Don’t forget about the children when closing schools

This fall, 1.7 million Ohio children will return to school for the first time in nearly half a year. Coronavirus brought about a second, unexpected summertime for Ohio’s K-12 students, surprising parents across the country with a new role as full-time educators and forcing teachers across the state to become remote educators. In the meantime, Ohio’s students suffered.

The goal of school closings is to slow the spread of COVID-19. Schools are locations of high traffic and high contact in close quarters, so the potential for spread of infectious disease in these locations is high. This is why the influenza protocol has placed school closures high on the list for social distancing measures to slow the spread of disease.

COVID-19, however, has had an uneven impact on people of different ages in the state of Ohio. While not a single school-age person in the state of Ohio has died of COVID-19, 90% of Ohio’s COVID-19 deaths have been suffered by those age 60 and up.

This means school closures are only a moderately effective tool for reducing COVID-19 deaths. According to a recent study in The Lancet that surveyed 616 studies and conducted meta-analysis on 16 high-quality studies, school closures alone would only prevent about 2-4% of deaths caused by COVID-19. A recent analysis conducted by my firm found this means we should only expect school closures in the fall to save at most a couple hundred lives.

Saving lives is important. But it is also something that we pay heavily to do. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institute suggests that learning loss by students over the period of COVID-19 school closures could cost students tens of thousands of dollars in future lost wages. Using more conservative assumptions than the Brookings study, we find that further school closures could cost students more than $22 billion in future discounted earnings due to learning loss over that time period.

This implies that school closures act as an intergenerational transfer. By closing schools, we extend the lives of a couple hundred elderly from anywhere from a few months to a couple decades by taking out a loan to be paid for with lost future earnings of children. Thus, a few mostly elderly people receive very large benefits paid for with relatively smaller costs (on the order of $18,000 or so) on a per-person basis for 1.7 million children.

When using standard valuation techniques, the lost future wages for today’s children, even when discounting to factor in present bias, vastly outweigh the present risk of death reduction brought about by school closures. This isn’t to say school closures are bad policy. School closures could be favored by policymakers who heavily prefer current lives being saved to future benefits for today’s children.

School closures could also be justified by a policymaker who wants to spare a small number of people of a large cost by spreading that cost (albeit inefficiently) across a large number of other people. When push comes to shove, however, the reality is that school closures for COVID-19 are strategy to reduce current risk of death for mostly elderly people financed with the future wages of today’s children.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

Scioto Analysis Releases Cost-Benefit Analysis on COVID School Closures

Scioto Analysis released a cost-benefit analysis on school closures for COVID-19 Monday morning. Co-authors Rob Moore and Noah Stein project that an additional four-month closing of schools in the fall of 2020 would likely save 100-210 lives but would come at significant cost to K-12 students in the form of future earnings.

“We know from the literature on ‘summer slide’ that months off of school hurt students’ future labor market earnings potential,” said Stein. “On a statewide scale, this adds up to tens of billions of dollars of discounted future wage losses for Ohio’s 1.7 million K-12 students.”

Overall, the cost-benefit analysis found that total costs in lost wages outweigh benefits measured in risk of death reduction by a factor of 14 to 1. The paper also touches on distributional impacts since further school closings would amount to a relatively small cost exacted on a large number of school-age children in exchange for a large benefit for a small number of elderly residents.

“More than nine out of ten COVID deaths in Ohio are among people age sixty and up and we have yet to record a COVID death in Ohio among school-age children,” said Moore. “Meanwhile, the average student loses out on $12,000-27,000 in lifetime earnings by losing four months of schooling. School closings are in essence an intergenerational transfer.”

Overall, the analysts estimate that further school closings would exact $22-37 billion in net social costs to the state when balancing wage losses with risk of death reduction benefits.

This is the second best-practices cost-benefit analysis conducted on a state policy in the state of Ohio in the past decade. The first, Ohio Earned Income Tax Credit Refundability: A Cost-Benefit Analysis, was released by Scioto Analysis in August 2019.

Cap-And-Trade for Carbon Emissions

On Monday, Scioto Analysis released a brief on what a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would do for the state economy.

