756 karma · joined August 10, 2017
Disclaimer: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
The lockdown report teases apart the costs of lockdowns from those of the non-lockdown-related effects of the pandemic, and also looks at the benefit of lockdowns.
I don't think you're making a genuine effort to appraise it, making it pointless for me to engage in this.
Like I said, your explanation for that not being how capitalism works, which was:
>>However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
>>You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats
One of the most far-reaching healthcare regulations was enacted during the Reagan era:
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
Beyond federal regulations, state and local regulations increased as well. The land-use study I linked to earlier explains how much land-use restrictions, enacted at the local government level, have increased since 1960, and how much this has contributed to income inequality and productivity growth stagnation.
Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
>>Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-paymen...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...
>>Marxist "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working weeks, paid leave, unions led to increased wages, and many other workers rights. Hell, before the left wing gained power, child labour was predominant in capitalist economies.
No it didn't. All of those things emerged as a result of the rising levels of per capita GDP that were due to profit-motivated investment in a free market.
Child labor could only be abandoned when productivity increases enabled parents to support their whole family alone, and that productivity increase was, again, a consequence of profit-motivated investment in a free market.
The activity of Apple is massively beneficial to China, and the other suppliers downstream of it. You're simply accepting the Marxist principle that profit is exploitation, and harmful to society, which is not economically valid, and oblivious to the facts around the impact of foreign investment in countries like China.
>>Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been implemented.
This is incredibly misinformed.
First of all, that link looks at wages, not compensation. The non-wage component of compensation has grown more rapidly than the wage component of compensation. Looking solely at wages, instead of compensation as a whole, is seemingly a deliberate choice to give people a sense of being victimized.
Second, the USA is NOT the world, and it has NOT implemented libertarian policies since 1960.
Market rights have been increasingly encroached upon since 1960, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.
Two major examples:
1. The rapid rise of social democracy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.
2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...
The world at large, which has moved more toward libertarianism since 1990, has seen the most rapid rise in wage growth in human history over the last 30 years:
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...
It doesn't break down. I consider land to be under the proper purview of the state, under exactly this principle.
>>The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe. While that may appear to be value-added to you, others may not share your assessment. However, the metal you used has now been removed from its natural condition (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and thus your action has the potential to be a net negative to the rest of the population. It's not clear what rationale they might have for respecting your claim to have added value.
Not really. The metal you used is so little that it can't have an appreciable negative impact on others. And the state can in fact charge you for taking that metal out of circulation, and redistribute the proceeds to compensate the rest of society for your extraction of it. But it is not reasonable for the state to simply never allow you to appropriate metal, under any conditions, or demand a right to anything you fashion from that metal, after it has already charged you a fee for your appropriation of it.
Now of course, if you go searching for edge cases, you will find them. A coherent moral philosophy doesn't eliminate the complexity of the world, and the challenge of navigating it. But it does give us a baseline moral philosophy that we can all agree to, and then together try to govern in accordance to.
>>There's no clear reason for land ownership given the notion that you should only own value added, but libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost without such ownership.
A land tax is perfectly consistent with both land ownership being an artificial right, bestowed by the state, and libertarianism.
It is also, intriguingly, the perfect tax, from an efficiency standpoint, according to economists:
Land ownership does not fit the definition I provided, which in greater context, is:
"a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe."
Land is not scarce, and appropriating it is not a case of appropriating only that portion of the matter of the universe which one reconfigures into a value-added form.
So I agree, there can be no natural right to private ownership of land. A land tax, therefore, can be justified, as can other forms of state-intervention over how one may manage it.
No one has the power to exclude you from the market and the benefits of division of labor.. You would only be excluded if what you provide is of such little apparent value, that no one wants to trade what they have for what you provide. That is not coercion. People have a right to not associate with you, even if that choice means you starve to death. You do not own other people.
>>I would count this as coercion because people who own money can refuse to spend it indefinitely.
