Re:State projections for Covid-19
by SpicyLemonZest on Friday March 20, 2020 @07:49PM
(#22642938)
On the contrary, we're learning that our economies are incredibly resilient. Nobody's concerned that we'll stop being able to deliver food, water, toilet paper, Netflix - the businesses which provide those basic necessities (and imagine telling someone even 30 years ago that on-demand home video is a basic necessity!) are almost entirely unaffected. This is a success story of capitalism by any reasonable metric - I would not have predicted that Amazon could keep making deliveries and Costco could continually restock their shelves in the middle of a global pandemic.
Unfortunately, even the best economic system can't disguise the fact that fewer people working means fewer products and services are available.
You should probably wait for another couple of months before declaring it a "success story". The lockdown has barely begun, and we haven't even see the first large wave of people fresh out of jobs getting their major bills in the mail.
Re:State projections for Covid-19
by meheleventyone on Saturday March 21, 2020 @03:30AM
(#22645173)
There’s a big ‘yet’ there. Also that things didn’t immediately collapse isn’t the economy showing resilience. It cannot be a binary thing like that. We’re seeing the first waves of mass unemployment, of enormous businesses like Boeing collapsing, of small businesses being grossly unprepared for any kind of disruption and of individuals likewise being ill prepared. The economy we leave this emergency with will be a shadow of the one we went in with. A gross structural failure.
There are going to be trillions of dollars spent attempting to bail out the economies of the world.
What we’re learning globally to a greater or lesser extent is that our economies are not resilient. That capitalism of various kinds has failed us. And that when it comes down to it we need one another to give a shit about each other.