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Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you mis

Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you missed those?

scottLobster 7y ago
Not sure if this was your intent, but "sacrificing millions for the sake of the Market" sounds like you're trying to shift away from the point that right now about 3.28 million more folks (probably more) are wondering how to pay their rent/mortgages and feed their children. If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 7y ago
  This is where it's very important to distinguish between financial conditions and material conditions. Feeding children and supplying respirators and masks are material conditions, dependent on the production and distribution systems. Paying rent and mortgage, on the other hand, isn't material. If you don't pay it nothing material changes - it's not an iron law of the world in the way that hunger is, evictions are a choice. Admittedly it transfers the problem to someone else, but if the solution to maintaining everyone fed includes them then they're not going to go hungry. Financial conditions also have a time tradeoff. Reducing retirement funds affects material conditions in the future. Or the date at which people are able to retire. If you had a button you could press which let you retire immediately, but (with probability P) took the life of some random person in the world, would you press it? With what value of P?
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    I imagine some communities will simply sink lower and never recover trajectory, and some sociologist will write a sad book sometime in the future about them. How does Black 2030 look like in America? Optimistic? We should believe that some economic curses last multiple lifetimes.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Mortgages and by extension rent provide liquid funds to banks so that account holders, including essential business's like hospitals, farmers, and factories can pay their employees and bills. You are delusional to think it is possible to suspend payments without printing massive amounts of money that will certainly lead to more death.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      shrug we provided liquidity last time and can do so again. Money printing doesn't kill people, viruses do. The banks are intermediaries. The essential businesses are not affected provided we do not let the banks fail randomly, and there is no need to do that.
      - tathougies 7y ago
        Last time we had nowhere near the need for liquidity. There were bad mortgages, but they were the minority. Currency inflation kills. Look at venezuela. You cannot shrug this off. At least consider the effects.
        pjc50 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing > By March 2009, it held $1.75 trillion of bank debt, mortgage-backed securities, and Treasury notes; this amount reached a peak of $2.1 trillion in June 2010. That feels like a lot of liquidity to me. Liquidity expansion through loans and purchase of credit and equity instruments simply isn't very inflationary. It can only cause real price inflation if the money starts chasing a shortage of real goods and services - which are currently being dramatically underproduced. If it does start causing inflation, the Fed can and will simply raise interest rates from their current near-zero level. Or fiscal policy can be used. Venezuela is under sanctions which are intended to exacerbate the situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Venezuelan_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
- spritecranberry 7y ago
  I wish more people realized this. I already know a few people who have lost their jobs, and several others who have had their hours reduced greatly. The government can't solve that sort of thing, especially if the economy grinds to a halt and tax revenue drops.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  Are you aware of a quantitative model relating economic losses to loss of life / quality-of-life? I see this claim repeated over and over, but after hours of searching I can't find any quantitative models. If such a class of models did exist, we could weigh it against various SIR models and make an actual assessment. Without that economic model, the decision calculus you're suggesting we make isn't really possible. Also: even that conversation seems like a huge false choice. Why not just give up on market capitalism for a few quarters and make sure everyone is fed/clothed/sheltered? It's not like houses disappear overnight if rent/mortgages aren't paid. And it's not like we've never suspended capitalism in the past -- the federal government put in price controls, effectively nationalized industries/supply chains, etc. during WWWII. And then we returned to capitalism afterward. > But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact! TBF, those are the folks getting most of the economic relief so far. And not just from recent Congressional action. Somehow when it comes to ensuring liquidity in certain financial markets, the federal government can move mountains in minutes. But when it comes to people having a safe place to sleep and food to eat we're the mercy of the invisible hand. Why can't e.g. HUD, unilaterally and without congressional action, create "liquidity in the housing market" by making enormous zero-interest loans to everyday folk whenever they feel like that's necessary? People who trade in equities and bonds have enormously powerful economic backstops, which people who merely pay rents and mortgages and buy food do not have.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism... I really wish that wasn't so close to the truth. Unfortunately the assholes on Wall Street also have the power to bend things to favor their interests at the expense of people doing real things. But don't worry, I am SURE that Steve Mnuchin and his investment banker buddies will unselfishly do the right thing as they dole out billions upon billions. We'll see. After all, Trump has told us he always hires "THE BEST PEOPLE", right?
- bjourne 7y ago
  > If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. Please show us your calculations.
- HappySweeney 7y ago
  > If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that? Are you under the impression people will just willingly starve to death, or that fighting over food will get so bad that millions of people will die?
  - scottLobster 7y ago
    First of all the "millions of deaths" comes from one model. There are many others and we haven't tested enough to know the true spread or lethality of the virus in a general population. It's quite possible that many people have already had covid-19 and were completely asymptomatic, which would make the death rate look much less scary. Anyone who tells you with certainty that "millions will die" is going off incomplete data like everyone else at the moment. And if we locked down the global economy for a year or two until a vaccine is developed, yes it's not out of the realm of possibility that millions worldwide would die a result of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th order consequences of that decision. Look how many stress fractures are occurring after just a few weeks. You think they'll get better with time and continued stress? Honestly I think the UK had the best original strategy of locking down the people most at risk, make sure they're taken care of as much as possible, and letting everyone else get herd immunity as quick as possible. But people weren't/aren't willing to accept that, and likely still won't for at least the next few weeks.
    - HappySweeney 7y ago
      The millions of deaths comes from most models, which is why governments the world over are willing to endure economic devastation. Also, we are talking about the US specifically, so bringing in the worldwide death toll from 5th order effects (why not 20th?) seems disingenuous. Finally, the UK changed their strategy away from sequestering the 70+ population because Imperial College told them that would only halve their death toll, and it would still remain solidly in the millions (for a country of 66 million).
      - 7y ago
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Yeah I don't see that the tradeoff is "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. Jeff Bezos losing 2% of his income" so much as "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. letting millions of people die of starvation". We're not there yet, but lets see where we are in a month.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Is there going to be some shortage of food that I'm not aware of? Or just a shortage in distribution mechanisms for it, because we are unwilling to consider emergency measures during an emergency?
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
The problem with that black and white reasoning is that on some level "the market" represents people's livelihoods and eventually there comes a point where it's reasonable to say "X people should die to prevent Y amount of hardship for Z people".
- steveeq1 7y ago
  I agree. It's easy to fall in the trap of "human life above all else", but there comes a time where tradeoffs become reasonable. Society already does this with the automobile. 36,000 people die every year for the convenience of driving, which I feel is a completely reasonable tradeoff, and this is not a controversy, at least in the united states.
  - bigbob2 7y ago
    That seems to only include the accident mortality rate. It would likely be even higher if you included deaths from automobile air pollution. Unrelated but curious, why do you feel it's a completely reasonable tradeoff? In my mind, automobiles have led to a class (and historically race) divide which further segregates and polarizes sects of society.
    - steveeq1 7y ago
      I seriously doubt cars cause a "racial divide" in any reasonable way. As for whether I think it's a "reasonable tradeoff". I don't know, but maybe because it's not brought up as controversial by society. This is not a good reason, I suppose, but I haven't really thought about it. I guess I'm mindlessly mimicing the ethics of people around me.
rubber_duck 7y ago
Those are not happening in the local media here.
jshevek 7y ago
"sacrificing millions for the sake of the market" This is an unfair way to characterize this difficult issue.
- cultus 7y ago
  No it is exactly how the issue should be characterized. Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    > Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way. In what way is the fact that there will be two different levels of economic costs in two scenarios a 'false dichotomy'? Edit: I think this is worth clarifying. I may misunderstand you, but it looks like there are two errors in your post. The first is treating differing scenarios with differing outcomes as if they were the same, simply because they have some facet in common. The second is a mis-use of the term 'false dichotomy'. If you believe that a choice between two options will have the same outcome, that is not a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy, a special case of the fallacy of exhaustive hypothesis. Here, one wrongly assumes that there are only two possible choices and uses this assumption to arrive at some seemingly logically derived conclusion. My apologies if I've misunderstood your intended meaning from your short post.
    - cultus 7y ago
      Hospitals will be overwhelmed much more, and there will be far more deaths if we don't "flatten the curve." In addition, workers will stay home anyway (which many are already doing), collapsing the economy regardless. It is indeed a false dichotomy. If anything, just irresponsibly letting nature run its course will be worse. Besides, recessions have been consistently associated with decreases of death rates. There is no evidence, and plenty of counter-evidence, that recessions cause increased death. Of course, we are getting a recession either way.
      - 7y ago
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Especially not on the topic of this most stressful and difficult moment. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site when posting here, we'd be grateful. Examples: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
econcon 7y ago
If world runs out of food supply or other important products, then the "young people who don't have any underlying disease" will also die.
- gwright 7y ago
  Not going to happen because of the virus. Could happen if the politicians don't remember to keep the economy functioning.

