No Way to Grow Up
I&#x27;d love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it&#x27;s not just the educational loss now, it&#x27;s the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we&#x27;re causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. There&#x27;s a lot of things that cost less than a thousand person-hours that could be done to help schools stay open.<p>I&#x27;m not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like &quot;we can&#x27;t afford to do the right thing&quot; when the right thing is actually more cost effective.