A reminder that it is the virus, not the government, that has been the primary driver of the economic damage. It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that we would rather get upset at the people in our immediate vicinity we disagree with than the faraway ones who are a bigger problem. It is likely an evolutionary advantage to focus your attention on things you have more influence over.
But it's still not more logical.
1st quarter economic stats for Sweden show an contraction of the economy of 0.3% vs 3.8 for Europe as a whole (https://www.politico.eu/article/swedens-cant-escape-economic-hit-with-covid-19-light-touch/), but as a result of the their economy's reliance on exports to other parts of Europe the predictions for the future are pretty dire.
ReplyDeleteI've focused my personal checking on clothing sales - also way down in Sweden (https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-sweden-retail/swedish-apparel-sales-tumble-even-as-stores-spared-coronavirus-lockdown-idUSL5N2BX1EK) because I can narrate a very clear story that lack of clothing sales in Europe (from either shutdown induced closures OR lack of customers) telegraphs quite clearly through the supply system ending up causing destitution to young single vulnerable females who had moved from their subsistence farming villages into SE Asian towns where clothing factories were located.
I have to read the Guardian to the that UN and other global aid agencies are screaming about the dire effects that the western economic contractions are going to have in the less developed world, those news stories aren't getting traction in US media. Would the contraction have been bad without lockdown? Yes, absolutely! Would it have been this bad? As Sweden shows, very likely not -- their coming implosion is because of lack of market in the countries they export to, which have been under lockdown.
Let me be clear that I'm not supporting premature lifting of lockdown. But when someone says on facebook that they support lockdown forever because they don't want people to die, I cannot help but read that as "I support lockdown because I'd rather that 10 young people die of starvation in Cambodia rather than one additional person die here in the US."
Heh. That wasn’t me, but it’s an argument allied to ones I’ve made.
ReplyDeleteSome damage is baked in. Maybe most; perhaps even nearly all. But as we’ve discussed, even small changes can have large effects give scale.
North Carolina goes to Phase II today at 5 PM.
We should care, but we likely won't hold the discipline of caring for long. Yesterday I ordered a large item from Amazon, one which had various choices and brands. Only after we had put the order in did I say "I should have checked whether it was made in China."
ReplyDeleteNot exactly on topic, but yesterday's post at the WestHunter blog ("Time Dilation") had a comment that nicely parallels some of my thoughts and frustrations with what I'm seeing from many putatively conservative voices as they opine on the virus and the lockdowns:
ReplyDeleteIn mid-March, skeptics were focused on the low headline death numbers. “Just a few dozen deaths. What’s the big deal?” A lot of those skeptics thought it was “just the flu,” but a handful of them didn’t even think it was that bad. Presumably that small group wasn’t watching what was happening in China and Italy.
Near the end of March, I offered a wager to one of those skeptics. I proposed that the U.S. would see more than thirty thousand Americans die of the virus by the end of April. He called me “alarmist” and then went even further by saying I was out of my mind. I told him that my estimate was conservative. I suspected the actual number would be much higher, but I wanted to win the bet so I lowballed it.
When the number of COVID-19 deaths picked up steam in April, the skeptics changed tactics and began arguing that we couldn’t trust the numbers. They were inflated. Grossly inflated. Old sick people were being knocked off a little early by a virus that wasn’t really that lethal. You see, those elderly were already living on the edge of the abyss so their deaths shouldn’t count. Why does it matter if a sick eighty-year-old dies this month or a couple of months later?
The month of May brought a determined resignation among the skeptics. I began hearing the words “herd immunity” a lot more. It had always been background noise before, but it was now front and center of many discussions. Apparently it was only days away, too. More shockingly, I began hearing that lockdowns and social distancing were a waste of time. They had, quite literally, no impact on the spread of the virus. Dozens of literate people have now told me this. Some have even demanded I prove that social distancing and lockdowns help slow down the virus at all. I would be only a little more shocked if they skeptically demanded that I prove the concept of gravity.
Do the people whose thinking has evolved over the last two months in the way I describe above represent the majority of Americans? No. But there are a surprisingly large number of vocal conservatives who think this way. And because they’re concentrated on the right, they will likely have significant influence on Trump’s thinking and on the thinking of the red-state governors where the virus has yet to get its hooks in good and tight. (Comment by "Pincher Martin", May 22 at 2:27am.)
