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Worries grow over a K-shaped economic recovery that favors the wealthy
- war1025 6y agoIt's almost like forcing businesses not to do business causes them to go out of business.. Shocking.
- spacephysics 6y agoDon’t worry, we did the same thing in the 1920’s when we had a pandemic that targeted the youth, and was far more deadly, regardless of comorbidities...oh wait, we didn’t...
- ashtonkem 6y agoWe also suppressed knowledge of it early on due to the war. That’s literally why it’s called the Spanish Flu, as a non-belligerent they were the only ones willing to report about it.
- awinder 6y agoYeah, that worldwide pandemic sure is a pain in the ass.
- quicklime 6y agoIt's not guaranteed that keeping businesses operating would stop them going out of business either. It's possible that a better strategy is to force everyone to shut down and get it over with quickly, so that customers can feel comfortable going out and spending money again.
- krona 6y agoforce everyone to shut down and get it over with quickly On a purely factual point, the way to get it over with quickly is not to stop people coming in to close contact with one another. Everyone seems to have forgotten what the original and only purpose for the lockdown was: to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
- quicklime 6y agoI don’t think that’s as purely factual as you make it out to be. Maybe that was the purpose for the US, but other countries did it for the purpose of eradication (eg New Zealand) or to get it to a point that the contact tracing workload was manageable. The hospital capacity threshold is just one of many arbitrary targets.
- makomk 6y agoIt's not entirely arbitrary - the fact that the US is not a small island about 1000 miles from its nearest neighbour seems to comprehensively eliminate the New Zealand-style elimination option, given the trouble they're having with it. Like, even if you assume an equally competent lockdown in the US would have the exact same per-capita chances of infections slipping through from outside, with no disadvantage from the porous southern land border with a country that has a major outbreak, it still has 100 times the population. Which means that rather than causing a new major imported cluster once in 100 days, the leaks which the New Zealand government can't identify, fix, and reckons are likely an inherent limitation that they'll just have do deal with would cause them roughly daily. That means no elimination, not even if the numbers worked out slightly better than my rough estimate. And remember, New Zealand was the last big, well-known elimination success story left standing.
- avani 6y agoCanada manages pretty well with a "porous southern land border with a country that has a major outbreak". I wonder what the difference is. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/i-crossed-back-state-denial/616126/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/i-crossed-...
- Retric 6y ago100x the size is neither beneficial nor harmful when controlling a pandemic. As demonstrated by the US’s successful reduction in spread before opening things up again. 0.9 new cases per existing case and it goes away. 1.1 new cases per existing case and it grows uncontrollably. There isn’t a true middle ground.
- war1025 6y agoThe economic devastation here in Iowa seems objectively less severe than in states that locked down more completely. People shit on Iowa at every turn for our pandemic response, but we've got a functioning economy and a whopping 3% of our population has tested positive for the virus so far.
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y agoUnfortunately, Iowa also has a relatively high positive test rate, which indicates that most cases there aren't being tested.
- evgen 6y agoWhen your economy does not have as far to fall before it becomes tragic I guess the drop doesn't feel too bad. Iowa's pandemic response has been pathetic and between Covid Kim pushing for opening things up while the state continues to see increased growth of covid cases and a senator who claims there have only been 10K covid deaths I think Iowa has absolutely nothing to feel good about. I keep calling back to parents who are rightfully afraid to go out with the large number of maskless morons walking around town while oblivious neices and nephews enjoy house parties in Ames and Iowa City for the first week of classes. You are less than two weeks from a peak of covid cases being diagnosed, schools are being pushed to open, and at this point it is no longer a question of whether you will see new covid diagnosis peaks by the end of the month but rather how high it will jump. There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them.
- war1025 6y ago> There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them. I work in Ames and live in the next town over. As I said before, and as I will repeat any time it comes up, for a place that is supposedly doing "everything wrong", there is very little impact on daily life. As in, literally zero. You wear a mask to the store. Other than that, life continues mostly as before. People are in my opinion making a serious mistake holding Iowa up as the picture of failure because Coronavirus is literally a non-event in most people's lives here. I've been told for months now that we're on the cusp of everything going wrong. It's been one big nothing after another.
- dopylitty 6y agoOnly in countries with no functioning federal government to take care of workers. In countries with a functioning government non-essential businesses shut down fully but temporarily and the government ensured people got the basic necessities without being forced to go out in public and spread the disease.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlexTWithBeard 6y agoBut... but someone has to produce all these basic necessities while all the businesses are shut down?
