8 ms·

Well, not really: bailouts punish people and business who incurred costs to operate in a way that would allow them to pause their economic activity for months (

by devit 6y ago

Well, not really: bailouts punish people and business who incurred costs to operate in a way that would allow them to pause their economic activity for months (cancellable supply/rent/employment contracts, cash reserves, etc.), and favors those who did not do so. In general, a society where it is possible to pause all economic activity at any time is going to be much more robust than one that doesn't, and is going to reduce the impact of an apocalyptic event that the government cannot bail the society out of, possibly avoiding human extinction in the most severe cases. For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home, then even the most catastrophic events are much less likely to kill the vast majority of people in the world. So, there is a moral hazard, and it may be wise to either minimize the bailouts or to make such resilience mandatory.

twblalock 6y ago
Businesses were never expected to be able to totally shut down for months at a time. It’s not reasonable to suggest that businesses who can’t handle that have been irresponsible or are less deserving of help.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  To say that those who can't handle it are not less responsible, is to say that those in the same industry who can handle it are not more responsible. I understand your point, that this is a major extreme that people don't tend to plan for, and for small businesses, I don't fault them at all. There is less sympathy for larger organizations like airlines who have (or should have) at least one full time team of people who prepare for all kinds of logistical scenarios: War/hostilities between nations, fuel shortages, pandemics, a broken supply chain of repair parts, green new deal legislation, the list goes on. So not only should larger organizations have been mindful that this kind of thing could happen, their cavalier use of cash on hand to inflate their imaginary value (stock price) should mean any help they get is tied to government stock in the company, a ban on stock buybacks, etc.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    Me and two others started a small business in 2000. After a year or two we developed a rule of keeping about three months of turn over in the bank at all times. It was designed to deal with say VAT and Corp tax turning up with payroll and no or late payments from a few big accounts in a perfect storm of cash flow fuck ups. No we did not factor in a global pandemic in our plans but it seems that avoiding credit to bailout your cash flow is a strategy to consider for the future. With the measures like furlough etc in the UK we have a plan for six months that leaves money in the bank and all 20 employees still on the books. I'll just be damn glad to get out the other side of this with my business and staff all in one piece. Losing the contents of the war chest for a while is the least of my worries if we are still solvent as a business and earning/paying personal incomes.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Not reasonable, and also not useful. That's probably 90% or 95% of businesses that were not able to pause like that. We're going to want a lot of those businesses. And the ones that are able, some are by luck or circumstance rather than wise design. Should we reward the luck as well as the design? "Don't help them" seems like throwing out ten babies with the bathwater.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I mean, that logic is applied to individuals that for example get sick or simple exist in bad economy. They dont get bailout while consequences on them are disastrous. I think that anger over companies being bailed out with no conditions placed on those money is pretty much about that. Individual get homeless, but the company wont even have to go through bankruptcy and restructuralization. It gets free money instead.
    - twblalock 6y ago
      This is a totally different situation. Businesses are failing because of the government. Therefore the government should compensate them.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Well... in this situation, individuals are also going to be failing because of the government. Therefore...
        twblalock 6y ago
        Therefore they should be compensated too, and they are going to be. They get unemployment benefits and Federal money. The income tax due date was moved out, and many states have allowed people to stop paying rent and prevented evictions. There will probably be more help for people in the next relief bill the government passes. People aren't being helped enough, but neither are businesses. On the plus side, helping businesses can help people keep their jobs, so if you help businesses you also help their employees. People are focused on stock buybacks, but what we really ought to do is prevent businesses that receive aid from laying people off. (Of course, that does create the incentive for businesses to lay people off before they get the aid, but a smartly written law could require companies to hire those people back as a condition of aid, etc.)
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Wimbledon took out a pandemic policy year after year. Turns out they were stupid to do so, they could have invested the insurance premium in the stock market and waited for their bailout.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    Think in risk terms. When they were assessing the risk to their business posed by a pandemic then they could not foresee the govt response. An insurance policy is (almost) certain to pay out. Risk assessed and mitigated. "turns out" is not a method I use for business planning. I'm not sure what sort of bailout they would get either. My firm does not expect a loss of earnings style bailout. I would venture that they did the right thing.
    - treyfitty 6y ago
      Insurance is most certainly NOT certain to pay out. Case in point Star Cinema Grill; albeit this is an egregious case where the insurer is blatantly arguing and bluffing a lawsuit. Insurance will fight tooth and nail to not pay out. https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/lloyds-of-london-underwriters-hit-by-lawsuit-from-pandemiccovered-cinema-chain-219185.aspx https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/llo...
  - ambicapter 6y ago
    Wimbledon the tennis tournament?
  - tathougies 6y ago
    Wimbledon is a one time (well annual...) event. I doubt anyone would insure a company making billions in revenue against a pandemic -- an inevitable outcome in a lot of ways.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      If it happens once every 20 years then the money earned by investing 20 years of premiums just have to pay for it. Alternatively the company could spend 20 years socking away money instead of issuing large bonuses.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Well Reddit would certainly disagree with you on that. But I agree with you. I don’t even know why we call them “bail outs” in this case. “Crisis operating grants” would be more accurate.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    Or just "compensation".
remarkEon 6y ago
I agree with the general principle here (that moral hazard is bad; that we should construct an economy in which it's possible to hit "pause" for any number of reasons), but that's not the economy we have. The one we have seems to reward financial engineering, cost-optimized supply chains that are highly vulnerable to even the most minor disruptions, and a general mindset that freaks out at the first sign of trouble. So, how to we get out of this trap? Most obvious answer to me is more localism. I.e., relying on local supply chains for goods (both consumables and foods) instead of a global one. This lockdown has been pretty miserable for a lot of my friends, but my one hope for a silver lining here is that after we're out of it there might be a return to prioritizing your local community over the bottom line. You don't freak out in a Pandemic if you know that your supply chains for all of this stuff are local, and unaffected by problems on the other side of the planet.
- twblalock 6y ago
  Localism is the opposite of the right thing to do. Small, local businesses are the ones that are going under. Large, geographically distributed companies are the most able to survive long-term shutdowns. What we need is more globalization and more redundancy of supply chains, not less. When the virus hits a region we need to be able to shift production of essential goods to other regions, so we need to have manufacturing capacity in many places.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Globalism doesn't really encourage redundant regions – it encourages all production of a certain type of good to be done in a single region and then traded with other regions for maximum efficiency.
    - twblalock 6y ago
      Globalism encourages production of goods in multiple regions which are efficient at the production of a particular product. For example, globalization is why Toyota manufactures cars and car parts in 18 countries, rather than just in Japan. Under localism, Toyota would only manufacture in Japan.
lopmotr 6y ago
There's a balance between everything being JIT to everyone living in a self-sufficient bunker their whole life. More agility is better for developing the economy and technology and efficiency and all sorts of good things while more preparedness is better for surviving freak events. I think we need some of both. The JITters might not survive a disaster and the survivors might not produce much value, but both keep civilization going. You see the conflict between these two directions with agricultural protectionism. Countries often pay to keep their agriculture industries local however inefficient they are. That's bad for the economy but good for resilience against disaster.
throwawayjava 6y ago
> For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home 1. That wouldn't allow us to pause all economic activity. Not even close. Not even remotely close. Notice that 0% of the economic damage caused by coronavirus could have been prevented by stockpiling food and water. 2. Lots of economic activity is not possible to pause. Think about e.g., large construction projects or any manufacturing process. There's an enormous amount of economic activity that just can't easily be paused, at varying timescales. At the short timescale, for example, you can't simply stop pouring a foundation and come back to it later. On a longer timescale, you simply can't restart an oil well at $0 cost. These facts aren't due to bad planning. They're due to the fundamental laws of physics. And for any given type of disaster scenario, even the most resilient and localized supply chains might be disrupted. In fact, it's not really clear that localized or even redundant supply chains/processes would make you more resilient in any given scenario. There are likely fundamental tradeoffs and, even if not, individuals and small firms simply can't plan for every possible apocalypse. 3. That level of food/water stockpiling would be enormously expensive. Stockpiling would become a nontrivial drag on GDP, not only through unproductive resource allocation but also due to new frictions (e.g., moving 2 states over now becomes a five figure investment). 4. Like it or not, most folks simply don't have the means to stockpile at that scale. A waitress working 80 hours a week will never be able to afford the space and continuous investment necessary to maintain a multi-year food and water stockpile. Heck, even the largest firms with the best margins have to take on some existential risk in order to operate. At some point, the choice is between extreme resilience and having a given sector of the economy. 5. I can't find the problem you're trying to solve with multi-year food/water stockpiling. I'm having trouble figuring out what scenario would only last a few years, and would result in substantial destruction/disruption of the agricultural sector, but would not result in either a) also damage stockpiled food/water or b) trigger extinctions/mass-deaths that aren't possible to prevent through stockpiling. Literally no massive natural disaster or attack I can think of fits that bill. Not blight. Not super volcanoes. Not pandemics. Not nuclear war. Not bioterror. In none of those scenarios would stockpiling likely be particularly helpful at a multi-year timescale. Maybe in some of those scenarios stockpiling buys you a full growing season, if all of the other stars perfectly align.
tathougies 6y ago
Storage requires economic activity though. Storing frozen food requires an economy to generate electricity and maintain power lines. Storing dry goods requires electricity to process those goods into something useful or a fossil fuel supply chain or a wood cutting insustry. Also, food production requires year round economic activity. Pausing for one week would mean mass starvation even if everyone had food stores. People keep talking about disrupted supply chains but nothing could be further from the truth. Food is widely available as are all needed consumer goods. In my city, restaurant supply companies have shifted to producing direct to consumer boxes in a matter of days. I love to garden and am attempting to grow a lot of my own food because I'm a bit of a prepped, but even I can see that we are not anywhere close to a true SHTF moment. For the most part the economy is operating as normal for necessary goods. Most people can still go to the same store they always do and get everything needed or go o line and have it delivered.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  If the farm workers or the meat packers get corona or wildcat strike? If the braceros can’t get across the border?
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/12/business/bc-us-virus-outbreak-meat-plant.html https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/12/business/bc-us-v...
  - tathougies 6y ago
    If the farm workers strike, there will be others willing to work. I don't think it's worth asking if the 'braceros' can't get across the border. The American government and ICE has proven for the past 2 decades that it is completely incapable of policing the American southern border in any meaningful way.
jariel 6y ago
This is upside down. Storing several years of food is hugely expensive and a waste of resources. Companies should not be stocking capital and supplies for 1 in 100 years Black Swans. We could end up in a several years long pandemic or war. Should every family have a bunker, 5 years of non-perishables, weapons, bio gear, medicine, generator, generator parts etc? It's much more efficient to have a smart restructuring program for when calamity hits and to smartly reallocate resources, capital for the new re-alignment. Because of the system-wide effects, we are facing - even insurance is not the best product. The 'moral hazard' is not in the bailouts themselves, but the terms of them and how exactly the bailouts are enacted. For system-wide events that are impossible to predict, what we need is dynamic leadership (policy, action, financing). Some parts of the system need more resiliency than others which is why we have regulations, strategic investment, reserves. And after this event those will be adjusted as well hopefully.
frankus 6y ago
You have to keep in mind that a business in a competitive market would have to trade off investing in surviving a disruption against investing in growth, lowering prices, or increasing returns to shareholders. Absent some kind of coordination a business that plowed its profits into the former would probably not survive against others (investing in the latter) long enough to even experience such a disruption. Unregulated markets encourage firms to engage in a sort of recklessness arms race. And IMO that’s one of the reasons why we need strong non-market-based safety nets for this type of disruption.
yourapostasy 6y ago
> For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home, then even the most catastrophic events are much less likely to kill the vast majority of people in the world. I see a lot of resistance to your suggestion based upon the supposed economic feasibility. However, one angle I haven't seen discussed is: if vast swaths of the labor force did become functionally independent for up to 5 years for example, it would dramatically alter the extant leverage in the job market. Instead of a centralized union negotiating mechanism, a de-centralized negotiation mechanism runs. Wage earners decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to accept a job offer, secure in that they can last for up to 5 years of nothing before they are in a "must-get-job" state. At scale, it might become a de-centralized lightweight form of UBI, unionizing, and general strike. This doesn't even have to be prepper-style decentralization. If enough people work towards FIRE at the same time, then it functionally accomplishes exerting the same market pressures, except on an even longer timescale.

