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It's a valid take. Not one I necessarily agree with, but one that deserves exploration. IMO we are facing costs and painful trade offs: * Many insisted that t

by rsj_hn 5y ago

It's a valid take. Not one I necessarily agree with, but one that deserves exploration. IMO we are facing costs and painful trade offs: * Many insisted that the "moral" course of action was shutting the economy down during Covid to minimize deaths. Well, OK, there is a price for that in terms of destroying businesses and livelihoods, of loneliness and isolation. A lot of people are now stressed out, out of work - and those jobs are gone. Yes, new jobs will take their place, but not necessarily the same jobs in the same place. * Many insisted that the "moral" course of action is to suspend evictions when people lose their jobs during covid. It was unfair to lose your apartment if you lost your job. Well, OK, but that means that rental prices are now out of whack from what people are earning and the new job situation. That inventory is held back from the market and from (downward) price pressure. * Many also insisted that the "moral" course of action is to not have professional versus trade tracking in schools, that every high school should be "college prep", and everyone should go to to college. Well, OK, there is a cost for that in terms of not having a trade school infrastructure and a lot of people with no marketable skills even if they attended college or a college prep high school. The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. By pretending we'll all just be professionals, we have a huge mass of people who have no careers and no opportunity to engage in truly skilled work, together with acute shortages of things like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, general contractors, etc. So yeah, life for a lot of people is very bleak. The take away is not to "warn" employers that they should manufacture lots of non-existent jobs for workers, but to fix our educational system so that it produces the kinds of people our economy needs, rather than the kinds of workers we think we want to be. Then rely on church attendance and government income insurance to take care of our moral concerns.

brighton36 5y ago
These are trolley problems all the way down. For which, there is probably no solution, save for educating the public as to what a trolly problem is. But, no one does that. So, instead, we have 'moral clarity'. I don't see how a country can work in such conditions for very long...
salawat 5y ago
>The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. That is the most silk glove way of saying "humans should serve the economy not the other way around". Which to be honest is no world I want to live in.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  No, it's really not. It's just the statement of a simple fact, that the economy is a complex technical thing, and does not follow simple moral heuristics. Basically the point that Keynes was trying to make when he was debating that the health of the economy was more important than the "sin" of abandoning the gold standard. It does not matter whether you like it or don't like it, it's reality, and denying reality is foolish. Foolishness is what causes most of the bad outcomes we see in the world, including the bleak lives of so many who were victims of good intentions which I gave examples of in my post. When people convince themselves that it's unfair to make unemployed people leave their apartments and are then shocked, shocked, that rental rates go up, that is foolishness. When people convince themselves that everyone should go to college, and are shocked, shocked that we have an army of unskilled workers, it is again foolishness. When people decide that advanced placement is unfair because the rich benefit and are then shocked, shocked that the rich end up benefiting even more as only private schools have advanced placement, then this is even more foolishness. But some people insist on living a world where society makes foolish choices rather than wise choices. Fortunately societies with too many such people don't last very long.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzelement 5y ago
  I expect the person you're responding to was describing how the economy works, not moralizing how he wishes it worked - which is what you're doing. You may be familiar with the metaphor of growing and dividing the pie. The hard thing is to make the pie large. It's much easier to divide the pie. If the pie is huge, even an 'unequal' distribution of pieces is an improvement over no pie. When people obsess about dividing the pie equally, they always ignore how the pie is grown in the first place. This is what happened to us in the USSR - we were all equal but nobody had anything.
kevingadd 5y ago
In many western countries we didn't actually shut the economy down - we left large portions of it still running and exposed all those people to covid without appropriate care (naturally many of them caught it), so at best we turned a large initial spike into a long, ongoing misery of deaths that continues until this day. Part of that is because politicians and business leaders were unwilling to stomach the difficulty of doing a proper shutdown. The outcome we got instead has all of the downsides you describe but I don't think it's correct to describe it as "shutting the economy down", at best it was a half-measure that perhaps was worse than either of the two real options. If large countries like the US had done a proper shutdown, the Delta variant might not be spreading around right now claiming huge numbers of lives. For example, if you want to avoid having covid cripple your economy, one useful measure would be to ensure your front-line workers (food service, caregivers, etc) have protected leave so they can recuperate at home if they get covid or go get vaccinated, then return to work full-time. Instead the US tells everyone to suck it up and come to work while they're miserable and infectious. Is it any surprise our death count is enormous and the economy is in tatters? Rental prices were already a nightmare before the pandemic, if anything rental prices tanked for a while in some areas during it. I don't think the eviction suspension is connected to that - it had bad impacts but I don't know that you can convincingly argue that one of those impacts was price.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

