So your American-centric, politicized explanation is misinformed.
Also, the US had more than three weeks of lockdowns.
>>and decades of being socially unprepared for a crisis such as this.
What kind of social preparations would have prevented the economic cataatrophe that occurred?
> What kind of social preparations would have prevented the economic cataatrophe that occurred?
I never said anything would be prevented, but there's plenty lacking that could have helped. The people that are struggling right now were struggling before, this has just exasperated it immensely. Put it this way: it took weeks to get a single check out to Americans in need and they haven't seen anything since. Are these not things that could be improved?
Taiwan and South Korea never instituted a lockdown. They instituted mask-wearing and aggressive contact tracing and did so early-on.
It could also be true that not acting early only leads to economic devasatation if the govermment's response to a high death toll is to institute lockdowns. In Sweden, the government did not respond to the high per capita death rate with a lockdown. In the EU and the US, most states did.
>Put it this way: it took weeks to get a single check out to Americans in need and they haven't seen anything since. Are these not things that could be improved?
So more personal savings is the kind of preparation that you're referring to, that would have lessened the damage? Well it's a well known fact in Economics that a social safety net reduces the personal savings rate.
One reason China has a personal savings rate of 40% is that it has very little in the way of a state-administered social safety net.
So to encourage people to better prepare with respect to personal savings, the West should have reduced its social welfare spending, instead of massively increasing it over the last 50 years.
How long did it last? What did they do? Was there a mass economic decline? If so, how could it have been avoided? If not, why not? Etc.
I suspect that because these questions are not being asked, it may be the case that there are things to learn which are counter to popular narratives. I could definitely be very wrong about that. But it might be worthwhile to explore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Transmission_and_m...
It may be the case that a hammer-like lockdown has largely stamped the virus out of many countries and that the US failed at that and is worse-off for it. It may also be the case that the US will build herd immunity faster and it the average infection rate and death rates will eventually converge to the same everywhere. We simply do not know yet, but people are judging as if we do.
If we look to the past, we may be able to gain insight into how it played out until completion and how it was or was not affected by regulation, local & international laws, and the layperson perspective. In the current instance, no country has yet played it out to completion so that is something we could not learn from other countries right now.
Take New Zealand. Its geographical isolation, low population density and strict national lockdown and contact tracing, led to it eliminating the virus.
However, now it has a set of policies that increase its isolation, and is stuck with them until an effective vaccine or treatment is found:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-zealand-beat-back-t...
In the absence of a vaccine, herd immunity is the only durable solution to the virus, and New Zealand is foregoing that solution to avoid a spike in deaths in the short term.
And indeed, the original plan, of 'flattening the curve' was tolerant of COVID19 deaths, and aiming for herd immunity.
But somewhere along the way, death from COVID19 became politically intolerable in the US, and now any rise in deaths leads to a call to re-lockdown, even when COVID19 cases are well below ICU capacity.
That's what is happening now in a lot of states that reopened. The lockdowns only delayed it. We wasted the opportunity of the lockdowns and didn't develop widespread testing, so as a result the lockdowns have done nothing except add government-enforced destruction of the economy on top of the damage the virus is doing.
Looking at the chart at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, the US is 27th, with most of the countries above it being much smaller ones which are not an apples-to-apples comparison because there's more of them to cherry-pick and the wealthiest few can massively increase their per-capita numbers just by ponying up money and buying a disproportionately large share of global supply of consumables. The only large countries above the US are Russia (extremely fishy), the UK (whose press has been pushing about as hard on the narrative that our testing is behind the rest of the world as the US media has), and Spain. About a quarter of the countries above the US on the list don't even have 100k people, and only the ones I listed have much above 10 million. (New York State - population 19 million - would also easily beat the UK, Russia and Spain if it were a country.) It's also well ahead of the well-publicised testing success stories like South Korea and Germany.
Current testing rate in tests per day per capita is even more impressive: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
Incidentally, the US was one of the countries the UK press used to point at in order to convince us that our coronavirus testing was falling masssively behind the rest of the world and our government was failing us.
I mean, yes, it is killing some old people, but not all. And it is killing some younger people, but not all.
It’s mortality rate might be similar to the regular flu.
But the kicker, is that Spain just announced that they detected the virus in their frozen waste water from January 2019. This is almost a whole year before China even detected it in December 2019.
So it’s possible that this virus has been circulating around the world for a lot longer than we even realized. And if Spain’s announcement is legitimate, then, this means we have no clue where this virus could’ve originated.
Now people will still die + their families will be without a job.
This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But the jury is still out to see if the current scenario will be better that the alternative (after you factor in suicides, depressions, overdoses, etc)
But personally, I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed)
The mortality is around 1%. So in the US alone that would leave over 3 million dead. Due to this 50 state lukewarm solution I think we'll ultimately see 1 million dead. The economy is made up of people, by the way.
All the shutdown was intended to do was to "slow the spread" from the 18 months to 24 months, and to hopefully keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Once we knew how infectious it was, Covid was always expected to infect nearly everyone eventually, whether the economy was shut down or not.