by devit 6y ago

twblalock 6y ago

Businesses were never expected to be able to totally shut down for months at a time. It’s not reasonable to suggest that businesses who can’t handle that have been irresponsible or are less deserving of help.

unethical_ban 6y ago
To say that those who can't handle it are not less responsible, is to say that those in the same industry who can handle it are not more responsible. I understand your point, that this is a major extreme that people don't tend to plan for, and for small businesses, I don't fault them at all. There is less sympathy for larger organizations like airlines who have (or should have) at least one full time team of people who prepare for all kinds of logistical scenarios: War/hostilities between nations, fuel shortages, pandemics, a broken supply chain of repair parts, green new deal legislation, the list goes on. So not only should larger organizations have been mindful that this kind of thing could happen, their cavalier use of cash on hand to inflate their imaginary value (stock price) should mean any help they get is tied to government stock in the company, a ban on stock buybacks, etc.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  Me and two others started a small business in 2000. After a year or two we developed a rule of keeping about three months of turn over in the bank at all times. It was designed to deal with say VAT and Corp tax turning up with payroll and no or late payments from a few big accounts in a perfect storm of cash flow fuck ups. No we did not factor in a global pandemic in our plans but it seems that avoiding credit to bailout your cash flow is a strategy to consider for the future. With the measures like furlough etc in the UK we have a plan for six months that leaves money in the bank and all 20 employees still on the books. I'll just be damn glad to get out the other side of this with my business and staff all in one piece. Losing the contents of the war chest for a while is the least of my worries if we are still solvent as a business and earning/paying personal incomes.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Not reasonable, and also not useful. That's probably 90% or 95% of businesses that were not able to pause like that. We're going to want a lot of those businesses. And the ones that are able, some are by luck or circumstance rather than wise design. Should we reward the luck as well as the design? "Don't help them" seems like throwing out ten babies with the bathwater.
- watwut 6y ago
  I mean, that logic is applied to individuals that for example get sick or simple exist in bad economy. They dont get bailout while consequences on them are disastrous. I think that anger over companies being bailed out with no conditions placed on those money is pretty much about that. Individual get homeless, but the company wont even have to go through bankruptcy and restructuralization. It gets free money instead.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    This is a totally different situation. Businesses are failing because of the government. Therefore the government should compensate them.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Well... in this situation, individuals are also going to be failing because of the government. Therefore...
      - twblalock 6y ago
        Therefore they should be compensated too, and they are going to be. They get unemployment benefits and Federal money. The income tax due date was moved out, and many states have allowed people to stop paying rent and prevented evictions. There will probably be more help for people in the next relief bill the government passes. People aren't being helped enough, but neither are businesses. On the plus side, helping businesses can help people keep their jobs, so if you help businesses you also help their employees. People are focused on stock buybacks, but what we really ought to do is prevent businesses that receive aid from laying people off. (Of course, that does create the incentive for businesses to lay people off before they get the aid, but a smartly written law could require companies to hire those people back as a condition of aid, etc.)
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Wimbledon took out a pandemic policy year after year. Turns out they were stupid to do so, they could have invested the insurance premium in the stock market and waited for their bailout.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  Think in risk terms. When they were assessing the risk to their business posed by a pandemic then they could not foresee the govt response. An insurance policy is (almost) certain to pay out. Risk assessed and mitigated. "turns out" is not a method I use for business planning. I'm not sure what sort of bailout they would get either. My firm does not expect a loss of earnings style bailout. I would venture that they did the right thing.
  - treyfitty 6y ago
    Insurance is most certainly NOT certain to pay out. Case in point Star Cinema Grill; albeit this is an egregious case where the insurer is blatantly arguing and bluffing a lawsuit. Insurance will fight tooth and nail to not pay out. https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/lloyds-of-london-underwriters-hit-by-lawsuit-from-pandemiccovered-cinema-chain-219185.aspx https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/llo...
- ambicapter 6y ago
  Wimbledon the tennis tournament?
- tathougies 6y ago
  Wimbledon is a one time (well annual...) event. I doubt anyone would insure a company making billions in revenue against a pandemic -- an inevitable outcome in a lot of ways.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    If it happens once every 20 years then the money earned by investing 20 years of premiums just have to pay for it. Alternatively the company could spend 20 years socking away money instead of issuing large bonuses.
mrfusion 6y ago
Well Reddit would certainly disagree with you on that. But I agree with you. I don’t even know why we call them “bail outs” in this case. “Crisis operating grants” would be more accurate.
- twblalock 6y ago
  Or just "compensation".

remarkEon 6y ago

I agree with the general principle here (that moral hazard is bad; that we should construct an economy in which it's possible to hit "pause" for any number of reasons), but that's not the economy we have. The one we have seems to reward financial engineering, cost-optimized supply chains that are highly vulnerable to even the most minor disruptions, and a general mindset that freaks out at the first sign of trouble. So, how to we get out of this trap? Most obvious answer to me is more localism. I.e., relying on local supply chains for goods (both consumables and foods) instead of a global one. This lockdown has been pretty miserable for a lot of my friends, but my one hope for a silver lining here is that after we're out of it there might be a return to prioritizing your local community over the bottom line. You don't freak out in a Pandemic if you know that your supply chains for all of this stuff are local, and unaffected by problems on the other side of the planet.

twblalock 6y ago
Localism is the opposite of the right thing to do. Small, local businesses are the ones that are going under. Large, geographically distributed companies are the most able to survive long-term shutdowns. What we need is more globalization and more redundancy of supply chains, not less. When the virus hits a region we need to be able to shift production of essential goods to other regions, so we need to have manufacturing capacity in many places.
- fastball 6y ago
  Globalism doesn't really encourage redundant regions – it encourages all production of a certain type of good to be done in a single region and then traded with other regions for maximum efficiency.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    Globalism encourages production of goods in multiple regions which are efficient at the production of a particular product. For example, globalization is why Toyota manufactures cars and car parts in 18 countries, rather than just in Japan. Under localism, Toyota would only manufacture in Japan.

lopmotr 6y ago

There's a balance between everything being JIT to everyone living in a self-sufficient bunker their whole life. More agility is better for developing the economy and technology and efficiency and all sorts of good things while more preparedness is better for surviving freak events. I think we need some of both. The JITters might not survive a disaster and the survivors might not produce much value, but both keep civilization going. You see the conflict between these two directions with agricultural protectionism. Countries often pay to keep their agriculture industries local however inefficient they are. That's bad for the economy but good for resilience against disaster.

throwawayjava 6y ago

> For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home 1. That wouldn't allow us to pause all economic activity. Not even close. Not even remotely close. Notice that 0% of the economic damage caused by coronavirus could have been prevented by stockpiling food and water. 2. Lots of economic activity is not possible to pause. Think about e.g., large construction projects or any manufacturing process. There's an enormous amount of economic activity that just can't easily be paused, at varying timescales. At the short timescale, for example, you can't simply stop pouring a foundation and come back to it later. On a longer timescale, you simply can't restart an oil well at $0 cost. These facts aren't due to bad planning. They're due to the fundamental laws of physics. And for any given type of disaster scenario, even the most resilient and localized supply chains might be disrupted. In fact, it's not really clear that localized or even redundant supply chains/processes would make you more resilient in any given scenario. There are likely fundamental tradeoffs and, even if not, individuals and small firms simply can't plan for every possible apocalypse. 3. That level of food/water stockpiling would be enormously expensive. Stockpiling would become a nontrivial drag on GDP, not only through unproductive resource allocation but also due to new frictions (e.g., moving 2 states over now becomes a five figure investment). 4. Like it or not, most folks simply don't have the means to stockpile at that scale. A waitress working 80 hours a week will never be able to afford the space and continuous investment necessary to maintain a multi-year food and water stockpile. Heck, even the largest firms with the best margins have to take on some existential risk in order to operate. At some point, the choice is between extreme resilience and having a given sector of the economy. 5. I can't find the problem you're trying to solve with multi-year food/water stockpiling. I'm having trouble figuring out what scenario would only last a few years, and would result in substantial destruction/disruption of the agricultural sector, but would not result in either a) also damage stockpiled food/water or b) trigger extinctions/mass-deaths that aren't possible to prevent through stockpiling. Literally no massive natural disaster or attack I can think of fits that bill. Not blight. Not super volcanoes. Not pandemics. Not nuclear war. Not bioterror. In none of those scenarios would stockpiling likely be particularly helpful at a multi-year timescale. Maybe in some of those scenarios stockpiling buys you a full growing season, if all of the other stars perfectly align.

tathougies 6y ago

Storage requires economic activity though. Storing frozen food requires an economy to generate electricity and maintain power lines. Storing dry goods requires electricity to process those goods into something useful or a fossil fuel supply chain or a wood cutting insustry. Also, food production requires year round economic activity. Pausing for one week would mean mass starvation even if everyone had food stores. People keep talking about disrupted supply chains but nothing could be further from the truth. Food is widely available as are all needed consumer goods. In my city, restaurant supply companies have shifted to producing direct to consumer boxes in a matter of days. I love to garden and am attempting to grow a lot of my own food because I'm a bit of a prepped, but even I can see that we are not anywhere close to a true SHTF moment. For the most part the economy is operating as normal for necessary goods. Most people can still go to the same store they always do and get everything needed or go o line and have it delivered.

selimthegrim 6y ago
If the farm workers or the meat packers get corona or wildcat strike? If the braceros can’t get across the border?
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/12/business/bc-us-virus-outbreak-meat-plant.html https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/12/business/bc-us-v...
- tathougies 6y ago
  If the farm workers strike, there will be others willing to work. I don't think it's worth asking if the 'braceros' can't get across the border. The American government and ICE has proven for the past 2 decades that it is completely incapable of policing the American southern border in any meaningful way.

jariel 6y ago

This is upside down. Storing several years of food is hugely expensive and a waste of resources. Companies should not be stocking capital and supplies for 1 in 100 years Black Swans. We could end up in a several years long pandemic or war. Should every family have a bunker, 5 years of non-perishables, weapons, bio gear, medicine, generator, generator parts etc? It's much more efficient to have a smart restructuring program for when calamity hits and to smartly reallocate resources, capital for the new re-alignment. Because of the system-wide effects, we are facing - even insurance is not the best product. The 'moral hazard' is not in the bailouts themselves, but the terms of them and how exactly the bailouts are enacted. For system-wide events that are impossible to predict, what we need is dynamic leadership (policy, action, financing). Some parts of the system need more resiliency than others which is why we have regulations, strategic investment, reserves. And after this event those will be adjusted as well hopefully.

frankus 6y ago

You have to keep in mind that a business in a competitive market would have to trade off investing in surviving a disruption against investing in growth, lowering prices, or increasing returns to shareholders. Absent some kind of coordination a business that plowed its profits into the former would probably not survive against others (investing in the latter) long enough to even experience such a disruption. Unregulated markets encourage firms to engage in a sort of recklessness arms race. And IMO that’s one of the reasons why we need strong non-market-based safety nets for this type of disruption.

yourapostasy 6y ago

> For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home, then even the most catastrophic events are much less likely to kill the vast majority of people in the world. I see a lot of resistance to your suggestion based upon the supposed economic feasibility. However, one angle I haven't seen discussed is: if vast swaths of the labor force did become functionally independent for up to 5 years for example, it would dramatically alter the extant leverage in the job market. Instead of a centralized union negotiating mechanism, a de-centralized negotiation mechanism runs. Wage earners decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to accept a job offer, secure in that they can last for up to 5 years of nothing before they are in a "must-get-job" state. At scale, it might become a de-centralized lightweight form of UBI, unionizing, and general strike. This doesn't even have to be prepper-style decentralization. If enough people work towards FIRE at the same time, then it functionally accomplishes exerting the same market pressures, except on an even longer timescale.