- ShamelessC 6y agoHence the "non-essential" qualifier in their sentence.
- runarberg 6y agoI mean, we saw this pattern also in 2010, but then there was no government enforced lockdown, so it is a bit disingenuous of you to blame this on the lockdown it self.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoIf we did nothing, over 2 million would have died. We have only had 190k deaths, so we saved 90% of the people that were going to die to date.
- war1025 6y ago> If we did nothing, over 2 million would have died. We absolutely cannot know that.
- ShamelessC 6y agoThere's this field of math called statistics that you may want to look into.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't do this here.
- ShamelessC 6y agoNoted. Apologies to you and the person I replied to.
- dang 6y agoAppreciated!
- Ericson2314 6y agoHow the hell can a graph be K shaped, however one rotates the K?!
- jeffbee 6y agoThe idea is that the outcome bifurcates into rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer.
- hinkley 6y agoPut another way, if the | is the Y axis and you plot outcomes for the two groups as separate lines on the chart.
- Ericson2314 6y agoOh wow, how crude. Thanks, you all.
- war1025 6y agoMy job is stable and my portfolio is up for the year. This is a pretty common situation among most of the STEM people I know. So does that mean we're all rich? I mean, objectively we are in most senses of the word. But that's generally not what people mean when they say "the rich"
- em500 6y agoYeah, what people mean when they say "the rich" is "richer than me".
- effingwewt 6y agoNot at all there is definitely a wealth point. There are classes of wealth its extremely disingenuous to pretend everyone is simply complaining some people have more than others.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 6y agoOne of the factors here besides ability to work at home is disposable income that is not being disposed. Bad for the companies that aren’t getting it, and leaving some of us with more savings than we normally would have. I’m trying to sort out better plans for patronizing businesses, donations and generally investing more locally. Not much else I can do about it.
- somewhereoutth 6y agoTrue enough. I'm taking this opportunity to buy new equipment for the sport I like - it keeps manufacturers afloat, and increases the supply so that second hand stuff becomes cheaper for other people wanting to enter the sport. And the more people, the bigger the economies of scale, and new stuff will eventually get cheaper too!
- ShamelessC 6y agoThe marginal propensity to consume is significantly lower for the wealthy who tend to hoard their wealth. Much of the lower-middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. They have significantly less disposable income currently because they're likely to be unemployed. They aren't shopping because they fucking can't afford to, and because social distancing is important right now - in that order. So yeah, the pandemic is partially why people aren't spending as much. But it's also just a core problem that existed pre-pandemic.
- AndrewBissell 6y agoNow here's an article that CNBC should have published 11 years ago. The way that the CARES Act was basically a rerun of 2008's corporate looting, but with almost none of the same uproar and outrage, is one of the most depressing developments of 2020.
- supernova87a 6y agoWhy does CNBC's website always break for me like no other news website. I have a bunch of ad/flashblockers on -- their site must be filled with junk in a very badly integrated way.
- sudders 6y agoIn related news, water is wet.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoMany facets here. We need better education. The wealthy have very good schools. Democrats protect wealthy schools from undesirables by preventing people from choosing which school their kids can go to. Unions slow societal progress (Police and Teacher’s unions for example)
- ShamelessC 6y ago> We need better education. Absolutely. > The wealthy have very good schools. Yep. > Democrats protect wealthy schools from undesirables by preventing people from choosing which school their kids can go to. Unions slow societal progress (Police and Teacher’s unions for example) Aaand you lost me. This sort of poorly thought out Ayn Rand POV is unfortunate to see so often here on HN. I'd also wager that your blaming of democrats here is obviously flamebait and is against the rules. There's no interesting discussion to be had when you just dismiss an entire portion of the population right off the bat. Nothing to engage with when you've already decided I'm part of some conspiracy to keep kids from having a decent education.
- matchbok 6y agoCharter and “school choice” just move problems around. Nothing is solved, while a few corporate school owners get rich. Stop acting like you know the field - you clearly have only a basic (and wrong) view of the situation.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe fallacy is assuming a given school can be fixed in less than 10 years. There are public schools in Detroit exposing kids to enough lead to cause measured behavioral changes. It seems reasonable to hand those families a check to help them to escape than to keep perpetuating the injustice.