consider myself a liberal and am generally anti-lockdown. I use liberal in the traditional sense that I am pro individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, free trade and freedom of speech etc - I'd characterise it as "live and let live" . I am also generally pro welfare state, which now tends to go alongside liberalism. I find that no political party really represents my views.

This. 👏

Interesting @Chessie678
I think the government has been anti-lockdown up to the point every time when the NHS has fallen over. We have had operations cancelled that never were before.
I think the government are mostly instinctively anti-lockdown, and that has got in the way of their competence or any coherent policy because at some point the reality of queuing ambulances makes them act. Eat out to help out was a fantastic waste of money in their overly optimistic stop start antics, for example.
I think the health effects of recessions may be more mixed than you say, but I can’t be bothered to do the research and it’s a bit of a tangent.

@TheUnlucky1

Interesting *@Chessie678* I think the government has been anti-lockdown up to the point every time when the NHS has fallen over. We have had operations cancelled that never were before. I think the government are mostly instinctively anti-lockdown, and that has got in the way of their competence or any coherent policy because at some point the reality of queuing ambulances makes them act. Eat out to help out was a fantastic waste of money in their overly optimistic stop start antics, for example. I think the health effects of recessions may be more mixed than you say, but I can’t be bothered to do the research and it’s a bit of a tangent.

Not that I'd actually want to go back in time and repeat the nightmare, but it would be interesting to see how a Corbyn-led Government would have done things differently. I don't imagine it would have been that different actually in terms of the end result.

I've noticed that many of the people wanting endless lockdowns, everyone vaccinated and masks forever are in nice, safe middle class public sector or well paid private sector jobs where they can work from home and have probably received lots of financial covid relief help or are retired on a nice, fat, guaranteed pension.

It's a sort of "I'm alright Jack" thing but ironically they are the most vocal at calling anyone who isn't as financially privileged selfish. They need a dose of humility.

I’m left wing.

I don’t even know what you mean by liberal. Usually an insult slung around but people dont (can’t?) really define who or what they’re annoyed about. It’s lazy.

The arguments about the economy are hard to swallow because the economy, pre pandemic, was not working for so many people. For example: low wages, high housing costs, people with long commutes, people pushed into jobs with long hours and no rights.

So it’s a bit rich hearing people talking about the economy when the economy is fucked anyway and has been for decades.

When I hear Tories talking about the economy, with their tin pot “let’s run it like a household” approach, I just hear “let’s get the plebs back to work so we can line our pockets.

@soredust

I've noticed that many of the people wanting endless lockdowns, everyone vaccinated and masks forever are in nice, safe middle class public sector or well paid private sector jobs where they can work from home and have probably received lots of financial covid relief help or are retired on a nice, fat, guaranteed pension.

It's a sort of "I'm alright Jack" thing but ironically they are the most vocal at calling anyone who isn't as financially privileged selfish. They need a dose of humility.

I don’t know anyone who wants endless lockdowns. Again, not really listening to what people are arguing for.

A lot of people want some sensible measures to remain in place. Masks being the big one and a few more weeks - weeks - to get more vaccine coverage. Hardly endless.

@TheUnlucky1

We have a right-wing government led by an anti-lockdown libertarian, and we have had months of lockdowns and restrictions and about 130,000 deaths because they screwed up more or less everything except ordering the vaccines, an advantage outweighed by allowing Delta to take off. Why are you whinging about the left?

Johnson is not, imo, really a libertarian, he just says that. He is banning protests, bringing in voter ID, bringing in vaccine passports, criminalising saving human life, making vaccines compulsory in health care, restricting judicial review. All of these limit individual freedoms.

Actions speak louder than words.

The fact that Labour has been generally deathly quiet through the whole pandemic is telling: they’re not any more sure on where they stand than anyone else and also know that if you offer no opinion you can’t be judged on it.

I heartily agree that the most fervent lockdown supporters are the most comfortable. I said at the start of things that every poster roaring about people going to the supermarket or heading out for a walk should carry a byline declaring income, wfh or retirement status, age of dcs and size of garden.

It’s a tightrope which we have followed since last year.

We didn’t get to zero Covid as Aus / NZ did so since then it’s all been about hospitalisation capacity.

Some see any cases / and resultant impact as bad but we kept within capacity (just with some impact with wait list) and that’s it.

After vaccination countries will merge and strategy won’t follow harmful restrictions just to delay cases if not overwhelming hospital.

Interesting to see more protests in Sydney in last couple of days. We really are not that different. This stuff is hard to get through. And it was harder here

@lannistunut I completely agree with your assessment of Johnson.

I do believe people have become very narrow minded during all this.

Calling someone selfish for going on holiday to a poor country, yet that person is probably allowing someone in that country to feed their family for a month by keeping their business going or though tips etc.

Yes @Iannistunut. I suppose Johnson is only libertarian when it’s the liberties of his type at stake. Nevertheless, I think his reluctance to lockdown is pretty evident.

So what do you want? What is the answer?

I meant @lannistunut.

The fact that Labour has been generally deathly quiet through the whole pandemic is telling: they’re not any more sure on where they stand than anyone else and also know that if you offer no opinion you can’t be judged on it.

I notice this but I also think as bad as Boris Johnson et al are (and I make no excuses whatsoever for them) there are no easy or obvious solutions (although many on MN like to think they would have implemented closing of borders in January 2020, without any consequences or opposition)

Disregarding SAGE in the first instance and delaying the lockdown had deadly consequences and cant be ignored but they would have been weighing their advice against advice from business and economic leaders. (And massively underestimated the impact of yhat)

NZ and Australia started in a better position merely by virtue of the fact that covid had arrived and been circulating in Europe well before it was declared a pandemic, or had reached their shores. While they were praised for taking tough and strict measures, the difference was its lot easier contain when there are only a handful of cases.

