Can you enumerate these people/jobs, and the stuff they need?
I feel I'm slowly coming around to be against lockdowns. I used to think things similar to what you wrote, but I've also been following supply chain news over the past two months. And I keep seeing things like:
- There's a shortage of yeast and flour in stores not because there's a shortage of actual yeasts and flour, but because there's a shortage of store-sized packaging for them. If you want to buy 50 kilos of flour in one bag, there's plenty of that on the market.
- At one point the UK was worried that delivering food into stores will slow down because the UK was running out of cardboard, as people order more while garbage collection for recycling halted. I haven't seen anything on that topic for a while, so maybe it was resolved.
- Recently, it was said that US food production may face problems because of shortage of carbon dioxide. The path here is that shenanigans with oil prices and closing down of various industries caused the plants producing, among other things, carbon dioxide, to shut down.
I'm just waiting for the first stories along the line of "critical sector X is rapidly losing manufacturing capacity as they run out of spare parts for some doodad Y, which are unavailable because they're manufactured by Z, which was deemed non-critical business".
For better or worse, we ended up with complex and deeply interconnected supply chains that nobody seems to have traced properly, so critical industries keep experiencing unexpected and non-obvious issues. This situation doesn't lend itself to shutting down arbitrary pieces of economy.
The problem is that merely being locked down is quite unhealthy in many ways. As anecdote, I'm drinking about twice as much, not exercising at all, canceling dental cleanings, and wouldn't go into a medical setting short of something obviously life-threatening. (And indeed, many people with stroke symptoms aren't going to the ER right away, which can easily be life-changing.)
One essay I just saw made the likely-valid point that the risk here is almost entirely concentrated in the population that's 60+ (and a few younger people with unusual medical conditions).
If so, a better plan than shotgunning the entire economy for a year or two may well be to figure out how to specifically protect those who are vulnerable, and let things run their course with the rest.
In any case, if something cannot go on, it will not. No way we'll be locked down in a year, no matter what pie-in-the-sky handouts are distributed.
This might be a life-stage or life-style thing, but this is probably the healthiest I've been in a long time. I have to be intentional with all my food, so I'm eating almost literally perfectly (though god do I miss restaurants...), and weed fits isolation or zoom hangouts in the way that alcohol fits in-person social events, and is _way_ healthier. And I've had multiple friends my age (late 20s) guiltily admit that this pace of life just feels a lot healthier mentally.
That isn't to say that the psychological challenges aren't sometimes significant, and I have gone from a 4x/wk gymgoer to struggling a little with consistent exercise. And the example of deferring medical care is a good one. But I just thought I'd share a counter-anecdote to the anecdote driving your assumption that being locked-down is necessarily net unhealthy.
Currently in Brussels, where things look quite bad statistically speaking. However, parks are full of people running/exercising/stretching and even walking just to enjoy the sun.
That said, most States have required lockdowns or shelter in place.
In the US system of federalism, the state governors+legislators have much more control over what happens in their state than the President+Congress.
But at scale, lockdown has broken our habits, good and bad. This has a price.
Covid-19 might be the wake-up call you needed to get your personal maintenance in check. This will drag on and may happen again in the future. No time like today.
Crossing into personal attack is not going to have good effects. Maybe this comment didn't quite do that, but you certainly went there downthread.
Policy needs to be decided on the basis of what people will do, not what they should do.
Thanks for your encouragement.
I'm sorry, but it's simply not good enough to say we can't abide this because you can't manage your own faculties. We're facing a virus that spread around the world in days because of normal social contact. Lasting respiratory and cardiac damage is common and reinfection appears to be possible.
People need to do better. Yeah, we're social beasts and struggle, but that's not a reason to abandon the actual goal here. It's possible to get through this with some support.
Willpower is a trainable life skill. We live in a society that does its level-best to undermine willpower to coerce you into bad purchasing decisions, but this is reversible. But you have to engage. Nobody can do this for you.
It is not enough to mandate belt tightening during a crisis, you must also get out there and give a rousing speech so people will want to tighten their belts.
If you just provide “good” policy, but no framework to make it palatable then you have failed before you started.
But many of today's leaders got where they are by division, not unification. Trump would have to do a pretty serious U-turn. Boris Johnson thinks he's Churchill but half the country hates him.
These are not simple times. I'd wonder if gamification (eg stayed-indoors points) could be used to improve this through soft social pressure but I'd suggest the overlap between people out protesting and ignoring rules are probably not the sort to want to engage with that.
Maybe we need this. A drawn-out decimation to teach future generations about how harmful people who insist on putting themselves ahead of the group can be.
You're hoping for death and destruction just to teach people your lesson? Really??
Personally, I'll be glad to be wrong about everything to avoid that outcome.
Yes, the people, who are sustained by their businesses. We can go back and forth on this, but it's not a mutually exclusive "only X is essential, not Y."
We can still sustain people for a while without producing the extra that lets us have a luxurious life... we just need to make sacrifices for a bit.
We need to do a better job of spreading that sacrifice around, is the issue.
What we have stopped are things like restaurants and entertainment... there aren't stockpiles involved with those things, we just aren't going out to eat and aren't going out for entertainment. They can start right back up when we end quarantine.
You should be considering the coronavirus essentially a trial run for any future pandemics or disasters we have to deal with, because it's showing how completely unprepared we are for anything that destabilizes our daily lives. We're lucky that covid-19 isn't deadlier because in the case of a far more serious disease with greater repercussions we'd likely be staring down the barrel of extinction with people clamouring to reopen business so they can die.
In scenarios like this the government should be stepping up to support people so that they can restart their lives when necessary. Rugged individualism doesn't work when you encounter a global disaster that requires everyone to work together.
Welcome to capitalism. Nice of you to join us.
> In scenarios like this the government should be stepping up to support people so that they can restart their lives when necessary.
Government gets its income from people. Who have businesses. Or jobs at businesses.
I've heard that argument before but people never clarify how it will affect the economy. Can you clarify?
Personally I don't know how deaths of 80-year old people (on average, like in Italy) can possibly affect the economy in any serious way, especially compared to the disastrous damage from lockdowns.
You're also discounting the hunger and a lifetime of poverty and misery created by these lockdowns for millions of young people who are not susceptible to that disease.
In a given town, X people will contract the virus. Y of those will die of complications. Z of those people will die without hospitalization. So if you keep the rate of people contracting the virus under a rate of Z people, you can avoid EXTRA deaths due to overwhelming the hospitals.
Had the response in the US been early and holistic, it’s possible we could have avoided national stay at home orders and instead used social distancing to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. But the nation didn’t. So to avoid MORE deaths, sty at home orders were issued.
Again, to repeat, the reason for staying home is to prevent overwhelming hospitals and more people dying. The same amount of people will die (roughly) whether we stay at home or not.
And it’s not just 80 year olds. I’ve seen more 30 year olds on ventilators than I ever need to see again.
400,000 people dying would be 0.1% of the US population.
I'm fairly sure the economy could abosrb that, particularly given the demographic bias of mortality.
416,000, primarily young men, died in WW2 of a population of 160 million.
And what about the percentage with permanent lung damage?
Or if it mutates? Or recovery immunity does not last more than a year or so?
That's without taking into account that less than half of the population will get infected.
And if you're concerned about short duration of immunity, we shouldn't drag that thing for a year, everyone should get sick faster.
Now concentrate that death toll into 4 months. Or less.
You are totally right. And that's why it's so infuriating that the government has done pretty much exactly the opposite. It has prioritized saving huge businesses and propping up the public markets (stock/bonds/futures/etc).
In my opinion, it would have been a lot more effective to give money directly to people, then let them figure out where and how they need to spend it to get through the crisis. Businesses would then adapt accordingly to survive, or fail if they couldn't. But at least then most people would be ok.
Now inequality is going to be worse than ever. People that already had a lot of money got saved and now can keep making loads of money, while the people that really needed saving, pretty much got abandoned instead.
