there. are. on the balkan 2 worlds apart we often hear that human life is priceless which may sound virtuous as a political statement but it's simply not true in the canonical terms economists have at a price to act if your mother lived like everything else on the market is susceptible to fluctuations but what is the cost of putting human lives above everything else while to discuss that i'm now joined by david hammond arson a research fellow with the hoover institution at stanford university professor henderson it's good to talk to you thank you very much for your time and if you're

actually now one of the things that has been possible in me is that all of the call that 9000 pandemic is that in many countries it's economists spread merrily liberally minded economists who are very much in favor of the strictest possible while many it could mean all exist and other public health professionals are a forum or are reserved about such tools mashers how do you explain that. what i think it what economists did early on starting in march the reason university of chicago study was they took the most extreme. model which was the imperial college of london model which has been shown to be fundamentally flawed and they said ok let's take that as given and then let's look at let's kind of see what policies will save how many lives and they came up with us an astounding measure 1760000 wives saved which now by the way birch really no

one believes that anyway that's what they said and then they took this value of a statistical life that economists talk about i can explain that a little more she wanted multiplied one by the other and while i got almost a trillion dollars in benefits and they said well lock downs are extremely costly but they are going to cost close to a trillion so therefore we should do it. is was it an economic consideration rather than a moral or ideological one that's correct but by the way i should have said lockdowns let me just read you what they study they study combine the home isolation of suspect cases on koren 1000 of those living in the same household as suspect cases and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk well guess what we can and we could have has essentially had all of that without lock downs so even that was. done even justify a lot of parents so that's striking and there is a want to call that 19 response that i find i think the most cynical and that is

in mandating those top almost to the low down government supposedly chose lives over money and the reason i macs are 2 reasons why i take issue with out 1st is that they i think they chose lives over other lives and 2nd the motivating factor if i somebody else of money and i'm wrong and. you're correct i'm now now to give their. do so if you look suicides have gone way up other times or things have gone up there's still if the if the military from other diseases is now going out across europe because people yet received necessary procedures on time right so if we could have magically handed vaccine by now you could pretty much be sure we've saved lives but one of the studies shows that wait a minute you'll get the lives lost later and so there isn't that much of a saving

a lot of but let me point out about the tradeoff between money and you make a very good point it's some people's lives versus other people's money which is problematic morally but it also just even a structural look at how we react are a large we act as if our lives are worth a finite amount not a new term you cross the street you take a risk you get in your car you take a risk and we we still live in the world where death does exist there is no vaccinate against it and i think many people are now days of pretending that somehow it disappeared because as i've seen you point out in one of your articles 78 percent of all 19 deaths in the united states are people over 65 so it's not so much about saving their lives but prolonging bound by a few months or maybe a few years i have a huge cost to society and other groups for example let's take our children they have been taken out of school for you know many months on hands and children you know they you know it could be a life threatening situations

a i wonder if it's even possible in economic terms at least to protect one group without causing some amount of damage to the other well it's possible to expect to protect one group naming the elderly without causing much damage the other 6 so the one of the worst things that it was shut schools down because i looked at the data the other day the number of people age 14 and under lost their lives so far from over 1000 united states remember we go under 20000 number of people 14 under have lost their lives is really sick shit got this right is 12. people and so when them go in that they don't want to until you get sick or they don't get to be very sick we get closer to her community that was one of the biggest mistakes and then the other big mistake is what governor cuomo of new york where he said he put out executive order in march that said if you're

a nursing home and someone has cobra dirtied or someone might have it but we haven't tested them you've got to accept them without testing that's crazy and i think we can attribute a few 1000 deaths to that pennsylvania governor did it also and i believe the new jersey governor now i started this interview by referencing the value of a human life something that economists call the value of it's the to stick a life we see it be if our as far as i know in the united states it's currently at 10 $1000000.00 per person although i've seen from economists use different figures to calculate the tonsil covered $1000.00 on it how arbitrary or solid that figure is what goes into calculating that number because it's used in a lot of resonance of the cost of the current matters yes let me tell you how we come up with that we come up with that with market data so that means it's not arbitrary it might be wrong but it's not arbitrary and the idea is you look at what