“Cap-and-trade is an efficient way to abate carbon emissions,” said Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore. “By allowing firms that can efficiently reduce emissions to sell emissions allowances and those that cannot to incur costs, a cap-and-trade system is able to promote economic efficiency and improve the environment simultaneously.”

Scioto Analysis also estimated that the auction in carbon emissions could raise $2.3-4.1 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

This analysis was conducted by Cruz Eduardo Flores Vera, MPP candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Writing support was provided by Rob Moore of Scioto Analysis and additional analytical support was provided by Isabel Clayter, Masashi Hamano, and Ashwin MB of the University of California, Berkeley.

Moore Elected President of Gross National Happiness USA

On Wednesday, Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore was elected president of Gross National Happiness USA, a non-profit organization with a mission to increase personal happiness and our collective wellbeing by changing how we measure progress and success.

“Scioto Analysis’s mission is Gross National Happiness USA’s mission—helping improve public policy by helping policymakers understand the impacts of their decisions,” said Moore. “This is a natural fit.”

Moore has been a board member for Gross National Happiness USA since 2018 and Scioto Analysis published its first genuine progress indicator study, Ohio’s Economy: 2009-2016, in conjunction with Gross National Happiness USA.

Moore will lead GNHUSA as it executes its strategic plan, which comprises of gathering data that contributes to measures of wellbeing, advocating for the use of holistic measures of wellbeing by promoting data-driven approaches, working with decision-makers to facilitate policies based on wellbeing, and engaging with individuals and organizations to build a nationwide effort for better metrics.

His term will be begin July 1st, 2020.

Race is a big factor in Ohio police killings

According to CNN, police shot and killed about 1,000 people in the United States in 2018. Compare this to Germany, where police shot and killed 11 people, Sweden, where police shot and killed six people, the U.K., where police shot and killed three people, and New Zealand, where police shot and killed a whopping one person.

These numbers aren’t just because the U.S. has more people, either. Even on a per-capita basis, U.S. citizens are shot and killed by police anywhere from five times as much as in Sweden to over thirty times as much as in the U.K.

It’s not just the prevalence of police killings that is prompting hundreds of thousands of people across the country to take to the streets, though. It’s the disparity in victimization rates between black and white Americans. About a quarter of people killed by police in America are black, much higher than the 13% of total Americans who are black.

Ohio is an especially bad offender when it comes to racial disparities in police killings. From 2013 to 2019, 215 Ohioans were killed by police, 80 of whom were black. That means over a third (37%) of people killed by police over that time period were black, despite the fact that only 12% of Ohioans as a whole are black according to Census Bureau estimates. This 25-percentage-point disparity makes Ohio a top 10 worst state for racial disparities in police killings and constitutes a bigger disparity than all of its neighboring states.

When people across the country think about large-scale activism, they might not think Columbus, Ohio, but Ohio’s capital city has exploded with protests over the past couple of weeks in the wake of the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. Columbus is no stranger to police killings, though: Officers of the Columbus Division of Police killed 40 people from 2013 to 2019, more than three times as many as any other agency in the state of Ohio. Of those 40 people killed by Columbus Division of Police officers, 27 were black, a number more than three times as high as any other agency in the state.

In case you were following along, this means that over two-thirds of people killed by Columbus Division of Police officers were black. This is in a city that is, according to the US Census Bureau, only 29% black as a whole. That means that black people are being killed by police at a rate 39 percentage points higher than would be expected by their share of the Columbus population. If Columbus was its own state, it would only be behind Rhode Island for how disproportionately its police officers kill black residents.

So this means that Columbus police are killing black people at higher rates than police across Ohio are, who are killing black people at higher rates than police across the United States are, who are killing people as a whole at higher rates than police in other developed countries are.

Despite these sobering statistics, police in the Ohio kill people on average less than the country as a whole, killing 26 people per 10 million citizens per year compared the nationwide average of 34, a lower rate than 36 other states. Hopefully after this nationwide wakeup call, cities across the state will figure out why they can’t extend the same courtesy to their black residents.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

Analyzing the Impacts of Motor Fuel Taxation

This morning, Scioto Analysis released a brief on motor fuel taxation, projecting the impacts on policy options for raising the motor fuel tax.

