Henderson and Lipow: The Data Are In: It's Time For A Major Reopening; And: Why Are Conservatives So Much Righter About Everything Now?

   Not an expert, but this sounds kinda predictable to me:

   Their findings? Social-distancing measures reduced person-to-person contact by about 50%, while harsher shelter-in-place rules reduced contact by only an additional 5%. Then, using data on Covid-19 infection and mortality, they estimated that these measures saved 74,000 lives. Finally, after using demographic data to adjust the VSL—which is lower for older people, who have fewer years to live—the study found that the gross benefit of social distancing has been a mere $250 billion.
   That finding casts major doubt on the value of lockdowns and even social distancing as a method of reducing the spread of Covid-19. While we can’t yet estimate a specific figure, the economic cost of social distancing and lockdowns will likely be more than $1 trillion. And that’s an understatement of the costs when you consider increased suicides and other social losses not captured in gross domestic product. For example, parents of young children have widely noted their kids’ gloomy outlook when not allowed to be with friends.
   An even more recent study from economists affiliated with Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics suggests that the Berkeley estimate of 74,000 lives saved over the past four months is best understood as an upper bound. The reason is that shelter-at-home policies don’t so much reduce Covid-19 deaths as delay them. Delaying deaths will reduce them if a vaccine or cure is found in time. But we can’t be sure that an effective vaccine will be produced and available any time soon.
   Rather than validating draconian lockdown orders, the latest economic research on Covid-19 suggests that social-distancing efforts in general, and shelter-in-place measures in particular, have done more harm than good. That doesn’t mean that all such measures should be abandoned. “To socially distance or not to socially distance” is not the question. The question should be, what policies actually make sense?
   To address that, a team of economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published the results of a study that compared various alternative strategies for limiting the spread of Covid-19. They concluded that twice as many lives could be saved if governments focused limited resources on protecting the most vulnerable people rather than squandering them on those who seem to face almost no risk, such as children.

   Again I'd like to harp on the fact that conservatives were right about this and progressives were wrong. And: Trump was right about reopening on Easter, and we'd have been much, much, much better off had we gone with his hunch.

  I've gone on about this already. I think it bears thinking about. This is an important question: why have conservatives been so much righter about these big, verifiable things over the past couple of years (at least)? I have two hypotheses:

[1] Progressives have lost their minds and are eaten up with political correctness (that's not part of the hypothesis--that's just a fact)--which means that they don't evaluate the evidence as honestly; they have a much stronger inclination to "rationalize" (in the bad, Freudian, sense) in order to make the evidence conform to their dogma. 

[2] Conservatives just generally tend to have better judgment about worldly matters than do progressives (and liberals?).

   Thing about [2], though: it doesn't explain what seems to me to be a big, notable change over the past couple of years. But maybe things have ever been thus.

   I'd say: this only goes for not-terribly-religious conservatives. Throw religion in to the mix, and things change. Which is basically the problem with progressivism: it's largely a religion. PC is just religious dogmatism applied to politics.