Luke Ford

I sense that much of the audience for talk radio and right-wing punditry feels emasculated. The world has changed and they don’t know how to cope. The more successful part of the audience also sees that the world has changed, but they’re not just coping, they’re thriving.

I can’t think of any right-wing pundit who is not hysterical. The left-wing pundits may be all hysterics too, I just don’t pay them as much mind.

A dominant tone on talk radio and right-wing punditry is male hysteria about a changing world. May 5, 2020, Dennis Prager wrote this hysterical column:

The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many — including world leaders; most scientists, especially health officials, doctors and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion writers in those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their faith in these people — as so preposterous as to be immoral. Timothy Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their states to open up as “the party of death.”

That’s the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit, cowardice and immaturity now dominate almost all societies because the elites are deceitful, cowardly and immature.

But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made…

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.

The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year’s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).

That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already “struggling to put food on the table.” Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.

In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, “Coronavirus has killed only around 700 Indians … a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd malaria deaths recorded every year.”

One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world: “We are starving. If we don’t have food in our stomach, what’s the use of observing this lockdown?” But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world’s elites seems nonexistent.

The lockdown is “possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation” (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.

When you enrage, you engage. That’s the winning formula for talk radio. I’m not aware of any viable business model for non-hysterical punditry (except for a few elite Substacks and Steve Sailer).

Michael Hiltzik writes May 19, 2021 for the Los Angeles Times:

The published data point to two related conclusions: First, lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates. Second, they had a very modest role in producing economic damage. Conversely, lifting lockdowns has done very little to spur economic resurgence.

Some of the evidence for both propositions has been expertly compiled by Noah Smith, a former finance professor now writing economic commentary for Bloomberg…

A team of UCLA researchers, in a paper first published in May 2020 and updated later, found that “likely Trump voters” reduced their movements by 9% following a local stay-at-home order, “compared to a 21% reduction among their Clinton-voting neighbors, who face similar exposure risks and identical government orders.”

Hostility to social measures short of a lockdown, such as social distancing and masks, bears the same partisan coloration.

It makes sense, therefore to examine the evidence — or rather, gather ammunition for the coming debate.

Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates. An Italian team found that lockdowns start to reduce the number of COVID infections about 10 days after they start, and keep reducing the case rate for as long as 20 days following initiation.

French researchers, in a paper published in January, compared the experience in countries that imposed stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and lifted the restrictions gradually — New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain— to that of Sweden, which imposed no lockdown, and the U.S., which had (and still has) a patchwork of state policies often involving late orders followed by abrupt and premature lifting.

The first group saw rapid reductions in infections and a rapid economic recovery, compared to the second. “Early-onset lockdown with gradual deconfinement allowed shortening the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and reducing contaminations,” the researchers concluded. “Lockdown should be considered as an effective public health intervention to halt epidemic progression.”

The UCLA researchers, meanwhile, estimated that reductions in movement resulting from stay-at-home orders reduced transmission in the hardest-hit communities, such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles by 50% or more.

All these findings point to savings of millions of lives globally. None of it is especially surprising. Compliance with stay-at-home orders meant reducing one’s exposure to strangers whose viral conditions were unknown. That was especially crucial in locations where COVID was raging and therefore the prospect of coming into close contact with an infected individual was relatively high.

That leaves the economic question. Critics of lockdowns typically advocate balancing the public health gains from stay-at-home orders against the economic losses from keeping bars, restaurants, hair salons, and other small businesses closed. They argue, as has DeSantis and other red-state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, that concerns about the latter should take primacy over the benefits of the former.

The problem with this argument is that there’s very little evidence that lockdowns themselves damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway, lockdowns or not. Nor is there much evidence that lifting lockdowns produced a faster recovery.

Those who have studied the course of the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe understand why the lockdowns have less economic impact than one might expect. The reason is that people made their own choices to stay at home or to patronize only businesses where they felt relatively safe.

As Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syversen of the University of Chicago said of their study of the economic slump during the pandemic, “The vast majority of the decline was due to consumers choosing of their own volition to avoid commercial activity.”

Noah Smith writes May 16, 2021:

There is copious evidence that lockdowns reduced transmission of the coronavirus. Some types of social distancing restrictions are more effective than others, and some sub-populations benefit more than others, but overall, lockdowns did limit the spread and saved lives.

That’s hardly a surprising result. The bigger question is, what did lockdown do to the economy? Most people make the natural assumption that lockdown hurts the economy — if you ban people from going out to restaurants, that stops people from spending money on restaurants, right? Obviously. Many economists made this assumption when they tried to model pandemic policy. In fact, some people go so far as to blame all the economic costs of the pandemic on lockdowns…

The fact is, even without lockdowns, plenty of people will avoid restaurants and other crowded spaces during a pandemic simply out of fear of catching the virus. And that will hurt the economy.

And lo and behold, when we look at evidence, we find that lockdowns accounted for only a small percent of the economic slowdown. For example, economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson looked at the state border between Illinois and Iowa. On the Illinois side, the towns issued stay-at-home orders, whereas on the Iowa side they did not. And guess what — economic activity fell almost as much on the Iowa side as on the Illinois side!

