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by wayoutthere 2285 days ago
You're absolutely right; our economy is far too interconnected to isolate specific industries. Right now it's a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" situation where the companies that are able to sustain operations (legally or illegally) will reap huge rewards when everything starts to go back to some version of normal.

I honestly think the thing we will learn from this pandemic is that we can't stop a modern economy like this for a couple months without also incurring significant loss of life. If this shutdown extends more than a month we're going to see supplies start to run low and people will panic. Grocery stores around me (large northeastern city) are already having trouble restocking.

2 comments

Careful, things may not go back to normal and we may have a lasting recession. This is especially so if we don't do things to help the rest of the economic ecosystem alive during this period of little to no commerce in some sectors.

At the same time, I hope Tesla is going as far as they can to protect their workers... and that will probably be the real story at the end of all of this, "What companies did to protect their workers and the economy around them."

I think it's already too late; we've ground the nation to a halt and it will take a while to restart. I work for a company that is often cited for knowing these kinds of things, and we were told today to operate under the assumption that the economy will be more or less shut down until May/June, with normal economic activity not resuming until the end of Q3. All that said, the companies that can keep as much of their operations going until then will be in a much better position to come out of this intact.

We're heading into the next great depression, and it's going to take a New Deal type of effort to recover. Trump is actually in a remarkably similar position to Hoover in all this too; so it's not unprecedented to be headed into something like this with a nincompoop at the helm.

A severe and sustained global economic depression could kill significantly more people than CV19, mostly in Africa and other poor regions. It could also trigger a half-million first-time homeless in the US.

We need to "Flatten the curve" enough to spread out critical care capacity surges without over-achieving to the extent we cause even more harm long-term to the world's poorest populations. We need a constant gradual rate of CV19 spread. If we "full stop" CV19's spread now, when social distancing and lockdowns lift, we'll be facing Wuhan/Italy surges again.

This is the time I really miss having adults running the federal government. Individual states are flying blind while everyone at the federal level is too worried about how the boss will take it to effectively coordinate.