People can barter. People can create their own money. When the state, under anti-libertarian principles, intervenes, and prohibits voluntary exchanges involving certain kinds of money then yes, these problems can theoretically emerge. This is why libertarian philosophy is so adament about not using the state's apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel compliance with state orders) to restrict people from engaging in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.
These outlier situations have properties not present in normal circumstances, regardless of the power imbalance in those normal circumstances. Normal circumstances mean that Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, can only induce me to purchase its product, if it is the best option for me amongst the entire set of options globally available to me. The harmful/coercive effect of the power imbalance vanishes in a free market, because by the ruleset of the free market, Apple cannot use its power to do anything except provide a better quality product for a lower price.
>> The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich are in a better negotiating position so the poor must take what they're given.
The poor don't get poorer in a free market.. We've seen wages grow over 20 fold since 200 years ago, in 1822. This is after adjusting for inflation, meaning a greater than 20 times material improvement in people's living conditions. The places in the world with the highest wages are precisely those which adhered to the free market ruleset most closely, and for the longest duration of time.
>>You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of what I'm saying
What you're implying is simply misinformed.
The normal libertarian ethics don't apply in such cases. In the ordinary non-emergency market, Newtonian/libertarian ethics do apply, and those are the circumstances you are avoiding contending with by focusing on extreme outlier/edge cases.
Could you elaborate? What exactly do you mean?
By "withholding care upon receipt of payment is not coercive", do you mean a person that commits to providing aid in exchange for payment, and then reneges on their obligation upon receiving payment? This is clearly theft/fraud, and in the same class of behaviors as coercion.
I'm totally confused as I don't know when we discussed such a scenario and why you think that I don't consider that coercive.
>demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a movie
There is nothing coercive about this.
>offering food to a starving man in exchange for his kidneys
Unless it's an emergency, where the starving man does not have the time to make/entertain offers on the wider global market, there is nothing coercive about this either.
In an emergency situation, different rules apply, as a consequence of the physical space we each take, which displaces others. This exclusionary effect creates a duty to render help in an emergency, as opposed to abusing one's position in such a situation to exploit others.
>buying all the food in the market to drive up the price from people desperate to not die
There is nothing coercive about this, and in practice, it's impossible. This should certainly be guarded against by individuals, through means like securing long-term food purchase contracts through co-ops, or by growing one's own garden, but that doesn't imply that it's a form of coercion which we have an ethical right to employ coercion to remedy.
It's socially interpreted, but I believe there is a natural justice, that promotes functional societies, that reasonable people can recognize, that will end up as the social interpretation via any process that is impartial and deliberative, like courts.
Natural resources are not man-made, and thus are not true private property. But we recognize a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe. We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights to this value-added portion of the matter of the universe, in order so that they may benefit from the value they created.
Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into question whether the you that exists today has a right to the you that exists in the future to the extent that the current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you don't.
But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what libertarians are arguing about. There are far more mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic examples.
How the commons - which exist outside the purview of private property - are treated, is completely orthogonal to one's belief in libertarianism. For example, you can be a libertarian, and believe no pollutants should be allowed to be emitted into the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is part of the commons, and should be maintained in a way where it remains useful to humanity at large.
>>Keeping schools open in various parts of the country and failing to implement proper safety measures resulted in tragic losses of brilliant young teachers who didn't have to die.
This is entirely speculation, while you demand extreme rigor from me when I suggest a causative link behind the surge in drug overdose deaths in 2020 and the lockdown policies that massively exacerbated social isolation.
>>A lot of that has to do with the inequitable distribution of resources and access to things like wifi, computers, and quiet spaces for study. We have been advocating for funding for these things for a long time, for precisely this reason.
So you are admitting that teacher's unions knew that this would happen in the event of school closures. The teacher's unions' behavior was completely inexcusable and they were clearly not advocating for children.
"There's no accompanying analysis to support its rejection from the comparison, let alone an attempt to quantify exactly how much of an outlier it actually is."
