Plague Journal (50): On Counting the Cost

Fifty days in.

I'm seeing lots of stories about how the lockdown is unnecessary, or is hurting people, or is causing more pain than it is relieving, or is a step toward a police state. The predominant theme seems to have changed from "We're all in this together" to "Why are we in this at all?"

Now, admittedly, this observation does not come from a thorough study, but is an overall impression from my own Facebook friends and from many news and opinion sources that I see via Feedly. Some of these friends and bloggers are classic Tea-baggers, but many others have not shown a tendency toward political angst before. It looks to me like people are getting very tired of all this.

One thing that proponents of lifting the restrictions almost never talk about is how much tolerance we should have of the heightened infection rate and consequent deaths that will inevitably come as a result of their proposed policy. How much is too much? 

One thing that proponents of the lockdown almost never talk about: how much unemployment, how much disruption in the food supply, how much failing small business becomes too much?

All of which is a way of saying, no one wants to talk about cost. Or, to be more precise, they are willing to talk about the cost of the policy they're against, but not a word about the cost of the one they favor. Indeed, that is actually a hallmark of our political system in recent years. 

We filter out the rational in favor of the polemical in these discussions. The cost of the other guy's plan is always exorbitant (think of the budget!), while the cost of my plan is always . . . unspecified.

But there's more! Life is more than budgets, after all. The other guy's plan is also heartless. That side doesn't care about real people. My plan, on the other hand, is all heart!

We're over-exposed to polemics, under-exposed to rational thought. Whatever truth seems inconvenient, that's the one we either edit out, or declare to be a hoax, a product of the Fake News media. And so we keep on getting nowhere faster and faster.

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This article makes some similar points: The problem of seeing the pandemic through a partisan lens.