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Whatever your opinion is about the lockdowns, there is one thing everyone should be able to agree on; they destabilize just about everything. I'm worried about
by brink 5y ago
Whatever your opinion is about the lockdowns, there is one thing everyone should be able to agree on; they destabilize just about everything. I'm worried about people going hungry or not being able to heat their home this winter from the ripple effects.
- barney54 5y agoThe energy situation in Europe and Asia is already ugly. The Indians only have about 4 days of coal at their powerplants, China has already had blackouts, and in Europe the price of natural gas is the equivalent of oil at $200 a barrel.
- lettergram 5y agoFrom the beginning it was known this would push 130 million people nearly to starvation https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/africa/coronavirus-famine-un-warning-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/africa/coronavirus-famine...
- the-dude 5y agoManufacturers were anticipating lower demand due to COVID effects, not lockdowns per se. It is not like life would have continued uninterrupted without lockdowns.
- goalieca 5y agoEvery economic forecast I read in April 2020 assumed things would be open by q3/q4 last year.
- nicoburns 5y agoWhich was pretty stupid given that public health professionals (and indeed people here on HN) were forecasting the pandemic lasting a minimum of 18 months from around that time when it became clear that it wasn't going to be contained to China.
- goalieca 5y agoThey were using the model forecasts from the health community. We all knew it would become endemic but it was hard to forecast lockdowns would continue for so long.
- CydeWeys 5y agoSounds like that forecast was wrong then. Also, you should've been looking at the forecasts from epidemiologists, not economists. Viruses don't care about what economists want.
- tenpies 5y agoUnfortunately - and as we can continue to see - there is nothing stopping scientists from being political mouth pieces. "Trust the science" comes with a huge asterisk: only the science of the approved scientific speaker by the approved political party and only of the approved narrative. The scientists that spoke out against this were quickly shunned, the wagons circled, and when evidence became to crushing to hold the narrative, history was simply re-written via gaslighting. With economists at least we know they will regularly be wrong and that you will openly see differing schools of thought on even the most foundational of issues.
- szundi 5y agoThis. And then when people started buy more cars instead of less, the automotive industry squeezed out all silicon for themselves with their contracts and power. Here we are from other industries without a single chip, while the car manufacturers probably are sitting on 2 years of supplies now.
- CydeWeys 5y agoWeird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave; it was always gonna go pear-shaped no matter what.
- wyager 5y ago> Weird to blame the lockdowns when the real cause was the pandemic. The lockdowns were the actual proximate cause for most business disruptions. > It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. People who are employed are usually younger than 65 and therefore were never at significant demographic health risk from coronavirus.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MrBuddyCasino 5y agoHow much this was due to organic behaviour changes in the population and how much was due to government regulations isn't clear to me at this point, only that it was both. Sweden and Denmark have ended all covid state restrictions afaik - anyone has data on how that affected productivity?
- ihsw 5y agoThe implication that government policy has an effect on individual choices is a fallacy -- assertions that lockdowns destroyed productivity (it didn't) are false and assertions that relieving lockdowns restored productivity (it didn't) are also false. Individuals will behave in their best interest regardless of external factors like unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.
- eljimmy 5y agoIt's true - China's numbers, unsurprisingly, really don't give light to how badly they were impacted. I remember reading about how they were building brand new hospitals to cope. Literally building a brand new hospital. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of the world.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoBlaming lockdowns isn’t the full story. Demand for electronics is way, way up. Everything from people being bored at home to extra stimulus dollars has put extra demand on everything electronic. The effect is amplified as companies are panic-buying every part they might possibly need for the next few years.
- newbamboo 5y ago- inflation
- bgorman 5y agoDemand for electronics being up is directly correlated to lockdowns. PCs had been a declining sector for years before covid lockdowns.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoDemand for cars is way up, too, which isn’t expected in lockdown conditions.
- switch007 5y agoReally? With governments saying avoid public transport and encouraging people to work remotely which caused a huge number of people to move to the countryside where public transport is largely non existent therefore requiring cars.
- dagw 5y agoPlus, with airplanes and international travel being off limits, the number of people going on road trips for their vacations has no doubt greatly increased.
- birdyrooster 5y agoSure it is, you couldn’t (or still can’t) safely carpool or take public transit so you need a personal vehicle. Simultaneously people are ordering record amounts of food delivery causing a surge in car based employment greater than was seen with Uber and Lyft of yore.
- heisenbit 5y agoWe were running an over-optimized system on fumes. Such is the nature of long periods of high stability with no oversight governance enforcing robustness. Any disruption would have had self amplifying and propagating consequences.
- pixl97 5y agoI disagree, the system has been unstable for years, this was just the first Black Swan that happened to land and sent it crashing to the ground. This was always going to happen. Taleb et al have been warning about the fragility of our systems for decades now and that JIT and long supply chains have made things even worse. You're taking the wrong lesson from lockdowns.
- mhandley 5y agoIt may well be that this was the pandemic we needed - really bad, but not so bad as to be catastrophic. When the next pandemic comes along, we'll be a lot better at fast vaccine production and lab testing, more prepared for how to lock down early and effectively, and understand better how to keep an economy running in lockdown. And the supply chain, when it eventually recovers and has time to breath again, will realize the value of building in more slack, shorter supply chains, etc. In the end though, while a lot could have been done much better, society generally has survived this disruption surprisingly well so far. Will it survive a worse future pandemic or larger disruption? I guess that depends on how well the lessons from this one are learned.
- analog31 5y agoPeople would have locked themselves down. My work group bailed a week before the lockdowns began. Of course some people would have locked down by dying. It was really a choice of an organized lockdown or a disorganized one.
- howmayiannoyyou 5y agoLockdowns are not the whole story, just a major contributing factor. Other factors: - China energy shortages forcing rolling blackouts. - Long standing under investment in older chip fab manufacturing (eg. auto industry). - Long standing under investment in US port infrastructure, causing unprecedented shipping backlogs. - Copper foil shortage due to over reliance on Chinese sources. - Covid negative impact on childcare, both informal and formal, requiring formerly working parents to now opt for unemployment or lower incomes.
- newbamboo 5y ago- inflation