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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Many of you have heard the sobering stat officially released last night, that in the 10 months since the pandemic began, COVID-19 has killed more than 1 million people worldwide. As of last night, a terrifying toll compiled from official counts, 206,000 of those officially from the United States. We have 4% of the world's population, 20% of the deaths, and yet, the stat itself is one that many experts say far understates how many have really died.

Just by looking at stats, we can get morally detached from the individual human beings involved. Many of you listening right now may have had someone close to you die, and for you, that number is obviously more than just a number, but for many people who have not been affected personally, the daily death count of the virus has become another piece of news to keep track of among the slurry of this month's troubling things, the possibility of a disputed election, California's wildfires, the president's tax returns.

Empathy fatigue, the point in a mass tragedy where we no longer see victims as individuals but statistics is a recurring human phenomenon. My guest now has written multiple pieces on empathy fatigue over the course of the pandemic. The first one, back in April, was about how human's ingrained optimism makes it hard to imagine and accept the exponential tragedy of a pandemic. Her most recent piece argues that the empathy fatigue in the pandemic is heightened by the demographics most effected, racial minorities, and the elderly.

Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She's also the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World, and her most recent piece in The Atlantic is called A Failure of Empathy Led to 200,000 Deaths. It Has Deep Roots. Olga, thanks so much for coming on today. Welcome.

Olga Khazan: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian: The centerpiece of your article is really this thing that's called the moral machine game. Would you describe that?

Olga: This is a global experiment that ran for several years from 2016 to 2018. Essentially, it was just a computer game that had people decide whether to let an out of control car drive into two different groups of people. Some of them were also animals. For example, there might be a cat or a dog and three little girls on one side or two adult men on the other side. Which of these groups of people would you let the car actually plow into? Through doing these multiple tests like these, I think they got millions of people in 233 countries to play this game, they essentially figured out what kind of lives do we value most, who are we willing to sacrifice if someone has to be sacrificed, and who do we want to save.

Brian: And?

Olga: What they found is essentially that people prefer to spare a greater number of lives, to spare human lives, and unfortunately, to spare young lives. Whenever people saw that the characters at the car was going to plow into were elderly, they were willing to just go ahead and let the car kill those people.

Brian: That is if they had to choose between killing people who are older or killing people who are younger, right?

Olga: Exactly.

Brian: If it was a horrible choice like that in that automobile context. Can you make the alternative case here? If one has to choose between killing elderly people or children, and the usual rationale is lost years of life, which is what you say the rationale is that people usually give, is it just ageism, or can one make a strong case for saving the seniors and killing the kids?

Olga: I'm not suggesting that we do make a case for saving the seniors and killing the kids. My article was descriptive, not prescriptive. I will say that some countries had less of a preference for sacrificing the elderly, particularly, in majority Muslim countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, East Asian countries like Japan and Taiwan. Interestingly, even the elderly participants who played this game also sacrificed the elderly characters with elderly pictures. This is a global preference for sparing young lives and sacrificing the elderly.

Brian: Interesting that it was different in different countries. With respect to race, you point out-- Well, why don't you-- Well, you're right. Sorry, I lost the line for a minute but now I found it. In your article, you write, "White people's brains, psychologically sort minorities as outgroups that stir less empathy." Can you go into that a little more? What constitutes an outgroup in this sense, and what are some ways that that's been psychologically tested?

Olga: There's a whole lot of research on the fact that people generally have less empathy for anyone they consider different from themselves, and race is a huge signifier of that. There's a lot of research on the fact that white people actually don't even process the faces of African Americans the same way they do the faces of white people. It's like this really dark reflex in our brains that's like, "This person's different from me. They're maybe not as worth pulling out all the stops in order to save."

I think that has played a role in why we haven't been as worked up over all these deaths because, among the people who are dying, who are not elderly, they're disproportionately African American. I think that because so many of our policymakers are white, that's making it less of a tragedy that so many people are dying. As one of the researchers that I interviewed for this article said, "If it was attractive, 15-year-old blonde, soccer-playing children who are dying, then, we would have more of a concern."

Brian: What do you think that would mean at the policy level? If we valued the lives of people actually dying from COVID as much of as the lives of people who are not, what do you think that would do to the policy response?

Olga: My article didn't focus as much on the policy response, but a lot has been written about this. I think we could do some of what other countries have been doing, which is to have a more thorough lockdown in parts of the country where the infections are spiraling out of control, meanwhile, pay people essentially freeze the economy in place by giving people an income to stay home as long as they need to.

Even simple things like mailing masks to people instead of requiring them to go out and purchase masks, not opening indoor dining while schools are still closed, having more of the type of response that we've seen from some of the countries that have handled this better. In particular, I mean, speaking of the elderly, I wrote another piece on our really, really awful number of deaths in nursing homes. A lot of that was just the fact that nursing homes have been chronically shortchanged for many years, understaffed. The staff is really low income. They often don't get sick time, so you did have COVID-infected staffers going into nursing homes that ultimately led to a lot of deaths in nursing homes.

Brian: Listeners, we have a few minutes to take some phone calls. I wonder if anyone out there has had someone older in your life succumb to the coronavirus, and I wonder if you have experienced ageism, either by a hospital or other medical staff. I also wonder if you have connections to elderly loved ones in some of the countries that Olga just mentioned, Japan or Taiwan or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, where maybe the value of elderly life is seen differently than it is in the United States. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or if you have a question about anything that Olga Khazan from The Atlantic is saying right now about her article, A Failure of Empathy Led to 200,000 Deaths. It Has Deep Roots.

Overall, older men and women, in this moral machine experiment, were some of the least likely to be spared ranking just above dogs, human criminals, and cats, disturbingly, in that order. There's something confounding about ageism. No one escapes aging, and most people know and love someone older than themselves. You have to because everybody has parents. Why does ageism exist from a psychological or sociological or evolutionary perspective?

Olga: It is interesting. I don't know that we're like programmed to be ageist, but one researcher that I talked to suggested that we subconsciously crave control over how the elderly behave because we, many of us know someone who's elderly, an aging parent or grandparent, even if we may not want to admit this, we subconsciously want to be sure that the elderly don't hog a disproportionate amount of resources and that they step aside when their time comes.

People who've seen the show Succession that explores a lot of those dynamics in one family, it could be something like that. It could be more just the utilitarian argument, like you mentioned, which is that, "Well, you've lived a long life. Maybe it's okay that you're going to die of COVID, it's 65 or 66, because you've lived this really long time and maybe it was just your time." I think that is one way that a lot of people rationalize it.

Brian: Daniel in Port Washington, you're on WNYC with Olga Khazan from The Atlantic. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi. Speaking of rationalization, how do you fit into the equation our acceptance of pneumonia and flu deaths every other year, which multiplied, would add up to a similar figure?

Brian: Right, whether it's a similar figure in a given year or not, tens of thousands of people die from the flu every year, and we've never had these conversations.

Olga: I wouldn't say that we've never had these conversations. I mean, I know that-- It's fewer people that die from the flu. It's about 50,000 every year. Actually, health reporters, at least, really encourage people to get the flu shot every year because of these deaths. It's not necessarily, with the flu, always the elderly,. I would have to check that. Often, those are immunocompromised people who can't get the flu shot and who are more vulnerable to flu infections. I think that we do talk about the flu, it's just that we've never had a respiratory event that's this big before.

Brian: For an ageist society, we surely seem to want old men to be president. How does the fact that we have a 74-year-old in the White House and a 77-year-old running against him complicate this idea that we don't empathize or think positively about older Americans?

Olga: I don't know if it's that we don't think positively about them in any way. I think that it's-- I think that if Trump did pass away, I just don't think it would be seen as necessarily that tragic for people. I think that some people do think of the elderly as good leaders or wise leaders, or they could just see them as better leaders than the young. I'm not really an expert on why we have such elderly leaders.

Brian: Well, I noticed that you recently wrote a piece about a strategy that Biden is employing to make young voters think more positively about him. What is that strategy, if you want to go to that article of yours briefly? Do you have a sense of whether it's working?

Olga: It's a really interesting strategy where a lot of, especially young, Democrats are not as excited about Biden as they were about, say, Elizabeth Warren or some of the more left-leaning candidates early in the primary. What they have devised, some of these liberal groups, is like, "Well, if you vote for Biden, just think about it, he'll have Elizabeth Warren be his advisor and he'll have maybe Pete Buttigieg be in his cabinet or something." They're creating this team of Democratic avengers, is what they're calling it. "You're not just voting for Biden, you're voting for this whole crew of liberals that's going to come in and fight for you." I'm not sure if it's working. I guess we'll find out in six weeks or whatever it is. A few Democrats that I talked to did see the appeal of that.

Brian: Or it might take 12 weeks, but that's another show. In our last two minutes to tie together these two pieces of yours, I'm curious if we value the lives of people actually dying from COVID as much as the lives of the people who are not. What do you think that would do to the politics? Because Donald Trump's base and the Fox News audience are disproportionately older white people, and yet, that's who downplays the severity of the virus the most, Trump and Fox News.

Olga: I mean, that's one of the most puzzling things about it, is that there's a huge preference for sacrificing the elderly, even among the elderly, so it makes sense that elderly Fox News viewers are not very worked up about these COVID deaths. My argument is not that we should be sacrificing young people instead of old people, it's that we don't really have to sacrifice anybody. We could be taking COVID more seriously. We could be having policies that spare a lot more lives, in general, including the lives of the elderly. it's not necessarily a choice that we have to make.

Brian: Quick call on the notion of empathy itself, Jim in Brooklyn. Jim, we've got 20 seconds for you. Hi.

Jim: Hi. My argument is simply, basically, your argument can be dismissed as just an empathetic liberal, but you're a step away from essentially being sympathetic, which is a bleeding heart liberal argument. The other point I was trying to make was we're in a capitalist society, and this is basically a survival of the fittest, and how if this pandemic was to happen again in, let's say, 20 years, we'll probably have the same result.

Brian: Jim, thank you. Well, he put a lot of big words on there. Does it have something to do with our capitalist society, in your opinion, or liberal bleeding heart empathy? Is that where empathy comes from?

Olga: I don't necessarily think empathy comes from being liberal, but I will say that the American devotion to work did explain some of why we had reopenings so soon is because people place so much emphasis on getting back to work, getting the economy going, and I think other countries are maybe more comfortable with just paying people to stay home.

Brian: Olga Khazan's latest article in The Atlantic is A Failure of Empathy Led to 200,000 Deaths. It Has Deep Roots. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Olga: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Brian: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on Our Daily Podcast. Our interns are Dan Girma and Erica Scalise this fall. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Julianna Fonda is that the audio controls most days, along with Liora Noam-Kravitz, Matt Marando, and Milton Ruiz. I'm Brian Lehrer, talk to you tomorrow morning. We'll break down tonight's debate.

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