Seriously? There were a number of submissions yesterday to HN discussing the relative merits of sacrificing millions for the sake of the market. Perhaps you missed those?

scottLobster 7y ago

Not sure if this was your intent, but "sacrificing millions for the sake of the Market" sounds like you're trying to shift away from the point that right now about 3.28 million more folks (probably more) are wondering how to pay their rent/mortgages and feed their children. If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact!

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 7y ago
This is where it's very important to distinguish between financial conditions and material conditions. Feeding children and supplying respirators and masks are material conditions, dependent on the production and distribution systems. Paying rent and mortgage, on the other hand, isn't material. If you don't pay it nothing material changes - it's not an iron law of the world in the way that hunger is, evictions are a choice. Admittedly it transfers the problem to someone else, but if the solution to maintaining everyone fed includes them then they're not going to go hungry. Financial conditions also have a time tradeoff. Reducing retirement funds affects material conditions in the future. Or the date at which people are able to retire. If you had a button you could press which let you retire immediately, but (with probability P) took the life of some random person in the world, would you press it? With what value of P?
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I imagine some communities will simply sink lower and never recover trajectory, and some sociologist will write a sad book sometime in the future about them. How does Black 2030 look like in America? Optimistic? We should believe that some economic curses last multiple lifetimes.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Mortgages and by extension rent provide liquid funds to banks so that account holders, including essential business's like hospitals, farmers, and factories can pay their employees and bills. You are delusional to think it is possible to suspend payments without printing massive amounts of money that will certainly lead to more death.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    shrug we provided liquidity last time and can do so again. Money printing doesn't kill people, viruses do. The banks are intermediaries. The essential businesses are not affected provided we do not let the banks fail randomly, and there is no need to do that.
    - tathougies 7y ago
      Last time we had nowhere near the need for liquidity. There were bad mortgages, but they were the minority. Currency inflation kills. Look at venezuela. You cannot shrug this off. At least consider the effects.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing > By March 2009, it held $1.75 trillion of bank debt, mortgage-backed securities, and Treasury notes; this amount reached a peak of $2.1 trillion in June 2010. That feels like a lot of liquidity to me. Liquidity expansion through loans and purchase of credit and equity instruments simply isn't very inflationary. It can only cause real price inflation if the money starts chasing a shortage of real goods and services - which are currently being dramatically underproduced. If it does start causing inflation, the Fed can and will simply raise interest rates from their current near-zero level. Or fiscal policy can be used. Venezuela is under sanctions which are intended to exacerbate the situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Venezuelan_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
spritecranberry 7y ago
I wish more people realized this. I already know a few people who have lost their jobs, and several others who have had their hours reduced greatly. The government can't solve that sort of thing, especially if the economy grinds to a halt and tax revenue drops.
throwawayjava 7y ago
Are you aware of a quantitative model relating economic losses to loss of life / quality-of-life? I see this claim repeated over and over, but after hours of searching I can't find any quantitative models. If such a class of models did exist, we could weigh it against various SIR models and make an actual assessment. Without that economic model, the decision calculus you're suggesting we make isn't really possible. Also: even that conversation seems like a huge false choice. Why not just give up on market capitalism for a few quarters and make sure everyone is fed/clothed/sheltered? It's not like houses disappear overnight if rent/mortgages aren't paid. And it's not like we've never suspended capitalism in the past -- the federal government put in price controls, effectively nationalized industries/supply chains, etc. during WWWII. And then we returned to capitalism afterward. > But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism II and lobbying governments for payouts. No way it has any real impact! TBF, those are the folks getting most of the economic relief so far. And not just from recent Congressional action. Somehow when it comes to ensuring liquidity in certain financial markets, the federal government can move mountains in minutes. But when it comes to people having a safe place to sleep and food to eat we're the mercy of the invisible hand. Why can't e.g. HUD, unilaterally and without congressional action, create "liquidity in the housing market" by making enormous zero-interest loans to everyday folk whenever they feel like that's necessary? People who trade in equities and bonds have enormously powerful economic backstops, which people who merely pay rents and mortgages and buy food do not have.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> But nah, the "market" apparently entirely consists of assholes on Wall Street playing Capitalism... I really wish that wasn't so close to the truth. Unfortunately the assholes on Wall Street also have the power to bend things to favor their interests at the expense of people doing real things. But don't worry, I am SURE that Steve Mnuchin and his investment banker buddies will unselfishly do the right thing as they dole out billions upon billions. We'll see. After all, Trump has told us he always hires "THE BEST PEOPLE", right?
bjourne 7y ago
> If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. Please show us your calculations.
HappySweeney 7y ago
> If this lockdown continues indefinitely the death numbers from the economic fallout will likely eclipse those of the pandemic. Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that? Are you under the impression people will just willingly starve to death, or that fighting over food will get so bad that millions of people will die?
- scottLobster 7y ago
  First of all the "millions of deaths" comes from one model. There are many others and we haven't tested enough to know the true spread or lethality of the virus in a general population. It's quite possible that many people have already had covid-19 and were completely asymptomatic, which would make the death rate look much less scary. Anyone who tells you with certainty that "millions will die" is going off incomplete data like everyone else at the moment. And if we locked down the global economy for a year or two until a vaccine is developed, yes it's not out of the realm of possibility that millions worldwide would die a result of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th order consequences of that decision. Look how many stress fractures are occurring after just a few weeks. You think they'll get better with time and continued stress? Honestly I think the UK had the best original strategy of locking down the people most at risk, make sure they're taken care of as much as possible, and letting everyone else get herd immunity as quick as possible. But people weren't/aren't willing to accept that, and likely still won't for at least the next few weeks.
  - HappySweeney 7y ago
    The millions of deaths comes from most models, which is why governments the world over are willing to endure economic devastation. Also, we are talking about the US specifically, so bringing in the worldwide death toll from 5th order effects (why not 20th?) seems disingenuous. Finally, the UK changed their strategy away from sequestering the 70+ population because Imperial College told them that would only halve their death toll, and it would still remain solidly in the millions (for a country of 66 million).
    - 7y ago
commandlinefan 7y ago
Yeah I don't see that the tradeoff is "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. Jeff Bezos losing 2% of his income" so much as "letting coronavirus kill millions of people vs. letting millions of people die of starvation". We're not there yet, but lets see where we are in a month.
- vkou 7y ago
  Is there going to be some shortage of food that I'm not aware of? Or just a shortage in distribution mechanisms for it, because we are unwilling to consider emergency measures during an emergency?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

