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Please don't compare the virus with a world war. World wars are followed by a miraculous age of prosperity. Home are destroyed and can be rebuilt, tenant and l

Please don't compare the virus with a world war. World wars are followed by a miraculous age of prosperity. Home are destroyed and can be rebuilt, tenant and landlord alike passed away. Rent is cheaper if not free in some places. All debts are forgiven and anyway the creditor is likely to be dead. Business that closed or lost their workforce can start over from scratch. A virus is nothing like that. It gives no boost to the economy. It doesn't make more homes available or make rent cheaper. Debts continue to accrue with interest while there are no revenues coming in.

ryanwaggoner 6y ago
Kinda working off a small sample size there, aren’t you? The last world war was almost 8 decades ago, and the last pandemic of equal impact was a century ago, and also overlapped a world war. We have no idea what life looks like on the other side of this, but I’ll take pandemic over world war any day.
wegs 6y ago
The debt forgiveness can happen here too. That's the critical piece now. A month ago, a debt freeze would have done it.
pvaldes 6y ago
> It doesn't make more homes available In fact it does when kills elder people that lived in their own house, and some places are still unsuitable to normal human activities since WWII, but I understand the subjacent idea. If debt (specially of the artificially inflated kind, with generations of people paying interests totalling decens of times the amount borrowed) is a menace for the recovery, at some time we eventually will need to agree to forgive it, or to make a law to enforce a limit. If copyright can't be applied for an unlimited time, maybe debt shouldn't be allowed to extend over an unlimited time. And of course a lot of debt will dissapear itself naturally after covid killing the debtor. I assume that the models include that possibility.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I feel like you're missing a basic sanity check here. If your position commits you to believing that having a bunch of infrastructure blown up is good for the economy, that it stimulates growth when a bunch of people die and most businesses disappear, you need to back up and think about where your train of thought got lost.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  It's certainly true that the rate of profit on new investments goes up when you destroy existing capital stock. In normal times, continuous expansions make bad money chase after good, and you need downturns to wipe out the malinvestments. War wipes out both good and bad money alike, so that, very temporarily afterwards, almost all investments are "good money": pick a rebuilding project and invest in it, and it'll probably turn a healthy profit.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window OTOH, there's an Either/Or fallacy in this subthread as well. We're talking about whether a pandemic or world war is worse, but historically we tend to get both. War tends to create unsanitary, chaotic conditions where disease can thrive, while disease tends to destabilize society and break down existing social bonds so that war becomes more likely. IMHO it's likely the grandparent is correct, but only because coronavirus will lead to WW3, not because the disease itself is worse.

ryanwaggoner 6y ago

Kinda working off a small sample size there, aren’t you? The last world war was almost 8 decades ago, and the last pandemic of equal impact was a century ago, and also overlapped a world war. We have no idea what life looks like on the other side of this, but I’ll take pandemic over world war any day.

wegs 6y ago

The debt forgiveness can happen here too. That's the critical piece now. A month ago, a debt freeze would have done it.

pvaldes 6y ago

> It doesn't make more homes available In fact it does when kills elder people that lived in their own house, and some places are still unsuitable to normal human activities since WWII, but I understand the subjacent idea. If debt (specially of the artificially inflated kind, with generations of people paying interests totalling decens of times the amount borrowed) is a menace for the recovery, at some time we eventually will need to agree to forgive it, or to make a law to enforce a limit. If copyright can't be applied for an unlimited time, maybe debt shouldn't be allowed to extend over an unlimited time. And of course a lot of debt will dissapear itself naturally after covid killing the debtor. I assume that the models include that possibility.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I feel like you're missing a basic sanity check here. If your position commits you to believing that having a bunch of infrastructure blown up is good for the economy, that it stimulates growth when a bunch of people die and most businesses disappear, you need to back up and think about where your train of thought got lost.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
It's certainly true that the rate of profit on new investments goes up when you destroy existing capital stock. In normal times, continuous expansions make bad money chase after good, and you need downturns to wipe out the malinvestments. War wipes out both good and bad money alike, so that, very temporarily afterwards, almost all investments are "good money": pick a rebuilding project and invest in it, and it'll probably turn a healthy profit.
nostrademons 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window OTOH, there's an Either/Or fallacy in this subthread as well. We're talking about whether a pandemic or world war is worse, but historically we tend to get both. War tends to create unsanitary, chaotic conditions where disease can thrive, while disease tends to destabilize society and break down existing social bonds so that war becomes more likely. IMHO it's likely the grandparent is correct, but only because coronavirus will lead to WW3, not because the disease itself is worse.