Slowing the spread was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (flatten the curve) but it was also to minimize the number of people infected before either a vaccine or effective treatments became available. In the US a vaccine is likely still a year off, but we already know more about how to treat this than we did 4 months ago. And in another 4 months we'll likely have even better treatments and protocols.
It's not inevitable that 80% have to be infected within 18-24 months. Other countries have slowed the spread with Hong Kong, S Korea and Taiwan being 3 of the more notable examples.
> The economy is made up of people, by the way.
And there is almost always an economic boom after any plague or war. Vacuums get filled, create opportunity.
If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. I’ll firmly bet on No, it totally would still, especially as the severity increases.
The states caused our deaths. New York and others shoved the elderly (an at risk population) into nursing homes. This isn’t due to good or bad responses from the Feds. The state governments are what killed us. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-co...
Ultimately the disease was going to infect us. The only question was “could we slow the spread of the disease in such a way that we don’t overwhelm the medical system?”
Two reasons to believe fear of the virus would not have, by itself, crippled the economy:
1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to.
2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
People don't tend to fear something until it's tangible to them. When one of their family members or best friends gets ripped apart and then dumped into a grave, it will become a lot clearer very fast what kind of danger it can pose to oneself.
>2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
Some people are behaving that way, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly limited to America where we've decided wearing a mask is a political statement. (There are exceptions, but they are also often other places with similar or worse anti-science/medicine sentiment.) It's hard to even know what the outbreak would look like if both businesses and all ordinary people went back to normal. I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.
On the other hand, we do know that the economies of countries that never locked down (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden) are doing better than economies in countries that did.
If countries that locked down are not recovering, that is likely a consequence of the lockdowns themselves. It's not a surprise that ordering everyone to stay at home would tank an economy.
I can say from my experience that the economy runs a lot smoother and recovers a lot quicker if people aren't terrified about a pandemic causing them long term health implications and killing their family.
Perhaps it's more a damning evidence for the unrestrained capitalism you hold so dear, that it spells catastrophe and misery if people aren't unable to keep working their bullshit jobs in the middle of the most pressing public health crisis of the last 100 years.
I share your feelings... I cam up in tech the early 90's, I can hardly recognize the hacker and free software communities any more
Very sad that authoritarianism is replacing individualism, free thinking and libertarian ideals that gave us soo much prosperity
Indeed, very sad. This is not what I signed for.
So I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore. This is not my type of people, and not my ideals. I feel I was born too late to taste this spirit of freedom I can only read about, but not experience.
"Pro-state pro-intervention"? If there's anything even most hardcore (but sensible) libertarians think should be the job of the state would be catastrophe management (and defence against invasion and the like).
We need to incentivize not working, thus not spreading the virus, in the short term. We also should take this opportunity to force the Great Unwinding, let value-less businesses fail and the market return sane levels and not these QE-fueled, post-2008 crazytown numbers.
The virus has affected the economy. There was no escape from that. With no enforced closures people, for example, aren't going to restaurants because of the pile of bodies. Sociapaths may wish everyone ignored the piling up of the bodies and acted exactly as they would have without all those dead bodies but that's simply not how humans behave. Some fantasy that letting everything rip would have had the economy unaffected is just delusional.
So now we look at how to minimise the effect on the economy. (1) overreact early. (2) testing and contact tracing (3) quarantine (4) mask wearing. Taiwan. South Korea. Japan. Hong Kong. These are the models worth understanding.
The government does national defense. This fight against the virus that is killing us is national defense. The problem was hopelessly incompetent government. Becuase, as a libertarian, this is exactly when you need the government. There's literally no other option. It's the same as property rights enforcement. It's the same as pollution control.
As a libertarain I do not feel I have the right to discharge firearms at random in the street. I do not feel the laws against and punishments for doing so infringe on libertarian principles at all.
And so it goes for steps 1 through 4. Don't harm others for your own comfort. The end. Wear your mask when going inside anywhere that isn't your home like a genuine libertarian. This way we minimise the economic cost of the virus.
This way we save the most lives - more important to me.
(And maybe consider that being libertarian has nothing to say about being sociopathic, that's kind of the point, but we can choose not to be as well. That pile of bodies, each of them was loved and is a person who is missed. Taring libertarians as not caring about that at all s^%ts me. There are socialists who also don't care and irk me similarly).
People just don’t want to hide in their homes from this. If they had been doing that, the lockdown orders would have been unnecessary and superfluous.
It’s fair to say that the virus would have damaged the economy, but it’s just not reasonable to believe that damage would have been as bad as, or worse than, the damage caused by the virus plus the lockdowns.
Maybe that wouldn't have happened if the government hadn't forced businesses to close? As in, if you make it illegal to go to work, people will be without a job.
> In the 2008 financial crisis, it took two whole years for the country to reach even half that number.
Morale of the story: the government could in 3 weeks destroy the economy to a level that in the 2008 crisis took 2 years for the private market to achieve.
Scary, and I'm not sure it speaks for more government.
Unfortunately, this is not what the pro-state pro-intervention crowd that dominates HN wants to hear. I long for the old days of the libertarian hackers...