Re:Coronavirus and Credibility
by pdonis on Monday April 06, 2020 @11:52PM
(#22800218)
> During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."
That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.
> The economy needs to change
The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.
What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.
> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently
Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.
Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.
There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.
That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.
> The economy needs to change
The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.
What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.
> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently
Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.
Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.
There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.