Kubeniz
2020-05-05T10:12:04+00:00
[url]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/05/05/cost-saving-lives-lockdown-high/[/url]
欢迎转载，还有没有公知想要尝试来洗一下的？[s:ac:哭笑]
欢迎转载，还有没有公知想要尝试来洗一下的？[s:ac:哭笑]
英文原文 ...
How do you put a cost on a life? It’s often said that human life is priceless, but that of course is a nonsense. Insurers and actuaries weigh it in their scales every day and now Boris Johnson has the biggest call for any prime minister to make outside of a war: the trade-off between “health and wealth” as he plots a path out of lockdown.
Politicians are deeply uncomfortable discussing such issues in public for fear of being portrayed as callous. Behind every cold statistic in the mounting Covid-19 death toll is, after all, an individual personal tragedy. But the Cabinet has been divided into hawkish and dovish camps for weeks now, and the calls from the Government’s own backbenches for reopening have been getting louder.
Those of us unburdened by the disadvantage of facing the voters can also speak with more candour. And it is clear that the internment of the UK population is now doing more harm than good. It will make us poorer, entrench intergenerational inequalities, and potentially scar the incomes of millions of people for generations to come.
Although the exact figure is disputed, you may be surprised to learn that the Treasury puts a ￡2m price tag on the cost of a life. This is the “value of a prevented fatality” (VPF) based on the death of an average person in an incident such as a road traffic accident, and used by hard-headed regulators to work out the trade-off between the cost of a life saved and the cost of implementing new rules.
Two LSE researchers, Paul Dolan and Pinar Jenkins, used that number and Imperial College’s modelling of the expected spread of Covid-19, to estimate that the suppression strategy adopted in March saved around 189,000 lives. Purely on the basic VPF, that saves the UK a vast looking ￡378bn: around ￡6,000 per head and a chunky 17pc of GDP.
Worth every penny then? Not quite. The average age of a Covid-19 fatality is around 75 and when the duo adjusted their calculations for the five years of expected life gained from a prevented death they came up with the much smaller number of ￡60bn.
To put that figure into context: it is less than a quarter of our expected deficit in the current financial year, and it is about the size of what the Treasury’s Debt Management Office will be raising in a single month to pay for the deep freezing of the world’s fifth largest economy.
Even if it is beyond the pale for a politician to acknowledge it, the LSE estimates illustrate the wider point that the cost-benefit analysis of this lockdown simply doesn’t stack up any more. The former Governor of the Bank of England, Lord King, put it well: “The younger generations have suffered in the last 20 years. Why on earth is our future being put at stake in order to help prolong life expectancy of older people, whose life expectancy will not be very high in any event?”
For the avoidance of doubt, the UK’s elderly should not be thrown to the Covid-19 wolves. Indeed, the most vulnerable groups still need to be protected. But I’ve argued previously that we need the economic contribution of our silver spenders to help get the economy back on track; and we also have to confront the fact that so far the protection of an aged, mostly retired, cohort has been pushed to the fore to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
That job is done. So now we have to acknowledge that the economic victims of this crisis are mostly the young, in lower paid jobs more likely to be furloughed or axed altogether, and over the longer-term at least school children missing out on education.
The hundreds of billions of pounds in government debt being taken on to pay for the crisis is a cost which will be shouldered by younger generations, not the old, and exacerbates the existing strain on the public finances from ageing demographics.
Meanwhile the emergency monetary policy measures from the Bank squeeze savers but also tend to support the prices of the assets more typically held by the old. The quicker we get out of lockdown, the sooner the talk of a Piketty-esque wealth tax to help pay for the aftermath might fade.
Think of the shuttered pubs and restaurants, or the closed building sites, in the past month and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the better paid white-collar workers beavering away in spare rooms have been the coronavirus “winners”. They also have the least to lose when the UK opens up again with social distancing in place, unlike the bar workers.
No wonder then that studies of previous pandemics by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that earlier outbreaks raised the Gini coefficient, a scale from 0 to 1 ranging between total income equality and one person owning all wealth.
CEPR says past events like SARS or MERS raised the income shares of the wealthiest, and lowered the share of the population with basic education in jobs, compared to those with degrees. More worrying still as nations around the world face up to record collapses in growth, “the inequality effect increases with the negative effect of pandemic events on economic activity”.
Finally, take education. The scarring effect of lower wages on young people entering the job market in a recession is well-documented. But the cost of losing months of learning on earnings is no less significant.
The Brookings Institute’s initial estimates suggest a 2.5pc per year drop in salary per student or $1,337 (￡1,063) in lost pay. Across the wider economy it reckons the cost to the US in lost earnings could be $2.5 trillion, or 12.7pc of GDP.
In a more extreme example, economists Andrea Ichino and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer studied the impact of lost education among 1930s-born children in World War 2, contrasting Germany and Austria with non-combatants Switzerland and Sweden. In Germany and Austria the pair found “an earnings loss that is still noticeable in the 1980s”.
That in essence is why the PM needs to lift the lockdown as soon as he possibly can: to prevent damage lasting decades. After putting our older people first, now we have to do the same for our children.
Politicians are deeply uncomfortable discussing such issues in public for fear of being portrayed as callous. Behind every cold statistic in the mounting Covid-19 death toll is, after all, an individual personal tragedy. But the Cabinet has been divided into hawkish and dovish camps for weeks now, and the calls from the Government’s own backbenches for reopening have been getting louder.
Those of us unburdened by the disadvantage of facing the voters can also speak with more candour. And it is clear that the internment of the UK population is now doing more harm than good. It will make us poorer, entrench intergenerational inequalities, and potentially scar the incomes of millions of people for generations to come.
Although the exact figure is disputed, you may be surprised to learn that the Treasury puts a ￡2m price tag on the cost of a life. This is the “value of a prevented fatality” (VPF) based on the death of an average person in an incident such as a road traffic accident, and used by hard-headed regulators to work out the trade-off between the cost of a life saved and the cost of implementing new rules.
Two LSE researchers, Paul Dolan and Pinar Jenkins, used that number and Imperial College’s modelling of the expected spread of Covid-19, to estimate that the suppression strategy adopted in March saved around 189,000 lives. Purely on the basic VPF, that saves the UK a vast looking ￡378bn: around ￡6,000 per head and a chunky 17pc of GDP.
Worth every penny then? Not quite. The average age of a Covid-19 fatality is around 75 and when the duo adjusted their calculations for the five years of expected life gained from a prevented death they came up with the much smaller number of ￡60bn.
To put that figure into context: it is less than a quarter of our expected deficit in the current financial year, and it is about the size of what the Treasury’s Debt Management Office will be raising in a single month to pay for the deep freezing of the world’s fifth largest economy.
Even if it is beyond the pale for a politician to acknowledge it, the LSE estimates illustrate the wider point that the cost-benefit analysis of this lockdown simply doesn’t stack up any more. The former Governor of the Bank of England, Lord King, put it well: “The younger generations have suffered in the last 20 years. Why on earth is our future being put at stake in order to help prolong life expectancy of older people, whose life expectancy will not be very high in any event?”
For the avoidance of doubt, the UK’s elderly should not be thrown to the Covid-19 wolves. Indeed, the most vulnerable groups still need to be protected. But I’ve argued previously that we need the economic contribution of our silver spenders to help get the economy back on track; and we also have to confront the fact that so far the protection of an aged, mostly retired, cohort has been pushed to the fore to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
That job is done. So now we have to acknowledge that the economic victims of this crisis are mostly the young, in lower paid jobs more likely to be furloughed or axed altogether, and over the longer-term at least school children missing out on education.
The hundreds of billions of pounds in government debt being taken on to pay for the crisis is a cost which will be shouldered by younger generations, not the old, and exacerbates the existing strain on the public finances from ageing demographics.
Meanwhile the emergency monetary policy measures from the Bank squeeze savers but also tend to support the prices of the assets more typically held by the old. The quicker we get out of lockdown, the sooner the talk of a Piketty-esque wealth tax to help pay for the aftermath might fade.