There's no accompanying analysis to support its inclusion in the comparison, let alone an attempt to quantify exactly how comparable it actually is.
Claiming Sweden underperformed Denmark is also a far cry from claiming that Sweden underpeformed other Nordic countries as a whole, as the original article does.
>>This suggests that keeping lower-secondary schools open had a minor impact on the overall spread of SARS-CoV-2 in society.
But you're disagreeing with that conclusion, and suggesting that the increase in COVID deaths amongst teachers, from a very small number, to a higher, but still very small number, would have caused more social harm than the harm of shutting down in-person schooling, which we know has been enormous:
"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
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:
My argument is that people by and large make rational cost-benefit analyses, and pay the cost of sheltering-at-home/social-isolation if the benefit in COVID risk mitigation makes it worth it.
I alluded to that here:
>>A lockdown rule, being rigidly preset, can't know when a young person is facing drug abuse problems, and faces far greater risk from social isolation than from COVID. The US saw a massive spike in fentanyl overdose deaths in 2020, showing the steep cost of social isolation - which lockdowns exacerbate - for public health.
To summarize, maximizing COVID risk mitigation is not the appropriate strategy for every individual. Whether it is, depends on their situation/circumstances. Lock-downs are a cookie-cutter solution that cannot make these kinds of distinctions.
>>The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it?
>>In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools.
It seems reasonable to assume that most of these measures would not impose significant harm to children, and thus would be perfectly appropriate to institute. Mask-wearing could harm children, due to its obstruction of communication and potential inhibition of social gathering and physical activity, and this would need to be seriously examined before the measure is mandated.
But school closures as a whole, which is the biggest point of contention, will absolutely harm children, yet teachers unions pushed for this for over a year in many jurisdictions.
>>Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year:
While this is obviously tragic, it is an ancedote, so these numbers cannot be generalized to all school districts. Moreover, there are far more likely vectors of transmission than exposure to students in schools. This study suggests that the vast majority of transmission occurs at home:
https://research.unc.edu/2020/04/24/household-deemed-most-co...
>>Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes?
A teacher dying is obviously damaging to students, and of course to the teacher themselves along with their family, but how could it possibly be more damaging to children than 30-40% of minority students not learning during the lockdown?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-hispanic-students-disproport...
>>Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons.
The spike, not the baseline, is due to despair. So fentanyl being a problem for a long time is not relevant to my argument.
>>For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns?
This could also be another cause, but we know mental illness and substance abuse increased in 2020, so "bad batches" cannot explain the entire spike in overdose deaths, and a portion of the spike needs to be attributed to the behavioral changes that emerged in 2020, the most likely cause of which is pandemic-related measures.
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/cov...
Beyond an increase in drug use and a rise in the frequency of bad batches, there is the additional risk of isolation during drug use, which makes overdoses more likely to become fatal.
>>That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state?
One more time: I am not saying that loneliness is the sole cause of fentanyl use. I'm saying it's the cause of the spike in fentanyl use seen in 2020. You're not grasping my critique of your argument as you keep on referring to the higher levels of overdose deaths in the South/border-states.
>>Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.
I can't prove anything definitively, but the correlation between fentanyl deaths and the pandemic makes it pretty obvious that there's a causative association. The effect of loneliness on the risk of substance abuse is also well documented:
https://recoverycentersofamerica.com/blogs/how-loneliness-fu...
Loneliness is risk factor for mortality in general:
https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/fulltext/2019...
>>No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions.
It's extremely obvious to me, based on what I have read and seen. A massive increase in social isolation, caused by COVID mitigation measures and efforts, is obviously going to cause enormous harm to mental health, and to normal healthy life habits, which will lead to exactly the results we've seen, with the spike in mental illness, substance abuse and obesity during the pandemic response era.
>>What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use?
Given 2.8 million people died in the US in 2019, it wouldn't make sense that the 385,000 COVID deaths, which only amounts to 13.7 percent of the baseline number, would have that profound of an impact on mental health and prevalence of substance abuse. We've seen the share of adults reporting anxiety/depression increase from 11 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2021:
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-imp...
