The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

~Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

As someone who has written articles and papers on police and prosecutorial matters (yes, economists analyze those things, too) for two decades, I am not surprised to see the kinds of police killings that provoke people to anger, frustration, and helplessness.

When economists look at what only can be called bad things that happen time and again, we ask why that is so. More specifically, we want to know about the structures of incentives that encourage things to occur time and again, even when there is general agreement that things need to change. Our analyses and our recommendations (when we make them) often are seen either as insensitive or outright offensive to people who don’t know or understand the language of economics and economists.

For example, many economists have been much more critical of the lockdown response to COVID-19, so we are accused by others of wanting people to die. People accuse of us being “unscientific” or insensitive to the needs of others during a pandemic. It seems that it is impossible to cross the divide between economists and their critics.

So, what do economists believe regarding something like dealing with COVID-19? Is our criticism of the lockdowns due to right-wing ideology (as some of my colleagues would claim), lack of compassion for the sick, or something else?

First, and most important, economists hold that we live in a world of scarcity and that our options always are going to be limited. We also will operate in logical fashion, working off sets of assumptions. So, let me demonstrate how the analysis might work.

Economists Must Consider Scarcity

Let us first assume that the national lockdown strategy (one size fits all) was the most effective in preventing more COVID-19 deaths. Now, there was no basis in fact for the original prediction of 2.2 million American deaths, and we know in hindsight that the model that came from Imperial College of London was terribly flawed and vastly overestimated the “if we do nothing” results. We cannot know if our assumption is correct given that we didn’t try anything else, so we would have to deal with a counterfactual, which speaks for itself.

The question, then, would be how long we could be locked down before becoming overwhelmed with the unemployment and the lack of production of essential goods. In other words, How long before the negative results of the lockdown become so dire that we cannot continue on this path? To put it bluntly, if we stay locked down too long, people will die from the consequences; lots of people. Think of all of the people with medical conditions that could not see doctors and receive treatment because most of the medical resources were being directed toward dealing with treatment and prevention of COVID-19. (See? There we go again with the law of scarcity.)

Do we know where the crossover point might be? Well, no. The worlds of medicine and public policy will depend upon models that are imperfect, that are likely to be ideologically biased (especially the more apocalyptic ones), and that do not “predict” the past very accurately, let alone the future. (When I was doing graduate work, one of my professors once told me regarding the use of econometric models: “Econometrics: Predicting the past with ever increasing reliability.”)

However, we can make general observations, and we also can look at the occupational (and racial) makeup of those who are directing the lockdown policies and those who are most negatively affected by them. Phil Magness notes that when we consider policy decisions these occupational differences are not trivial:

Many in elite academia and journalism have the luxury of a paycheck for the time being, as well as the ability to do their work from home with only modest disruption. Vast numbers of newly unemployed Americans do not.

At the same time, most academic efforts to cast the lockdown debate along racial lines miss or omit another dimension that belies their critical theory-infused attacks on any attempt to reopen the economy. The very same lockdowns, social distancing mandates, and shelter-in-place orders that these writers defend are also backed by heavy-handed enforcement by the state. And in many cases, that enforcement falls disproportionately on racial minorities, the poor, and people with fewer means to defend themselves.

Magness was writing in response to those who claimed that people who protested the lockdown did so either out of selfishness or racism or both. (That the lockdowns have disproportionately harmed racial minorities seems to have escaped the notice of many academic and media elites. One doubts that this omission is accidental.)

Looking at the Long-Term