Because no one wants to pay them - it's the age old problem.

Interesting thought. How much would that cost? And is it only restaurant direct staff that is compensated or also other industries that are negatively impacted by their closure?

There's an inherent tension, on the one hand, we cant afford to pay the wages of a 100 billion pound a year industry out of tax revenue. On the other hand we completely fucked up any of the potential ways we could have avoided doing that.

Why can’t we pay them?

Well, sure they get paid, but what about the people who are deemed essential and still have to work? Seems kind of unfair to those people doesn't it? It's not an easy problem to solve...

It could be even simpler. Suspend mortgage and rents so that people can afford to stay home or at least work less.

The hesitancy is due to the cost and the desire some restaurants and some of their customers have for them to remain open.

This is especially the case in non-island nations that cannot control their borders as easily.

Do you want to pay them?

Yes. The money isn't coming from my pocket our yours. It comes from a Central Bank punching keys --literally in the case of America's Federal Reserve-- on a keyboard and updating a ledger balance.

This is a terrifying and yet all too common view. When the central bank punches keys and creates money out of thin air this DOES come from your pocket and mine, but in a way that is not entirely as obvious as the way other costs are. It reduces the value of what was already in our pocket via inflation. The money in our pocket can no longer buy the same amount. That’s a cost.

God I wish we would go back to the gold standard so that the cost of government expenditures would be more obvious to the general public via payment from increased taxes or from allocation away from some other government expense. Instead, people are left thinking the government could magically solve all of our problems by printing more money, but for some reason doesn’t because it doesn’t care.

What inflation? Gold bugs have been telling me that inflation was going to happen for my entire 20 year adult life. And being on the Gold standard did not in any way prevent inflation...but don't let that little fact get in the way of your hard money talking points.

If you want to have an honest discussion about the inflationary effects of adding more dollars to the money supply, then we have to talk about where those dollars come from and why they do and don't create inflation. Talk about what the real demonstrable alternatives are, and whether or not a higher inflation is really the devil that so many claim it is.

Where’s inflation? See real estate, all financial assets, medical costs, and education to name a few obvious examples. For many of the items actually included in CPI numbers, the inflation has been outsourced to third world countries.

The real demonstrable alternatives are those we had prior to eliminating the gold standard. We are now able to print our way out of recessions, at the cost of an incredibly destabilized economy comprised of asset valuations that are so high they lead to perfect correlation downward when there is a shock to confidence.

Real estate is local, my house in Alabama has returned sub 1% annualized in appreciation, my house in Washington as returned about 6% annualized. Where supply is constrained, prices are going up, where there is excess, prices aren't even keeping up with inflation. Seems like a perfectly rational market to me.

Financial assets is far too broad a category, but "markets can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent" isn't some new statement. I'd argue that this is more a consequence of a confluence of factors including the end of general scarcity of capital, low interest rates, and low taxes.

Medical and Education costs are structural issues within the US, see most of Europe for a counter example.

As far as outsourcing, well that has lifted over 1 billion people out of poverty...so yea, I got nothing for you if you think American's being able to buy more goods for fewer dollars while simultaneously making the world a better place is something to be concerned about.

And our economy is far more stable today then any time in the history of the US. Or are we going to pretend that multiple depressions didn't happen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The only reason that the 2008 recession was as bad as it was, was because of a lack of political will to spend money.

Inflation hasn't become a reality since the other nations still trust the value of the US dollars as reserve. With so high trade deficits, we are essentially saying to the world, "sell me goods in exchange for the paper that I printed some big numbers on it", without getting as much in return.

Do you think this is sustainable in the long run? Will they keep giving us more goods/services than they get? What would happen if they decide to not use US dollar as reserve or they start demanding another currency for trade?

If the US dollar ceases to be the world's de facto currency, we have much larger problems then the moderate inflation that may or may not follow. I'd argue it is far more a political problem than a monetary problem at that point.

And FED continuing to print excess money is one of the reasons believed to speed up the process to the "much larger problems".

It’s “all too common” because it’s how most 1st world economies work (though to be fair: your fear-based view and false belief that it is anomalous is the true “all too common” viewpoint). Case in point is the US that has been running deficit budgets for decades - and yet it still exists! It is still an economic power house! The general disconnect is that nearly all discretionary spending is directed towards the military, which somehow eludes all those who ask the question “but how are we going to pay for that?” whenever anyone proposes providing money to people who definitively need it.

I am unclear on your first sentence and bracketed section. My point was that people generally share the view that printing money is without cost and that this is incorrect. The government cannot magically print money and provide goods and services without cost, via future tax increases or inflation. There’s no free lunch.

The cost is so low as to be non-existent. The downsides of printing money are effectively nil. If this were not true the modern global economy would have died out decades ago, when printing money became the primary method of commerce. Your concern here cannot rationally be a concern for printing money, a ship that sailed long ago. So I’d have to assume your concern is how the printed money should or should not be used. And in this case you were replying with concern to a post that recommended using printed money to pay high-risk people a sustainable income when their jobs should be furloughed. But instead of making a case as to why high-risk people should continue to sustain high-risk, you instead want to falsely claim printing money is significantly detrimental.

If this is true then why do any of us pay taxes?

We could just print all the money we need.

Central banks create money, but governments don't spend that money. They spend money from taxes and bond sales.

About $15T USD exist [0]. $5T are held by foreign banks [1], because the USD is the world's reserve currency. All of those countries want the USD to remain stable, so their own economies can work smoothly. The countries cooperate with USA and side with USA in disputes. This benefits USA greatly. If USA went to the gold standard, this benefit would disappear.

Currencies on a gold standard experience inflation and deflation due to changes in the value of gold. The value of gold is primarily driven by demand for jewelry and manufactured products [2]. Demand fluctuates with the business cycle. Gold value is also affected by supply fluctuations. On a gold standard, these would become extra unwanted currency fluctuations.

Only $9T of gold exists above ground in the world. USA has only 3,000 tons of gold, worth 3,000 t * (1,000,000 g / t) * (oz t / 31.1 g) * (USD$1840 / oz t) = $177B. So to get $15T of gold, USA would need to mine or purchase 250,000 t of gold. This is equivalent to 72 years of the world's current gold production. So to make it possible, gold production would need to increase dramatically. And it would take a while. Meanwhile, the US economy keeps growing, increasing the need for currency.

Gold mining produces huge amounts of crushed ore which continually leaches heavy metal pollution into the environment. Gold mining uses cyanide which occasionally leaks and sterilizes a river or lake and kills all the birds and other wildlife nearby. Increasing gold mining would increase suffering around the world.

Another option is to increase the price of gold. This would negatively affect industry, especially electronics manufacturing. It would also cause an enormous wealth transfer to India and other countries that hold a lot of gold jewelry.

On a gold standard, governments have limited ability to solve problems in money supply, and their currency is subject to business cycle fluctuations and interference from cartels. USA will have difficulty getting enough gold to back its currency. Increased mining will poison people in many communities and devastate parts of nature.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/Current/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Consumption

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Production

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_prod...

Then why not pay everyone, not just restaurant workers? And as much as one needs or wants?

Because then the work wouldn't get done.

Some work still needs to get done. Society won't work if everyone sits on their bum for a year, pandemic or not. Among the jobs which need to be done, however, there are no restaurant workers.

For the same reason that a tourniquet is not a long-term solution to a severed artery. It is a short-term solution to a specific problem and it has a shelf life.

Surely by being forced to do lockdowns later on we are paying dearly for letting them stay open.

I think we can also have more fine-grained policies. In Scotland they simply disallow serving of alcohol in restaurants and pubs, and restaurants have to close by 6PM. Unsurprisingly Scotland seems to be doing somewhat better than England and has avoided a second nationwide lockdown.

The basic idea is if we can target the 5% of the economy that is causing most of the spread, you can keep the other 95% open.

> "I don't know why we're so hesitant to just close bars and restaurants everywhere..."

because despite the fearful hype, there's no evidence restaurants are significant sources of spread. bars, at least, are more plausible (because of social dynamics, not fluid or viral ones), but still not conclusively proven to be significant transmission localities. transmission is primarily happening in private social gatherings, not in public places like restaurants, gyms, or grocery stores where we see so much attention being misdirected.

this paper, like similar others, paints a possible but unlikely picture of how a couple infection cases might be related, out of probably thousands (millions? billions?) of other possibilities. it's a classic case of availability bias--creating an explanation based on the limited observed information at our disposal, while expressly ignoring the much vaster array of information we don't, or can't, observe.

it's clues tied together to create a pat narrative, not conclusive, nor even particularly persuasive, proof on how transmission happened in this scenario. it's only one possibility among many.

I'm not familiar with the research on transmission occurring primarily in private social gatherings. In fact, I've seen some researchers suggest the opposite. Do you happen to have any helpful links or search pointers?

no good pointers offhand, but the likeliest source is contact tracing programs. they understandably seem to be more focused on tracing over paper-writing. in any case, here's one published study from hunan: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/23/scie...

this quote sums up their findings:

> "The average risk of transmission scales positively with the closeness of social interactions: the average per-contact risk is lowest for community exposures (including contacts in the public transportation system and at food and entertainment venues), intermediate for social and extended family contacts, and highest in the household. The average transmission risk in the household is further elevated when intense physical distancing is enforced, and for contacts that last longer."

the intuition is also pretty straightforward--we let our guard around those closest to us, who also happen to be those we spend the most time with. those are the two primary factors (closeness and contact time) for transmission. social gatherings are that layer just beyond the household where we are most exposed on those dimensions.

The way this is presented is going to be interpreted incorrectly. It is incorrect to compare percentages or probabilities like this.

Here is a different example to try and illustrate the problem:

Is 10% larger than 5%?

It is not possible to answer this question if the basis on which the percentages are calculated are different.

What if I said the 10% was 10% of whatever you last spent money on, but the 5% was 5% of Google's annual revenue. Which is larger?

The same thing is happening in the above - it isn't okay to calculate the probabilities in two situations and then try to cross compare them for size.

Sadly this error seems to be cropping up quite a lot! Matt Parker (Stand-up Maths) has an example of this and related to a recent election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8. His explanation is likely better than mine.

> The average transmission risk in the household is further elevated when intense physical distancing is enforced

How is this possible? Distancing _elevates_ within-household risk?

> How is this possible? Distancing _elevates_ within-household risk?

One obvious mechanism: Enforced distancing makes it less likely you get COVID from a source outside of the household, which (since infection usually provides some period of immunity) thereby increases the risk you get it in the household, on average.

Ah I see, I misinterpreted this as referring to within-household distancing (separate rooms, masking, etc). Thanks!

yes, that's the explanation given in the paper--the more restrictive the public measures, the more likely spread occurs at home.

This is also misleading. The paper does not intend to mean that "lockdowns will cause you to get infected by the people you live with". Which is what you seem to have written.

Restrictive measures do not increase your absolute risk at home. The paper was talking about the relative risk between two scenarios - which allows for misunderstandings. The last sentence which was omitted in your quote was:

"These lines of evidence support that SARS-CoV-2 transmission is facilitated by close proximity, confined environment, and high frequency of contacts."

What the paper ought to have said was, when more restrictive measures are in place, it then becomes important to focus and step up measures for the people you interact with most - because those people in this new and different scenario now become the most likely people for which you will catch an infection.

The people you interact with have not suddenly become more risky in an absolute sense, but they become a more important risk factor when situations change.

Trying to draw conclusions between the relative risks between two different scenarios is not the same as absolute risk. This is the trap!

[edits: for clarity]

Perversely, it sounds like transmission occurring primarily at home suggests the government is doing a decent job at managing the problem.

no, it's really the government pushing infections to the periphery, so that it gets credit for visible action rather than meaningful effect (i.e., lowering death rates permanently without throwing half the population into severe distress). that's exactly the empty effort we should hold against politicians, especially when so much harm has blindly been brought to bear along with it.

it's unrealistic to expect families to social distance from each other for months on end for a pandemic of this severity (~0.5% fatality rate heavily skewed to the aged, as opposed to the 1918 flu with ~10-20% fatality rate across the age spectrum).

so the most impactful, and realistic, action to materially lower infection/death rates is to alter our behaviors around private social gatherings only (distance or mask indoors). focusing our efforts there would be spending our collective goodwill budget wisely, as opposed to the pointless political theater around masks and restaurants. instead, all of the focus has been on curtailing public settings (easier for the government to control), where only a small minority of transmission is happening (moreover, public behaviors changed without needing government intervention). it'd be farcical if it weren't so tragic.

> only a small minority of transmission is happening [in public settings]

Well, wouldn't that be because public settings are more controlled, as you said?

It seems strange to suggest wearing a mask at home, in private, but not in public. Or did I misread?

no, the only policy we needed is to either distance or wear masks when visiting in private with those outside your household, not at home with family (which no one would do) or in most public settings (which are already very low risk because exposure in space and time is vanishingly low). that would focus our attention and effort on the most impactful situations, not the ineffective shotgun approach we have now.