brighton36 5y ago

These are trolley problems all the way down. For which, there is probably no solution, save for educating the public as to what a trolly problem is. But, no one does that. So, instead, we have 'moral clarity'. I don't see how a country can work in such conditions for very long...

salawat 5y ago

>The biggest problems that we face in our economy are problems we ourselves create in trying to approach the economy as a pez-dispenser of fairness rather than as an engine of economic growth that follows emergent technical, rather than ethical, laws. That is the most silk glove way of saying "humans should serve the economy not the other way around". Which to be honest is no world I want to live in.

rsj_hn 5y ago
No, it's really not. It's just the statement of a simple fact, that the economy is a complex technical thing, and does not follow simple moral heuristics. Basically the point that Keynes was trying to make when he was debating that the health of the economy was more important than the "sin" of abandoning the gold standard. It does not matter whether you like it or don't like it, it's reality, and denying reality is foolish. Foolishness is what causes most of the bad outcomes we see in the world, including the bleak lives of so many who were victims of good intentions which I gave examples of in my post. When people convince themselves that it's unfair to make unemployed people leave their apartments and are then shocked, shocked, that rental rates go up, that is foolishness. When people convince themselves that everyone should go to college, and are shocked, shocked that we have an army of unskilled workers, it is again foolishness. When people decide that advanced placement is unfair because the rich benefit and are then shocked, shocked that the rich end up benefiting even more as only private schools have advanced placement, then this is even more foolishness. But some people insist on living a world where society makes foolish choices rather than wise choices. Fortunately societies with too many such people don't last very long.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xyzelement 5y ago
I expect the person you're responding to was describing how the economy works, not moralizing how he wishes it worked - which is what you're doing. You may be familiar with the metaphor of growing and dividing the pie. The hard thing is to make the pie large. It's much easier to divide the pie. If the pie is huge, even an 'unequal' distribution of pieces is an improvement over no pie. When people obsess about dividing the pie equally, they always ignore how the pie is grown in the first place. This is what happened to us in the USSR - we were all equal but nobody had anything.

kevingadd 5y ago

In many western countries we didn't actually shut the economy down - we left large portions of it still running and exposed all those people to covid without appropriate care (naturally many of them caught it), so at best we turned a large initial spike into a long, ongoing misery of deaths that continues until this day. Part of that is because politicians and business leaders were unwilling to stomach the difficulty of doing a proper shutdown. The outcome we got instead has all of the downsides you describe but I don't think it's correct to describe it as "shutting the economy down", at best it was a half-measure that perhaps was worse than either of the two real options. If large countries like the US had done a proper shutdown, the Delta variant might not be spreading around right now claiming huge numbers of lives. For example, if you want to avoid having covid cripple your economy, one useful measure would be to ensure your front-line workers (food service, caregivers, etc) have protected leave so they can recuperate at home if they get covid or go get vaccinated, then return to work full-time. Instead the US tells everyone to suck it up and come to work while they're miserable and infectious. Is it any surprise our death count is enormous and the economy is in tatters? Rental prices were already a nightmare before the pandemic, if anything rental prices tanked for a while in some areas during it. I don't think the eviction suspension is connected to that - it had bad impacts but I don't know that you can convincingly argue that one of those impacts was price.