Quite a few people have noticed that many people who were dead set on lockdowns until some cure is found are now championing the protests turned riots. There are plenty of people who have been consistent, with those who believe in reasonable measures against Corona-chan also worried about an uptick in coronavirus cases, to those who were peacefully protesting against over-the-top restriction. Both of those groups are aghast at the sheer hypocrisy of “public health” experts who consider a family enjoying a park while social distancing to be a greater health threat than rioting, looting, mayhem, and arson committed by large groups in sustained and prolonged close quarters.
How do they square that circle? Be believing that “systematic racism” is such a threat that both “grandpa and grandma” and your personal freedom must be sacrificed for it. They’ve let their cat out of the bag, and now they are using bad math to justify it.
An opinion writer and wannabe professional economist tries, and fails, to justify killing off tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable to save even one criminals life.
This means only one thing… it’s time for a fisking!
![](http://politicalhat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/zoot-dingo.png)
A fisking! A fisking!
1/OK, I didn't want to have to do this thread, because it's inevitably going to make a lot of people angry. But lots of people are asking, so I guess I have to:
Protest Cost-Benefit Analysis
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Because telling people their loved ones need to die for “Social Justice” would of course make the vast majority of people angry?
2/A number of public health experts signed an open letter, supporting the current wave of protests against police brutality and racism, while differentiating them from the earlier reopening protests.https://t.co/LYGa3OGkRf
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Right off the (Wuhan) bat (soup), we have the idea that bad ideas are an “infectious disease”. By this line of reasoning, thought criminals and other dissenters are treated as patients who’s mimetic evil must be isolated and “cured”.
But of course…
3/Predictably, these public health experts have taken some flak for making this call.
So I guess it falls to economists (or former economists like me) to do the grim Trolley-Problem math of evaluating the public health experts' decision in terms of lives lost/saved.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
So, someone who couldn’t even hack it as an economist? Based off his opinion columns, not even the pretense of neutrality will be applied to this “economic” analysis.
4/Obviously, lives lost/saved are not the only measure of cost and benefit from the protests! The impact of broader cultural changes is impossible to measure, or even guess.
But it turns out that the math comes down largely in favor of the public health experts' decision.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Note that he says that the “impact of broader cultural changes is impossible to measure, or even guess”. Any bets on whether he does just that?
5/This top epidemiologist does a back-of-the-envelope calculation and guesstimates that the protests might result in 200-1100 additional coronavirus deaths per day. https://t.co/D5vdwK4fRe
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
A “peaceful” protest that could kill a thousand people a day sounds like a real public health problem, something which could be stopped by breaking up the riots and insisting on the same social distancing requirements imposed on churches.
6/That's just a guess, obviously; there are lots of things that could be wrong with this estimate. We should probably treat it as an upper bound. https://t.co/gPkZtLacqY
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Yet this “guess” will be used for hard number comparisons to prove what this twit had already decided.
7/But just to illustrate the point, let's take a very worst-case scenario: Suppose protests cause 1000 additional coronavirus deaths per day, and continue for 2 months, meaning 60,000 additional coronavirus deaths due to protests.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
That’s nearly a 50% increase over what we have now. Sounds like a reason to stop the rioting and get the protestors to protest in a more reasonable way.
8/Now, let's compare that to police violence. Police regularly and consistently kill about 1100 people in the United States each year.https://t.co/GvdoHNs5wo pic.twitter.com/c8RlzuWDzG
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
So, it would take the police over half a century to be involved in the death of a suspect to even come close to what two months of rioting would do to the coronavirus death toll. Yet police involved deaths are somehow a greater concern than an actual infectious virus?
9/The current protests are unprecedented in scope and size, meaning that they have a good chance of generating a long-term change in police behavior.
Suppose that this change lasts for 50 years — about the same amount of time since the last big protest wave, in 1968.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Will he be talking about the “long-term” effect of less policing (i.e. the “Ferguson Effect”) that results in more crime, including violent crime, and economic devastation which causes poverty that in turn can have a real effect on people’s health?
Nah, of course not!
When he wrote “impact of broader cultural changes is impossible to measure, or even guess” he clearly wasn’t going to refer to the broader cultural changes in policing and criminal activity.
