Lloyd Blankfein, saying, “extreme measures to flatten the virus curve is sensible for a time to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure, but crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue and beyond.” You had the Wall Street Journal editorial board writing recently, “No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.”
We have this concept in mostly regulatory arguments called a value of a statistical life which is kind of a grotesque concept to most people when they’re introduced to it. But it’s basically putting a price on a life. They put the price at about, like $10 million or $11 million. And the reason they come up with these []—numbers is because you have to do all these cost-benefit analyses when you’re passing laws and regulations to determine that, you know, the regulation saves more money than it costs. And so they’re handing out a very similar thing here. It’s basically saying, look, GDP, U.S. GDP is about $20 trillion. If we cut the GDP in half by having everyone stay home, that costs us $10 trillion of output. If we send everyone to work, then OK, maybe an extra three million people die, but is three million people worth $10 trillion? That’s basically what they’re asking us to think about.
It’s essentially like capitalist death panels.
— source theintercept.com | Mar 25 2020