Science not Sacrifice

Recently Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of the state of Texas suggested that he, and by extension other “Sr. Citizens” should be willing to risk infection and COVID-19 rather than sacrifice the country and its economic prospects. And thus by extension the lives of children and grandchildren.

He got pretty beat up for it. But for the wrong reasons.

Religious people took him on for the implied suggestion of the sacrifice of the lives of the elderly to save the economy. That was my first response but it was misguided. Gov. Cuomo said there didn’t need to be a tradeoff between public safety and the economy. A good tweet but not backed up by an actual strategy. On the sentimental side folks said that children and grandchildren would rather have parents and grand parents than a quick return to economic prosperity. I’d like to think so myself but its not an evidence based assertion. 

And that’s what is really wrong with Mr. Patrick’s suggestion. Instead of acting on evidence he is suggesting that decisions be made on the basis of the Christian religious concept of sacrifice. By turning policy decisions into decisions about who should sacrifice he turns what should be a rational scientific discussion into a journey into sentimentality. And by turning to the Christian religious concept of sacrifice he makes political decisions into personal decisions and commitments. 

This is a common move in contemporary US political culture, but it draws on the wrong portions of our cultural inheritance.

A state, and a nation, cannot long survive when it replaces rational decisions about public policy with opportunities for sentimental personal decisions based on quasi-religious concepts of sacrifice. This is one of the reasons the US founding fathers kept religion out of government and focused on the common good. And that Enlightenment culture of rationality is the culture we need right now. 

The science of epidemiology demonstrates that epidemics spread through a population until all those who are too weak to resist the disease die and the rest develop immunity, or the virus is so isolated it isn’t readily transmitted. How much of the population is affected directly depends on how easily the disease is transmitted and how quickly immunity is developed. The science says that the most lives are saved, not just elderly lives, when the spread of the disease is slowed as much as possible. 

And economics tells us that the basis of any economy is healthy workers producing goods and services that healthy customers can buy. A decrease of even 1% of the population hurts an economy badly. And if that decrease is accompanied by spikes in unrecoverable medical costs, distortions in production and consumption, long term lost productivity, and a failure in confidence in the government to save lives it is even worse. Mr. Patrick didn’t factor any of these into his policy ideas, focusing instead on his utterly irrelevant personal willingness to sacrifice. 

It isn’t the task of government, or government officials, to offer citizens a way to construct meaningful lives. It is, if I may quote the US constitution. “To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Ultimately Mr. Patrick, or indeed any of us, may wish to find meaning through our willingness to serve larger aims than our personal health or prosperity. Religion may well guide our understanding of those larger purposes. Or we may find those purposes in our larger social world. But let’s keep that out of policy making in a time of crisis. We need science, not sacrifice.