Andrew Cuomo is discussed in The Bob Zadek Show exclusively in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown policies of 2020. The excerpts do not cover his biography, his earlier offices, or his career after the period under discussion. He appears instead as a named example of a governor who, in the view of the program’s host and guests, treated the preservation of life as a value to be pursued without regard to cost.
The lockdown trade-off
In a March 2020 episode, Jacob Sullum invoked Cuomo while discussing how governments should respond to uncertainty about the mortality rate of COVID-19. Sullum said that if you listen to Andrew Cuomo, his inclination is that given the uncertainty, the focus should be on preventing deaths and saving lives while ignoring everything else. Sullum called that position clearly irrational, arguing that when government imposes regulation aimed at protecting public safety and health, it routinely takes into account not only how many lives the regulation is expected to save but also how much it will cost, assigning a dollar value — usually around $8 or $9 million — to each life saved or death prevented How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020). He added that if a regulation spends billions while saving only a handful of lives, it is not supposed to be imposed.
Sullum’s broader argument in the same episode was that the shorter-term question is whether hospitals have been overwhelmed, and that the longer-term question is how to move from total lockdown to a functioning economy. He suggested antibody testing to identify people who had recovered and presumably had immunity, and more narrowly tailored approaches to protect the elderly and people with serious pre-existing conditions rather than shutting down everything. He said he did not see enough discussion of those alternatives by politicians How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020).
”Even one life is priceless”
Bob Zadek returned to Cuomo’s framing in a July 2020 episode, in the context of what he described as arbitrary actions taken by governors who had assumed extraordinary, almost dictatorial powers. Zadek said that implicit in those actions is a decision that, writ large, people staying healthy is more important than people earning a living. He quoted Cuomo as saying, “Even one life is priceless,” and paired the quotation with one he attributed to Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania, “First we deal with life, then we deal with livelihoods.” Zadek called this utter insanity and an utterly irrational, non-data-driven decision to subordinate economic well-being to health well-being The Mini-Administrative State (2020).
The same episode’s closing segment was largely devoted to the work of Glenn Roper and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which Roper described as concerned about the erosion of the separation of powers. Roper directed listeners to the organization’s website and invited them to call if they were aware of a way the organization could help push back against government overreach The Mini-Administrative State (2020). Cuomo is not mentioned in that portion of the exchange.
The value of a statistical life
A November 2021 episode with Ryan Bourne treated Cuomo’s statement as the starting point for a sustained discussion of how economists value mortality risk. Zadek recalled that Andrew Cuomo, when he was Governor of New York, defending what Zadek called his authoritarian behavior, said he would do all that he could to save even one life because even one life basically has immeasurable value. Zadek said this teed up a question that produced serious public discussion about the value of one human life, and that the study of economics applied to this conversation requires making a calculation of how much must be spent to save one life and whether that public expenditure makes sense Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021). He noted that the relevant chapter of Bourne’s book was titled “How Much Would You Spend to Save My Life? An Introduction to the Value of a Statistical Life.”
Bourne explained that economists derive the value of a statistical life from labor market observation: workers in risky jobs such as mining or high-rise construction earn a compensating differential, and dividing the average amount a person must be paid to bear a risk by the elevated death risk itself yields the value. He cited Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University, who reckons that for very low risks at work, observed behavior suggests a collective value of about $10 million on any life mitigated by regulation Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021). Bourne then raised an objection specific to COVID-19: those figures come from labor market studies, while many of the people most at risk from the disease are elderly and not in labor markets. He said literature shows elderly people tend to be willing to pay less on average than middle-aged people to bear a given risk, and that economists adjusting for such factors have thought the $10 million figure should be reduced by between a third and two-thirds, to something more like $3 million per life saved. At that lower figure, he said, the cost-benefit calculus of lockdowns looks very different and the benefits are much smaller.
Bourne also said he and Zadek agreed on the lockdown question, describing the strongest case for extreme measures as very early on, when action was taken on a precautionary basis, or just before vaccines were rolled out, when a life saved today would be almost guaranteed by high-efficacy vaccines. Everything in between, he said, he was highly critical of continued blanket measures. Asked how politicians might have decided differently had they applied the value of a statistical life, Bourne said he thought they would first look to alleviate the worst death risks — reducing risk in nursing homes, not sending people back from healthcare settings to nursing homes, insisting on masking, and paying staff to live within nursing homes for weeks to avoid people coming in and out. Beyond that, he said, they would have been much more skeptical of crude blanket lockdowns and would have thought about the risks of COVID rather than dividing businesses into essential and non-essential Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021).
Federalism and the states
Cuomo appears once more, in an April 2020 episode on state assertions of authority against Washington. Zadek observed that the states then pushing back were progressive ones — Newsom in California and Cuomo in New York, along with the governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and, a little, Massachusetts — and that all of them were Democratic governors. He said he hoped that fact was not significant, and that he was encouraged to find a return to original federalism being discussed in polite conversation Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020). Frank Buckley’s contribution to that episode concerned federalism generally: he described an internal fragility in the arrangement, a tendency toward bigness and centralizing power in Washington, and said that a state independence referendum would not really be binding but would begin a process of negotiations over federal debt, federal property, free trade in goods and people, and continued relations with the rest of the country. Buckley said the most likely consequence of such a bargain would be a return to the federalism of 200 years back, the federalism of the founders. Cuomo is named only in Zadek’s list of governors; the substance of Buckley’s remarks does not concern him.
Across episodes: the same question, sharpened
The same question — whether a governor may treat lives saved as a value that outweighs all competing costs — runs through three episodes, and the treatment changes in precision rather than in conclusion. In March 2020, Sullum framed the issue as one of regulatory cost-benefit analysis and cited Cuomo’s inclination to focus on preventing deaths and ignore everything else How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown (2020). In July 2020, Zadek quoted Cuomo’s “Even one life is priceless” directly and called the underlying decision insane The Mini-Administrative State (2020). In November 2021, Bourne supplied the analytical apparatus the earlier episodes lacked, deriving the value of a statistical life from compensating differentials, naming Viscusi and the $10 million figure, and arguing for a downward adjustment to roughly $3 million for a disease whose victims are disproportionately elderly Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021). The April 2020 episode adds a separate thread, listing Cuomo among Democratic governors resisting Washington, but does not develop the lockdown argument Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biographical information about Cuomo: no date or place of birth, no family, no education, no earlier or later offices, and no account of his tenure as Governor of New York beyond the pandemic statements quoted. They do not describe any New York state policy, executive order, or statute by name, and they do not report any figure for New York’s death toll, hospitalizations, or economic losses. No guest or host defends Cuomo’s position in his own words; his statements reach the program only through Sullum’s paraphrase, Zadek’s quotation, and Zadek’s recollection. The excerpts also break off mid-exchange in two episodes, so the surrounding argument is not available.