COVID-19: Are government resources better spent on public health or stimulating the economy?

Hardline economism is obscuring the reality of coronavirus

Question: COVID-19: Are government resources better spent on public health or stimulating the economy?
Position1 of 3›: This is a false dichotomy
Argument: Hardline economism is obscuring the reality of coronavirus

Increasingly, political analyses use statistics and economic forecasts to make decisions. But these can be extremely misleading.

The argument

Considering public health and economic growth to have equal weight when choosing where to invest government funds is misleading, because the framing smuggles in an assumption about what kind of thing an economy is. Such a position rests on the principles of economism: the belief that 'everything can be simplified to models and curves, and that it's possible to count and maximize utility in every circumstance'. Presented as a trade-off between two comparable goods, the choice looks like a technical exercise in allocation, and whichever side produces the larger modelled number wins. This is simply untrue, and the reason it is untrue is that the models leave out what actually drives economic change: people, and the way their behaviours, priorities and emotional responses may change after coronavirus. An economy is not a mechanism that resumes when a policy lever is pulled; it is the aggregate of decisions made by people who have just lived through something. A curve fitted to conditions before the pandemic cannot represent a population whose willingness to travel, spend, gather and work has been altered by it, which means the figure the trade-off rests on is not measuring the thing it claims to measure. The practical consequence is that the apparent trade-off inverts itself. If a government failed to grasp this and prioritised the economy, there would be dire consequences: 'No one would trade with anyone for years. Trade would grind to a halt because of mourning, fear of infection, society-wide trauma and social unrest'. An economy protected at the expense of public health would not in fact be protected, because the conditions it depends on — people healthy enough, confident enough and settled enough to participate — are the very things being spent. The dichotomy is false because health is not a competitor for economic resources but a precondition of economic activity.

Context

Economism is in. And unless we broaden our understanding of the economy to account for human behaviour, any conclusions we draw will be dangerously flawed.

Premises

[P1]Weighing public health and economic growth as equal investment choices rests on economism, the belief that everything can be reduced to models and maximised utility. [P2] That belief ignores how people's behaviours, priorities, and emotions change after a pandemic; prioritising the economy would bring mourning, fear, trauma, and social unrest that grind trade to a halt anyway. [C] Therefore, framing public health against the economy is a false dichotomy created by hardline economism that obscures the reality of coronavirus.

Counter-arguments

Economism prevails because it offers an unbiased, scientific understanding of complex human issues. Rather than take a politically-charged viewpoint, economism relies on data, and is therefore entirely based on facts rather than opinions. This makes it a more reliable basis for financial forecasting than others.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Economic growth does not depend on human behaviour