That magnitude of a difference can't be reasonably explained by an increase in the death rate amounting to 0.1 percent of the US population.
>>I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation.
Those arguing for mandatory behavioral modification have to prove it's safe. The onus is not on me to prove that the subsequent surge in mental illness, obesity, and substance abuse was caused by this mandatory behavioral modification. The onus is on lockdown supporters to prove that it wasn't. You have to prove that a highly distressing/disruptive intervention, that is forced on millions of people, is not going to harm them, before instituting it. And there are plenty of indiciation that it was in fact harmful.
>>But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID.
You're oversimplifying my argument. I'm saying that people will generally make rational cost-benefit analyses that will lead to them taking the appropriate measures that minimize all risks that face them. For a person with substance abuse problems, the risk of social isolation that emerges from social distancing measures may outweigh the risk from COVID from not taking those measures, and they may choose to not socially distance as a result. These kinds of individualized responses are not possible with lockdowns.
>>I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd;
They were triggered by the George Floyd video. The number of unarmed black people being killed by police is very small, and has decreased enormously over the last decade. More black people are killed in single days in Chicago by people other than police than the number of unarmed black people killed across the entire US over the course of a year by police.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but generally people adjusted their behavior based on rational risk benefit assessments:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...
>>Atkeson (February 2021) then used the same model with a simple behavioral adjustment that allowed individuals to change behavior in light of the value of Rt
.
>>The new forecast of daily deaths is shown as the blue line in panel (b) of Figure 2. Adding the single behavioral response completely changed the model’s predictive power. The model now tracks the actual progression of the daily deaths very closely. In correspondence with Atkeson he provided the reason for this result: The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow disease spread. Likewise, if the prevalence of the disease falls toward zero, then the demand for costly disease prevention efforts also falls towards zero, and so the
>>–
>>disease will come back unless the population has already achieved herd immunity measured at pre-pandemic levels of behavior.
Regarding this:
>>The idea that we can let young people do whatever they want while isolating and protecting the old and vulnerable has always been false in our society. Many vulnerable people died as a result. It's created paradoxes where we send kids to school because they are not vulnerable; meanwhile their teachers are in fact vulnerable and have predictably died at a frequency that has created teacher and substitute shortages.
Young people should take priority over the old. This is not acceptable:
"Longitudinal Trends in Body Mass Index Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Persons Aged 2–19 Years — United States, 2018–2020"
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Neither is this:
"Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds"
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
And for what? The lockdown proponents projected 96,000 COVID deaths by July 1st 2020 in Sweden without a lockdown. The real number was approximately 20 times lower, at 5,400, the vast majority the elderly.
Is robbing a million young people of a year of their development worth maybe reducing this 5,400 death toll? I think clearly it's not. You need to consider the damage done by lockdowns, not just by COVID.
Just this alone makes the whole exercise unacceptable:
"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
And the premise of your argument - that young people being able to live normally was such an unacceptably high risk to those older than them that it should have been forbidden - is very tenuous, with some findings suggesting that there was very little COVID spread through schools:
"Incidence and Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Schools "
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/147/4/e20200...
>>Fentanyl has been a problem long before the pandemic
I never implied otherwise. My only comment was on the spike in deaths.
>>and many of the places that are most affected by increased fentanyl deaths over the last 2 years have imposed the least restrictive lockdown measures [0]:
Alaska had a stay-at-home order, and in any case would have been amongst the most affected by the lockdowns, as it severely impacted travel between Alaska and the continental US. I don't see anything in that list suggesting that less locked down states saw a bigger spike in fentanyl deaths. In your list, all had stay-at-home orders:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay...
And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling?
>>Florida, a state which advertises itself as the state of freedom, and whose governor has positioned himself as an anti-lockdown champion, has the worst fentanyl deaths in the entire nation. So I don't know how much you can say about the causation between lockdowns and fentanyl overdoses.