Think of the shuttered pubs and restaurants, or the closed building sites, in the past month and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the better paid white-collar workers beavering away in spare rooms have been the coronavirus “winners”. They also have the least to lose when the UK opens up again with social distancing in place, unlike the bar workers.
No wonder then that studies of previous pandemics by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that earlier outbreaks raised the Gini coefficient, a scale from 0 to 1 ranging between total income equality and one person owning all wealth.
CEPR says past events like SARS or MERS raised the income shares of the wealthiest, and lowered the share of the population with basic education in jobs, compared to those with degrees. More worrying still as nations around the world face up to record collapses in growth, “the inequality effect increases with the negative effect of pandemic events on economic activity”.
Finally, take education. The scarring effect of lower wages on young people entering the job market in a recession is well-documented. But the cost of losing months of learning on earnings is no less significant.
The Brookings Institute’s initial estimates suggest a 2.5pc per year drop in salary per student or $1,337 (￡1,063) in lost pay. Across the wider economy it reckons the cost to the US in lost earnings could be $2.5 trillion, or 12.7pc of GDP.
In a more extreme example, economists Andrea Ichino and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer studied the impact of lost education among 1930s-born children in World War 2, contrasting Germany and Austria with non-combatants Switzerland and Sweden. In Germany and Austria the pair found “an earnings loss that is still noticeable in the 1980s”.
That in essence is why the PM needs to lift the lockdown as soon as he possibly can: to prevent damage lasting decades. After putting our older people first, now we have to do the same for our children.