a worker has to be paid all of the things equal to except a tiny increase in risk in a year so let's say there's an increase of one in 10000 i'm losing your life on a job in a year. and let's say that turns out to be $500.00 to take that risk more than $10000.00 workers would have to be paid $10000.00 times $500.00 which is $5000000.00 to $2.00 to lose a statistical life one in 10000 times 10000 is one and so that's how they do it the 5000000 tends to be close to the wall and the 10000000 tends to be close to the heart but one thing it doesn't take account of was the older system like me on. 69 i've got fewer years of wife left so really all of the things equal my value of life is probably lower than the value of life of someone like you resolve your sleep very young and you to a good care of my house i'm going to ask you a question about it later but. just for the record i do think that life is very

valuable i'm just very uncomfortable with saying that if the highest value because . existence is ultimately about all life not only human life and death is also part of life now i understand the british and can no longer afford to say a large slab nature take its course they have to be seen as a sparing no means to protect the lives of their citizens do you think that's actually a good change in as far as social and political norms are concerned i think it wasn't putting human life above all else it was putting human life to avoid cold 19 above all else. and eat right because as you pointed out we have losses in in other areas probably from other diseases and certainly we've had more suicides united states than is typical in a month so it's not even clear that supporting life above all else and then also

let's even say that saving lives from coburg 19 go back to my nursing home example that was actually not putting life above all else so it's a mess it's what government does actually make a mess of it and then there's a very well studied phenomena in economics and moral hazard one somebody takes after bigger risks because the consequences of that action ah footed by somebody else i want to leave that has come into play here by making the government's farm was susceptible to the risks of call that night and sometimes quite outlandishly define the risks and being almost oblivious to the consequences and the cost of taking those matters well i think there's something to that but let me just give the other side their due my daughter was missing for father's day this weekend she went out with a friend she's an adult she had a cold night she test just before coming home so she knew she wasn't during a shoot out with a friend from high school days and they were into

a bar and no one was wearing masks there was no social distancing it was all these young people and based. so she left you know it was like they weren't doing the basics they were doing just the easy basics so there was moral hazard because the odds that they get sick are very low but they can pass it on while some of the rest really very interesting and other very interesting and intriguing phenomena and about 19 because it. shifted responsibility here for personnel have outcomes from an individual to the society or to somebody else just because there are so many asymptomatic carriers bodies are considered to be walking weapons what do you think about that there's a tarion right. answer here you know respect i think there's something to that and here's what happened. when the government kind of took over at various state level

$45.00 states imposed a lockdown out of 50 states. then you know that they they kind of took it over but also look at the bad advice that the anthony family gave where he admits now that he lied he will use that word but he lied he said mass don't matter and he admits now he did it so that professionals would get the mast up so so when the major health officials why people take them less seriously in the future so i think that was a real problem again and there would have been i think a little more not a lot misaligned but a little more responsibility if they'd been straight with us. but look professor henderson as much as people hate to admit it susceptibility to complications from car that 19 is a matter of 2 factors wise age as we agreed before there is no vaccine against death yet and 2nd one is a state of mid to boley house which to

a large extent is solved driven if we accept that asymptomatic carriers are a danger just a. we apply the same standard to people who don't take proper here of doubt on how one bad create a new moral hazard i do whatever i please with my body but you have to change your life your life circumstances. in order to protect me can i put that in my words and maybe slightly more gently and i said this in an article in early april staying in a lockdowns now i was one of the 1st to say that basically if you look at who's at risk it's order people with co-morbidities well guess what a very low percent of them are all played outside the home so it's relatively easy there's this car unshipped in liability in action i miss the one bill be called lowest cost of a waiter we should cross the border to the person as the least cost should be the $1.00 avoiding the problem and that's kind of what you're saying so if you're one

of those people who's old with co-morbidities stay home it's very easy and it's relatively easy for older people run up to younger people or people were 40 your shift you need to make a living and so that i think is what should have happened well at home dads taking into account next time around those low downs are rolled out but for the time being after festa henderson let's take a very short break we'll be back in just a few moments. 54 jets and more than 1300 military personnel are headed to heal some air force base in alaska where is that to say come on i'll show you what's the reason

for any type of enhanced u.s. military presence in this area russia. what is it suddenly about the south china sea that makes. and so of it 11000000000 barrels of oil. take a look at this map who really owns what kind of says no it belongs to us india says no we claim that that belongs to us both of these countries have nuclear weapons capabilities there is reason for concern so that's why we're going to drill down on this story for you today right here on the news or direction shows where you know as we always like to say we do believe by golly it's time to do news again.