Completely irrelevant to my point, which again, is about the spike in fentanyl deaths. Yes Florida has for a long time a massive drug problem, probably due to being the largest gateway for drugs entering the US.
Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use. You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior.
>>One demographic that has seen the highest increase and absolute rates of fentanyl deaths has been African Americans, particularly young men and teens. If your contention is that fentanyl is a drug of despair, why are you assuming lockdowns are the source of that despair? During the summer of 2020, African Americans (and Americans of all backgrounds) highlighted one of the most pressing concerns in their community: police violence against black men and teens. Have you considered this despair as a possibility for the increase in overdose deaths (particularly considering many of the states hit hardest have very high black populations)?
The spike in fentanyl deaths was seen in all demographics. And to me it's common sense that being forced to stay home, and prevented from socially interacting, is going to be a far more likely source of despair, than some perception of police brutality stemming from the video of George Floyd's death.
I don't see how you are so easily dismissing the damage that lockdowns/social-isolation can do to people. People being negatively affected by social isolation and economic decline is completely predictable. Social isolation in particular is known to massively increase mortality risk:
"Social Isolation: A Predictor of Mortality Comparable to Traditional Clinical Risk Factors"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3871270/
Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him.
To make clear, I was incorrect in generalizing all the other Nordic countries as having a lower population-weighted density. But it's an outlier and I think the support for the broader point is still strong.
Economic indicators over shorter time spans can't reflect long-term harm.
Tens of thousands of business closures, and elevated deficit spending to make up for the loss of private income, is going to show up in GDP statistics over a very long period of time.
You're correct that sheltering and social distancing behavior manifests in a lockdown-free society as well, but it will be 1. less prevalent (if not, what was the point of the lockdown) and 2. more intelligently applied based on the diverse set of circumstances found in the population.
With respect to point 2, a lockdown is a one size fits all solution that treats an elderly person and a young person the same, despite COVID posing a 1,000 times greater risk to the former than to the latter.
A lockdown precludes creative ways of minimizing COVID risk, like having social gatherings in venues with better ventilation, or only with people in a low-risk demographics, because again, a one-size-fits-all solution cannot be adaptive/intelligent the way individuals can.
A lockdown rule, being rigidly preset, can't know when a young person is facing drug abuse problems, and faces far greater risk from social isolation than from COVID. The US saw a massive spike in fentanyl overdose deaths in 2020, showing the steep cost of social isolation - which lockdowns exacerbate - for public health.
People when left to their own devices are able to make judgments based on their individual circumstances, and this latitude is impeded by lockdowns. The potential harm from this is simply ignored by the authors.
>>In fact, in Western Europe, there is a striking correlation between population weighted density – which may influence both the speed of virus transmission and the amplitude of infection waves – and covid mortality per country (see map below). This correlation does not apply, however, to Denmark, which has a low covid mortality but an average population weighted density (3434).
First of all, the comparison to other Nordic countries is inappropriate. Its population-weighted density is closer to the UK, and closest to Austria:
https://swprs.org/judgment-day-sweden-vindicated/
This Nordic cross-comparison is lazy and agenda-driven.
Secondly, Sweden had 20 times fewer deaths than initially projected without a lockdown:
https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.fu...
The initial calls to lockdown were justified with these projections, not with how many COVID deaths Sweden would have relative to neighboring countries.
Thirdly, not instituting a lockdown meant Sweden had far fewer limitations of civil liberties, and fewer adverse lockdown-related health and socioeconomic damage. For example, forcing a million young people to forego in-person schooling for a year would have done enormous damage to education:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
Not to mention the harm to development from foregoing summer jobs, in-person social interaction, etc for one or two years.
The claim that lockdowns were appropriate doesn't even begin to contend with the harm from lockdowns. It focuses on COVID deaths single-mindedly, when it's a policy that affects every facet of society and daily life.
My second biggest concern is the rapid loss of natural habitats and the concomitant loss of biodiversity.