The Seen and the Unseen about Kung Flu

One of the most important economic principles comes from the nineteenth century French economist Frederick Bastiat.  The "Broken Window Fallacy" derives from the fact that you are only looking at part of the picture - you see some things, but don't see others and so come to faulty conclusions.  This is what is called "The Seen and the Unseen":

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? ...

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another.

The national lockdown is basically breaking thirty million windows, and the governments are all patting themselves on their backs for all the lives they are saving.  But are they really?  Sure, we see some: the curve is starting to bend, and mortality rates are (thankfully) lower than predicted.  This is What Is Seen.  The Silicon Graybeard has a brilliant post about What Is Unseen:

The problem as I see it is we're not tracking any of the impacts of shutting down the country and just tracking how well we protected the health care system from collapse due to an increased workload.  There are many reports going around about increases in calls to suicide hotlines and telephone counseling facilities as more and more people face depressing situations.  There are anecdotal reports of increased calls to domestic violence agencies.  The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reported an 891% increase in calls over last year.  Doctors are reporting fewer patients in Emergency Rooms for heart problems and other typical conditions they treat and doctors think patients are staying at home when they think they're having a heart attack instead of going to the Emergency Room.  This isn't good.

In New York City, the number of people dying at home has surged in recent weeks to about 200 a day, compared with about 22 to 32 deaths during the same time frame last year, according to the New York City Fire Department’s data on cardiac arrest calls.
...
Nearly 68% of cardiologists who responded to an informal Twitter poll posted this month by Angioplasty.org, an online community of cardiologists, said they have been seeing at least 40% fewer cases.

I know that when this topic comes up, the leftist wokescolds start to say, "you only care about money!  You don't value life!"  The answer is that the country is only looking at how many lives we're helping in one very specific place and totally ignoring the much, much larger group that's being impacted by these policies.  We can't put a price on it because it's impossible to know how many lives we've saved.

Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway.  Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.

But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences.  Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:

And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.

Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.

But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.

SiG isn't the only one making this point:

Overall? I see little evidence that the various measures adopted by the western nations have had much effect. And with the exception of closing schools, I would not expect them to do so given the laxness of the lockdown and the vague nature of “essential business”. I’ve mentioned before, here in Sonoma Country California, the local cannabis retailer is considered an essential business … strange but absolutely true.

Finally, I want to talk about that most mundane of things, the humble cost/benefit analysis. Draw a vertical line down a sheet of paper, label one side “Costs” and the other “Benefits”. Write them down on the appropriate side, add them up. We’ve all done some variation of that, even if just mentally.

Unfortunately, it seems Dr. Fauci doesn’t do cost/benefit analyses. It seems he only looks at or cares about the benefits. He called millions of people being thrown out of work “unfortunate” … unfortunate? It is a huge cost that he doesn’t want to think about. He’s not going to lose his job. His friends won’t lose their jobs. Meanwhile, at the same time that he’s saying “unfortunate”, the mental health hotlines and the suicide hotlines are ringing off the wall. People are going off the rails. Domestic violence calls are through the roof, and understandably. Forcibly take the jobs away from a wife and a husband, tell them that they are under house arrest, that’s stress enough … and meanwhile there’s no money coming in, rent and electricity bills are piling up, can’t put gas in the car, kids bouncing off the walls from being cooped up … of course domestic violence and suicides and mental health problems are off the charts.

And this doesn't count important intangibles.  Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again.  Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future?  To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people?  Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months?  Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months?  That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.

It's the Unseen.  And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor.  That it is Unseen is not by accident.

And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation.  Of course the resulting public policy is hideous.  Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference).  You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine.  No doubt this is all a coincidence.

Also interesting, the only person who has been talking for over a week about getting this fixed is Donald Trump.  No doubt this is also a coincidence.

But hey, we are governed by really Smart® people, are we not?  Relax, citizen - all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.  The bread is free and the circus is entertaining.  And even better, the chocolate ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2.5 ounces ...