you can't be thrilled with yet you like. to. welcome back to worlds apart with david henderson a research fellow with the hoover institution at stanford university and dr henderson our discussion about 1000 is enough to get us into hot water but i want to push both of us into an even more controversial territory and that is the racial tensions in the united states and i want to start with the data. the conventional and now almost obligatory a wisdom is that. you know why is privilege of white supremacy

a continuous exerting. its having a hand on black communities is that supported by the economic data and can you actually calculate the impact of racism on that people who leave right now. ok so i wouldn't put it so much as white privilege i think if i look at my life i don't see that i was privileged i grew up in a cafe that a final 50. well guess what the only thing i have is my brain and so if i outsource my brain to others and let them say what's true i'm in way hot hot or water then being accused of having white privilege so if you think of privilege as having something to do with well i grew up in a distinctly non wealthy family now there's room one way that i'm all of the things equal substantially better off than a black person in my situation i have looked at the data there's

a guy named roland fryer who had an excellent piece in the wall street journal a couple days ago in which he pointed out and he just he went to he's black he went against all his own biases just to watch the data and he said no there's not if i recall correctly there is not a. dramatic difference in unarmed black men being killed by cops versus an unarmed white man but there are dramatic differences in the number of times they're stopped they're just driving a wall and they're doing nothing wrong and they're stopped way more like a multiple of the percentage for white people and that matters but i wrote an article and i don't know if you want to take away yet or are stuck on this but i wrote an article saying here's what we do know black widely hood's matter and when i look at what's in the way of black livelihoods a lot of government regulations are on the way now to those regulations apply to everyone black and white yes but if you look at the areas where they apply they

tend to just fortunately black people the true disha one historically was the minimum wage and gunner mirrorball who was a kind of a social democrat from sweden wrote this classic in the 1000 shorties called america an american dilemma about the situation of black people. it was a very talented book it's a classic gambit i do it was published that i think way back in the forty's do you think that argument still stands because i mean when he make the point and then all fast forward to now one of the things he studied was the minimum wage and he pointed out that the minimum wage was differentially hurting black people why because on average they were less productive than white people and so if you add there being west productive and there's some discrimination then it isn't any longer worth it for a white employer to hire many of them and so it was when they met it was really when the minimum wage got heat back in the late forty's early fifty's that we started seeing a big divergence in black teenage unemployment and white teen or john employment

and so the minimum wage differential hurt them and it was meant to john f. kennedy almost on a senate committee area night you could see 7 sad he was he understood that an increase in minimum wage would hurt black people in the south and help his white workers in massachusetts now and so you know i'm sorry for jumping into that since yesterday and that mentioned. mr president candidate i want to mention another presidential candidate in this point joe biden who as part of his. can pay for the office proposes to double the minimum wage in the united face to $15.00 an hour as far as i remember i guess saying. people asked specifically black people would actually be heard events tend to pass yes unskilled people would be hurt and that differentially therefore affects blacks you especially black youths and the

reason is this a minimum wage doesn't guarantee you a job it guarantees you that if you get a job you be paid that wage but history so i see that guarantee that means you're less likely to get the job and so i would predict. probably over a 1000000 people would lose their job if the minimum wage were doubled to 50 now they want to phase it in so maybe $800000.00. and that would be differentially in communities ripple out of black people alabama mississippi lower wage states and other interesting point you're making in that article is that what's hurting the black community more of them other communities is. access if occupational licensing and one of the fascinating examples you provide is hair braiding which many black women and i say maybe mad as well in gaijin but. 16 american states require a special license to do something like that i checked some of the states they tend

to be democratic and i think the funny thing about american politics is that democratic states tend to favor more regulation rather than law as even in the made about just my anecdotal impression in any case do you think the time has come to abolish something like that because obviously. there seems to be. a consensus on the need to do something for the black community to provide them with better and more patooties yes i think it is time to abolish it was always time to abolish but especially now and just let me point out you did your research well i didn't know about the democratic states that's interesting i didn't count them i just looked there were 16 but here's the weird thing you have to get a cosmetology license in those states you have to pay hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars you have to take hundreds of hours of training and what's one of the main things you learn to do use chemicals what's the thing you do not do when

braiding use chemical so it's clearly a protectionist measure by existing hairdressers to price out their competition so you are getting rid of that would help getting went to berkeley all occupational licensing would help because we have other ways of. people and you know we got yelp we've got all these other things and if you look it was never consumers who were saying we want protection we want licensing it was always people in those occupations already firmly entrenched who wanted to keep the competition out so yes that would help and by the way the obama administration or council economic advisors had a very good report on this the last couple years they were in office weighing out some of the problems of occupation a licensor. i don't want to get through as involved in the end of the american politics you know we russians have a bad reputation in the engine. when another important factor is segregation

