All of us get into sloppy habits of mixing together clumps of people who are actually different. Though I don't think I have written it anywhere, I have gotten into the habit of thinking of all the newly unemployed or under-employed people as having gotten there because of the governors and president's shutdown of non-essential industries. Yet this is not so. Many are shut down by the very natural reaction to the circulation of the virus. Even if there were no government forbidding travel to China or Italy (more importantly, travel back from there), most people wouldn't be going anyway. No government officials made the NBA shut down, it was the decision of many leagues not to have either fans or athletes close to each other. Knowing about the contagion, many restaurants would not be open even if allowed to be. So travel, entertainment, and restaurant businesses have not been hurt so much by Trump or any governor or mayor as by the virus itself. Anyone who has direct contact with others might be in the same shoes even if next week they are allowed to restart. Most of this economic hit is from the virus, not the government. Remember that if we are looking at government to blame for everything we slowly fall into the trap of looking to it for rescue. Not fully, or not among the crew here, anyway. Yet a little more, even among us. The ratchet does tend to move in only one direction.
Interestingly, the implied seal of safety that the government is giving to industries reopening may actually be an advantage. It shouldn't be, but people do think that way. Under a voluntary system, people might have been more reluctant to decide on their own "it's safe now." That's just speculation on my part and it does cut both ways. Having been declared an unsafe business by a government, however temporarily, might have a depressing effect on business for a long time to come. Even though people are eager to get back to church, a lot of folks may not go the first few weeks they are allowed. We have entered a world of greater risk whatever we do, because of C19. The tradeoffs are neither offsetting nor clear. A lot of us think that a shutdown that applied mostly to urban areas might have been a better choice. Yet if that, those city people would drive out to the neighboring towns for their bars, or head for the safer areas that were not shut down for a vacation, inviting the virus out of the cities, at least somewhat. People in tourist areas have very mixed feelings about people arriving From Away, as we say up heah.
There are next those who have losses because of secondary effects: they have less business because there are fewer people with money to spare to buy their product or services. Those are only partly the result of government restrictions, as above. A lot of them would be having diminished business in any event.
4 comments:
In the 2nd and third week of March I was noting that government edicts such as "no events larger than x people" and Cuomo's "send home 25% of your work force" were allowing businesses to take actions that they wanted to take but were inhibited from doing - no-one wants to lay off workers, but many individuals were fearful of working and wanted to stay home, so this made them unambiguously qualified for unemployment-insurance payments even though it might have been largely their own choice that they were first-in-line for layoff. Event cancellation often won't trigger cancellation insurance or contractual clauses that would allow sponsors to not pay for work contracted but not needed, but a planned event being suddenly prohibited by government is force majeure that would.
I'm thinking that government mandate to re-open would likely insulate some from fear that their personal decision to re-start would subject them to liability (in the legal and $$ sense) or bad PR if that decision turned out in hindsight to be premature.
And I'll express here that I've a suspicion that Trump's claim of authority to re-open is partly battlefield prep so that if Governors decide to independently to ramp down their states' restrictions ahead of any schedule promulgated by FedGov, he won't get the blame..
I'll monopolize the comments to also say you are right about inutility of urban-only restrictions, Reason magazine has documented that the closure of PA liquor stores has caused a great deal of traffic to neighboring states. And elsewhere I've seen complaints that rural-area supermarkets were swamped by shoppers who did not want to put up with the outdoor waiting lines imposed at suburban stores to keep the number of people in the store at one time down. So restrictions to stop spread of a virus can and do have the effect of pushing it faster into more remote areas.
Which might result in more deaths, or fewer, most likely unknown unless experiments are run in enough places to get meaningful numbers. Even then, that's later. But either way, it's not clear, and not worth making assertions in ALL-CAPS.
You may be right about Trump's battle prep. Everyone is in an impossible position.
I only follow people who follow Trump's twitter so I don't know, but I suspect if he hits the 'ultimate authority' thing once and done it was a laser pointer dutifully followed by the usual suspects.
It ain't 4D chess. Anybody with an ounce of political sense avoided it. Bashear here in KY did pretty handily.
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