“Through our analysis, we were able to determine that an increase in the motor fuel tax would reduce consumption of gasoline by 1.6 million to 9.1 million gallons per year, which would reduce use of non-renewables and carbon emissions,” said Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore. “At the same time, the options we studied could raise anywhere from $200 million to $1 billion in new revenue, which could significantly bolster state revenues at a time they are lacking.”

This policy brief is one in a series of briefs on raising revenues while preserving the state economy. A recent study by Scioto Analysis found that use of non-renewables was one of the biggest drags on the state economy throughout the 2010s, leading to a less sustainable state economy.

“If use of non-renewables had stayed from from 2009 to 2018, the economy would have been $5.2 billion larger at the end of the decade than it was,” said Moore.

This analysis was conducted by Masashi Hamano, MPP candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Writing and analytical support was provided by Rob Moore of Scioto Analysis and additional analytical support was provided by Isabel Clayter, Ashwin MB, and Cruz Eduardo Flores Vera of the University of California, Berkeley.

Moore speaks at Genuine Progress Panel

Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore spoke Wednesday afternoon at a webinar hosted by the United States Society for Ecological Economics on Scioto Analysis’s work on the state Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) over the past two years.

“It was such a pleasure to present with GPI researchers from across the country on this topic,” said Moore. “We had some tough conversations about right calculation of GPI and how an indicator like GPI can be used to inform the policymaking process.”

Also presenting their work calculating state GPIs Mairi-Jane Fox of Regis University in Colorado, Eli Lazarus of the University of California, Berkeley, Gunseli Berik of the University of Utah, and Regina Ostergaard-Klem of Hawaii Pacific University.

The full recording of the presentation can be found here, with Moore’s portion beginning at 17:30. The 2020 release of Scioto Analysis’s GPI report can be found here.

Road Pricing for Ohio

This morning, Scioto Analysis released an analysis of road pricing options for the state of Ohio. The brief covers the costs incurred by commuters and the public in the form of time and CO2 emissions from commuting, how road pricing can free up traffic and reduce emissions from stop-and-go gridlock while raising revenue for the state.

“The revenue impacts would not be large, but the $2 million in projected revenue could go to public transportation, support for low-income commuters, or plugging COVID-19 budget holes,” said Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore.

The study reviewed options for more or less aggressive road pricing strategies and their impact on commute times and the environment. On average, strategies could save the average commuter 3-10 hours a year in added commute time and could reduce 10 to 20 million gallons of excess fuel consumption per year.

This analysis was conducted by Isabel Clayter, MPP candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Writing support was provided by Rob Moore of Scioto Analysis and additional analytical support was provided by Masashi Hamano, Ashwin MB, and Cruz Eduardo Flores Vera of the University of California, Berkeley.

Ohio crosses the 2,000-death mark: COVID-19 in the Buckeye State

On Tuesday, the state of Ohio crossed the 2,000-death threshold for COVID-19. The crisis is far from over over, but in this moment when restaurants and other businesses are opening back up, we have an opportunity to look at what COVID-19 has looked like in Ohio so far. First, let’s look at cases.

The most concentrated outbreaks by far have been in Marion and Pickaway counties, home to two medium-security correctional institutions that were revealed to have serious outbreaks through widespread prison testing. As can be seen from above, the third- through tenth-most concentrated counties don’t even compare to the top two counties in cases per 100,000 residents.

Deaths are more spread out than cases by county, suggesting that testing was behind some of the large numbers in Marion and Pickaway counties. That being said, Pickaway county is still the third-highest in the state for deaths, which means the outbreak may be more severe in this county. The top 10 counties for deaths per 100,000 residents are mostly suburban, but with some urban and rural counties included as well.

Ohio’s deaths have been heavily skewed towards older residents. About half of Ohio’s deaths were among people age 80 or older, three quarters were among people 70 or older, and more than 9 in 10 were people 60 or older. Only 3% of Ohio’s deaths were among those younger than 50 and there have been no recorded COVID-19 deaths in Ohio among children or teenagers.

