Not when the state engages in deficit spending to make up for the lost income. That deficit spending will impact productivity over a very long period of time.
>>Regardless, we need to compare to the appropriate counterfactual; you're still listing a bunch of bad things that happened, but implicitly comparing those to some world where the pandemic never happened - but it did happen, so that's not valid; you need to tease out how much of those downsides are due to "lockdowns" specifically. There's just not a lot of clearcut evidence showing lockdowns actually were worse than the alternative - self-imposed lockdowns, or pre-vaccination mass outbreaks.
Obviously lockdowns increased sheltering-at-home/social-distancing behavior. If they didn't, there would have been no need to institute them.
>>Some countries suffered more; others less; but I can't see a trend (maybe somebody can, but at least a few papers on the topic are clearly biased, which doesn't help).
Here's a good meta study on the costs and benefits of lockdowns:
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf
The conclusion is that the net effect of lockdowns was enormously negative.
>>Furthermore, let's talk about that word "lockdown", which you describe as being rigidly present - well, 0% of the world's countries had rigid lockdowns for the duration of the pandemic.
The definition provided in the meta-study linked above is:
>>The term “lockdown” is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions. That is, the term will be used to include mandatory state-enforced closing of non-essential business, education, recreation, and spiritual facilities; mask and social distancing orders; stay-in-place orders; and restrictions on private social gatherings.
Of course lockdowns exist on a spectrum, from most all-encompassing, to least.
>>And even that belies practical complexities - I sure get the impression that most places, for most of the duration of the pandemic did not actually police many covid-restriction-violations very harshly.
Of course, this is all very complex, but from what I've seen, the evidence suggests that the harm from non-pharmaceutical interventions that limited the right to free association and movement did massively more harm than good, even ignoring the harm to civil liberties.
>>It's perfectly plausible that a country had excellent policy, including harsh lockdowns, real lock-down related damages, and high death rates - all at once! Because the alternative might have been much worse; and _that's_ hard to measure; we can't do randomized controlled trials on entire countries.
Of course, and that is why being careful with which countries are being compared is important in trying to tease apart the effects of lockdown interventions specifically, as this analysis does: