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I find the idea of being unvaccinated creating an externality, and therefore receptive to externality-targeting policy, to be a very weak. Not specifically for covid, but in general for vaccines.
When calculating externalities, you need to set a reference point - externality relative to what. Generally, this reference point is set relative to doing nothing. For instance, when it comes to climate, we choose the reference point of no pollution, and therefore class polluters as inflicting a negative externality. If we instead, erroneously, set the reference point of yes pollution, we'd instead find that non-polluters are inflicting a positive externality. Opposite of consensus on how this is calculated. Since the default state of humans is to not be vaccinated, externalities need to be set relative to this. Because of this, the demand for someone else to be vaccinated creates the externality. I'm yet to see a rigorous explanation of why being unvaccinated is the negative externality, rather than demanding that others be vaccinated creating the negative externality.
To give an example this applied to a hypothetical situation of whether unvaccinated and vaccinated people should meet at a venue.
Nobody wants to be there: No externality.
Only one person wants to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there but one of the two insists the other be vaccinated: Externality, as they impose a cost of being vaccinated on someone, while reaping all the (hypothetical) reward of supposedly lower chance of being infected.
Besides, vaccine mandates are not vaccinations. As in, the policy of a vaccine mandate doesn't vaccinate people. It merely punishes them for being unvaccinated. The standard justification for externality-targeting policies is that they can resolve market failures where people impose costs on others for their own benefit, by redistributing both the costs and benefits. However, vaccine mandates don't have benefits to redistribute, they just have the costs of the loss of utility from harming unvaccinated people. Well, I guess you could get really nebulous and claim that e.g firing unvaccinated people redistributes wages to vaccinated people, or suggest that vaccinated people emotionally benefit from seeing unvaccinated people be needlessly harmed, but that's not what any advocate of vaccine mandates claims to want.
Further, if we're doing a full accounting of covid-related externalities, we should do it evenly. Advocates of lockdowns and other restrictions reaped all the rewards (emotional, health risk etc) while imposing costs on me (emotional, health risk etc). This is unfair. I've seen people crunch the numbers on how much being unvaccinated "costs" to healthcare. It's about $1k for the average person, which is way way lower than a lot of other voluntary activities that are considered sacrosanct to restrict, but whatever. Great. I'll gladly pay that amount, provided I am compensated for all the other externalities. I expect to massively benefit from this arrangement overall. The chance of me being hospitalized with covid is negligible. The financial damage of restrictions, once you sum up years of lost income, QALY losses, increased taxes, increased cost of living due to inflation, the loss of government services etc, will come in at well over $100k.
This post seems confused by its own argument. You setup an equivalence between a negative externality of X and a positive externality of not-X, which is logically sound. You then ask why we're treating X as a negative externality instead of treating not-X as negative externality. This does not follow from your reasoning.
Indeed, the logical equivalence of "X is a negative externality with respect to not-X baseline" and "not-X is a positive externality with respect to the X baseline", means that which framing you choose to do the calculation in, cannot possibly alter the result. Minimizing f(x) and maximizing -f(x) gives you the same value of x.
People being vaccinated imposes a cost on them. This cost varies from minor (risk related to the vaccine itself) to really quite substantial (the emotional consequences of being subjected to a medical treatment you do not want). We know some people place quite a high cost on them being vaccinated because of what they were willing to continue suffering in the presence of vaccine mandates. I don't see why demanding others be vaccinated shouldn't be treated as the negative externality, rather than remaining unvaccinated being the negative externality. Similarly, the implementation of vaccine mandates creates a negative externality, via the suffering of victims of vaccine mandates for the sake of either the health or emotional gratification of supporters of the mandate.
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I'm not sure your notion of "default" is really relevant. Either not getting vaccinated causes a negative externality or getting vaccinated causes a positive externality.
The question of whether you want to internalize that by paying people to be vaccinated or levying fines on people for not being vaccinated is, theoretically at least, a minor implementation detail.
Claiming that the government insisting on vaccinations causes negative externalities is a bit weird since the government is typically seen as optimizing for social welfare, and so should already be accounting for the benefits and costs to citizens.
You can argue that a vaccine mandate is bad policy (in which case by all means argue that), but using the word "externality" doesn't absolve you of the requirement to actually argue that.
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Have you ever heard of the Coase theorem?
Property rights have to already be defined in order for the Coase theorem to apply (among a litany of other assumptions). But who has what property rights over their bodies is exactly what’s at issue here.
Very true, the Coase theorem relies on some unrealistic assumptions. However it's relevant regarding the discussion on reference points. If we're talking about a system where pollution is discouraged through taxes, that's not really any different from a system where non-pollution is encouraged through subsidies. That's why I found the talk about reference points to be a bit puzzling.
“Not really any different” in what sense? And evaluating whether something’s an externality still requires a fixed point of reference relative to which it can be considered an externality. That was the whole point of the post above. I don’t really see what the relevance of Coase is there.
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This proves too much. The default state of humans is famously to live lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Maybe you're going for a libertarian argument that the state should be doing nothing or almost nothing, but otherwise this seems like a strange conception of the responsibilities of the state to me.
I think you are misunderstanding the argument. The point he's making about default states is establishing a policy baseline to measure from, not we should never move away from that baseline.
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