The problem with that black and white reasoning is that on some level "the market" represents people's livelihoods and eventually there comes a point where it's reasonable to say "X people should die to prevent Y amount of hardship for Z people".

steveeq1 7y ago
I agree. It's easy to fall in the trap of "human life above all else", but there comes a time where tradeoffs become reasonable. Society already does this with the automobile. 36,000 people die every year for the convenience of driving, which I feel is a completely reasonable tradeoff, and this is not a controversy, at least in the united states.
- bigbob2 7y ago
  That seems to only include the accident mortality rate. It would likely be even higher if you included deaths from automobile air pollution. Unrelated but curious, why do you feel it's a completely reasonable tradeoff? In my mind, automobiles have led to a class (and historically race) divide which further segregates and polarizes sects of society.
  - steveeq1 7y ago
    I seriously doubt cars cause a "racial divide" in any reasonable way. As for whether I think it's a "reasonable tradeoff". I don't know, but maybe because it's not brought up as controversial by society. This is not a good reason, I suppose, but I haven't really thought about it. I guess I'm mindlessly mimicing the ethics of people around me.

rubber_duck 7y ago

Those are not happening in the local media here.

jshevek 7y ago

"sacrificing millions for the sake of the market" This is an unfair way to characterize this difficult issue.

cultus 7y ago
No it is exactly how the issue should be characterized. Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way.
- jshevek 7y ago
  > Besides, it is a false dichotomy. There will be an economic collapse either way. In what way is the fact that there will be two different levels of economic costs in two scenarios a 'false dichotomy'? Edit: I think this is worth clarifying. I may misunderstand you, but it looks like there are two errors in your post. The first is treating differing scenarios with differing outcomes as if they were the same, simply because they have some facet in common. The second is a mis-use of the term 'false dichotomy'. If you believe that a choice between two options will have the same outcome, that is not a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy, a special case of the fallacy of exhaustive hypothesis. Here, one wrongly assumes that there are only two possible choices and uses this assumption to arrive at some seemingly logically derived conclusion. My apologies if I've misunderstood your intended meaning from your short post.
  - cultus 7y ago
    Hospitals will be overwhelmed much more, and there will be far more deaths if we don't "flatten the curve." In addition, workers will stay home anyway (which many are already doing), collapsing the economy regardless. It is indeed a false dichotomy. If anything, just irresponsibly letting nature run its course will be worse. Besides, recessions have been consistently associated with decreases of death rates. There is no evidence, and plenty of counter-evidence, that recessions cause increased death. Of course, we are getting a recession either way.
    - 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Especially not on the topic of this most stressful and difficult moment. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site when posting here, we'd be grateful. Examples: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

econcon 7y ago

If world runs out of food supply or other important products, then the "young people who don't have any underlying disease" will also die.

gwright 7y ago
Not going to happen because of the virus. Could happen if the politicians don't remember to keep the economy functioning.