Brookings reports that in each the ten countries with the most COVID-19 deaths, men outnumber women in number of deaths. In eight of these ten countries, men are dying in numbers 50% higher than women and in the Netherlands the number of men who have died is more than double the number of women who have died. In Ohio, we are seeing a lot more parity between men and women when it comes to deaths than in these countries.

We haven’t heard the phrase “flatten the curve” a lot recently, but that was the original goal of social distancing: to ease the burden on our medical system so everyone who needed treatment could get it. This means that looking at cases or death rates is not the appropriate chart to judge our success with, it is tracking hospital admissions. Hospital admissions reached a peak at about the very end of March, declined sharply through the first half of April, stayed steady through the second half of April, then declined gradually throughout May. Ohio still has a while to go in the COVID crisis, but if we play our cards right, we might be past the worst of it.

There is no script for reopening Ohio

Ohio is opening back up. While our state garnered national and international praise for its initial handling of the coronavirus crisis, we have experienced some notable bumps in the road on the way towards reopening ranging from crowded patios that skirt rules in place to questionable definitions of “mass gathering” that seem to make such skirting unnecessary in the first place.

Probably most troubling for public health advocates and those threatened by COVID-19 during this phase of reopening is how nakedly political the process has been. While the swift enactment of social distancing measures in March operated under the auspices of scientific credibility, even the governor acknowledges the timing of the lifting of these measures has not aligned with White House guidelines for relaxation of social distancing measures.

To say we followed the playbook in March and threw it out in May, however, is wrong. There was no playbook in March. There was no national, White House protocol provided for promoting social distancing. There was no CDC guidance for what should trigger business closings and shelter-in-place orders in the face of a novel coronavirus or any other highly communicable disease for that matter.

While we like to think of pandemic response as a carefully-scripted play, in reality it’s a lot more like taping an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where actors have a general idea of a plot but are making up their lines as they are hit with new conflicts in every successive scene.

That being said, the DeWine administration’s aggressive action against coronavirus was vindicated early. There was no formal cost-benefit analysis conducted prior to the administration’s decision to close large sectors of the economy for months, but subsequent national studies of social distancing measures all suggested that the national-level social distancing measures generate trillions of dollars in risk of death reductions and would almost certainly outweigh the severe economic damage they may create. Subsequent research studying the impact of stay-at-home orders seems to support this analysis, suggesting that stay-at-home orders had a significant impact on reduction of spread of disease in Illinois compared to no-stay-at-home Iowa counties across their border.

Both friends and foes of state social distancing measures have characterized the current moment as a conflict between public health and the economy. This, however, is a false dichotomy. We know that economic factors impact health at the community and individual level. We also know that health impacts economic success, whether it means taking off sick days today or missing school and losing out on human capital accumulation.

Ultimately, the DeWine administration is dealing with an uncomfortable truth: If we didn’t have a script for closing, we certainly don’t have a script for reopening. Sure, the White House has issued a series of recommendations based off an American Enterprise Institute report thrown together in the first weeks of Ohio’s stay-at-home order by a team headed by a former FDA administrator. This is better than nothing but still leaves a lot to be desired, especially considering that original report on how to reopen the economy had no economists among its five coauthors.

No script can’t mean no guidance, though. Policymakers need to listen to public health researchers who continue a familiar refrain: distancing, screening, treatment, vaccine. Ohioans should be asking if mass gatherings for weddings and graduations are necessary in the short-term. Ohioans should be asking why places like Vermont have universal COVID testing while Ohio doesn’t. Ohioans should be asking if we have enough ventilators so we don’t become the next Lombardy or New York City in the case of a second outbreak. And Ohioans should be asking what little things we can do to chip in to speed the development of a vaccine for COVID-19.

In the meantime, we need to preserve our economy, not as some abstraction that correlates with electoral outcomes for incumbents, but as a system that we use to get people things they need and want. This means measuring what matters comprehensively and using these measures to guide our policymaking. There is no tradeoff between economic activity and public health: They are two enterprises inextricably linked. It’s up to us to make sure they walk forward in tandem, supporting one another, with a script or without it.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.