10/Suppose that the protests initiate a wave of reforms that reduce police killings by a modest amount — say, just 20%.
That's 220 lives saved per year, or 11,000 total lives saved.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Note the presumption here that all deaths, or if one is being charitable, 20% of deaths are nonjustifiable homicides and the fault of police which could be avoided due to “reforms”, and not to an officer legally arresting someone who is resisting, often violently so, let alone police having a reasonable fear that a criminal will kill/severly harm them or someone else.
About a quarter of these deaths are from individuals who are Black. If this is about “social justice” and we assume that the decrease will track equally across all races, then only about fifty fewer homicides would occur. Even if we assume that all non-Black people who are killed were justifiably killed, that would only mean about two-hundred individuals. Even further in assumption, this would suggest that almost all Black individuals were straight up murdered (or victims of manslaughter).
Of course, the almost all homicides by police are justified, and those that aren’t are almost always prosecuted. As horrible as it is than anyone is unjustly killed by a police officer, this is not a “public health crisis”.
To be fair, a justifiable homicide by police can and does include incidence where an officer was in legitimate fear for theirself or for others, and it turned out that the person was just reaching for a wallet like a fool, but those examples do tend to be rare.
But hey, let’s say that independent of all the death caused by criminals due to police “reforms” that result in fewer murderers and rapists that police don’t arrest because of “reforms”, two-hundred and twenty lives are not killed by police, even though such killings would have been justified…
11/Now, 11,000 is less than 60,000 (our worst-case COVID scenario, from above).
BUT, now remember that police killing victims are much younger than COVID victims on average!
The median police killing victim is 35. https://t.co/xpd4HRKWpi
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Most violent criminals are indeed not physically disabled or geriatric, which isn’t much of a surprise.
Oh wait, he’s going to argue that the lives of young criminals are not only worth more than lives of “grandpa and grandma”, but worth many times more, isn’t he.
12/Life expectancy at age 35 is about 43 years for men, 47 years for women. So let's say 44 years, since most shooting victims are men. pic.twitter.com/QOlB89YNDr
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
He’s assuming that these criminals will live an average age comparable to the life-expectancy of the average person, and not be killed sooner or later due to crime-related lifestyle choices.
13/In contrast, the average life expectancy for a COVID-19 victim is 10 years.https://t.co/tsgqja0CeQ
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
A decade of living longer is a heck of a lot of time. Is this twit saying that forty or so years of extra life of two hundred people, almost all of whom really were threats to others, outweighs sixty-thousand sick and elderly having an additional ten years to live, spend time with their families, &c.?
14/And if we're calculating Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), there has to be an additional fudge factor to deal with the fact that most people who die of COVID-19 have co-morbidities.https://t.co/MSVU4dEhd6
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Ah, the “their lives aren’t worth living” argument!
Or perhaps for those, or the friends/family thereof, who would live an additional ten years, even with other “quality of life” issues value their lives more highly than the lives of a couple hundred people who, with few exceptions, gave police no other choice than to use lethal force?
15/So let's set that factor at 0.75, meaning that a COVID-19 victim has a utility of a year of life equal to 0.75 that of a police killing victim.
(Yes, calculations like this are why everyone hates economists!)
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Even adjusting that sixty-thousand who would die within months due to coronavirus to about forty-five equivalent “worthy lives”, that is still far more than two-hundred lives ascribed with a 100% “worthy” value, which disregards any estimates on not only the decrease in life-expectancy and quality of live due to criminal lifestyle choices of the people not justifiably killed by the police but also the deaths and decrease in the quality of life of others due to future criminal activity.
16/So in terms of QALYs, a very moderate (20%) reduction in police killings over 50 years gets us the equivalent of 1100*0.2*50*4.4*1.33 = 64,517.2 COVID-19 death equivalents.
This is more than 60,000.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Ah, this must be the “new math”.
Notice all the assumptions and “fudge factors” that he applied in a biased manner to get his result, and he did all that to get a slightly higher number.
