[OatsAndHoney]

The title is just doublespeak. The article ends with the line: "At 12 weeks, he says, the benefits from a shutdown exceed the costs."

The economy is a human invention, there is nothing natural about it. You can't go on the safari and find a wild S&P500. These consistent demands in the media for a blood sacrifice is outrageous and dehumanizing to the people that have to suffer the consequences.

[bad_user]

While I'm a proponent of restrictions, your argument doesn't make much sense.

It's irrelevant if the economy is human-made or a natural phenomenon, because it is nevertheless what keeps us fed and with a roof over our heads.

There are indications that this depression is as bad as the Great Depression and might be even worse. It is true that there is no food shortage right now, but we might have one, at least from where I'm from, esp due to drought, which affected crops all over Europe. And guess what, during the Great Depression people starved to death.

So if the restrictions continue, I sure hope there's a better plan in place other than taxing the living shit out of the middle class that still have jobs and pay their taxes. Because we all know that the money required to keep the unemployed from starving will not come from the rich.

[Barrin92]

Food shortages would be the results of lack of agricultural output and disruption of supply chains, which by and large is not happening. (At least to no degree that would put you at risk of serious shortages in Europe)

Non-essential workers don't influence a food shortage. If those workers stay home their income may be hurt for a while, but in contrast to 1918 we have a social security system. Nobody's going to starve.

edit: For reference, Greece suffered from 18-25% unemployment for the last ten years. The economic effects of the pandemic will have bad consequences, but it's not an existential issue, it just sucks and will destroy some wealth.

[Izkata]

> and disruption of supply chains, which by and large is not happening. (At least to no degree that would put you at risk of serious shortages in Europe)

It's starting in the US.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/meat-proc...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/26/business/tyson-foods-nyt-ad/i...

[ryb73]

> If those workers stay home their income may be hurt for a while, but in contrast to 1918 we have a social security system.

Depends where you are.

[boudin]

It depends if you see the economy as a source of a result. I don't think the current system was built to feed people. It is the end result of centuries of political decisions, individual actions, wars, trade agreements, etc... It's more an image of the balance of power rather than a tool thought from head to toes to run our socities. So either we think that actually nothing changed in the environment and we can keep the system as it is or we consider that all the changes that have been stressing this system (covid-19, climate change) required some adaptation so that the system stay somewhat balanced.

I think it's where this becomes quite problematic, re-balancing this requires people with a huge amount of power (the wealthiest part of our society) to accept being less powerful. That's where we've been stuck for years now. What we're seeing now is how this system should have changed before we were in this emergency situation because it clearly can't handle actual emergencies.

[bad_user]

> "I don't think the current system was built to feed people"

And yet it does feed people, billions of us. Even more so we have less extreme poverty and fewer people suffering from malnutrition than any other time in human history, with poverty plummeting since 1960 at least.

The current system wasn't built indeed, it was evolved, in tune with the industrial revolution. And it works. In the 19th century over 80% of the world population was living in extreme poverty.

The progress has been immense, both technological and social, in only one century, a blink of an eye in the context of human history. Any such discussion should acknowledge this.

> "...rather than a tool thought from head to toes to run our socities"

Yeah, you know what economic system was designed like that? Communism. So I'm skeptical of any such claims.

[orbifold]

Well you also can’t eat money. So at a certain point there just will not be any stuff to buy if the shutdown continues and people just get checks in the mail. That is magical thinking.

[culturestate]

There is a reachable middle ground between "everyone stays home all the time" and "everyone goes back to work, consequences be damned." It requires close coordination between governments, widely available testing with quick turnarounds, and a mutual understanding that this is a serious situation and we all need to contribute by doing things like wearing a mask, being mindful of personal hygiene, and accommodating those who need space.

The real unknown is whether we have the political and social will to get there.

[the-dude]

What has a drought to do with the current COVID induced crisis?

[buzzkillington]

>The economy is a human invention, there is nothing natural about it.

So is agriculture. And we are currently looking at 30 million deaths due to famine this year with what has been done so far. If we continue the lockdowns it will be a lot more.

So the question is: are 3 million whites in their 70s worth 30 million people of color who are mostly children?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8300297/The-world-f...

[rbg246]

Sorry could you please out the connection between lockdowns in wealthy countries and starvation? I missed that in my reading?

[cma]

> Even before the pandemic hit, parts of East Africa and South Asia were already facing severe food shortages caused by drought and the worst locust infestations for decades.

Sounds like it isn't all caused by the pandemic.

With the US essentially joining OPEC, maybe we could divert ethanol destined corn to famine relief.

[bad_user]

The notion that only old people are affected is wrong. And hospitalization rate doesn't differ much between age groups, only fatality rate. And if the healthcare system breaks down due to number of cases, you start seeing a lot of young people dying too.

