Choosing the Economy over People’s Lives?

The current novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has stimulated all kinds of questions. As more and more people begin to demand that the more extreme measures to curb its spread—those that are shuttering a large part of our economy—come to an end, one of the most common is whether such thinking involves prioritizing the economy over lives. Is it not pro-life to insist that we continue the widespread shutdown of our economy in the name of saving lives?

That’s what drew this email from one follower of the Cornwall Alliance today:

… this was posted today on FB. I know something is wrong here, but can’t think of what. 
 
“If you prioritize the economy over saving people’s lives, then you never get to call yourself ‘pro-life’ again.”
 
Jared and I discussed it but I can’t think of the fallacy, but I know in my gut there is one.

It’s partly a fallacy (false choice, or faulty dilemma) and partly a factual falsehood. It presupposes that one must choose the economy or people’s lives—that’s both a false choice and a factual falsehood.

People’s lives depend on the economy. One cannot have an economy without living people; but neither can one have living people without an economy. People require a certain amount, and a certain quality (safeness, nutritive value) of food and water to stay alive. Neither of those comes to anyone without expending effort to obtain or produce them—and that’s economy. To stay alive for long, people need more than just food and water—they need clothing, shelter, medical care when they get sick (Where does the sort of person who says what you’ve quoted think the respirators that keep COVID-19 patients alive long enough to recover from the disease come from—the respirator fairy?), safe transportation, education, communications, and (to prevent despair and all the self-destructive behaviors that come from it) social interaction, and economy is what brings them all of those.

In the hunter-gatherer economy that characterized all humanity until the dawn of agriculture, life expectancy at birth was undoubtedly very short—we don’t know for sure just how short, but certainly shorter than it became once people learned to grow crops and keep livestock so that their food supplies were more reliable. Even after that, their life expectancy was hideously short compared with today’s. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was about 27 or 28 years, and almost half died before their fifth birthdays. What stretched life expectancy out to the present roughly 70 years worldwide, 80 in developed countries, and 65 in developing countries, was the growth of more productive economies. Quite simply, poverty is a risk factor for premature death. The poorer people are, the higher their mortality rate at any given age. And economies are what lift people out of poverty—some economies better, some not so well.

Part of the mistaken thinking behind such statements as the one quoted is the idea that we choose between life and death. No, we choose between sooner death and later death. It’s appointed for everyone once to die, and after that the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). We never save a life—we might prolong it, i.e., we might postpone death, but we don’t save a life.

The strength of our economies is a very important factor in prolonging life. Various studies have shown a strong correlation between economic downturns and increases in mortality (not, of course, increases in the ultimate mortality, that is, the fact that everyone eventually dies, but the mortality rate at any given age), e.g., here and here and here plus several cited in my article “How Many Uninfected People Will the War on the Coronavirus Kill?.

Asking the question, “How much does it cost to prolong W lives for X number of months versus what it costs to prolong Y lives for Z number of months?” isn’t a rejection of being pro-life. Indeed, it is much more consistent with a pro-life ethic.

Life is full of tradeoffs. The time I spend answering this question I can’t spend swimming to improve my health. The money you spend on a new book you can’t spend on groceries. And the money we spend to postpone (remember, never prevent) 5,000 deaths from COVID-19 we can’t spend to postpone 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 deaths from other causes. It is, as I’ve argued in “How Many Uninfected People Will the War on the Coronavirus Kill? (and more and more economists are pointing out) entirely possible that the more extreme measures to slow or limit the spread of COVID-19—the ones that are reducing our economic production this year by trillions of dollars—will result in more premature deaths than the virus itself.

So don’t be tricked by the accusation, “You’re prioritizing the economy over people’s lives.” No, you’re not. Your recognizing that the economy is critically important to sustaining people’s lives. The more you cripple it, the more years of life you take from the more people.

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash.