Someone here has the misconception that the powers-to-be plan on containing pandemics, just as most have the misconception that the people who created the controlled demolition of the worlds' economy, now plan on repairing the economy.

Not to be rude, nor disrespectful, but someone here needs to stop reading corporately controlled medias, or they will continue believing that Al Qaeda is a threat to the people who live under the control of the corporation known as THE UNITED STATES of AMERICA and that Iran is the bad guy.

Becker's method of estimating the costs is a bit puzzling.

"To get a monetary value of the aggregate cost of another such great pandemic, we assume that the comparable statistical values of life in other countries equal $5 million times the ratio of the per capita incomes to the US per capita income. For example, the statistical value of life for a typical young person in a country with half the per capita income of the US would be $2.5 million. Then if we assume that the same percent of the population would die from such a pandemic in all countries, the total cost of a pandemic equal in severity to the Great Pandemic would be over $100 trillion. This is such a huge amount that it is hard to visualize. It dwarfs in magnitude the effects of such a pandemic on world GDP, the economic effects that are usually calculated."

........... where does he get the $5 mill worth of life? From wrongful death awards?

......... as a practical matter few would have that much, even those with most "insurance" coverages. In nation of "half the ......... income" it would be yet harder to raise such funds.

...... then in the case of flu how would that amount be spent? Even, were it available, under pandemic conditions, a week or month in intensive care would top out at $50k -$100k or so.

As a practical matter in a "2.8%" pandemic such care would be available to very few. But I fully agree with his conclusion that it would be wise to invest in anti-virals, vaccines.......... and preventative measures.

Perhaps a good start is a strong memo from management to stay home at the first sign of symptoms; looks like a few lost days even on a false positive or a bit of feather-bedding is a bargain!

WOW!!! Think of the stimulus value of 100 trillion spent, not to mention millions fewer people to demand social services. This could be a governmental resuce plan.

On the other hand, most of the flora and fauna of the earth would rejoice if half the human population disappeared overnight. And a young child's life and a old fart's life must be "worth" a whole lot less than $5M, though Medicare and Medicaid will happily pay more than that to keep either alive for two more weeks.

We learned from the 9/11 disaster that a poor, single, orphaned, childfree person's life is worth a whole hell of a lot less than that of a married insurance broker family guy with 4 kids polluting the atmosphere.

Indeed, I would pay a lot to someone who could put birth control in all the world's water.

Чёрт возьми! Круто!Вы Сами ответили.Беру в цитник! Смысл жизни и всё остальное. Решено.Без шуток.

Большое вам не человеческое спасибо. Весь материал очень интересный и увликательный.

Большое вам не человеческое спасибо. Весь материал очень интересный и увликательный.

It is an exaggeration to claim such a large damage from the flu pandemics. If we take the figure of 20 trillion dollars for 60 million lives seriously, Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward and The Great Cultural Revolution should have already wiped out 20 trillion dollars from China's wealth that is almost 5 times today's GDP of China per year!

Hi.. this is a very informative post

If 3% of Americans were ill enough to require hospitalization from the flu, each of the 6000 hospitals in the US would have to admit an average of 1666 patients. Since the average hospital bed size is somewhere around 150, this might represent a problem, not to mention that many of the care givers would be ill and unable to function. In Europe, it would be even woese. On any given day in the UK, there are 1 million people waiting to get into a hospital. Rationing you say?

Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago and have been reading it over the past few days.

Интересно, а почему так редко блог обновляете?

In King County Washington in the winter of 2008 there were several days during Jan. and Feb. that the incidence of flu was so great that no beds were available in any hospital or emergency room in the county. Consequently acutely ill patients regardless of their illness were directed to the counties bordering Seattle to the north.

To date the number of deaths from the highly publicized avian flu, and Saars earlier this decade and this current round of swine flu are much less than the annual death toll from "common influenza".

Public health should be less enamored with the sensational and more attentive to the common. Sound economic as well as health policy is much better served by such a mundane but imminently sensible practice.

With all due respect to everyone on this blog, why debate the economics of the swine flu epidemic and not the more significant so-called "autism epidemic ?" I am a diagnosed prodigious savant person with high functioning autism, both in art (see my URL and go to Gallery for savant art and law school savant doodles) and in the law. Denied bar admission for 20 years for no reason other than fear of admitting anyone with autism can really be a lawyer, resulting in lack of access to those of us who "Think in Pictures," our Nation is about to embark on selecting a new Supreme Court Justice from yet more left-brain linear thinkers who only use half their brain -- the left part, instead of nominating and confirming our first Michaelangelo in American history to the Supreme Court -- a person diagnosed with autism.

If President Obama is looking for "the best and brightest," why would anyone who is not counted among the membership of the 30 or so prodigious savant geniuses in the world be selected ?

The tragedy of the autism epidemic, as compared to the swine flu epidemic, is our continued failure to nominate and confirm a diagnosed prodigious savant person with autism (and a Juris Doctorate degree !) who can and does use both halves: the left and right parts of the brain -- all and not part of the entire visuo-spatial and polyglot language parts of the whole human brain

And if the autism epidemic must continue because we only presently have a left-brain Supreme Court, then it is my considered autistic opinion we should ask Congress to establish a counterpart right-brain "Thinking in Pictures" Supreme Court corollary.

I agree with Prof Becker, but we have to consider market failures. In the case of antivirals we know that they are effective, at the best of our knowledge, against a pandemic flu, but public authorities face ambiguity about pandemic occurrence and they have to face huge cost now. WHO recomends at least antivirals for 25-30% of population in every Country. LDCs do not have money to buy them and supply capacity is given. What about a failure in supply side, not enough supply able to face the suggested stockpile of antivirals, and in demand side, high price prevents stockpiling of antivirals? Is there the room for a liability to make generic producers able to increase the supply at an administrated price?
Vaccines are a public goods, but there is a given capacity of production at most the global capacity is one and half bl. of doses. The supply is not elastic and firms are risk averse as a consequence they produce a new vaccine if and only if they have a market risk sharing. There is ambiguity about the possible outbreak of a pandemic flu as prof Becker says, than how to overcome this shortage? What about a trust fund public and private financed by an hypotecated tax on medical sales to finance production of vaccines for global and neglected diseases?

Let us all attack the pharma companies as being greedy and heartless and then ask (demand) that they produce vaccines for the world at a loss and in a hurry and without legal protections for possible bad outcomes. Right! And what vaccine have you been smoking?

Viral vaccine science and technology is uncertain at best. Should the vaccine be a protein or DNA? Should be be live or killed? Should it be engineered or natural? What will be the death rate from the vaccine itself? Will it work in the most vulnerable?

Ah yes, we all want perfect security, perfect happiness and immortality. And all provided at someone elses expense and guaranteed by our governments (with someone elses taxes. Good luck!!!

Jim, We really can't vilify Big Pharma as they do create new medicines and while it was crafty of them to purchase enough Republican "Reps" to insure they'd get their full retail for all the drugs sold to Medicare for the "Part B" scam and over twice the amount the VA pays for the same, the move was not illegal (though holding the midnite vote open for an unprecedented amount of times while Admin pressure and arm-twisting was exercised on the needed hold-outs was......... let's agree "a bit edgy?)

It's true too that Pharma has to make a buck to cover their research, and even to cover their saturation ad campaigns which cost far more than does their research. Assuming that they do need to fund these functions AND obtain return percentages larger than nearly any other endeavor, I've a few suggestions for how that might be done w/o hyper-gouging only the patients of the very nation sponsoring the research.

To wit: There has been a Lot of back and forth over "re-importation" of OUR drugs at prices 1/3 or half what the US citizen is required by law to pay, and that with the Canadian or other pharmacist taking a cut for his role in the activity.

Thus! it occurs to me that WE should be able to price shop (in "our?" globalized world?) just as vigorously as does the VA and the foreign nations who buy in bulk to keep THEIR H/C costs down. Which of course gives those nations a tremendous edge in "competing" with the US.

If we did "allow" a competitive capitalism to exist here what would become of the poor drug companies? Well, it strikes me that they would spread their adv and research costs over all of the developed nations and still obtain a fine return on sales or investment.

I'd expect that such a biz model to provide quite a bit more attention to cost saving measures than does today's "rack rate -- take it or leave it -- ) approach with perhaps fewer costly junkets to warm sunny places for the prescribing set.

Do you think I'm being selfish to expect the leading nations of Europe, Canada, AUS, NZ and others to pony up a bit more such that our aging boomers are not saddled with paying three times as much?

I should add that in addition to the profit making, but competitive model I've suggested for first world nations that our Pharma could supply their mass produced product sans development costs and advertising costs to poor nations; even licensing them to mfg lower cost generics in their nations when such is feasible. "We" do not need to profit from every illness or deny medicines to the truly poor and wretched of the world.

Jack,

I agree with most of what you said but be careful where your drugs come from. Check out the site below.

http://www.acsh.org/news/newsid.1774/news_detail.asp

Jim, thanks! As a VA patient I'm not tempted, nor forced by circumstance to bootlegging my prescriptions. And Ha! assuming a functioning market, if WE make the pills here surely they SHOULD be cheapest here.

But! if we do "believe" in globalism and import foods from everywhere that we eat on a daily basis surely we can import drugs, safely, from Europe, the UK, Japan, Canada and others, each of which have longer life spans than the US while spending just over half as much for health care.

We live in a society where the mass media directs our understanding and knowledge of what is happening in our world, driven by entertainment more than anything else.

No doubt, the recent swine flu outbreak was over blown having governments and the public running around with their heads off.

Carrying wolf will present a serious problem of dealing with real thing when it happens.

Roy D. Schickedanz

شات صوتي

Excellent book; thanks for writing it.

Other than one paragraph on page 273, you didn't talk much about the budget deficits which really began early in the Reagan Administration, and averaged between $200 and $400 billion a year through Reagan and Geoge HW Bush. Of course, these continued on George W. Bush. You focus on the increase in the federal deficit (from roughly $1 trillion in 1980 to close to $10 trillion in late 2008). In addition to the negative impact this deficit has on our ability to deal with the current recession, as a follower of Keynes, I would argue that the Republican administrations artificially stimulated the economy for many years, and that this also contributed to the bubble in both housing and investments.

Another factor that has concerned me for years, and is evident in the auto industry, is one of excess productive capacity in many industries (e.g., commercial real estate, obviously housing, many types of manufactured products). This overhang of excess capacity worries me in terms of the timing, magnitude and shape of any economic recovery.

In comparing our current situation with the Great Depression (which I remember as a child), one big difference is the number of two-income households today compared to the 1930s. Unemployment is bad, but it seems to me that there is often at least one wage earner in the family. In my view, this somewhat mitigates the impact of high unemployment on working-age families.

Finally, and this has nothing to do with the main thrust of your outstanding book, I was not surprised but a little disappointed that you accept the arguments for man-made global warming. I am a Democrat who tried to analyze the arguments, pro and con, earlier this year, and concluded that the case had not been made for man-made global warming. If you are interested in our analysis (my brother who was with EPA for 30 years is a co-author), I would be glad to send it to you.

Again, thanks for your service to our country, both on the Federal bench and as a writer and analyst of the economy.

Dean C. Coddington (dcoddington@mcmanisconsulting.com)
8282 South Peninsula Drive
Littleton, CO 80120
303-794-3055

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Jailed for Drawing Cartoons!!!!!!!!

http://www.cartoonsbyirfan.com/mid_day.php
Ever heard that before?

Read it now: Mid Day Contempt Controversy : Cartoonist Irfan & 3 of his colleagues were sentenced for four months by Delhi High Court over making a cartoon on former Chief Justice of India'.

Cartoon is the most visible democracy index.

However, Cartooning had sent 4 Mid-Day journalists to jail for 4 Months! Incredible, isn’t it?

Cartoons – loved by all the ages are not mere disfigured sketches in black & white, but rather are more alive than the most of the living groups.

Cartoons – have got the power to speak truth in the most humble way!

Cartoons – don’t fear to be like or disliked, they are very honest in their manner and they mirror the real complex life in simple and plain manner.

Cartoons on the Former Chief Justice of India YK Sabharwal sketched by Irfan Khan of Mid-Day newspaper raised many eyebrows, which was showing the peoples’ view of Sabharwal’s dealing. The whole Mid-Day team was held guilty and sentenced to four months' imprisonment. The issue brought the media around the world together in protest. The case is still pending in the Supreme Court of India.

I bet now you would you like to see more of him, so go ahead and entertain yourself with all matters of mind explained through simple cartoons! You are welcome in the world of Cartoons by Irfan!

Click here to read all…

……… and the fight continues in Supreme Court of India till date...