The Lives-or-Dollars Debate Is a Waste of Time
Nobody really believes that any cost is worth paying to save just one life, or that the Dow matters above all else.
Looking clueless.
Photographer: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
Among the critical shortages the coronavirus has revealed is one of a sophisticated vocabulary with which to discuss basic moral questions. It is not as urgent as the shortages of masks and ventilators but it has been just as evident in the news media.
How else to explain the bizarre debate now taking place about whether we should sacrifice our economy to our health, or vice-versa? Those who want to reopen the economy now say that we are putting livelihoods at risk to save a small part of the population, and a part that has disproportionately seen most of its years already. Sometimes they find a class angle: People who can easily work from home, such as pundits, are protecting themselves from tiny risks by forcing real harms on those who can’t. A few people, like Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, have volunteered that they would sacrifice their lives for their countrymen: a stance that might be heroic if it weren’t theoretical.