I'm in agreement with you for financial crises in general (with caveats), but this doesn't apply here. The usual ability of individual spenders to direct their money to the businesses that they'd like to sustain is limited, because the nature of the pandemic response has caused an oddly-shaped crater in consumer demand. As a simple example: deferring teeth cleaning for a couple of months is an extremely rational decision right now, but under your plan, every dentist in the country would go out of business. I don't think this implies that dentists are non-essential, in the same way that sharp drops in airline and public transit usage don't render those services inessential.
Like a chemical compound, a lot of the value of a business is contained not in the capital or human capital per se, but in the connections between its constituent parts: a business is nothing more than a structure that produces utility for the landlord, the business owner, the employees, the suppliers, the customers, etc. If you suddenly bring that machine to a hard stop, all of those actors get hurt (the employees often most of all).
The GP comment is obviously correct that businesses are not entities whose welfare we need to focus on maximizing as a terminal goal. But they are critical structures through which the welfare of pretty much every citizen is maximized, not just business owners. In the same way that sustaining police departments or hospitals isn't motivated at saving those institutions per se, but at sustaining the value they produce for citizens, sustaining businesses is part of how we sustain the welfare of every citizen.
This is why the SBA/PPP are so valuable: they provide relief for those who would otherwise be laid-off, but do so in the form of salaries from a business that otherwise would have gone under. Not only are individual citizens able to keep paying their bills, but they're able to retain their relationship with their employer (losing a job has far more costs than just the foregone salary). And obviously this is in conjunction with things like the expansion in unemployment benefits, so that those who have been laid off and are unconnected to a business have a safety net as well.
This is NOT infinite, nor remotely large enough.
True.
> nor remotely large enough.
I do not believe this to be true at all. As numerous other people have pointed out, the government can currently borrow money at next to no cost.
Furthermore, there's a very (conceptually; the implementation is fraught) straightforward method of vastly increasing the government's funds without risking massive future debts: Put our taxes back the way they were during the time we were most productive—the period after WWII, where the top marginal brackets were around 90%.
Lol nope. Would rather take my chances with the virus than hand over 90% of my earnings, and I suspect most would agree.
Check it: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/15/bernie-s/i...
Adjusted for inflation, that 90% rate would only hit individuals making $1.7 million/year. I suspect most people would be just fine with that top rate if it meant they could keep their homes and feed their families.
Very few people have actual “income” over 1.7 million a year. Most people who could bring in that kind of money are smart enough and have the resources to structure things so that they don’t bring that kind of money in W2 type earnings or earnings that would qualify for this kind of tax.
Or they renounce their citizenship and move to Singapore as some have already.
That kind of tax rate is essentially pointless. It’s virtue signaling at its worst.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/07/two-democrats-come-up-with-a...
Then why be against it? Why not say “look, we enacted 90% top marginal rate and it hasn’t helped at all?”
Can you expand on this? Why would you want to put a policy on the books, dealing with its side effects without achieving its objective? You're saying this as if it's obvious; to me, it's anything but.
Because driving wealthy people and powerful businessmen out of your nation is obviously going to have bad effects that can't be reversed?
If you don't recognize that particular ideology, it's one that has murdered millions of people worldwide in every place it's been implemented.
The suicide rate this year is greater than the COVID death rate.
When trying to come up with a policy that will help the most, start from first principles, like "people are what we care about; businesses and the economy are there to serve us, not the other way around."
Because...yes, if we don't reopen everything, millions of people are going to be in serious financial trouble.
But if we do reopen everything, millions of people are going to be in serious medical trouble.
If we get tens to hundreds of thousands of people dying in the span of a few weeks, how do you think that will affect the economy? Even leaving aside the psychological and human toll.
Provide for the people. Make sure the truly essential workers (the ones needed to keep us fed, clothed, healthy, and with the lights on) have what they need to be safe and healthy themselves, and then keep the rest of us fed, clothed, and healthy, and keep the lights on, out of the government's purse.