Of course if we use the 1100 estimate over two months (61 days), the total dead would be over sixty-seven thousand, which is higher than the guesstimated sixty-four thousand five hundred and seventeen +⅖ persons that he estimates based on his “fudge factor” assumptions, which include assuming that those who would not have died at the hands of police not only live an average of forty-four years all of which have a perfect unadjusted quality of life, that public healthcare considers the sick and elderly to have the worth of ¾ of a person (which is at least more than a slave), and that there will be “reforms” that can not only reduce the number of instances where a police officer is justified in using lethal force, but also that this reduction will be permanent for half a century without causing any negative effects whatsoever.
Heck, if all we do it add on the same ¾ value for the last ten years of the two-hundred and twenty persons lives, that’s—over fifty years—more than ten-thousand less equivalent lives than those who would die from the “peaceful protests” in a mere two-months.
17/Now remember, this analysis assumed:
1. Lives saved from police are the ONLY benefit of protests
2. A maximum estimate for protest-caused COVID deaths
3. A very modest effect of protests on police violenceThese are VERY conservative assumptions!!
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
There were further assumptions, including: Death, decrease in “quality of life”, other results of violence, &c. are irrelevant compared to the “Lives saved” of people who gave good reason to police to use justified lethal force, and a massive long-term effect on criminal activity that would reduce the number of justifiable homicides without increasing crime or any the of the long-term effects thereof.
Yup, lots of guesstimate going on, and all towards a preconceived answer.
18/Even with all of these very conservative assumptions, the protests — and the public health experts — still come out ahead in this back-of-the-envelope calculation!
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Only if you fudge your mathematics like this “former economist” did.
19/So while there's obviously an enormous amount of uncertainty here, this simple calculation shows that public health experts' decision to support protests, even in the face of coronavirus, can't be dismissed as a bad call.
Police violence IS a huge public health hazard.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
No, it doesn’t because this dishonest guesswork doesn’t even show that, let alone prove that a justifiable homicide is such a massive “public health” threat that killing off tens-of-thousands of innocent people is, even with utopian assumptions is somehow justified.
20/Now, remember that this sort of grim Trolley-Problem style calculation is highly limited. It isn't a true cost-benefit analysis, just a measurement of the limited set of things that can actually be measured. (Again: why everyone hates economists!)
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
So s**t these biased pseduo-guesstimations aren’t a real cost-benefit analysis like you said it was.
21/The point here is not to say whether protests are really worth it or not — in a moral sense OR an economic sense.
But people saying that the danger of COVID-19 obviously outweighs the benefits of protesting need to check their assumptions — and their math.
(end)
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Note: A number of people are responding "But how many of those police killings are justified?"
Economist answer: Who cares. Cost-benefit analysis isn't about passing judgment on who deserves death. A life saved is a life saved.
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
B***h you did just that when you devaued the live of the nearly seventy thousand people who are estimated to die because of these “peaceful protests” by SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT.
Additional note: A number of people have asked me "But shouldn't we discount future lives?"
Answer: I don't know. What discount rate do you want to use? The real interest rate? (It's zero anyway)
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
Again, HE DID JUST THAT.
Additional note: A number of people have asked me "But shouldn't we discount future lives?"
Answer: I don't know. What discount rate do you want to use? The real interest rate? (It's zero anyway)
— #TestAndTrace Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2020
This just goes to show how full of s**t this twit is. Funny how the decrease in killings of Blacks by police also corresponds to an increase in crime, including murder, that hit the poorest communities, notably Black communities, for decades to come. Also note how the graph doesn’t show the past decade or that the vast majority of police killings involve non-Blacks.
This was one of the more pathetic attempts at justifying “Geriatricide for Social Justice” out there.
Ironically, while Blacks make up about 25% of arrest-related deaths which is twice the percentage of Black in the population (though it is less than the percentage of crimes committed), they also make up 24% of the COVID-19 death rate, which again is about twice that of their percentage in the U.S. population.
So, at most, in order to avoid 11,000 Black people (and more likely a small fraction of that) over a FIFTY YEAR period from dying by a justifiable homicide, this “former econimist” would kill off over SIXTEEN THOUSAND BLACK PEOPLE in a mere TWO MONTHS.
And that is considered “Social Justice”.
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