Taboo trade-offs in the spotlight
The lockdown has dragged the invisible choices we constantly make between life, liberty, and money into plain sight.
What price can we put on a human life? The socially acceptable answer rejects the very question: every life is priceless! But if we really thought this was true, we’d crawl around in Mack trucks at 5kmh.
The heartless but pragmatic answer is ‘‘about $5 million’’. That’s the number statisticians use when figuring out where to distribute limited funds, or how strictly to set health and safety policies. We have to accept some loss of life, or civilisation would grind to a halt.
And so, the lockdown has dragged into plain sight the taboo trade-offs we constantly make between life, liberty, and financial wellbeing.
Models suggest Covid-19 could kill up to 60,000 Kiwis if no measures are taken, reduced to 10,000 under the most aggressive controls. Taking the most extreme scenario, let’s imagine we really do have an opportunity to save 50,000 lives.
Using the $5m figure, we should be willing to throw $250 billion at this thing – sacrificing an entire year’s worth of GDP.
But that number needs some major adjustments. Do we value the lives of the elderly differently, because they have fewer years left? This is another grotesque question, but the answer is ... yes. Statisticians use measures like ‘Quality-adjusted life years’ for this exact reason.
On that basis, we might only be willing to sacrifice $62b. That’s still an incredible sum of money: the equivalent of 30 KiwiBuilds, or 20 Provincial Growth Funds.
But it’s still massively oversimplified. We’d also have to factor in the ongoing health costs for those who survive, the blow to GDP even without lockdowns, how many people die ‘with’ Covid-19 but not ‘of’ it, how to price the massive social costs, the self-harm that comes from isolation, the inevitable spike in domestic violence, and crucially, what benefits the lockdown is actually buying us.
It’s certainly not enough time for a vaccine. Is it enough time to roll out a massive contact-tracing test regime? To ramp up the number of ICU beds?
Presumably the Government has a team of crack statisticians modelling these kinds of problems. It would be great to see their analysis, and in particular, what the endgame is.
In the meantime: if we’re willing to throw the book at this particular threat, and act as if there’s no cost too great to bear, it might be worth rethinking the more mundane trade-offs in life. Here are some prompts:
If you drive everywhere, how much is that draining your healthspan? How much would it be worth to walk or cycle instead?
What would you have to cut out of your life to make time for a regular exercise routine?
How much is your time worth?
Seriously, try to put a dollar figure on it. How much less stuff would you be willing to consume to buy back your freedom? What price would you pay to extend your healthspan by a year?
Thinking in this transactional sort of way is a bit weird, but it can be illuminating to drag these murky trade-offs out into the cold light of day.
Personally, I believe that good health, meaningful work and time spent with loved ones are vastly more precious than merely being rich or having fancy stuff. The research on happiness backs this up. And times like this make it glaringly obvious.
When life goes back to normal, I wonder what tradeoffs we might start to make differently. Who’s gonna quit their soulless job? Finally learn how to cook? Prioritise their health over social pressure? Turn down a promotion to spend more time with the family?
We are currently test subjects in an enormous experiment. Every habit, routine, and norm has been wiped clean. Four weeks to think about what’s important in life, and re-evaluate everything. What are you going to do differently?