中文机翻 ...
如何给人的生命计价？人们常说，人的生命是无价之宝，当然这句话是无稽之谈。保险公司和精算师们每天都在天平上掂量着，现在鲍里斯-约翰逊(Boris Johnson)提出了战争之外任何一个首相要做的最大的呼吁：当他在谋划摆脱封锁的道路时，"健康与财富 "之间的权衡。
政客们在公开场合讨论这样的问题时，都会感到很不舒服，因为他们害怕被描绘成冷酷无情。在新冠肺炎死亡人数不断攀升的每一个冰冷的统计数字背后，毕竟一个个的个人悲剧。但是，几周以来，内阁已经分为鹰派和鸽派两个阵营，而政府后座要求重启的呼声也越来越高。
没有面对选民的的负担的人，也可以更坦率地发言。而且很显然，现在对英国民众的拘禁是弊大于利。它将使我们更贫穷，巩固代际间的不平等，并有可能使数百万人的收入在未来几代人的收入上留下伤痕。
虽然确切的数字有争议，但你可能会惊讶地发现，财政部对一个人的生命成本提出了200万英镑的价格标签。这是 "预防死亡的价值"(VPF)，是基于一个普通人在道路交通事故等事故中的死亡人数，被头脑发热的监管者用来计算出拯救生命的成本和实施新规则的成本之间的权衡。
LSE的两位研究人员Paul Dolan和Pinar Jenkins利用这个数字和帝国理工学院对Covid-19的预期传播的模型，估计3月份采用的抑制策略可以挽救约18.9万条生命。纯粹是在基本的VPF上，这为英国节省了3780亿英镑：约6000英镑/人和17%的GDP。
值得每一分钱呢？不尽然。Covid-19死亡的平均年龄约为75岁，当两人调整了他们的计算结果后，从预防死亡中获得的5年预期寿命--他们得出的数字要小得多，即600亿英镑。
把这个数字说成是：这还不到我们本财年预期赤字的四分之一，它大约相当于财政部债务管理办公室将在一个月内筹集的资金来支付世界第五大经济体的深度冻结。
即使对于一个政治家来说，承认这一点是超出了常理，但伦敦证券交易所的估计也说明了一个更广泛的观点，那就是这种封锁的成本效益分析根本就不可能再叠加起来。前英国央行行行长金勋爵说得很好。"在过去20年里，年轻一代受尽了苦难。为什么我们的未来会受到威胁，以帮助延长老年人的预期寿命，而他们的预期寿命无论如何也不会很高？"
为了避免疑问，英国的老年人不应该被扔给新冠病毒狼群。事实上，最脆弱的群体仍然需要保护。但我之前已经论证过，我们需要我们的白银支出者的经济贡献，以帮助经济重回正轨；而且我们还必须面对这样一个事实，即到目前为止，为了防止NHS不堪重负，保护一个老龄化的、大多是退休的人群，我们已经被推到了最前面。
这项工作已经完成了。因此，现在我们不得不承认，这场危机的经济受害者大多是年轻人，他们从事的是较低工资的工作，更有可能被裁员或完全被解雇，而且至少从长远来看，还有学龄儿童失去了教育机会。
政府为应对这场危机而背负的数千亿英镑的债务，将由年轻一代而不是老年人承担，这也加剧了人口老龄化给公共财政带来的压力。
同时，央行的紧急货币政策措施在挤压储蓄者的同时，也倾向于支持更典型的老年人持有的资产价格。我们越快摆脱封锁，关于开征皮凯蒂式的财富税以帮助支付后遗症的说法可能就会越早消失。
想一想过去一个月来关闭的酒吧和餐馆，或者是关闭的建筑工地，就很难避免得出这样的结论，那就是在闲置的房间里忙碌的白领工人是冠状病毒的 "赢家"。他们也是在英国再次开放时，与酒吧打工者不同的是，他们的损失最小。
那么也难怪，经济政策研究中心对以往的大流行病的研究发现，早期的爆发会提高基尼系数，基尼系数是一个从0到1的量表，介于总收入平等和一人拥有全部财富之间。
CEPR说，过去的SARS或MERS等事件提高了最富有的人的收入份额，与那些有学位的人相比，受过基础教育的人在工作岗位上所占的份额降低了。更令人担忧的是，随着世界各国经济增长面临创纪录的崩溃，"不平等效应随着大流行病事件对经济活动的负面影响而增加"。
最后，就拿教育来说吧。在经济衰退时，较低的工资对进入就业市场的年轻人造成的伤痕效应是有据可查的。但失去几个月的学习时间对收入的影响代价不亚于此。
布鲁金斯研究所的初步估计，每个学生的工资每年下降2.5个百分点，即损失工资1337美元(1063英镑)。就整个经济而言，它估计美国的收入损失可能达到2.5万亿美元，占GDP的12.7个百分点。
在一个更极端的例子中，经济学家Andrea Ichino和Rudolf Winter-Ebmer研究了1930年代出生的儿童在第二次世界大战中的教育损失的影响，将德国和奥地利与非战斗人员瑞士和瑞典进行了对比。在德国和奥地利，这对研究者发现 "在德国和奥地利，"收入损失在20世纪80年代仍然明显"。
