Gigi Foster estimates COVID lockdowns cost young people 116x any benefits - EP205

Economics Explored

Professor Gigi Foster talks about her paper "COVID's Cohort of Losers" which argues that COVID lockdowns and other restrictions disproportionately imposed costs on young people with few offsetting benefits. Gigi is a Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and was named the 2019 Young Economist of the Year by the Economic Society of Australia.

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About this episode’s guest: Gigi Foster

Gigi Foster is a Professor with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, having joined UNSW in 2009 after six years at the University of South Australia. Formally educated at Yale University (BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics) and the University of Maryland (PhD in Economics), she works in diverse fields including education, social influence, corruption, lab experiments, time use, behavioural economics, and Australian policy.

Gigi’s research contributions regularly inform public debates and appear in both specialised and cross-disciplinary outlets (e.g., Quantitative Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology, Human Relations). Her teaching, featuring strategic innovation and integration with research, was awarded a 2017 Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

Named 2019 Young Economist of the Year by the Economic Society of Australia, Gigi has filled numerous roles of service to the profession and engages heavily on economic matters with the Australian community. As one of Australia’s leading economics communicators, her regular media appearances include co-hosting The Economists, a national economics talk-radio program and podcast series premiered in 2018, with Peter Martin AM on ABC Radio National.

What’s covered in EP205

• Intro to the cost and benefits of lockdowns. (3:22)
• Quality adjusted life year (QALY) and WELLBY. (8:07)
• Fear and the crowd. (13:47)
• The history of the cordon sanitaire. (16:58)
• How many lives were saved? (22:14)
• The cost and benefits of lock-downs. (27:25)
• The economics of the lockdown. (34:24)
• How do we determine the severity of pandemics? (36:25)
• The difference between the 1918 flu and COVID-19. (41:18)
• Citizen juries. (46:35)
• New laws about misinformation and disinformation. (49:45)
• Health and good nutrition. (56:01)

Links relevant to the conversation

Gigi’s paper for CIS:

https://www.cis.org.au/publication/covids-cohort-of-losers-the-intergenerational-burden-of-the-governments-coronavirus-response/

Information on WELLBYs:

HM Treasury’s Wellbeing Guidance for Appraisal: Supplementary Green Book Guidance

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