@Fizbosshoes

The fact that Labour has been generally deathly quiet through the whole pandemic is telling: they’re not any more sure on where they stand than anyone else and also know that if you offer no opinion you can’t be judged on it.

I notice this but I also think as bad as Boris Johnson et al are (and I make no excuses whatsoever for them) there are no easy or obvious solutions (although many on MN like to think they would have implemented closing of borders in January 2020, without any consequences or opposition)

Disregarding SAGE in the first instance and delaying the lockdown had deadly consequences and cant be ignored but they would have been weighing their advice against advice from business and economic leaders. (And massively underestimated the impact of yhat)

NZ and Australia started in a better position merely by virtue of the fact that covid had arrived and been circulating in Europe well before it was declared a pandemic, or had reached their shores. While they were praised for taking tough and strict measures, the difference was its lot easier contain when there are only a handful of cases.

I agree on timing for Aus etc

But go back to SAGE minutes early Feb. They didn’t advise lockdown in fact thought best to avoid winter peak.

It was only when numbers were higher than what they thought lockdown was suggested a week before implemented.

I suppose I would have more sympathy with people who think that lockdowns are for left-wing killjoys who want to wreck the economy, if many of the same people didn’t also oppose compulsory masks. Where is the economic harm from compulsory masks in certain situations?

unherd.com/thepost/labours-covid-strategy-isnt-working/

@Chessie678

I think the argument that controlling covid is good for the economy needs real examination.

The argument has some merit if you are talking about NZ / Australia and then you get into a whole debate about whether that is plausible here and what the exit plan is etc.. But if you are talking about European countries most of which have been in and out of lockdowns for over a year and where there has been a devastating economic impact and huge level of government spending, I don't think it really holds.

I agree that if the population is afraid of catching covid this will damage consumer confidence and have an economic impact. Reduced consumer confidence always damages markets.

But that has to be compared against what has actually happened which is most businesses which consumers would use being shutdown and / or operating at such a limited capacity that they aren't profitable for 16 months.

If you run a pub and covid rates are high, maybe fewer people will come to it. If you run a pub and it has been shutdown by law, no one will come. Same for hotels, leisure businesses, beauty services, to a slightly lesser extent retail etc, even dentists in the first lockdown. I don't see that the profits of these businesses could possibly have been lower if there had been less lockdown.

And it is not like the constant cycle of lockdowns or restrictions in between times have kept cases consistently low anyway so as to give people the confidence to go out and spend. In periods where cases have been low businesses have mostly been closed anyway. In periods where we have partially opened up, cases have gone up quickly. So "controlling the virus" has led to very few periods where cases are low enough for people who are worried about covid to feel confident. The UK isn't alone in that - the same pattern has occurred across Europe so it can't just be blamed on our government.

In terms of people being ill having an economic impact, of course it will, but again this ignores the extent to which this has happened anyway and overestimates how ill the majority of people get with covid. Around 30% of the population have had covid. For most it is a mild and short illness or has no symptoms at all (particularly for the group most likely to be out at the businesses which have been closed). We can see now that self-isolation of contacts is a much bigger issue than actual illness - logically it has to be because most people with covid have more than one close contact. On that basis, self-isolation of close contacts is a more damaging economic policy than more people getting covid.

There is also the issue of the very high level of government spending needed to support lockdowns. We are starting to see signs that this is causing inflation. If we had borrowed this amount and spent it on almost anything else we could almost certainly have saved or improved more lives.

The question of what would have happened economically if we hadn't locked down or had done much less of it is really complicated (even for top economists) and I don't think anyone should be calling people on the other side of the argument stupid. I think there are plenty of valid and interesting arguments to be had about it.

I do think that people intuitively understand more about health than economics though (unsurprisingly given the education system and what is in the media etc) and that once numbers get into billions or trillions people can't always process them or understand the impact. I have seen it argued on here that businesses selling masks could counteract the loss the the economy caused by hospitality being closed and that adding 1% to income tax for higher rate tax payers would pay for covid.

I also think the health impact of recessions is ignored and debates about lives saved end up being about covid vs suicides (where suicide numbers are small in absolute terms though obviously devastating when they occur). Recessions and particularly unemployment provably shorten peoples lives (with most impact on the poor) due to a complex network of factors like nutrition, housing, access to healthcare, addiction, poor mental health, needing to work longer hours or until an older age in physical jobs etc). My opinion has always been that over time the lives lost as a result of those factors will outweigh lives that would have been lost to covid (particularly in a time where the government will have less to spend on mitigating them because they spent it all on locking everyone in their houses).

I don't really understand the view that the current conservatives are neoliberal or anti-lockdown. They have kept the country in lockdown or something approaching it for around 15 months, including going much further than other countries in banning contact between families and are now talking about vaccine passports (probably the least liberal policy you could conceive of). There was a study which found that the UK's lockdown has been the 5th harshest in the world. The view that we have had a light lockdown is not backed by the evidence.

I consider myself a liberal and am generally anti-lockdown. I use liberal in the traditional sense that I am pro individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, free trade and freedom of speech etc - I'd characterise it as "live and let live" . I am also generally pro welfare state, which now tends to go alongside liberalism. I find that no political party really represents my views.

THIS!!!

The Unherd article linked to is spot on, BUT I think Labour’s covid strategy is working purely because no one knows what it is! The best plan is for them to keep their heads down and claim they would have done it all differently, without saying quite what.

I agree at the beginning of 2020 when there was talk of stopping flights, there was lots of “racism!” bandied about. Even now there are some posters who refuse to countenance that the virus originated in China, and swear blind it’s all “Boris’s fault” or that of the UK at large (excluding their enlightened selves, of course…).