A working paper that examined how U.S. states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic found that states with strict lockdowns and other COVID-19 policies did little to prevent COVID-19 deaths, but those economic restrictions and school closures proved costly in other ways.
“School closures may ultimately prove to be the most costly policy decision of the pandemic era in both economic and mortality terms,” University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and fellow authors Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity wrote in the paper.
“One study found that school closures at the end of the previous 2019-2020 school year are associated with 13.8 million years of life lost. An [National Institutes of Health] analysis found that life expectancy for high school graduates is 4 to 6 years longer than high school dropouts,” the authors wrote. “The [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] estimates that learning losses from pandemic era school closures could cause a 3 percent decline in lifetime earnings, and that a loss of just one third of a year of learning has a long-term economic impact of $14 trillion.”
…