31 ms·

I wonder if people are starting to question if the magnitude of the Covid response was justified now the bill is becoming due? Is anyone willing to put their h

I wonder if people are starting to question if the magnitude of the Covid response was justified now the bill is becoming due? Is anyone willing to put their head above the parapet of supporting the shutdowns and now realising it wasn’t worth the cost? Huge inflation, generational debts, increased poverty, broken systems left right and centre etc etc. Or does Putin get all the credit?

paulpauper 4y ago
real economic growth since 2020 is still positive despite inflation and covid
RIMR 4y ago
I think that if we have to choose between letting hundreds of thousands of additional people die, or having a healthy economy, we utterly failed our priorities as a society long before the pandemic started.
- 650 4y ago
  "Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die" – this comes from the film The Big Short.
  - aschearer 4y ago
    Not sure if you're being serious with these numbers, but we've had 1,000,000 covid deaths in the U.S. So we'd need 25% unemployment to match... And people are still dying from covid.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Unemployment is historically low.
- JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  If a society makes the choice that they'd rather be a bit wealthier, at the cost of having slightly lower life expectancy, that certainly does say something about the society in question. I don't think I would describe a society that knowingly and intentionally made that decision as having "utterly failed", though. US society has failed the "knowingly and intentionally" side of that, and also mostly the "trade" side of that (vaccines being the exception -- we actually did succeed at trading a pretty small amount of money for much-better-than-baseline outcomes there). But the problem wasn't that we chose to trade life for money, the problem was that we failed to have and act upon coherent priorities at all.
lamontcg 4y ago
The covid response was fine. A lot of what we're seeing now is bullwhip effects from the massive evaporation of demand due to the pandemic (spot prices for oil actually went negative at one point, which is one of those things that everyone seems to have entirely forgotten). That will be transitory. So will the impact of the stimulus checks. Secularly we're seeing the impact of cracking down on immigration combined with death and disability due to Covid and the retirement of baby boomers. There has also been a 40-year long secular trend of tax cuts for the rich and free money policies which has blown up asset bubbles and increased the Gini index of wealth disparity (give rich people money to spend and they blow up asset bubbles and create evaporating risk premiums as investment money goes looking for gains). The covid stimulus to average workers was actually overdue and did create some wage inflation (which would offset the asset bubbles and decrease wealth disparity) but that is what is now being cracked down on by the Fed. I suspect it will be entirely successful at what it is trying to do in the short term, and unemployment will get driven much higher because we can't tolerate the lower class doing any better in this country, that's a disaster. Then I suspect we're going to oscillate between periods of sharp recession and sharp inflation as the secular problems (inequality, lack of immigration and retirement) won't be addressed. 10 years from now Putin and Covid will be long gone, but we'll still be dealing with the secular trends. What I don't know is how much pain that investors or homeowners will be put through either deliberately or unintentionally by policymakers. Everyone has forgotten the problem of "pushing on a string" where no matter how much money you give to investment banks it just gets hidden under the mattress and can't stimulate demand. If they break the economy hard enough we could wind up there and the trajectory of the economy could be out of their control.
tarsinge 4y ago
To my understanding you can’t have both huge inflation and debts, absolute value of debts don’t change contrary to everything else. If everything (including salaries) does x2, then debts get divided by 2. Inflation has positives too.

paulpauper 4y ago

real economic growth since 2020 is still positive despite inflation and covid

RIMR 4y ago

I think that if we have to choose between letting hundreds of thousands of additional people die, or having a healthy economy, we utterly failed our priorities as a society long before the pandemic started.

650 4y ago
"Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die" – this comes from the film The Big Short.
- aschearer 4y ago
  Not sure if you're being serious with these numbers, but we've had 1,000,000 covid deaths in the U.S. So we'd need 25% unemployment to match... And people are still dying from covid.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Unemployment is historically low.
JoshuaDavid 4y ago
If a society makes the choice that they'd rather be a bit wealthier, at the cost of having slightly lower life expectancy, that certainly does say something about the society in question. I don't think I would describe a society that knowingly and intentionally made that decision as having "utterly failed", though. US society has failed the "knowingly and intentionally" side of that, and also mostly the "trade" side of that (vaccines being the exception -- we actually did succeed at trading a pretty small amount of money for much-better-than-baseline outcomes there). But the problem wasn't that we chose to trade life for money, the problem was that we failed to have and act upon coherent priorities at all.

lamontcg 4y ago

The covid response was fine. A lot of what we're seeing now is bullwhip effects from the massive evaporation of demand due to the pandemic (spot prices for oil actually went negative at one point, which is one of those things that everyone seems to have entirely forgotten). That will be transitory. So will the impact of the stimulus checks. Secularly we're seeing the impact of cracking down on immigration combined with death and disability due to Covid and the retirement of baby boomers. There has also been a 40-year long secular trend of tax cuts for the rich and free money policies which has blown up asset bubbles and increased the Gini index of wealth disparity (give rich people money to spend and they blow up asset bubbles and create evaporating risk premiums as investment money goes looking for gains). The covid stimulus to average workers was actually overdue and did create some wage inflation (which would offset the asset bubbles and decrease wealth disparity) but that is what is now being cracked down on by the Fed. I suspect it will be entirely successful at what it is trying to do in the short term, and unemployment will get driven much higher because we can't tolerate the lower class doing any better in this country, that's a disaster. Then I suspect we're going to oscillate between periods of sharp recession and sharp inflation as the secular problems (inequality, lack of immigration and retirement) won't be addressed. 10 years from now Putin and Covid will be long gone, but we'll still be dealing with the secular trends. What I don't know is how much pain that investors or homeowners will be put through either deliberately or unintentionally by policymakers. Everyone has forgotten the problem of "pushing on a string" where no matter how much money you give to investment banks it just gets hidden under the mattress and can't stimulate demand. If they break the economy hard enough we could wind up there and the trajectory of the economy could be out of their control.

tarsinge 4y ago

To my understanding you can’t have both huge inflation and debts, absolute value of debts don’t change contrary to everything else. If everything (including salaries) does x2, then debts get divided by 2. Inflation has positives too.