[simoom22]

When you talk of real wealth being lost, I'm curious how exactly you see that happening. I do agree with your points about exacerbating inequality, but that's as a consequence of the status quo structure of our economy, and going back to work won't fix that. Meanwhile, our factories and equipment aren't going to fall apart in a year, people by and large won't forget how to do their jobs, we were already tossing out 40% of our food, so that's no big change, and the education system, at least in the US, is little more than free lunch and day care for many poor children anyway. It sucks for people entering the job market, but that was the case ten years ago too. I get that the government response is once again failing people (mostly in the US) but do we really want to rush back down the old path when we have a rare opportunity to talk about taking different ones?

[__blockcipher__]

The real wealth lost is all the production we would have had had we not shut down that is now lost forever.

Yes, without shutdown some people would have taken sick days, etc, but the effect would be extremely manageable. We would not have people dropping like flies the way the flawed IMHE model implies.

As to your question about rushing down the old path, it is very inappropriate for the government to destroy peoples’ livelihoods (and make no mistake, it was the government’s / our doing, _not_ covid), and then to turn around and say “you’re only screwed because government isn’t in your life _enough_!”. As your point revealed, this is actually IMO what democrats are very blatantly trying to do (I am calling out a specific party because it really is them who are still pushing for these lockdowns).

It’s not relevant, but know that I support UBI (iff it replaces welfare rather than being in addition to it), but not like this. This would be such an evil way to introduce UBI: manufacturing a problem and then “fixing” it.

—

The inequality exacerbation is not a consequence of our economy. The government created it by creating the concept of “essential workers”. All workers are exactly as essential as the economy (we) decide(s) they are.

But we didn’t just prevent wealth from being created, the media combined with our incompetent public health officials created an unprecedented level of panic and fearmongering that most of us have never seen in our lives. The result? Case studies like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517812... (and no, this was not caused by covid, it was causes by the aforementioned fearmongering)

[cycrutchfield]

If you truly believe that productivity would not have taken a massive hit by letting the pandemic burn through the entire population then I don’t really know what to say. You’ve got some very skewed beliefs.

[__blockcipher__]

What makes you so sure of that? The hospitalization rates per https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4tqvk/dutch_antib... (this is extrapolated from serological data but is in the right ballpark) suggest that not as many would have been taken out of the workforce as you think.

Now, the number of sick days will be far higher than the number of hospitalization-days. But if we're comparing losing, say, 25% of our efficiency, to losing 100% of it...yeah, it actually wouldn't be as massive as most people think.

Anyway, a better characterization of my view is that I view containment as an unworkable strategy (and everything we're seeing in the US further proves that, IMO), therefore we didn't actually avoid any true mortality by locking down. Rather we just postponed it.

We never overwhelmed our healthcare system, and due to cancelling elective surgeries and other important preventative care, we have actually scaled _down_ our healthcare capacity by a massive amount across the country. Tens of thousands of healthcare workers furloughed. How is that sane policy?