Vaccine-required zones seem unworkable to me: ours is a highly connected society and it’s common for a single household to have members who have jobs / school separated by many miles. Self-sufficiency is completely impossible in the modern world—the closest example is probably North Korea, but that’s probably not a model we want to pursue.
There are also immense transaction costs here: there’s no area where everyone wants (or doesn’t want) to be vaccinated, so implementing this would require massive migration, with immense costs.
It seems to me you’ve hit on one of the most interesting and challenging things about Covid policy (at both a government and a household level): many of the usual libertarian-ish solutions don’t work here, because of the difficulty of keeping one person’s choices from impacting everyone around them.
residents would be able to come and go as they see fit
When I said self-sufficient, I didn’t mean that nobody ever has to leave, but that ~95% of daily life can be lived without leaving the zone. And that is an aspiration, not something that breaks the proposal if it can’t be attained.
If you have a community of vaccinated people, the nice thing is that even if some of them have jobs that put them around non-vaccinated people, first: that person is less likely to get infected at any given point in time, and second: if/when they do get infected, the people they are in contact with will be much less likely to get infected as a result. Both of these combine to mean that someone who lives in a vaccine-only zone will be better-protected than someone who lives outside of one.
I agree that there transaction costs involved, since moving is not a small deal. This can certainly slow down the proposal relative to the ideal, but it hardly seems like a killer argument against implementing vaccine-only zones (as long as it is ensured that implementing the zone doesn’t require forcing any existing population to move, i.e. founding in a currently sparsely populated area)
Vaccine-required zones seem unworkable to me: ours is a highly connected society and it’s common for a single household to have members who have jobs / school separated by many miles. Self-sufficiency is completely impossible in the modern world—the closest example is probably North Korea, but that’s probably not a model we want to pursue.
There are also immense transaction costs here: there’s no area where everyone wants (or doesn’t want) to be vaccinated, so implementing this would require massive migration, with immense costs.
It seems to me you’ve hit on one of the most interesting and challenging things about Covid policy (at both a government and a household level): many of the usual libertarian-ish solutions don’t work here, because of the difficulty of keeping one person’s choices from impacting everyone around them.
In the post I say:
If you have a community of vaccinated people, the nice thing is that even if some of them have jobs that put them around non-vaccinated people, first: that person is less likely to get infected at any given point in time, and second: if/when they do get infected, the people they are in contact with will be much less likely to get infected as a result. Both of these combine to mean that someone who lives in a vaccine-only zone will be better-protected than someone who lives outside of one.
I agree that there transaction costs involved, since moving is not a small deal. This can certainly slow down the proposal relative to the ideal, but it hardly seems like a killer argument against implementing vaccine-only zones (as long as it is ensured that implementing the zone doesn’t require forcing any existing population to move, i.e. founding in a currently sparsely populated area)