factor that you mention is housing and there was an equality is a most present if you know long house democrats voting cities like new york chicago philadelphia san francisco etc i understand that those cities are very . special maybe they are the victims of their own success and do you think there is actually an alien both been. party leadership and the cost of housing and the sprout of segregation among their i mean you know you what i know and then i can work backward to answer that question what i know is it is true if you look at the cities that have done the most restrict housing is restricted in the supply of housing that makes the price so high it's places like los angeles san francisco washington new york and all city all those cities have democratic mayors however i do think the push to restrict housing is more bipartisan the better if you just

look at the average person you look at a homeowner who says hey i don't want to lose my house to lose 20 percent of its value i'm going to stop that apartment complex down the street and unfortunately in our society property rights just aren't nearly as respected as they were so those people get to intervene and pray. or slow the building of a ghost projects and i think it's also. perhaps an unpleasant picture that poverty is really color blind because it when you look at the. homeless population in that city it's you can see that. you know people of all colors you know trap in poverty now i am in the time to have left i want to ask you about one more solution that we are proposing and that is. a higher availability of charter schools in black communities you argue that in those schools children may receive better and cheaper education and that can be a win win both for the taxpayers and the students and their family right why do you

think it hasn't taken off yet the teachers union the teachers union typically charter schools are not unionized and also the teachers aren't paid as much because you get actually dedicated teachers who mainly want to teach and they'll take a pay cut to teach there and and. the average charter school costs about $5000.00 west pursued than the average traditional government school and so it is win win as you say but of course the loser would be the teachers' unions i think that's a huge part of well i think there is also another factor and i have a friend who runs. an out of charter schools very successful charter schools in the united states and whenever he looks at a possible new location and he identifies a black community as a major business risk do you know do you want to guess why. i'd like to

hear why while he sat in black communities it's almost impossible to ensure the stability of student population almost half of students move every year and that's because black women tend to be. very mobile when it comes to their private life whenever they want to move with a new boyfriend they take their kid out of school and it makes all i think the hospital to ensure good academic standards and you know sustainable student population which is wot charter schools are a soft on and he never encounters anything of the kind of other minority communities and interesting i'm not sure i got it how to actually fix that because he can't tell women to sort of prioritize that kid's education over their private lives but without that you cannot also ensure any educational of business continues

in well i've got a fix but it might be illegal and the fix would be you apply to a charter school whether you're black or white because the same thing would apply are used and maybe it is legal because it would be destroyed by race and you and you have to show that you have lived in that area for the last 2 years i mean that's not perfect but that gets a real literal around this mobility issue but if you haven't i mean if you leave with the obama and the you know that the air problem of single motherhood and absent father and it is a very prominent problem in the black community it is if if if you are faced with that i simply don't understand how anyone can solve that issue od them the black community itself and i'll be with sure that that's possible because when you talk to many black people they believe that that's the legacy of racism and you know a long history of the families being pulled apart forcibly so. do you think looking at something that could be worked on. i do it on their congress and

one of the most important things i taught before retard was think on the margin so i don't think of the whole black community can compare to cure people let's say you come out of my solution you're going to allude to marry or house or whatever for 2 years in order for your skin to be in school suddenly there's an incentive will it work for everyone no but obese. i'm black parent so will say you know what this is worse and the way you solve problems is one little piece of the time the only thing i ever liked out of chairman mao who was a horrible horrible mass murderer kind of like alan was when he said a singer of a 1000 mile march begins with a single step i think on the margin mile after mile and you'll get some more while i'm but that's promised on this sumption that the you are the one who is spirits to make about that rather than the waiting for the society to change so i think the saudis think of particular people in society society change not all society changes

at once in fact some people never change but some of them will and those parents will get those mothers to pick which will get a better education for their chins well i really hope professor henderson that they hear advise anyway we have to leave it there thank you very much for the lightning conversation. and thank you for watching healthy series again next week on a world apart. are. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of

the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then. in the main stories of the week here not a moscow funny homelessness delayed world war 2 victory parade marking the 75th. for the defeat of nazi germany we had correspondents at the very heart of the action when it comes to weaponry this machine is really. for instance a carries for guided antitank missiles you can see them over there. and i see racism resolution by the un human rights council sparks anger from washington to support chrissy and from n.g.o.s to for effectively failing to mention any u.s. role in the problem and russia begins voting on constitutional reforms with to reconsider making people cast their ballots online only due to coronavirus concern .