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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

You could make an argument that society as a whole should start looking at things that way, but personally I'd have no basis for understanding how that translated to damage. 3 million people dead is a number that I have a lot of mental models around, it's easy for me to get a sense of magnitude that way. 50 million human years lost is a lot less relatable number and I'm not sure how to contextualize it.

It might also be interesting to measure the cost of the pandemic in terms of economic harm, how much the GDP dropped, how much production was lost, how many stores closed, etc.

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> 50 million human years lost is a lot less relatable number and I'm not sure how to contextualize it.

On way of contextualizing it that doesn't equate lives with economic output is to divide by life expectancy: if life expectancy is 70 years then 50 million years lost ~= 0.7 million human lives that never happened, or 0.7 million healthy newborns that died preventable deaths.

In some sense that's not interesting though, right? A newborn that never made it also had very few resources poured into them. From a purely utilitarian perspective, the worst age to die is 20-22, when you've got an education and a long history of people devoting time to making you a productive member of society, but you've had no space to contribute anything back yet.

I think there's a straightforward counter to that:

> From a purely utilitarian perspective, the worst age to die is 20-22,

that's easily adjustable: if 95% of newborns become healthy 20 yr olds, then just multiply the number of newborns by 0.95. The harder part is estimating total number of years lost, but it doesn't sound particularly out of the ordinary for a research problem in statistics/epidemiology.

The (terrible) thought experiment that perhaps gets the parent's point across:

Which "costs" more, 100k 20-year-olds dying today, or 100k babies dying today? The 20-year-olds have already had a lot of time, money, and opportunity poured into them, while the babies have not.

Compare it to the world population. It's currently about 7.8 billion. So if 50 million years are lost in total, everyone lost on average 50 million years / 7.8 billion ~= 2.4 days of life.

This way of looking at human suffering might be counter productive:

“oh, those slaves in [country] only cost me 0.03$/year, no big deal.”

Slavery costs me money and that's why it's bad? I don't understand.

It's easy to contextualize. 50 million human years lost means that people would have to put in 50 million human years worth of work to recover the economic loss of COVID-19.

Consider the average human worker. In their life, they will output around 10.5 human years worth of work. 50 million years represents the total output of about 4.76 million human lives.

So if you delete the production of 3 million people due to COVID deaths plus all the time spent in lockdowns, 50 million human years lost sounds about right, but probably could be higher. I'd say it's probably about 80 million human years lost.

Perhaps the value of a human life is that they are alive, not the hours of work they produce during that lifetime.

Valuing people as primarily their economic output is anti-social to the point of being dystopian, and we have much better economic indicators than arbitrary heuristics when we do want to understand the economic damage of the pandemic.

Right. Think of this as "50 million years of opportunities for grandchildren to get to know their grandparents or 50 million years of time spent as a widow after your elderly husband dies" as well as just the economic cost.

This assumes that the lost human years are productive years, which I think is dubious at best given the demographics of Covid death.

We could count "years of productive work lost", but that feels like a very cynical way to look at it.

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