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Recently my friend Kurt Mahlburg wrote an article relating to an analysis by Gigi Foster, Professor at the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, which sought to calculate:

“…the minimum cost of lockdowns, taking into account all dimensions of human suffering that they created in both the short and the long term. These include mental health declines, disruption of education for children, additional domestic violence, and economic losses that shuttered businesses, damaged whole sectors, increased inequality, and will depress spending on roads, hospitals and other infrastructure for years to come.”

Her conclusion is that the cost of lockdowns was 68 times greater than the benefits delivered.

On the surface that’s an incredibly alarming figure. But how is it arrived at?

She explained her method this way:

The human welfare costs of lockdowns are put into a currency (quality-adjusted life years, or QALY) that is used to enumerate both current and projected costs and benefits of the lockdowns. The analysis also uses a newly created measure (the wellbeing year, or WELLBY) to capture some lockdown costs. Since one year of average healthy life (one QALY) equates to six WELLBYs experienced by a person for one year, [Professor Foster] said this allows suffering across the society in various dimensions to be compared with benefits in the same welfare ‘currency’.”

But is this a true and accurate, or even a humane, way of calculating costs to benefits? How can one person determine how “quality-adjusted life” is determined on a society-wide basis? And how is this calculated across the broadest possible spectrum of attitudes and responses in relation to the various government restrictions? How does she determine how “one year of average healthy life (one QALY) equates to six WELLBYs experienced by a person for one year”? How do you even begin to? Does her “newly created measure” have any kind of consensus among her peers? Or is this her own unique, therefore, untested theory? By using the word “suffering”, is she presuming that every single person views their own circumstances during that time in that light?

None of this is explained. But perhaps there’s more in the 242-page book that has been published explaining her research.

Before I dig into these questions, I want to make it very clear that I am not advocating the various measures our governments took in the first two years of the pandemic. Far from it! Mistakes were made. But in a fallen and imperfect world, isn’t that what we should expect? Nor am I saying they got everything wrong, and neither does Professor Foster.

And I’m certainly not “having a go” at my friend Kurt. After all, I owe him a debt of gratitude, as he is one of the people most responsible for the fact that I’m writing anything, let alone having my musings published here. I am simply seeking to offer an alternate view that I believe to be relevant and important from our shared Christian perspective.

My argument is with Professor Foster. So back to the questions I asked.

The conclusions she arrives at are the result of what she admits are “assumptions”. And this is revealing, because ultimately that’s what they are, based on terminology that is unique to her interpretation of the situation. They are not the result of any kind of scientific consensus at all.

But this is rather typical of Economics, which has often been described as an “inexact science”, and that is explained well by Daniel Hausman, a philosopher of economics, in his book, The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics.

In his review of the book, fellow philosopher Dan Little writes that the description in the book’s title “conveys that economic laws have only a loose fit with observed economic behavior”. If they only “loosely fit” economic behaviour, the core focus of Economics, then how much more loosely issues relating to human nature on the whole population level? Then how much loosely on an issue like “wellbeing”, and particularly drawing lines between life and death?

He continues:

“Here are the loosely related interpretations that Hausman offers for this idea:

1. Inexact laws are approximate. They are true within some margin of error.

2. Inexact laws are probabilistic or statistical. Instead of stating how human beings always behave, economic laws state how they usually behave.

3. Inexact laws make counterfactual assertions about how things would be in the absence of interferences.

4. Inexact laws are qualified with vague ceteris paribus [all things being equal] clauses.”

It’s for these reasons that Professor Foster’s deductions are ultimately subjective. She claims to have allowed for margin of error (she says in ways that are “extremely favourable to the government’s choice to pursue a lockdown strategy”). But she is still forced to settle on a statistical average, because “economic laws state how [humans] usually behave” (which is far more variable). So they’re “counterfactual” for not accounting for “interferences”, or in other words, opposing ideas (what in experimental science is called “falsifiability”). Thus everything is reduced to “all things being equal”.

Yet she seems unaware of these facts, in particular in the video of the interview with The Epoch Times editor, Jan Jekielek, embedded in Kurt’s article. There she offers what is actually a truly excellent criticism of computer modelling. Yet she is obviously unaware that her own effort is no different:

Jekielek: Is there a kind of ascendancy of people who function using these types of methods instead of having to deal with reality? And those people making decisions, because they believe that those types of structures actually work better, or that’s just their bias, because they work in modelling, and they believe that that’s the way you can come up with a good answer.

