Economists are trained experts in modelling human behaviour and testing those models with real world data. Hundreds of papers have been written dealing with the costs and benefits of lockdown, and Professor Doug Allen summarised their major findings to help his family and friends see past the curtain of big tech, media, bureaucracy and government brazenly censoring the information and critical thinking which casts doubts upon their coordinated responses.
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Just over a year ago now, I had an hour long conversation with the professor (which Good Sauce supporters have full, “behind the scenes” access to), and this is the edited version, also available on podcast. Four flawed assumptions government “experts” made in the modelling lead to their zealous commitment to failed policy.
Of the 40,000 or so papers published in the year preceding June 2021 related to Covid, Professor Doug Allen sought out studies which dealt with lockdown and were related to the costs or benefits thereof. To be clear, lockdown means non-pharmaceutical state interventions like closing businesses, schools, outdoor spaces, and churches; social distancing and mask mandates, and restrictions on movement and private gatherings. It doesn’t refer to international border closures.
The report’s major conclusions are:
- a proper cost/benefit analysis of a specific policy must consider all, and not just some cherry picked costs or benefits of implementation,
- all analyses depend on assumptions, and many of the studies relied on false assumptions which over-estimated benefits and under-estimated costs of lockdown,
- most of the early studies were proven incorrect by global experience and objective data,
- advanced models with the benefit of real data have showed the benefits of lockdowns in preventing Covid deaths to be at best trivial, generally due to voluntary changes in behaviour by people most at risk while failing to prevent non-compliance by others,
- death tolls in various countries is not correlated to lockdowns.
The original post and full accompanying article can be read here.