So you'll get a significant percent of the workforce incapacitated, either because they get sick and need hospitalization, or because their parents or grandparents die. During such a pandemic the economy suffers anyway, because appetite for risk or for buying useless shit people don't need goes down.

N.B. people often point at Sweden these days, as being in a not that bad situation, however note that the Swedes are very disciplined and many of them have isolated themselves voluntarily. Given their culture, their slightly optimistic scenario can't be easily replicated and the jury is still out anyway.

And the comparison you're making is inhumane and possibly a false choice. We should strive to save both the "whites in their 70s" and the poor people of Africa.

[luckylion]

> The notion that only old people are affected is wrong.

Let's not read too much into a sentence that's not super nuanced. It's not only old people, but it's mostly old people and people with severe comorbidities.

> And the comparison you're making is inhumane and possibly a false choice. We should strive to save both the "whites in their 70s" and the poor people of Africa.

Yes, ideally we'll always save everyone. Unfortunately, the world is rarely ideal, so we often have to make choices. If two people need a lung transplant and we only have one, what do we do? There's one 80yo smoker and one otherwise healthy 20yo. Do we flip a coin?

[bad_user]

> It's not only old people, but it's mostly old people and people with severe comorbidities.

You realize that you're speaking of a majority of the population, right? 1 in 3 Americans are prediabetic. Nearly half of Americans suffer from heart disease.

> the world is rarely ideal

That's a platitude.

Also given we do talk about the real world, we also have to consider that a country's first priority is towards saving its own citizens. Not ideal, but a fact, driven by those who vote and pay taxes. Nobody is going to allow the death of their own citizens in order to save people living on another continent.

People bring the starving children of Africa into the discussion without actually caring or doing anything about those children.

> If two people need a lung transplant and we only have one, what do we do?

False analogy. Medical triage is at some point necessary, but that's not what we are talking about.

But I'm glad that you brought this point up, because young people that need oxygen or ventilators will die if they don't receive it.

[luckylion]

> Nobody is going to allow the death of their own citizens in order to save people living on another continent.

It's not just about people on another continent though. Modern life costs money. Keep everything locked down, reduce economic output, and you will feel that. Social programs are too expensive so he US accepts a 10 year class-difference in life expectancy? That'll be increased with a halved economy and taxes drying up completely.

> False analogy. Medical triage is at some point necessary, but that's not what we are talking about.

Sure we are. You can measure the impact of an economic depression on life expectancy. The choice isn't between no deaths, just a tiny bit of inconvenience and every old person dies. It's a higher chance of death for the old and the severely ill vs a general shortening of life expectancy. And there's the uncertainty: we don't know whether we will, in the end, save anyone with a multi-month or multi-year wide-reaching lockdown. But we do have a good idea what will happen if we crash the economy.

[deathgrips]

Are the human requirements for water, food, and shelter also a "human invention"? These needs are only fulfilled by a functioning economy.

[vkou]

They can also be fulfilled by a half-functioning economy.

There's no shortage of any of those things in the Western world.

[deathgrips]

Are you sure about that? Many essential businesses rely on goods that are produced by inessential businesses. These shortages can cascade throughout supply chains.

The big one that no one seriously considers is people running out of money, and then their governments running out of money. It's hard to tax people who can't work.

[vkou]

> Are you sure about that?

Yes, because plenty of economies that modern westerners would describe as grossly inefficient and half-functional, at best, have managed to provide all of those things over the past century.

> Many essential businesses rely on goods that are produced by inessential businesses.

This is false. Consider reading the lists of essential businesses enumerated in the shutdown orders. Businesses that produce goods consumed by essential businesses are essential.

> and then their governments running out of money.

This is also false. Sovereigns that control their currencies cannot run out of money. Especially in a recession, when they have a lot more headroom to inflate[1] by borrowing printed money.

A government is not a household, and its budget is not balanced like one.

[1] During a recession, wealth is destroyed, and the money supply deflates. Deflation is bad. Deflation is incredibly bad. You can combat deflation by having your central bank cause inflation, by printing money, and lending it out - to the government.

[deathgrips]

How much money can we print until people lose faith in the currency? How many months can we do it for? It may take up to 2 years to discover and distribute a working vaccine. Can we print money to pay everyone's food and rent for 2 years?

Why aren't we treating every workplace as essential, since they produce an income for their workers?

[vkou]

> How much money can we print until people lose faith in the currency?

How much money do you think the recession will destroy?

Take that amount, and add a few percentage points of the total money supply to it.

> Can we print money to pay everyone's food and rent for 2 years?

