JABS FOR BLUE-LINE WORKERS.

In accordance with Quebec’s declining vaccination age limits, the Montreal Canadiens are getting their jabs starting this week. Fans are hoping it’s neither Pfizer nor Moderna but “Score.”

I’ve actually thought for a while now that we should have put blue-line workers — i.e., NHL players — closer to the front of the queue. Not ahead of frontline workers, especially in health care. But not far down the priority list.

I know, I know. Professional athletes are overpaid, over-pampered and over-obsessed-about already. What business do they have moving to the front of the vaccination line? But all that is rather the point, isn’t it? They’re only in that privileged position because so many people want to watch them play. Maybe we shouldn’t, but we do. And in a pandemic they provide an especially welcome diversion from Netflix.

Such is the tenor of the age that players have all been very clear they don’t want special treatment. But if they had all been jabbed early on, the NHL season would have proceeded more smoothly, the Canadiens wouldn’t have had to take a week off, or the Vancouver Canucks two, and they wouldn’t now be playing at an arguably dangerous rate in order to complete their 56-game schedule.

In the larger scheme, of course, these are trivial matters. But hundreds of thousands of hockey fans, probably millions, would have had their lives improved at least a little if teams hadn’t been hit by COVID. Providing small but appreciable benefits to millions and millions of people is why these athletes are paid so well in the first place.

I see our Olympic athletes have now been guaranteed inoculation in time for the Tokyo Games, thanks to a deal between Pfizer, Biontech and the International Olympic Committee — a deal that supposedly won’t reduce anyone else’s supply of jabs.

If you buy that last bit, you don’t understand either the physics of the conservation of matter and energy or the related economics of opportunity cost. But the number of athletes and hangers-on isn’t large and, come July, millions of people in this country and billions around the world will become interested in the Games — they always do. There’s a potentially very big non-pecuniary benefit if the Games go off as scheduled.

I saw a press release last week from a Montreal company that is paying its workers to get their jabs: $200 for the first dose, $150 for the second or $350 for a one-shot treatment, if that becomes available in Canada. The company may be looking for some free publicity. But it also presumably believes that if it can get to herd immunity internally, its own operations can proceed without interruption.

The subtext here is “externalities” — the benefits or costs of an action that aren’t captured in markets. Governments love externalities, which can serve as an excuse for all sorts of interventions. Educating A supposedly benefits B and C and D in ways they don’t pay for. “Don’t pay for” is key: the externalities don’t include the higher salary A receives after the extra education: those benefits are “internalized.” A gets paid for them.

Externality talk is often mainly hooey — hot air from people whose main interest is getting subsidies. (Since such subsidies are mainly productivity-reducing, a good argument can be made that much externalities talk is itself a negative externality.)

But when the subject is contagious disease, externalities really are involved. Contagion is literally a textbook example of externality: you read about it in almost all economics textbooks.

Governments spend so much money on spurious externalities, should they get behind what really is an externality — the benefit you create for others by getting yourself vaccinated and thus reducing your chances of infecting them? Governments already pick up the cost of vaccination. The jab itself is not expensive but the armies of jabbers administering it are.

Should governments go beyond that and actually offer $50 or $100 or whatever it takes to get people to roll up their sleeves? It’s obviously best if people got the jab out of a sense of civic duty. But if they resist appeals to duty, as many apparently are doing, should we sweeten the offer?

It’s a classic conflict between fairness and efficiency. It’s not fair that people who volunteer to do their civic duty don’t get paid while shirkers and malingerers do.

On the other hand, getting the shirkers and malingerers vaccinated clearly has real benefits in reaching herd immunity and beyond. Ideally, we would let the market work.

If you don’t get vaccinated, fine, but you’re then held liable for the costs of anyone you infect and, if you catch COVID yourself, you pay for your own health care.

Unfortunately, proof of transmission may be too difficult to make the legal solution work, while the goodhearted but maybe at times soft-headed Canadian public would probably balk at sending people, or their estates, bills for health care.

So pay them it may have to be.

THEY’RE ONLY IN THAT PRIVILEGED POSITION BECAUSE SO MANY PEOPLE WANT TO WATCH THEM PLAY.