The Payoff from the Pain: Trillions in Benefits Seen from Social Distancing to Slow Coronavirus
The costs of slowing the spread of coronavirus are enormous. Large sections of the economy have ground to a halt. The stock market has crashed. Unemployment claims surged by more than 3 million last week alone. Congress was forced to pass a $2.2 trillion rescue package — and it will likely need to add to that as the budgets of states on the front lines begin to crater. President Trump has bellyached “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” — though he has now blessedly backed off plans to reopen the country by Easter.
But what are the benefits from this pain of social distancing?
It turns out you can put a dollar figure on reducing deaths from COVID-19. And it is an enormous figure: $8 trillion, according to modeling by economists at the University of Chicago, whose economics department is best known for its defense of the harsh orthodoxies of free markets. “These benefits are over one-third of U.S. GDP and larger than the entire annual federal budget,” the economists write.
Michael Greenstone is the lead author of the working paper. He serves as the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University’s Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. He tells Rolling Stone that he wanted to balance the conversation about the costs of coronavirus.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trillions-benefits-social-distancing-975130/