1. This is nonsense. Not everyone is out of work because of the shutdowns.

2. If you want more businesses to re-open, we should be working on better mitigation for the virus. The more testing, the more contact tracing, the more PPE, the better we comply with social distancing requirements, the better we can prevent spread in workplaces, the more non-essential businesses can re-open.

For some reason though, nobody who wants to re-open wants to talk about the work that has to be done, to allow for re-opening to take place.

There's no shortage of work that can be done, to improve the health of the economy. Why aren't we doing it? Could it be because the same political factions that are pushing for re-opening aren't interested in paying for it?

[luckylion]

> There's no shortage of any of those things in the Western world.

Yet. And let's not talk about more advanced things that are also needed. Like medicine, transportation, power etc pp.

"Hey, don't worry about the economy, we can always go back to how life was 300 years ago, we can easily do that with a fraction of the people". Ok, cool, but do you really want to live like that? Are you sure that everybody else wants to?

[dkdk8283]

We will see a second wave of devastation in 6 months when foreclosures hit. We are fucked even if there isn’t a second infection uptick.

The handling of this situation is a perfect demonstration of how the current political system fails us.

Half the people want lockdowns to continue and cite research papers supporting the argument. The other half wants it to end so they can pay their bills.

People are going to die. It can’t be helped.

[ekidd]

> Half the people want lockdowns to continue and cite research papers supporting the argument.

I don't think anybody who's thought about it for more than a few minutes wants the stay-at-home orders to continue indefinitely. I certainly don't, and it's not what my state has proposed.

There are several states that are aiming for something like the South Korean solution: stay-at-home until the level of cases drops low enough that we can test mild symptoms, track contacts, and safely treat everyone who falls ill. This is literally the official proposal in my state, and we're relaxing the stay-at-home order now that the conditions are met.

I won't pretend that this proposal will be easy to execute. IIRC, Seoul just re-closed all its bars after an infected partier visited four bars that hadn't been following the social distancing rules.

As someone in my 40s, my risk of death is fairly low. But a substantial portion of hospitalized cases are younger people, and something like 30% of severe hospitalized cases are showing some loss of lung capacity, loss of kidney function, or micro-clotting with risk of stroke. I earn a living with my brain; stokes scare me.

So you can reopen the economy all you want, but I'm not setting foot in a restaurant, movie theater, airplane or barbershop until I'm vaccinated (or recovered). Whenever possible, I'll be buying from merchants who offer curbside pickup or delivery. And I've been trying to support local merchants as much possible, including takeout from several local restaurants.

[zelphirkalt]

> I don't think anybody who's thought about it for more than a few minutes wants the stay-at-home orders to continue indefinitely. I certainly don't, and it's not what my state has proposed.

Eh, well, I personally would like the lock down to finally actually happen.

Everyone prepare or get help to prepare and then actually have a lock down for 2-3 weeks and beat this virus. Instead we have this 1 friend meeting allowance and some non-essential businesses opening up or people acting incredibly selfish/stupid and doing parties, because they suffer oh so much from isolation.

These are things, that drag a semi-lockdown waaay out and make it actually bad for businesses. It would be half as bad, if not less, if people had discipline and we had acted with strong lock down initially or at any point since then.

I personally have not met with a single friend or person outside this household since the start of semi lock down here, with the exception of buying food, and do not plan to do so. I do not want to be the one responsible for bringing the virus into this household or giving it to anyone else. It might be easy for me as introverted or computer guy, but so what? Of course it will be harder for some other people! There are always differences. It's not like people could not survive 2-3 weeks actual lock down at home, when prepared properly and delivered food in emergency.

We could have a state organized food delivery service for emergency cases, where people did not prepare sufficiently. We could also have avoided people buying too much of certain goods by simply starting out with lock down + purchase per person limitations at the same time.

Another idea: Have a state supported fund for everyone who cannot work during lock down. Make it easy for the working from home population to support everyone else. Do not rely on private people organizing this themselves! I have yet to see the news announcement of there being some official place, organized by government, where I could donate part of my wage, so that people wgo cannot work currently due to the virus get some income. I have seen (and donated to) some private campaigns for gastronomy and similar, but not simply anything for trying to share wages.

The point is, that we need to get back to a point, where tracing all the infections is possible again, fast. Only then we should loosen restrictions. We could be there already, with a little discipline and more government support for helping people instead of relying on private actions.

("Here" is Germany in this case.)

[ekidd]

> Everyone prepare or get help to prepare and then actually have a lock down for 2-3 weeks and beat this virus.

I don't think it's quite that easy. Wuhan shut down on January 25th, and they were still seeing 500 new cases a day by the end of February. This was despite a very strict lockdown, and a serious effort to find and isolate all the mild cases until they got better. Something like 80% of transmission was within households. Nobody was going out to party. Once this thing gets started, it's a beast to stop, taking something like 5 to 8 weeks bring a major urban cluster mostly under control.