This is very similar to the results of a comparison of Sweden and Denmark. Denmark locked down and saw its economic activity decline by 29%; Sweden chose not to lock down, and saw its economic activity decline by 25%. The biggest economic destroyer by far was not government policy; it was fear of COVID.

In fact, states that didn’t issue stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020 saw just about the same amount of economic devastation as states that did issue those orders:

How did lockdowns save lives without hurting the economy?

At this point you may be scratching your head (or, if you’re a lockdown hater, seething with rage). How the heck could lockdowns have a big effect on the transmission of the virus, but only a small effect on the economy? Shouldn’t the tradeoff basically be one for one? Doesn’t every infection you stop mean one less meal in a restaurant, one less drink at the bar, one less trip to the store, etc.?

Well, no. That’s not how it works. As the evidence above shows, it’s fear of the virus that was the big economic killer. And if fear is proportional to actual infection rates, then by suppressing the virus, lockdowns reduced fear.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose in City A, they lock down. People stay home. The economy gets hurt, but the virus gets suppressed and infections go to a low level. Eventually, they can start to reopen safely, and they don’t immediately get another wave of COVID because there just aren’t that many sick people in town. But in City B, they don’t lock down. 80% of people stay home because of fear, so the economy gets clobbered anyway. But the 20% who go out end up spreading the virus, raising the infection rate to a high level. That causes more fear, and eventually even the 20% who were going out get scared enough to stay home. But now it’s too late — infection has a higher baseline, and takes much longer to go down. So the fear lasts longer, and so does the economic pain.

In fact, this is why in the long run, lockdowns might even have helped the economy. Countries that don’t lock down will have higher infection rates, thus prolonging the fear and keeping people in their house for longer (on top of having to pay higher medical costs). In its World Economic Outlook in October 2020, the IMF notes this possibility:

The effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing infections suggests that lockdowns may pave the way to a faster economic recovery if they succeed in containing the epidemic and thus limit the extent of voluntary social distancing. Therefore, the short-term economic costs of lockdowns could be compensated by stronger medium-term growth, possibly leading to positive overall effects on the economy.

And an analysis by some folks at the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that countries that tried to sacrifice lives to save their economies ended up hurting their economies anyway.

In fact, historical evidence shows that something very similar happened in the Spanish Flu, the eerily similar pandemic that hit us almost exactly 100 years ago. A March 2020 study by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner found that cities that enacted stricter social distancing restrictions in response to the Spanish Flu saw their economies recover faster.

In other words, we were warned. This isn’t just a case of — pardon the pun — 20/20 hindsight.

In the summer of 2020, right-wing pundits pointed out the hypocrisy of the Left in advocating lockdowns and street protests. Now it is clear that there were virtually no cases of outdoor transmission of covid, so the Left wasn’t so hypocritical after all.

So what’s the solution for emasculation? Number one, accept reality. Reality keeps changing and we can’t change reality. We can only change ourselves to adjust to reality. Number two, develop a life of love and service. When you seek to be helpful to others, you stop feeling emasculated. You only feel emasculated when you focus on what you’re not getting. In other words, you only feel emasculated when you have a selfish attitude. Change your attitude and you change your life. Change your attitude and your rage goes away. Change your attitude, and instead of focusing on what you’re not getting, you look for where you can help others.

A friend says:

All of these persons writing about how the lockdowns saved lives are idiots, or else they are unaware of the fatality rate associated with contracting Covid and actually becoming ill with it. Better than most I can talk about that since I became ill with the disease.

There are a lot of misunderstandings about (1) how transmissible the disease is (2) who gets it (3) how to prevent its transmission and (4) the medical outcomes for those who get it.

The key is to prevent those who are most at risk from the disease from getting it. I am the classic example of someone who is at risk, but not at the severest risk, once I contracted covid. It almost exclusively kills the elderly obese, and poses a risk to non elderly obese with other co morbidities. Everyone else is at a statistically non existent risk of fatality.

The emphasis should have been on isolating those most at risk and letting the rest of the population roam freely. As an example children are not at risk and except for the most elderly and fattest teachers they are not at risk yet schools were closed out of ostensible fear by teachers that somehow or other they would be exposed to children who would give them the virus. This is non sense and no scientific evidence supports that.

Then once one looks at the factors I have set out, you have to do a cost benefit analysis to locking down. Its important to note that some of the original projections were that this is such a virulent disease and we had not therapeutic means of dealing with it that up to 5% of persons who contracted the disease would die from it. In other words it was a modern day bubonic plague. That turned out to be wildly off the mark.

All the statistics cited by Hiltzik and others are based on worst case projections, none of which came anywhere close to be being accurate. We have never before treated a disease which has a specific victim profile, by locking down everyone including those to whom the disease is harmless.

Through that prism, its clear that lockdowns had little effect on mortality rates and what little effect they had was greatly outweighed by the negative aspects of the lockdown.

What conservatives said was hypocritical was the criticism by liberals of college kids frolicking in close range during spring break in Florida and Texas and criticizing the Trump rallies during the closing days of the campaign as well as the outdoor events at the white house while not objecting to (and in some cases encouraging) protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The reality is that none of these outdoor activities carried any risk. The best evidence is that only one case (in China) was transmitted outdoors.