PS - My apologies for turning this into a very long comment, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to directly link the specific comment, so I've pasted it here in its entirety.
Thos.:
ReplyDeleteI find that right-clicking on the time-stamp for a comment often works for a direct link. So to provide a link in its context would look something like this:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/time-dilation/#comment-147613
There's further expansion of that comment in their reply to akarlin about plasticity of views. I'd thought of dropping an extended prediction as a marker on a previous thread on this blog just to be sure that in a few months time my memory of what I was really thinking a few weeks ago would be documented somewhere. I think we all in hindsight tend to remember that we were on whatever turned out to be the side of the angels.
I think Thos's quote from West Hunter (which I had also read) is very good. Moving the goal posts has been common on both sides this time.
ReplyDeleteBut I fear more that Unknown is going to be right and I will misremember in September what I said in March.
I'm not sure I'm buying it. If consumer fears were enough to keep businesses closed, no governments would have had to close businesses, and we wouldn't see drastic differences in the open/closed patterns across states with different governmental approaches. I'm not saying that consumer fears are having no effect, only that we can't attribute the economic hit predominantly to consumer fears until the governments quit threatening to sue business owners and revoke their licenses.
ReplyDeleteThe open-closed pattern is not random, neither in culture nor in government action. This is mostly related to population density and type of economy, I think. Many businesses and events shut down long before the government suggested it. When Son #5 visited Son #2 north of Houston March 6-12, he hit the last day open of a few things, including the rodeo. Lots of things shut down in advance of government edict, all over the country.
ReplyDeleteAs I noted before, we believe that in the long run individual choices in personal economic decisions work out best if people can make their own choices and stand or fall on the consequences, without the government doing everything. But we just don't know that concerning public safety, because individual decisions have broader consequences. After Mardi Gras, we have evidence that people making their own safety decisions can work out very badly for innocent bystanders, and not that far down the road.
BTW, I don't think of it as "fear" when I wear a seat belt or take medicine or use the better-plowed route home. One might have the courage to go into a subway car to save a child yet choose not to ride the NYC subways at present. I suppose you could call that fear, because there is some bad consequence down some path that I could be called "afraid" of. But it's a stretch, and should probably be worked around in a climate where one side of the argument is painting those on the other side as timid and obedient, which by implication means they are in contrast brave and independent-minded.
It's definitely fear that makes me use my seatbelt consistently. It's something I've done since I was a teenager. I get an extremely vivid image of what it would be like to be in even a minor accident without a belt, and that motivates me to buckle up every time. It's pretty much the same with disease; I'd really much rather not see a doctor or take a drug, but if I'm afraid enough about the course of an unchecked illness, I'm motivated to do it anyway. And I'd have an almost physical reluctance right now, clearly rooted in fear, to enter a crowded enclosed space like a subway car. If I had a really good reason to do it, I'd conquer the fear, but the fear is definitely there.
ReplyDeleteAbout GMO foods, now, I have no fear. If I avoided one, it would have to be on some abstract philosophical basis involving probabilities and the balance of harms. So there are some threats that hit me on a gut level, and others that are merely cues to a dispassionate risk/reward comparison. I lock my doors at night because it seems like a good practice, not because I feel a subjective fear about it. If I had a good reason to tromp out in my woods after dark, I wouldn't feel fear, even though I know there might be some hazards.
Some things are "just done," and gut-fear doesn't enter into it. I grew up without seatbelts (there weren't any in Liberia), but when they were available they were presented as things that you just used, without thinking about it, like closing the door. OTOH, I grew up taking care to lock cars and doors and make sure windows were not silently penetrable--theft is widespread there, and a stint in Chicago reinforced my practice. That's something that was both "just done" and "I have a strong sense of why."
ReplyDeleteI'm not afraid of crowds in the same way I am of heights, or even with the visceral aversion to getting poked with sharp things, but given what I've been told the risks seem annoyingly high, and I avoid activities that involve crowds(*). BTW, after a few minutes I forget the risks as old habits kick in.
I'm leading a Bible study in which the average age slightly exceeds my own. Zoom is all very well, but at some point we need to meet in person again. Obviously I don't control that timetable, but I will influence it, and my answer may put people at risk. (It looks like the disease is on the downswing, but there's still a lot of tail in the distribution.)
(*)True, I've done that all my life--but I do it more now. https://xkcd.com/2276/