Our state has been lucky so far. We have about 1 new case per 100,000 people per day, and less than 2% of our tests are coming back positive. So we're preparing to move ahead with contact tracing and a staged reopening.

[zelphirkalt]

OK, I don't know how long it would really precisely take of course, given proper lock down. Maybe it's even longer than 3 weeks.

You say that 2% of the 100.000 tests come back positive.

Who can monitor 2000 people around the clock and track every single person they have any contact with? Honestly, where do such capacities come from? Or are people just told to stay at home and it goes unchecked, whether they actually do?

I imagine that to be very difficult to contact trace perfectly. Each infected person could infect many others, if not properly isolated. 2000 is still a lot to trace. If we were talking about 100 to 400 maybe or so, then I could imagine that being done.

[Izkata]

> Wuhan shut down on January 25th, and they were still seeing 500 new cases a day by the end of February.

Wuhan was still on lockdown until April - almost three months.

[dkdk8283]

Great, you have the money to do it. Avoid risk.

Humans have had a long successful streak without major devastation.

That’s now changed.

Being strong does matter. Being afraid in your palace doesn’t.

Funny how history repeats itself.

[Gibbon1]

What's also telling is all these 'calculations' deny the public any agency. As if they aren't going to try and protect themselves unless the government forces them to. To believe that is insane.

As a member of the public and old enough to have a good sense of mortality, I don't care what happens to anyone's paper wealth if it means I don't die of this. I'm not going to a movie, or a bar, or a concert. Not happening.

[didibus]

It does seem like we are in a strange situation where we can produce all essentials for everyone, and in fact, we can do so so efficiently that we don't need everyone in order to do so.

Imagine a scenario where 5 people can provide for 10. It seems we are in such a scenario. But it used to be that the 5 essential workers would take the surplus of their production and give it to the other 5 non-essential workers in exchange for non-essential things like serving them a beer.

Now that those activities are risky to the 5 who can provide, they don't want to catch Covid. As well as currently restricted by the governments themselves. The 5 who produce the essential in enough quantity for all 10 have no incentive to give their surplus away to the other 5.

So logically, if it is true that we produce a surplus from people still employed which could cover all people no longer employed, then it seems all we need is to figure out how to self-organize in a new way, so the surplus are still being distributed to those who are not currently producing. And to find a way which does so while still allowing for social distancing and lockdowns and all that.

This is the ideal, but I really doubt we will figure a way. Thus, the best way we know for now is the traditional economy, which requires people to continue to wilfully spend money on non-essentials. So somehow, we need to strike a balance between Covid protection and motivating and still enabling people to spend on non-essentials.

[js8]

> The 5 who produce the essential in enough quantity for all 10 have no incentive to give their surplus away to the other 5.

Maybe then, the other 5 should stop sitting on their asses and start contributing towards that "essential surplus". For example, they could divide the shifts in half and decrease the chances of getting COVID19 for everybody.

[didibus]

> For example, they could divide the shifts in half and decrease the chances of getting COVID19 for everybody.

That's one of the proposed alternative means of organizing that I've heard. Some of the criticism against it I've heard are the overhead logistically, like the follow up from one shift ending to the next beginning can slow things down. The other criticism I've heard is that the people currently working in those essential jobs don't want to let them go, even partially. There's a human instinct at play, those surplus are their retirement fund, they don't mind working the 40h a week to build it up. Another challenge is education and training, we didn't plan for this, we trained 5 people in essential work, and 5 other in non essential work, so its not like the other 5 can just pick up the work immediately.

I also heard some of the opposite happening, with Covid, essential workers are choosing to reduce their own shifts, to protect themselves, and that now causes a lack of surplus, because we reduced production from pre-Covid. Mixed with the lack of availability in people who have the training to take over their "missing shift", its a problem.

I still personally think it could be a good idea. As we drive up efficiency more and more with the use of technologies, automation, better techniques and processes, we'll just more and more face this problem, Covid or not. The 5 needed to produce for 10 might become 1 needed to produce for 10. I think we could solve the above problem if there was a political will and a populace movement behind it.

A good variant I've heard on it is to make the work week 10 day long, and split shift 5/5. So people work 40h on and take 40h off. That reduces the shift switch overhead, while still allowing two people to contribute to any given job.

[zelphirkalt]

I imagine, that working in shifts actually increases chance of infection, because of aerosols and surface contamination. However, you are right, that it would be fairer to do that.

[Izkata]

Depends on how the shifts are organized. Every-other-week, for example, gives time over the weekend for the viruses to die off.