Foster: First, part of the seduction of the model is that it seems to be a way to simplify what is an incredibly complex reality. Particularly now when we have this bombardment constantly through the internet. You need heuristics [mental problem solving shortcuts] to cope with all of this. And if someone comes and says, “OK, I’ve reduced all of this complexity into this simple model”, it’s very seductive. And this is one of the reasons that not just politicians, but even scientists, get sucked into the idea that these very narrow, very heavily laden with assumptions, kinds of stylized versions of reality, are just as good as coming to terms with all of reality.

So, in this interview, she is actually criticizing the very method she has employed to arrive at her conclusions about the lockdowns, to the point where everything she said in her response to that question from Jekielek could equally be from someone else commenting onher ownmethods.

But my real concern with all of this is deeper. As Christians, what are we to hold as being of greater value? Can we even compare wellbeing and quality of life to saving life itself? After all, it’s Scripture which over and over instructs us to put others first:

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.” (Phil 2:3–4 NASB)

“No one is to seek his own advantage, but rather that of his neighbour.” (1 Cor 10:24 NASB)

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Upon these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.” (Matt 22:36–40 NASB)

“I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34–35 NASB)

This is why, until recent times, one of the distinctives of Western liberalism, founded as it is on the Christian worldview, was the notion of “the Common Good”. For me this is most clearly expressed in the founding document of the United States, their “Declaration of Independence”. There it states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

When the focus is on the common good, then those three rights are exclusively other centred. The “pursuit of Happiness” is not in relation to my personal state, but to the state of society as a whole. In other words, my “happiness” (or to use Professor Foster’s terms, “wellbeing” and “quality of life”) can only be determined on the basis of the general “happiness” of those around me, and especially those I interact with.

This is, in fact, the legacy we as Christians have from the past. Under that mindset, it is unthinkable that my wellbeing can take precedence over the life of another person, or even to find a means of measurement to draw a comparison, the very thing that Professor Foster’s research is doing.

As an example of that mindset, it was the Christian poet, John Donne (1571?-1631) who wrote the lines:

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”

In other words, whether it is a single life of a stranger, or a large group of people, familiar to us or strangers, “of thy friends or of thine own”, each of us is diminished by the loss of any life. And ultimately, it’s our communal responsibilities (the “bell” that “tolls”) which always take priority over personal rights.

If that seems far fetched or old fashioned, then perhaps that’s a sign of how far even we as Christians have fallen into a form of individualism that now pervades our whole culture, which grates against our fundamental Christian principles relating to the Common Good. As I noted in another article recently, vigilance against “the spirit of the age” was never more necessary!

And from this perspective, we can see that Professor Foster’s deductions are the product of a very mechanistic, essentially materialistic, view of human beings as nothing more than products and producers, whose lives, and their sense of wellbeing, are reduced to the base functions she uses in her analysis.

But let’s for a moment try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine for a moment that her analysis is scientifically rock solid. What then, as “Common Good” Christians, do we do with that information? What of the decision makers in government and their health advisers? How do we work out ways to get more things right if there’s a “next time”? Surely not the suggestion of some in the Conservative ranks, some even Christians, literally baying for a “Nuremberg 2.0”, where those in question are already assumed to be criminally responsible and are to be summoned only to be sentenced! That’s not “Nuremberg 2.0”. That’s “Reign of Terror Lite”!

What we do need is an inquiry which can examine the events of those times. But it needs to be with the involvement of all those politicians and officials, and a sober examination of the first hand evidence only they can provide. It also needs to be free from blame. Of course, if there were evidence worthy of further action, then that can be dealt with. But that would only have come out as a consequence of the kind of inquiry I’ve just described.

And this is the only hope of such an inquiry being effective. It must be for the purpose of finding better ways to deal with such crises in the future for the common good, which endeavours to find better solutions that will dramatically increase the number of lives saved and dramatically reduce Professor Foster’s 68 times cost/benefit ratio.

But even there, because, as Mark Twain observed, “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes”, we can only make best guesses at what might work better next time.

Foster said in the “Epoch Times” interview that the “…public health experience and knowledge of many generations, embodied in the existing pandemic management plans in Australia and overseas in early 2020…were summarily scrapped and put in the garbage bin in March 2020”. This is what Twain meant by history not repeating.  This overlooks the fact that those plans were specific to an influenza pandemic. So there’s nothing at all to suggest that they would have been effective against this novel coronavirus. The circumstances covered in that plan were totally different.

Finally, here’s another thought experiment. Let’s for a minute allow that Foster’s estimate of 9,951 lives saved is accurate. First, that’s four times the number of lives lost. Why is that not treated as a positive?

And second, let’s assume in our thought experiment that we can identify exactly who the people are who constitute that 9,951 people. Let’s assume that one of those is Professor Foster.

Do you think she would be placing as much emphasis on the lifestyles of others if she knew it was her own life that was spared?

What would your answer be if your name was on that list?

I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

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Photo by Nina Uhlikova.