这本质上就是为什么总理需要尽快解除封锁：防止损害持续几十年。在把老年人放在第一位之后，现在我们必须为我们的孩子们做同样的事情。
政客们在公开场合讨论这样的问题时，都会感到很不舒服，因为他们害怕被描绘成冷酷无情。在新冠肺炎死亡人数不断攀升的每一个冰冷的统计数字背后，毕竟一个个的个人悲剧。但是，几周以来，内阁已经分为鹰派和鸽派两个阵营，而政府后座要求重启的呼声也越来越高。
没有面对选民的的负担的人，也可以更坦率地发言。而且很显然，现在对英国民众的拘禁是弊大于利。它将使我们更贫穷，巩固代际间的不平等，并有可能使数百万人的收入在未来几代人的收入上留下伤痕。
虽然确切的数字有争议，但你可能会惊讶地发现，财政部对一个人的生命成本提出了200万英镑的价格标签。这是 "预防死亡的价值"(VPF)，是基于一个普通人在道路交通事故等事故中的死亡人数，被头脑发热的监管者用来计算出拯救生命的成本和实施新规则的成本之间的权衡。
LSE的两位研究人员Paul Dolan和Pinar Jenkins利用这个数字和帝国理工学院对Covid-19的预期传播的模型，估计3月份采用的抑制策略可以挽救约18.9万条生命。纯粹是在基本的VPF上，这为英国节省了3780亿英镑：约6000英镑/人和17%的GDP。
值得每一分钱呢？不尽然。Covid-19死亡的平均年龄约为75岁，当两人调整了他们的计算结果后，从预防死亡中获得的5年预期寿命--他们得出的数字要小得多，即600亿英镑。
把这个数字说成是：这还不到我们本财年预期赤字的四分之一，它大约相当于财政部债务管理办公室将在一个月内筹集的资金来支付世界第五大经济体的深度冻结。
即使对于一个政治家来说，承认这一点是超出了常理，但伦敦证券交易所的估计也说明了一个更广泛的观点，那就是这种封锁的成本效益分析根本就不可能再叠加起来。前英国央行行行长金勋爵说得很好。"在过去20年里，年轻一代受尽了苦难。为什么我们的未来会受到威胁，以帮助延长老年人的预期寿命，而他们的预期寿命无论如何也不会很高？"
为了避免疑问，英国的老年人不应该被扔给新冠病毒狼群。事实上，最脆弱的群体仍然需要保护。但我之前已经论证过，我们需要我们的白银支出者的经济贡献，以帮助经济重回正轨；而且我们还必须面对这样一个事实，即到目前为止，为了防止NHS不堪重负，保护一个老龄化的、大多是退休的人群，我们已经被推到了最前面。
这项工作已经完成了。因此，现在我们不得不承认，这场危机的经济受害者大多是年轻人，他们从事的是较低工资的工作，更有可能被裁员或完全被解雇，而且至少从长远来看，还有学龄儿童失去了教育机会。
政府为应对这场危机而背负的数千亿英镑的债务，将由年轻一代而不是老年人承担，这也加剧了人口老龄化给公共财政带来的压力。
同时，央行的紧急货币政策措施在挤压储蓄者的同时，也倾向于支持更典型的老年人持有的资产价格。我们越快摆脱封锁，关于开征皮凯蒂式的财富税以帮助支付后遗症的说法可能就会越早消失。
想一想过去一个月来关闭的酒吧和餐馆，或者是关闭的建筑工地，就很难避免得出这样的结论，那就是在闲置的房间里忙碌的白领工人是冠状病毒的 "赢家"。他们也是在英国再次开放时，与酒吧打工者不同的是，他们的损失最小。
那么也难怪，经济政策研究中心对以往的大流行病的研究发现，早期的爆发会提高基尼系数，基尼系数是一个从0到1的量表，介于总收入平等和一人拥有全部财富之间。
CEPR说，过去的SARS或MERS等事件提高了最富有的人的收入份额，与那些有学位的人相比，受过基础教育的人在工作岗位上所占的份额降低了。更令人担忧的是，随着世界各国经济增长面临创纪录的崩溃，"不平等效应随着大流行病事件对经济活动的负面影响而增加"。
最后，就拿教育来说吧。在经济衰退时，较低的工资对进入就业市场的年轻人造成的伤痕效应是有据可查的。但失去几个月的学习时间对收入的影响代价不亚于此。
布鲁金斯研究所的初步估计，每个学生的工资每年下降2.5个百分点，即损失工资1337美元(1063英镑)。就整个经济而言，它估计美国的收入损失可能达到2.5万亿美元，占GDP的12.7个百分点。
在一个更极端的例子中，经济学家Andrea Ichino和Rudolf Winter-Ebmer研究了1930年代出生的儿童在第二次世界大战中的教育损失的影响，将德国和奥地利与非战斗人员瑞士和瑞典进行了对比。在德国和奥地利，这对研究者发现 "在德国和奥地利，"收入损失在20世纪80年代仍然明显"。
这本质上就是为什么总理需要尽快解除封锁：防止损害持续几十年。在把老年人放在第一位之后，现在我们必须为我们的孩子们做同样的事情。