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: