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By Isabella Glassman, New York Times, September 24, 2024

When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

I never daydreamed about hiding in the library bathroom, crying because I had just been rejected from an undergraduate law journal.

The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.

It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices; it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

This pressure is hardly exclusive to Ivy League students. In the 2022-23 academic year, 112,270 students majored in computer science, more than double the number nine years earlier. In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.

The interview process for Cornell’s Undergraduate Asia Business Society includes entering a pitch-black lecture hall, having a projector light shone in one’s face and yelling responses to questions. Getting into Yale isn’t enough: Its investing club turned away 236 applicants in 2022.

Once one snags a spot in a club, it’s straight to LinkedIn. Nearly 20 percent of people on the site are between the ages of 18 to 24, making the platform an incubator of young adult FOMO. There, we stress over whether our headshots look too high school (at the age of 18) and race to the coveted over-500-connections designation.

When I doom-scrolled LinkedIn, I wished I was like my classmates, posting about their prestigious internships and gathering validating likes and comments. Unfortunately, I knew my state government internship was a scarlet letter of inadequacy. My classmates seemed to think the world comprised investment bankers, management consultants — and everyone else.

When I first got to the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, it felt like a daily pop quiz, one where I was graded on a language I still struggle to speak.

I heard students say things like: I think I want to work in mergers and acquisitions. Do you have any interest in that? It’s very competitive, just so you know. And: Unless it’s Goldman or J.P. Morgan, who cares?

I wondered how I missed the memo that I needed to take microeconomics. This fall at Penn there are 672 seats in the course; as of Monday, only four had not been taken. Does everyone like economics that much?

I later learned that according to student lore, if you do well in microeconomics and macroeconomics, then get accepted into one of the selective finance clubs, you have a chance of internally transferring to Penn’s Wharton School, the most prestigious undergraduate business school in the country. A Wharton degree, popular superstition had it, was akin to buying a home in the Hamptons and sending your kids to one of the Phillips academies.

Responding to the pressure, I took microeconomics. When I did well on my first midterm, I realized that I could perhaps earn some respect from my peers by winning one of the few transfer spots into Wharton. Then I remembered I had no interest in business.

I wanted to go to law school, so I applied to Penn’s Undergraduate Law Journal. During my callback interview, however, I failed to prepare questions for my interviewer, wrongly believing questions would be a nuisance. When I got a rejection email, I was crushed. I felt like law school was now an impossibility.

It sounds silly — in hindsight, it was — but that is how I felt when I was surrounded by thousands of intelligent classmates competing for the same handful of results. I’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. from the recurring nightmare that I didn’t land an internship my junior year summer. I heard people, maybe friends, endlessly discussing the “only way” to be successful. I consoled a sobbing roommate after she failed to land the job her parents expected her to get.

There is some economic reality behind the madness.

Real wages have remained moribund since the 1970s, a hard pill to swallow in the face of the last several years of inflation. Today’s young adults feel worse off than their parents because their salaries no longer buy a suburban starter home with a picket fence. House prices have outpaced inflation, making homeownership a bigger challenge. Gen Z-ers have more student loans than millennials, and big, corporate salaries seemingly promise a salve for all one’s financial worries.

But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020. Almost two-thirds of college students have reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” within a given year, and experts have pointed to the cocktail of coursework, pressure to participate in extracurricular activities and concerns over choosing a career as causes.

Naturally, when thousands of students rush into the same handful of majors and professions, supply cannot possibly meet demand. That’s particularly true now, as openings for postgraduate tech industry jobs advertised on the student job board Handshake decreased about 30 percent this spring from the prior year. Job openings in the financial sector are similarly declining. Consulting firms have cut numbers of new hires and delayed start dates for undergraduates with offers.

Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.

Then there are the parents, who have enormous influence on their children’s career choices. Take a deep breath. A kid’s first word doesn’t need to be “revenue” or his first language Java. It’s hard to not want the best for your children — and not to define it as them starting the next Amazon. But stop and think about what actually makes them happy and keeps them sane, not what you think will keep them safe.

As for me, I was wrong: My failure to get admitted to the law journal in college didn’t prevent me from getting into law school. I’m now a second-year law student and a member of my school’s law review, and still cannot confidently define management consulting.

But as soon as this essay is published, feel free to check out my LinkedIn post about it.

Hot on the heels of cases against other tech titans, the US government has filed a lawsuit against Apple. The Department of Justice is accusing Apple of adopting anti-competitive practices to maintain its monopoly in the US smartphone market.

The case has attracted less attention in the media than cases against others like Google, but it is different and stronger. And like the antitrust case against Microsoft in the late 1990s, this one has the potential to significantly change the tech landscape.

Apple’s fortunes changed with the launch of the iPod in 2001. This success was driven largely by the consent decree in the Microsoft case, which forced Microsoft to open up its Windows PCs to Apple’s iTunes. The subsequent success of the iPhone was largely built on that initial breakthrough.

Now, Apple and Samsung control around 90% of the smartphone market in the US, with Apple controlling 70%. There are only two smartphone operating systems, Apple’s proprietary iOS and Google’s Android, which is available freely.

Apple’s primary goal is to ensure that its monopoly in the smartphone market remains unthreatened. To do so, it has created a range of applications, services, and devices like Apple Pay, Apple CarPlay, and Apple smartwatches to lock in customers. The entire point is to create ‘stickiness’, making it difficult for customers to move away from the Apple ecosystem.

It would be great if people using Apple and Android phones could seamlessly access the same services. But if that were to happen, many customers would no longer need to pay for the higher-priced iPhones, which would threaten Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market.

Think about New Zealand’s broadband internet service. The fibre optic cables are all owned by Chorus, but there is active competition over who provides the service between OneNZ, Spark, 2 Degrees, Skinny, and others. Suppose Chorus said that since they own the cables, they should be the only ones allowed to provide a broadband service, not anyone else. This would be anti-competitive.

So, what potentially anti-competitive tactics is Apple employing to ensure customers remain tied to its devices?

First, the tech behemoth ensures its devices don’t work seamlessly with other devices for messaging services. It does this by deliberately downgrading the quality of the experience to give customers the impression that the inferior quality of Android devices is causing this. To do this, Apple often sacrifices the encryption and privacy of messages sent. The Department of Justice lawsuit quotes an Apple executive: “…in going forward, we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are ‘good enough’ for the consumer. I would argue that we’re already doing more than what would have been good enough. But we find it hard to regress our product features YOY [Year over Year]”. Consequently, in 2023, Apple “spent more than twice on stock buybacks and dividends as it did on research and development.”

Another way that Apple downgrades the user experience is by actively disallowing the development of ‘super apps’ and other cloud-based apps. A super app allows users access to multiple apps within a single app such as Expedia that allow users to search for flights and hotels without having to check multiple different sites, or Netflix, which allows you to search for numerous movies or TV shows within the same app.

Apple does this by denying developers access to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This means that developers must write separate programs for Apple and Android phones, which is often impractical. Apple can restrict access to APIs via its role as an intermediary between the developers and users.

The company is fully aware that the development of such ‘middleware’ that allows users to access super apps or cloud-based apps (including games) makes the underlying phone software and hardware less important. Users can easily access these apps using cheaper Android phones rather than more expensive iPhones.

A final way Apple locks customers into its ecosystem is by using tying arrangements. Anyone with an Apple Watch knows you need an iPhone for the watch to work. iPhones don’t work with Android watches. There is no reason why this should be so: smartwatches should work with smartphones.

Apple’s response is that there are valid technological reasons for its choices and that the US DoJ case effectively tries to turn an iPhone into an Android phone. However, some strategies adopted by Apple, such as tying arrangements for smartwatches, have already been litigated in other cases and have been struck down as anti-competitive.

It remains to be seen whether Apple can provide a comprehensive rebuttal on the basis of technological arguments.

The case against Apple may force the tech giant to provide greater access to APIs, just as Microsoft was forced to do. This will result in greater availability of apps that will work across iOS and Android devices, greater competition and innovation across the smartphone ecosystem and cheaper smartphones.

That birthrates are plummeting around the world is testament to the fact that life is generally getting better. With rising incomes, there are more income-earning opportunities, particularly for women. In many countries the amount of education needed for a given job has increased. People are studying longer and working harder.

The cost of having a baby needs to be considered against the loss of income from a woman’s wages, a trade-off that was not required when jobs for women were relatively few and far between. As a consequence women are often choosing not to have babies.

Further, women are getting married later and having babies later in life, so they will end up having fewer children compared with women who start having children much earlier in life.

Ananish Chaudhuri
Auckland, New Zealand
The writer is professor of experimental economics at the University of Auckland and the author of the forthcoming “Economics: A Global Introduction.”

The presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified before a House committee on Tuesday about the state of antisemitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.

Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, asked the presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the schools’ codes of conduct or constituted “bullying or harassment.” None of them could answer with a yes. M.I.T.’s Sally Kornbluth said it could be, “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements.” Penn’s Elizabeth Magill called it “a context-dependent decision.” Harvard’s Claudine Gay agreed with Magill and added that it depended on whether “it crosses into conduct.”

By the next day, those answers were drawing rebukes not only from Republicans and wealthy donors like Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan, but also from prominent Democrats. The Harvard law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe reproached Gay for “hesitant, formulaic and bizarrely evasive answers.” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is a nonvoting board member at Penn, called Magill’s answer “unacceptable.” The White House also weighed in: “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said,” a spokesman, Andrew Bates, said. “Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.”

I have some sympathy for the three presidents following their stumbling performance. None have been in their jobs for long. They all expressed abhorrence for antisemitism during more than three hours of testimony. And they are clearly struggling with how to balance respect for free expression on campus with opposition to hate speech. When Magill later posted a video trying to clarify her remarks, she had the broken look of someone who thought she was about to be sacked.

But the deep problem with their testimonies was not fundamentally about calls for genocide or free speech. It was about double standards — itself a form of antisemitism, but one that can be harder to detect.

The double standard is this: Colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.

The point came across at different moments in the hearing. Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, observed that Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, had been hounded out of Harvard (though not fired outright) for her views on sex categories. “In what world,” Walberg asked, “is a call for violence against Jews protected speech but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Gay offered no real answer. Representative Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat, asked Magill if she would permit a hypothetical conference of 25 racists to go forward at Penn — given that in September, under the banner of free expression, she had allowed a conference that included speakers she herself had condemned as antisemitic to take place at the school. She could not bring herself to answer yes.

Other examples abound. M.I.T.’s alleged commitment to viewpoint diversity, which Kornbluth extolled at the House hearing, was hardly evident two years ago, when one of its departments canceled a scientific talk by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot because he had questioned the wisdom of some diversity initiatives.

At Stanford, the university issued a statement after the attacks of Oct. 7 saying it “does not take positions on geopolitical issues and news events.” Yet Stanford was outspoken on the subject of George Floyd’s murder.

At Yale, the law professor Amy Chua was relieved of some teaching duties and ostracized by students and the administration on blatantly pretextual grounds while her original sin, as The Times reported in 2021, was her praise for Brett Kavanaugh. Yet when Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, posted on X on Oct. 7 that Israel “is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle,” Yale defended her by saying Grewal’s comments “represent her own views.”

The word for all this is hypocrisy. Gay, Kornbluth and Magill may not be personally to blame for it, because they only recently took over the helm of their schools. But there’s an institutional hypocrisy that they at least have a duty to acknowledge.

They also must decide: If they are seriously committed to free speech — as I believe they should be — then that has to go for all controversial views, including when it comes to incendiary issues about race and gender, as well as when it comes to hiring or recruiting an ideologically diverse faculty and student body. If, on the other hand, they want to continue to forbid and punish speech they find offensive, then the rule must apply for all offensive speech, including calls to wipe out Israel or support homicidal resistance.

If Tuesday’s hearing made anything clear, it’s that the time for having it both ways, at the expense of Jews, must come to an end now.

As Israel debates what to do next in Gaza, I hope Israel’s political-military leadership will reflect on the adage often attributed to Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” — one for your enemy and one for yourself.

Wise man, Confucius.

The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.

In doing so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever — owning all its pathologies and having to govern its more than two million people amid a humanitarian crisis, and even worse, discrediting the very Israeli military that it was trying to restore Israelis’ trust in.

Quite honestly, I thought back to America after 9/11. And I asked myself, what do I wish I had done more of before we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq for which they and we paid a huge price?

I wish I’d argued for what the C.I.A. calls a “Red Cell” or “Red Team” — a group of intelligence officers outside the direct military or political chain of command, whose main job would have been to examine the war plans and goals for Iraq and Afghanistan and stress-test them by proposing contrarian alternatives for achievable goals to restore U.S. security and deterrence. And to have that Red Team’s recommendations be made public before we went to war.

As a retired senior U.S. intelligence official said to me: The role of the C.I.A.’s Red Cell on other thorny problems “was to help the U.S. government make decisions with eyes wide open and to buy down, but not eliminate, risk. It’s not a sign of weakness to make fully informed decisions and I think the Red Cell is a great tool for weighing alternative options and potential second- and third-order effects. Israel’s leaders need to be rigorous and not only passionate at this moment in time.”

So it’s with that in mind that I am proposing Israel create not only a Red Team for how to deal with Hamas in Gaza but also a Blue Team to critique the Red Team. Israel needs to have a much more robust internal debate because it has clearly rushed into a war with multiple contradictory goals.

Israel’s stated aim is to get back all its remaining hostages — now more than 130 soldiers and civilians — while destroying Hamas and its infrastructure once and for all, while doing it in a way that doesn’t cause more Gazan civilian casualties than the Biden administration can defend, and without leaving Israel responsible for Gaza forever and having to pay its bills every day. Good luck with all that.

Here’s what an Israeli Red Team might point out and advocate instead.

For starters, because the military and cabinet rushed into Gaza in this war and seemingly never game-planned for any endgame, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament. It has pushed well over one million civilians from northern Gaza to the south to get them away from the fight as it has attempted to wipe out all Hamas fighters in Gaza City and its environs. But now, the only way that Israel can take the ground war to southern Gaza — around Khan Younis, where Hamas’s senior leadership is suspected of hiding in tunnels — is by moving through this mass of displaced people and by creating even more.

Facing this predicament, the Israeli Red Team would suggest a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent cease-fire that would be followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas return all the hostages it has left, civilians and military, and any dead. But Hamas would get no Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal — Israeli withdrawal and a permanent cease-fire in return for the 130-plus Israeli hostages.

There would be an Israeli asterisk, though, which wouldn’t be written in, but everyone would understand it is there: Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the top Hamas leaders who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do that with a scalpel, not a hammer.

What might be the advantages of such a strategy for Israel? The Red Team would cite five.

First, it would argue, all the pressure for a cease-fire to spare Gazan civilians more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living out in the cold and rain — and the world — that it will not agree to a cease-fire for the mere humanitarian price of returning all the Israeli hostages.

Moreover, Israel would have ensured that Hamas got no big political victory out of this war like forcing Israel to free all the more than 6,000 Palestinians in its jails in return for the hostages Hamas is holding. No, no — it would just be a clean deal: permanent cease-fire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.

Second, some, maybe many, in Israel would complain that the military did not achieve its stated objective of eliminating Hamas, therefore it was a Hamas victory. The Red Team would respond that, for starters, the objective was unrealistic, especially with a right-wing Israeli government unwilling to work with the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to build an alternative to Hamas to run Gaza.

What Israel will have achieved, the Red Team would argue, is to have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.

And think smart about it: In the wake of such a permanent cease-fire, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, would have to come out of his tunnel, squint into the sun, and face his own people for the first time since this war started. Yes, the morning after he comes out, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name for dealing such a heavy blow to the Jews.

But on the morning after the morning after, the Red Team would predict, many of those carrying him around would begin whispering to him: “Sinwar, what were you thinking? My house is now a pile of rubble. Who is going to rebuild it? My job in Israel that was feeding my family of 10 is gone. How am I going to feed my kids? You need to get me some international humanitarian assistance and a new house and job — and how are you going to do that if you keep lobbing rockets at the Jews?”

With Israel out, the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem — as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.

Keep in mind, as Reuters recently noted, that before Oct. 7 Israel was issuing “more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to cross into Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to take jobs in sectors like agriculture or construction that typically carried salaries up to 10 times what a worker could earn” in Gaza. Gaza was also exporting over $130 million a year of fish, agricultural produce, textiles and other products to Israel and the West Bank. That’s now all stopped.

Third, the Israeli Red Team would argue, this will create the same kind of deterrence for Hamas that Israel’s devastating bombardments of pro-Hezbollah communities in the southern suburbs of Beirut did in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has never dared to provoke a full-scale war with Israel since.

The Red Team would add that not only would the damage Israel has inflicted on Hamas and Gaza create similar deterrence, but so too would the fact that Israel could now reimagine and strengthen its own border defenses. Hamas has shown Israel where all its vulnerabilities were and how it smuggled in so many weapons — and Israel can now make sure this will never happen again.

Fourth, one of the biggest strategic benefits of Israel getting out of Gaza in return for an internationally monitored cease-fire is that it could then devote full attention to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Iran would not like that. They want Israel permanently militarily overstretched and forced to keep a good chunk of its 300,000-plus reservists — who drive its economy — permanently mobilized to govern Gaza.

They also want Israel’s economy permanently overstretched to pay for it. And they want Israel morally overstretched by permanently owning the Gaza humanitarian crisis, so that every day the sun did not shine in Gaza, the rain did not fall, the electricity did not flow, the world would say that it is Israel’s fault. Israel’s worst enemies could not design a worse fate for it — and that is what Hezbollah and Iran are praying for.

Finally, the Israeli Red Team would argue, Israel has important healing to do at home. This surprise attack happened because Israel had a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had fractured the country by trying to mount an insane judicial coup and who governed Israel for a total of 16 years with a strategy of dividing everyone — religious from secular, left from right, Ashkenazim from Sephardim, Israeli Arabs from Israeli Jews — weakening the country’s immune system. Israel can be healed internally and resume its project of normalizing relations with its Arab neighbors and forging a stable relationship with the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank only if Netanyahu is removed. If the war goes on forever, that will never happen. And that is exactly what Netanyahu wants.

But now comes the Israeli Blue Team. What would it say about the Red Team?

Well, first, it would ask, what do you do if Sinwar simply says no, I won’t accept just a cease-fire, I need my 6,000-plus prisoners out of Israeli jails and I will pay the price in Western public opinion to hold out for them? Then Israel is stuck again.

The Israeli Blue Team would say: We have a better idea. First, downgrade our objectives. Declare that the military’s objective is not to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, but to significantly diminish its fighting capacity.

Because, the Blue Team would say, we actually don’t believe in deterrence. Hezbollah has not really been deterred since 2006. That is an illusion. Iran is just saving Hezbollah for the day Israel will threaten its nuclear program. We Blue Teamers believe in constantly diminishing our enemies’ capabilities. Once we have greatly diminished Hamas’s capabilities, we are not going to stay in Gaza forever until we kill every leader.

Instead, we will pull back and create a perimeter and outposts one mile inside the Gaza-Israel border to ensure that our border communities can never again be attacked overland as they were on Oct. 7. And we will do that to emphasize that we have the abilities and intentions to return at will if Hamas keeps firing rockets at us. If Hamas wants to trade our hostages for prisoners, we can talk. As for governance of Gaza, a diminished Hamas can stay in charge if that is what Gazans want. Let Hamas be responsible for the water and electricity.

Finally, the Blue Team would say to the Israeli political leadership: “Stop lying to yourself and the public. If we try to conquer and hold all of Gaza, Gaza will not only swallow us in the end, you politicians will create huge doubts in the public’s mind about the military by giving it an unachievable goal and Israel simply cannot afford more doubts about the military a second longer.”

In sum, Israel needs this kind of internal debate, where an Israeli Red Team and Blue Team can remind the country’s leadership that there is no perfect outcome waiting for Israel in Gaza. Fixing Gaza “once and for all” was always a fantasy.

But here is what is not a fantasy: The true history of Israel-Hamas relations. It is very simple. It is war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout …. Hamas thrives in the wars, because that is all it can deliver and all that it exists for. Israel thrives in the long timeouts — in the cease-fires — when all of its societal, economic and innovative strengths come to the fore. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah want to drag Israel into a permanent state of war. Israel needs a Red Team and a Blue Team to advocate instead for longer cease-fires, a more hardened border and the flexibility to return to Gaza if Hamas forces it to.

Not perfect, but perfect was never on the menu. It’s the Middle East, Jake.

Stephanie Nolen, New York Times (Nov. 25, 2023)

Large outbreaks of diseases that primarily kill children are spreading around the world, a grim legacy of disruptions to health systems during the Covid-19 pandemic that have left more than 60 million children without a single dose of standard childhood vaccines.

By midway through this year, 47 countries were reporting serious measles outbreaks, compared with 16 countries in June 2020. Nigeria is currently facing the largest diphtheria outbreak in its history, with more than 17,000 suspected cases and nearly 600 deaths so far. Twelve countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, are reporting circulating polio virus.

Many of the children who missed their shots have now aged out of routine immunization programs. So-called “zero-dose children” account for nearly half of all child deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses, according to Gavi, the organization that helps fund vaccination in low- and middle-income countries.

An additional 85 million children are under-immunized as a result of the pandemic — that is, they received only part of the standard course of several shots required to be fully protected from a particular disease.

The cost of the failure to reach those children is fast becoming clear. Deaths from measles rose 43 percent (to 136,200) in 2022, compared with the previous year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figures for 2023 indicate that the total could be twice as high again.

“The decline in vaccination coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic led us directly to this situation of rising diseases and child deaths,” said Ephrem Lemango, associate director of immunization for UNICEF, which supports delivery of vaccines to almost half the world’s children every year. “With each new outbreak, the toll on vulnerable communities rises. We need to move fast now and make the investment needed to catch up the children that were missed during the pandemic.”

One of the biggest challenges is that the children who missed their first shots between 2020 and 2022 are now older than the age group typically seen routinely at primary health care centers and in normal vaccination programs. Reaching and protecting them from diseases that can easily turn fatal in countries with the most fragile health systems will require an extra push and new investment.

“If you were born within a certain period of time, you were missed, full stop, and you’re not going to get caught just by restoring normal services,” said Lily Caprani, UNICEF’s chief of global advocacy.

UNICEF is asking Gavi for $350 million to purchase vaccines to try to reach those children. Gavi’s governing board will consider the request next month.

Many developing countries have some experience of carrying out catch-up campaigns for measles, targeting children between 1 and 5, or even 1 and 15, in response to outbreaks. But now those countries also need to deliver the other vaccines and train personnel — typically community health workers who are only accustomed to vaccinating babies — and to procure and distribute the actual vaccines.

Dr. Lemango said that despite the urgency of the situation, it had been a struggle to get plans for such campaigns in place and that he hoped most could come together in 2024.

“Coming out of the pandemic, there was this hangover — no one wanted to do campaigns,” he said. “Everyone wants to return to normalcy and do regular strengthening of immunization. But we already had unfinished business.”

In some countries, such as Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia, health systems have recovered from severe Covid disruption and have regained or even surpassed the levels of vaccination coverage they had reached before the pandemic. But others — mostly countries where vaccination rates were already considerably lower than the targets set by UNICEF — have not caught up to their previously lower levels.

The countries with the most zero-dose children include Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. Many with the lowest levels of coverage are facing compounding challenges, such as the civil conflicts in Syria, Ethiopia and Yemen; the growing population of climate refugees in Chad; and both of those problems in Sudan.

Ghana’s experience is representative of the challenges of many lower-income countries. Parents couldn’t take their children for routine shots when communities were locked down to protect against Covid, and when those restrictions were lifted, many parents still stayed away because of fear of infection, said Priscilla Obiri, a community health nurse in charge of vaccinations in low-income fishing communities on the edge of the capital, Accra.

Of the children Ms. Obiri sees these days at a typical pop-up vaccination clinic, where she sets up a table and a few chairs in the shade at a crossroads, as many as a third will have incomplete vaccinations, or sometimes none at all, she said. She agrees on a plan with their mothers to make up the gap.

But some parents don’t, or can’t, bring their children to a clinic. “We must go out to the community and hunt for them,” she said.

As Ms. Obiri and her colleagues attempt to regain that lost ground, they face another challenge: disinformation campaigns and hesitation about Covid vaccines have spilled over and eroded some of the traditional eagerness that parents had to get their children routine immunizations, according to the Vaccine Confidence Project, a long-running research initiative at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“In 55 countries, there was a precipitous drop between 2015 and 2022 in the number of people who said that routine immunization is important for children,” said the project’s director, Heidi Larson, whose team collected what she described as “robust global polling data” in more than 100 nationally representative surveys.

Even as people around the world were seeking information about vaccines, there was a surge in mis- and disinformation, she said, and people with low trust in officials and official guidance were particularly vulnerable to believing alternative sources of information.

In 2015, 95 percent of Ghanaian parents said they believed vaccines were safe. That figure plunged to 67 percent of parents in 2022. It had climbed back to 83 percent by October of this year.

Dr. Kwame Amponsah-Achiano, who oversees the childhood immunization program in Ghana, said he did not believe that confidence had fallen during the Covid pandemic. Demand remains high and has outstripped the program’s ability to supply in some areas, he said.

Ms. Caprani said UNICEF had found that both problems were occurring in parallel.

“You can have demand outstripping not just physical supply, but also outstripping access — convenient, affordable, reachable access — and simultaneously see some declining confidence,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the same people.”

Last year, 22 million children missed the routine measles vaccination given in their first year of life — 2.7 million more than in 2019 — while an additional 13.3 million did not receive their second doses. To reach herd immunity, and prevent outbreaks, 95 percent of children must have both doses. Measles acts as an early warning system for gaps in immunization, because it is highly transmissible.

“There are communities where an outbreak of measles is a bad thing, and there are communities where it’s a death sentence, because of the combination of other risk factors such as poor malnutrition, poor access to health care, poor access to clean water,” Ms. Caprani said.

By New York Times The Editorial Board

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.

It will take a multidisciplinary approach, and at this point, all the solutions that will be needed long term can’t be known; the work of getting kids back on solid ground is just beginning. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be immediate action.

As a first step, elected officials at every level — federal, state and local — will need to devote substantial resources to replace the federal aid that is set to expire and must begin making up lost ground. This is a bipartisan issue, and parents, teachers and leaders in education have a role to play as well, in making sure that addressing learning loss and other persistent challenges facing children receives urgent attention.

The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent — those who miss 10 percent or more of the days in the school year — and for whom absenteeism will translate into gaps in learning.

In the early grades, these missing children are at greater risk of never mastering the comprehension skills that make education possible. The more absences these students accumulate, the more they miss out on the process of socialization through which young people learn to live and work with others. The more they lag academically, the more likely they are to drop out.

This fall, The Associated Press illustrated how school attendance has cratered across the United States, using data compiled in partnership with the Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee. More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. That means an additional 6.5 million students joined the ranks of the chronically absent.

The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.

The Times reported on Friday that preliminary data for 2022-23 showed a slight improvement in attendance. However, in some states, like California and New Mexico, “the rate of chronic absenteeism was still double what it was before the pandemic.” The solutions are not simple. There is extensive evidence that punitive measures don’t work, so educators may need a combination of incentives and measures to address the economic and family issues that can keep children away from school.

Researchers have long known that American students grow more alienated from school the longer they attend — and that they often fall off the school engagement cliff, at which point they no longer care. This sense of disconnection stems from a feeling among high school students in particular that no one at school cares about them and that the courses they study bear no relationship to the challenges they face in the real world.

These young people are also vulnerable to mental health difficulties that worsened during the pandemic. Based on survey data collected in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this year that more than 40 percent of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 22 percent had seriously considered suicide; 10 percent reported that they had attempted suicide.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many parents and educators have been raising the alarm about the effects of grief, isolation and other disruptions on the mental health of their children. In addition to reconnecting these young people to school, states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.

The State of Virginia took a big swing at the problem of learning loss when it announced what is being described as a statewide tutoring program. But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.

While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.

A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.

The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

Philip Clarke, Professor of Health Economics, Nuffield College, Oxford University.

For a decade, science has faced a replication crisis in that many of the results of many of the key studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. For example, the Open Science Collaboration in 2015 published a paper involving a replication of 100 psychology studies that found that many replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings. A study in the journal Science reproducing 18 economic experiments soon followed and again found that up to one-third could not be reproduced. The question still to be answered is whether health economics faces a reproducibility crisis, and if this is the case, what do we do about it?

To fully understand the reproducibility crisis, one must look at the incentives for authors trying to publish scientific articles. It is only human nature to regard results that are perceived as positive or statistically significant as telling a better story than negative or non-significant results. A common manifestation is P-hacking which arises when researchers look to report effects that are deemed statistical significance above a threshold such as 0.05. A recent analysis of over 21,000 hypothesis tests published in 25 leading economics journals show this a problem, particularly with studies employing Instrumental variables and Diff-in-Diff methods. 

An initiative editors of health economic journals took in 2015 aimed at reducing P-Hacking was to issue a statement reminding referees to accept studies that: ‘have potential scientific and publication merit regardless of whether such studies’ empirical findings do or do not reject null hypotheses’. This appears to have had some impact, but health economics faces a unique set of challenges. Often there are pressures to demonstrate that an intervention is cost-effective by showing that it falls below a predefined cost per QALY threshold, which produces what could be termed cost-effectiveness threshold hacking.

Beyond formal hypothesis testing, the widespread use of key health economic results such as EQ-5D value sets means reproducibility is likely to be extremely important, as the results of such studies become inputs into potentially 100s of other analyses. It is perhaps not surprising that one of the only replications conducted in health economics has been over the EQ-5D-5L value set for England, although in less-than-ideal circumstances. Rather than a one-off, replication should be seen as integral to the development of foundational health economic tools such as value sets and disease simulation models that are critical to so much research.

The question now for the discipline is how can we promote and facilitate replication and avoid the pitfalls of P or threshold hacking?

One approach undertaken by the Mount Hood Diabetes Challenge Network has been to run comparable scenarios through various health economic diabetes simulation models. A recent challenge involved a comparison of 12 different Type 2 diabetes computer models that separately simulated the impact of a range of treatment interventions on Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). The variation in outcomes across models was substantive, e.g. up to a six-fold variation in incremental QALYs associated between different simulation models (see figure 1). This suggested that the choice of simulation model could have a large impact on whether a therapy is deemed cost-effective and, when combined with threshold hacking, means that many economic evaluations are likely to be more in advocacy than science.  

To create greater transparency, the Mount Hood Diabetes Challenge Network has also created specific guidelines for reporting economic evaluations that use diabetes simulation models to enable replication and has developed a simulation model registry. The registry is designed to encourage those developing models to provide documentation in one place and report on a set of reference simulations. Modelling groups are also encouraged to update these simulations each time the model changes, which provides a benchmark to compare different simulation models and how models evolve. Health economic model registries can potentially improve the science of economic evaluation in the same way clinical trial registries have improved the conduct and reporting of randomized controlled trials in medicine.

Finally, those conducting experiments or quasi-experimental methods can now submit registered reports. This initiative started with psychology journals with the idea that authors submit the protocol before undertaking the study to a journal for peer review. After review, if the registered report is accepted, the journal commits to publishing the full study regardless of the results’ significance. Registered reports are a way of avoiding the pitfalls of P-hacking and publication bias.

There are now more than 300 journals that allow registered reports, but take up by economic journals has been slow. Quality of Life Research and Oxford Open Economics are the only two options for those undertaking health economic experiments. Hopefully, these initiatives and an online petition signed by more than 145 health economists will encourage other health economic journals to provide this option in future.

Health economics embracing registered reports and developing health economic model registers are two ways to strengthen the discipline as a science.

Figure 2 Comparisons of incremental life-years (ΔLYs) and incremental QALYs (ΔQALYs) across different models by intervention profile. Originally published Tew M, Willis M, Asseburg C, et al. Exploring Structural Uncertainty and Impact of Health State Utility Values on Lifetime Outcomes in Diabetes Economic Simulation Models: Findings from the Ninth Mount Hood Diabetes Quality-of-Life Challenge. Medical Decision Making. 2022;42(5):599-611. doi:10.1177/0272989X211065479 (Note figure is Creative Commons)

Agustín Bénétrix, Ananish Chaudhuri, Philip Clarke, Amrita Dhillon, Ana Beatriz Galvão, Pushkar Maitra, Ugo Panizza

In recounting his life as an applied economist, Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton concluded that he greatly benefitted from the openness of economics and its lack of nepotism and patronage (Deaton, 2011). Many now question this perception of openness and suggest that economics can be clubby and hierarchical (Galiani and Panizza, 2020).

In economics, the publication process is extremely long (Ellison, 2002). A lengthy publication process is frustrating for everybody but can be disastrous for young scholars on the tenure clock (Conley et al., 2013). The profession also gives excessive weight to publications in a small number of journals (often referred to as Top-Five) even though there is weak empirical support for the fact that these journals produce more impactful papers than lower ranked journals. There is also the risk that this excessive focus on a small number of journals ‘incentivises professional incest and creates clientele effects whereby career-oriented authors appeal to the tastes of editors and biases of journals’ and ‘raises the entry costs for new ideas and persons outside the orbits of the journals and their editors’ (Heckman and Moktan, 2020).

The launch of a new general interest economic journal is an opportunity to address these challenges.

Oxford Open Economics is the first general interest journal in Economics that is fully open access. The approach of providing open access to sound science has been popular in the natural sciences for a while with journals such as Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group or the Public Library of Science journals. With Oxford Open Economics, the discipline of Economics can now be part of this movement designed to provide better access and easier dissemination of research findings.

Economic journals often reject papers on the basis of subjective evaluations of likely impact and breadth of interest. These subjective evaluations become a source of publication bias and reinforce the impression that economics is elitist and clubby. Oxford Open Economics will strive to avoid such subjective evaluations by adopting ‘sound-science’ peer review, where the focus is on methodological rigor rather than subjective judgments of novelty.

Furthermore, many scholarly journals are published not by university affiliated publishers but by commercial publishers, who often charge hefty subscription fees to libraries. The rationale of this commercial model of charging high fees for research results and peer review of the same carried out for free by academics at publicly funded universities has been questioned by authors such as Bergstrom (2001). This pricing model results in limiting access to new research, particularly in developing countries, whose libraries are often unable to afford the exorbitant charges. Providing open access to the latest research can go a long way toward removing this barrier.

The goal of Oxford Open Economics is to become a top general interest economic journal but it wants to be more than that by also publishing high-quality articles that are usually shunned by traditional journals. Funding agencies emphasize the need for interdisciplinary research, but interdisciplinary articles are traditionally difficult to publish in an economic journal. Oxford Open Economics aims to be an outlet for high-quality and interdisciplinary research. Along similar lines, papers with null results are often difficult to publish, a fact that leads to selective reporting (or p-hacking) and ‘file drawer effect’. Oxford Open Economics plans to address this issue by publishing high quality studies with null effects. A recent evaluation by Blanco-Perez and Brodeur (2020) showed that the editors issuing such an explicit statement had an impact in reducing publication bias and so we plan to adopt a similar policy with Oxford Open Economics. Oxford Open Economics also looks forward to publishing review articles that take a strong stand on the state of the literature on a given topic.

With Oxford Open Economics, we plan to offer a quick turnaround. We want to reduce repetition and redundancy in the review process by allowing authors to share reports and decision letters from previous submissions or to opt for a no-revision option, which means that they will not receive a revise and resubmit decision. Even for authors who do not submit previous reports and decision letters and do not opt for the no-revision option, we plan to provide a first decision within 6–8 weeks from submission and avoid multiple rounds of revision.

As noted above, the publication process in Economics tends to be lengthy. Part of this seems predicated on the premise that while research questions in the medical and natural sciences require rapid dissemination due to their immediate impact on health-related and social outcomes, issues in the social sciences are slower-moving and hence the turgid pace of the publication process is perfectly acceptable.

A recent editorial in the journal Science has argued the case of the need for much greater level of translational research (Proctor and Geng, 2021). For example, developing a highly effective COVID-19 vaccine is not enough if people choose not to get vaccinated. In this regard, economists alongside other disciplines have much to contribute. Take for example, a large pre-registered randomized controlled trial in Sweden and data on population-wide administrative vaccination records, Campos-Mercade et al. (2021) show that modest monetary payments of $24 increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points from a baseline rate of 71.6%. In contrast, behavioral nudges increased stated intentions to vaccinate but had only small and not statistically significant impacts on vaccination rates. Whether one agrees with or disputes these findings, the fact remains that this line of work clearly falls within the purview of economics and that these results should be of immediate interest to both researchers and policy makers. There is no obvious reason why researchers undertaking such work must automatically look at natural science outlets for disseminating their results rather than ‘economic’ ones.

The purpose of peer review is to make sure that research findings are reported honestly, backed up by rigorous evidence and are free of mistakes. Yet, the current incentives in economics have degenerated to a point where the peer review process becomes an opportunity for reviewers to look for excuses to reject papers or to request elaborate and time-consuming revisions that often do not add value and slow down the process considerably.

Where possible, we, as editors, also plan to both implement and generate evidence that can both improve the journal and the publication process for both reviewers and authors. For example, in 2015, several health economic journals adopted a policy that reminded referees to accept studies that ‘have potential scientific and publication merit regardless of whether such studies’ empirical findings do or do not reject null hypotheses’. We also plan to look to generate evidence that increases both the scientific value of the journal and the process of publication for both authors and reviewers.

In a world populated by predatory publishers, credibility and high academic standards are key for a new journal and Oxford University Press is a guarantee along these lines. Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world and the second oldest; it publishes more than 450 academic journals, including some of the most prestigious economic journals and a newly launched series of fully open access journals. Oxford University Press is thus the ideal partner for a new journal that wants to make economics open again.

Our team of senior editors has expertise in Macroeconomics and International Finance, Experimental Economics, Health Economics, Political Economics, Applied Econometrics and Development Economics and our editorial board covers the whole spectrum of economic research. Hence, we welcome submissions in all fields.

References

Bergstrom, T. (2001) ‘Free Labor for Costly Journals?’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15: 183–98.

Blanco-Perez, C., and Brodeur, A. (2020) ‘A Publication Bias and Editorial Statement on Negative Findings’, The Economic Journal, 130: 1226–47.

Campos-Mercade, P.  et al.  (2021) ‘Monetary Incentives Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations’, Science, 374: 879–82.

Conley, J. P.  et al.  (2013) ‘The Effects of Publication Lags on Life Cycle Research Productivity in Economics’, Economic Inquiry, 51: 1251–76.

Deaton, A. (2011) Puzzles and Paradoxes: A Life in Applied Economics. https://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/Angus_Deaton_Puzzles_and_Paradoxes_v1.4_9_13_10.pdf  Mimeo, Princeton University.

Ellison, G. (2002) ‘The Slowdown of the Economics Publishing Process’, Journal of Political Economy, 110: 947–93.

Galiani, S., and Panizza, U. (2020) Publishing and Measuring Success in Economics, London: CEPR Press.

Heckman, J., and Moktan, S. (2020) in ‘Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five’ Ugo Panizza and Sebastian Galiani, (eds) Publishing and Measuring Success in Economics, London: CEPR Press.

Google ScholarProctor, E. K., and Geng, E. (2021) ‘A New Lane for Science’, Science, 374: 659.

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John Gibson and Ananish Chaudhuri

John Gibson is Professor of Economics at Waikato University. Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland. The views expressed are their own.

A recent New Zealand Herald poll finds that 46% of respondents support “elimination” while a further 39% support “elimination till vaccination”.

Does the support for elimination imply support for Level 4 lockdowns? If so, then for how long and for how many more lockdowns will people support?

How do the 39% supporting elimination till vaccination interpret their position?

Israel has vaccinated a large proportion of its population with the same Pfizer vaccine we are relying on. Yet, that vaccine has proved insufficiently effective against the Delta variant. Infections in Israel have skyrocketed of late.

A recent paper by Pfizer’s own scientists shows vaccine efficacy (VE) for infection with the Delta variant falls by 10 percentage points per month, to be just 53% if the second jab was more than 4 months ago. Falling protection was almost as fast against other variants, declining by 8 percentage points per month.

VE for the at-risk elderly (≥ 65 years) starts low and wanes at a similar rate as for all-age groups: VE against infection (from all variants) is highest at 80%, within a month of the second jab, and by four months later VE is down to 43%.

Waning protection was almost as fast against other variants, declining by 8 percentage points per month.

The Ministry of Health website suggests that New Zealand’s elimination strategy is based on four pillars.

First, “Keep it out”, which involves border control and managed isolation “designed to keep COVID-19 out of the New Zealand community and prevent onward transmission of COVID-19 from New Zealand to other countries (e.g. in the South Pacific)…”

Second, “Prepare for it”: here the key risk being mitigated is to prevent “undetected cases of COVID-19 in the community”.

The third pillar is “Stamp It Out” which “encompasses contact tracing and case management to eliminate COVID-19 as quickly and efficiently as possible from the community, and the activation of higher Alert Levels to contain the spread of any incursion.”

The fourth pillar is “Manage the impact” which is less immediately relevant to the current discussion.

The above does not automatically suggest that “elimination” and “Level 4 lockdowns” need to be synonymous. Leaving aside border control policies, with adequate testing and contact tracing, elimination should be achievable even in the absence of Level 4 lockdowns.

Indeed, other countries such as Taiwan seem to have managed such elimination successfully.

Suppose we assume that elimination is synonymous with lockdowns. What have we learned in the last eighteen months or so?

The headline results from the (in)famous Imperial College paper of Ferguson et al assume an absence of “spontaneous changes in individual behaviour” (p.6).

Yet empirical study of actual humans (e.g. their shopping patterns) finds almost 90% of response was private action, and so the models greatly overstate lockdown efficacy (and are too alarming about the no-lockdown option).

Subsequent studies looked at Covid-19 deaths, as the outcome that really matters, and also because deaths data should be more reliable than infections data. Variation in the strength of lockdown (or lockdown versus no lockdown) is not related to variation in Covid-19 death rates. Yet the question of death with Covid versus death from Covid affects these studies, especially as jurisdictions with good public health data start to retrospectively revise Covid death totals, which were inflated by up to one-third.

The most recent studies look at all-cause mortality, as these data have fewer biases (one is dead or not, irrespective of cause) and also show lockdown collateral damage. Across European countries, stricter lockdowns did not reduce excess mortality, while across 43 countries and all U.S. states excess mortality rose following the imposition of lockdowns.

Local defenders of lockdown may note New Zealand had no excess mortality in calendar year 2020. However, an unprecedented post-lockdown surge in deaths that carried on through the summer into 2021 largely reverses that pattern if the full 12 months after the first lockdown is considered.

While lockdowns have not worked to reduce deaths in the present, they almost certainly harm future life expectancy. This especially matters for New Zealand, due to the following:

The long-run relationship between the real value of our economic activity (what we produce) and life expectancy is 50% higher than the OECD average. A 10% fall in real GDP, in the long-run, reduces NZ life expectancy 1.8% below what it otherwise would be. So these trade-offs should matter more here than elsewhere.

Real GDP in 2020 was 5.2% below expectation (using the last 2019 fiscal update). Part of this fall was outside our control but much is from a “go hard” approach. With a Covid response stringency of the median OECD country our 2020 GDP growth rate would be 3 percentage points higher (lockdown stringency is unrelated to mortality so this is all pain no gain).

The $14 billion of output not produced in 2020 is not shifted through time, it is a permanent loss. The same will be true for the 2021 lockdown. A share of future output also has to go on debt-servicing, as NZ tried to borrow her way out of this pandemic, and so is not available to fund improvements in life expectancy.

New Zealand residents currently alive can expect 224 million more life years (based on the latest 2017-19 period life tables). If real GDP ultimately falls 10% below what was expected pre-Covid (e.g. if Level 4 lasts as long as in 2020), and if we apportion half of this to the unusually harsh NZ response (rather than to overseas factors), then our politicians and health bureaucrats will have presided over a fall in life expectancy where there are two million fewer life years than would otherwise be expected. If this loss was full concentrated on a select group, it is equivalent to 46,000 deaths.

In case one doubts these calculations, note that the Treasury long-term fiscal forecasts released recently show future life expectancy is almost two years below what they had previously forecast in 2016. 

Putting all of the above together, a thorough review by Canadian economist Douglas Allen concluded that lockdowns will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures.