Everyone ought to be worried about the dangers of the coronavirus, as well as the dangers of our reactions to the coronavirus. Unhelpfully, many in the media and many protesters frame this in stark terms. They pit “the economy” against health. They combine their opposition to (or support for) closures with their opposition to (or support for) safety protocols, such as masks or required spacing.
Really, our economy can be aided by better safety (and well-targeted closures), and our health will be aided by minimizing the harm to our economy.
As our government reports a 20-million-person increase in unemployment in March, creating a 14.7% unemployment rate and leaving about half the adult population out of the labor force in one way or another, we need to think about how to get as many people back to work as quickly as possible. We need to do this not because “the economy” is a good in itself. It’s not. We need to care about employment because the American people suffer when so many people are out of work.
First off, there are the costs to the unemployed. Unemployed men are more likely to die sooner. At least one study purports to have found evidence that unemployment causes mortality.
We need plenty of caveats here: Maybe coronavirus unemployment won’t cause depression, bad health, and death, because it appears to be temporary, or because it’s a widely shared phenomenon with an understandable cause. Also, more robust monetary assistance to the unemployed could ease some of the burden of being unemployed.
Look a little deeper into the employment figures, though, and there’s more reason to believe the costs of the lockdown isn’t merely “economic.” The work that other people do makes us better off. Losing that work makes us worse off.
When 1.4 million healthcare workers lose their jobs, that’s bad for all of us. That means there are fewer doctors and nurses working to keep us healthy. One study estimated that many cancer treatments will be missed, and many cancers will go undiagnosed during this shutdown. If healthcare is a human right, as some political rhetoric would have us believe, then it is a right that is currently being taken away.
When 88,000 food processing jobs disappear, food becomes scarcer. When 220,000 repair and maintenance workers are no longer repairing and maintaining, our physical world starts to crumble.
This massive unemployment isn’t simply a loss of income to people. It’s a loss to the rest of us of the good work those people do.
Obviously, we cannot simply flip a switch and send everyone back to work, school, and crowded restaurants. Our efforts to fight this virus will impose costs by depriving us of the company and the work of others. But when weighing the costs and benefits of lockdowns, we need to consider that keeping people away from work has grave costs that aren’t simply “economic.”
