Economists go astray

Lockdown Australia: ‘Expert’ economists as clueless as their ‘expert’ peers

The Conversation, the public outreach platform for Australian academics, touts its COVID-19 coverage as “accurate content based on evidence, not alarm” but its social-distancing delight could hardly be contained when it gleefully trumpeted that three-quarters of Australia’s top economists support economic lockdown.

A survey by the Economic Society of Australia has found that 34 out of 47 of Australia’s “leading economists” believe the economic benefits of lockdown, in terms of the value of lives saved, exceeds the economic costs of sending the Australian economy into cryogenic sleep. Only nine of the 47 economists surveyed dissented.

So, economic debate settled, then, in favour of lockdown, by a clear margin. The experts have spoken, dispensing their spread-sheeted Wisdom of Solomon to us rubes. Well, not quite.

The arguments used by the economic sages of social distancing are unimpressive. They rehearse the slogans that we have all become wearily familiar with such as:

• • lockdown “saves tens or hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths”;

  • one sustained and draconian lockdown avoids the yo-yo risk of even more economically damaging “repeated lockdowns” in response to second and subsequent waves;

  • a dose of short-term economic pain yields long-term health and economic gain;

  • Post-infection respiratory and other health consequences, and their costs, could be huge.

Such hypotheses, however, have either been disproven empirically or are panic-fuelled speculation designed to keep the pot of fear simmering with scary unknowns:

• • International and intra-country analyses have yet to find any correlation between the degree of lockdown stringency adopted and virus deaths avoided. Social distancing doesn’t alter the natural bell-curve trajectory of this, or any other, virus (Farr’s Law - still going strong since William Farr formulated it in 1840!) as a growing herd immunity impedes the bug’s smorgasbord of easy pickings (indeed, social distancing merely prolongs the duration of economic misery, and collateral health damage, by delaying the development of community resistance);

  • The dreaded ‘second wave’ has yet to eventuate anywhere as various countries ease restrictions and begin to re-open their economies;

  • The cost-benefit analyses by lockdown-supporting economists are designed to support the conslusion they want to reach;

  • The health unknowns, and associated future costs, of the virus are propaganda of a piece with general COVID hysteria to justify continued lockdown and shield it’s political architects from a public reckoning.

All up, the lockdown proponents’ appeal to experts as the final arbiter of policy isn’t as persuasive as intended. After all, wasn’t it the expert, Professor Neil Ferguson, whose ‘expertise’ in epidemiological modelling was marked by a recidivist history of repeated failings. Wasn’t it Ferguson, whose ‘expert’ model was seemingly interrogated by the British government with what amounted to a version of ‘Cardinal Fang! Fetch …. the comfy chair’, who got us into this unholy economic mess? Wasn’t Ferguson ‘Expert Zero’, afflicted with the Hysteria bug and who, with an R value rivalling that of Typhoid Mary, went on to infect susceptible others of the medical-bureaucratic, political and media elites, including in Australia, who were petrified of the straw-man accusation of placing ‘money before lives’ if they resisted the sirens of lockdown.

From the earliest days of the virus, and the associated hand-flapping and arm-waving of pro-lockdown experts, we have been greatly in need of some real experts - experts in scepticism. ‘Question authority!’ as we on the left (used to) say.