All this, too, turns on things that are facts of the matter. Roger’s post is of course both excellent and empathetic, and when I read it I wanted to just say thanks for it.
Marcus’s counterpoint I also agree with. But at the end of the day, whether your decision is good or bad turns on what it accomplishes in the actual world of events, relative to other decisions you could make. Fighting public health measures because you are bitter does not get you back to work sooner. Indeed, it does nothing materially good for anybody. That seems to be a fairly easy fact from which to start. Taiwan never had a shutdown. Japan never had a lockdown, and even in metropolitan Tokyo, where infection density was probably one of the worst two areas (the other being up around Sapporo, per million), there was about a month of business shutdown. One time. I forget or didn’t learn details about S. Korea, but I think they never had a broad or ongoing lockdown; maybe short local ones at most, and some business suspensions. Those countries will have public health costs, a period of broad-based business costs, and sector-specific longer-term severe business costs in areas like bars or nightclubs or karaoke parlors, etc. It will be heavy but it need not lead to a depression. If vaccines work, the duration of the really bad sector impact will be measured in years, but not be permanent. The US, by refusing to spend 10G$ in mitigation at the beginning, followed by wallowing in indulgence of wounded vanities, has now spent 2.4T$ in extra unemployment, and probably needs to spend something on that order more. It will go on, in the best case, for a year from the start. Plus they need to pay the public health support costs, which are much higher than they were at the start. The ones with market power can push the exploitation curve harder and harder, so that the stock markets remain high while unemployment and all three of personal, business, and government debt climb and climb, but at some point no amount of market power will compensate for the reality that debt service has consumed all the income workers can generate, and they are not extended any more revolving credit. For the US government, I guess something like that will happen when foreign lenders compute that it will be mechanistically impossible for the US to repay any further loans they make to it by buying government debt. I have in mind the picture of core collapse at the end of the red giant phase of stellar lifecycles, that leads to supernovae. I don’t see anything that escapes from just these accounting identities, which turn on what has already been spent. To be sure, there are better and worse decisions going forward. Money on testing is nearly money poured down a well when you have as many cases as we now do; the return is much less because you are dabbing your eyes with a hanky while standing out in a downpour. So some strategic and focused use, with emphasis on very low-cost surveillance tests, combined with heavy public health behavior pressure, is probably all that pays. All other money in public health goes into vaccine distribution supply chains, I guess. The other major area, I take from one of Shubik’s themes. He always emphasized (as I have said on this list before) that the government has two roles in an economy. One is as the setter of rules of the game; the other is as large coordinated player in the game. So, e.g. monetary versus fiscal policy. Monetary is setting the rate of interest for central-bank borrowing, which doesn’t set the money in the society but affects the rates at which private actors can choose to change it. Fiscal is government spending, “quantitative easing” by buying troubled debt, issuing government bonds, and so forth. Similarly, Shubik used to say repeatedly that there should be a Federal Jobs Program, which is not equally activated all the time, but is a source of emergency employment stability during down-cycles. One could pick things like discretionary infrastructure repair, which is not the highest priority during boom times, when some of that can be done through private companies, but is a useful thing to pay people to do during employment crises because it gives predictable income and gets something done that was needed anyway. I would put retooling to non-fossil energy storage and distribution systems, with worker re-training to do it, in that category too. Two birds with one stone. To me, where that fits in is in parallel to the rules/player distinction. Supporting re-formation of collective bargaining to try to rein in the productivity-pay gap, or minimum wage laws, are regulatory roles. On the long term, they are necessary, but they are too slow to save this administration from being swamped again in a backlash midterm, and then getting replaced by the true antichrist in the next presidential. Direct hiring with a federal jobs program is the only thing I can see where the government can act fast enough, on large enough scale, to deliver to the blue-collar formerly-democratic voting bloc a real reason to support that administration. Similarly, I have head complaining, but not done the work to know how much of it is true, that business loan-support is getting in significant part siphoned off by people who don’t really need it, to the exclusion of many who do. There is some new micro-data modeling consortium involving some Harvard professors and somebody else (heard in a snippet on NPR) to try to micro-target the next round of bailout money (unemployment and business support) to where it is really needed. But one could say that one way to avoid the overhead of skimming that comes with giving it to the private sector, is to try to identify areas where the government can just directly employ the privately unemployed. It then controls the wages and is sue they end up with the workers. That’s not a great solution, because it leaves the private business that employed them in the lurch, so some other layer would be needed to tide those people over in a sort of dormant or tun state. But in terms of cost per output, it seems that it recovers certain losses that have been major leakages in the style of spending done so far. Not to claim that any of this is easy or that I see what should be done (I don’t have either the knowledge or the expertise). But it does seem that there are more mechanisms available than those being used. It also seems that distinguishing the timescales between the government’s impact as setter of rules of the game, versus as player in the game, gives a starting point when trying to figure out how to regain some electoral stability and give the Dems enough of a footprint in rural areas to be allowed to actually do work that would help anybody. What I say above may or may not be correct. I put it forth as an example of a kind of argument that one can try to make, because SOMETHING is actually correct, and one can try to figure out what that is. If the battleground or red-stater’s way of life is to be permanently angry, support the abusers who make their situations even worse, then get angrier as a result and support even worse abusers, they may be sincere, but I think it is a completely non-ideological thing to argue that they are not pursuing the best course of action that exists. And the existence of other countries (which one can read about on the internet!) is sufficient evidence that something is possible, that an ordinary person ought to be capable of knowing it is not a law of physics that things have to be exactly as bad as they currently are here. That’s where I attach to Marcus’s rebuttal that they can be understood for being angry and desperate, but they don’t get a pass for wallowing in it. Anyway, Eric > On Nov 11, 2020, at 1:35 PM, Marcus Daniels <[email protected]> wrote: > > Roger writes: > > < These people weren't voting for rascism, misogyny, narcissism, > authoritarianism, xenophobia, gimp shaming, science denialism, or all that > other baggage, they were overlooking it for reasons. > > > Many of those that could not work due to COVID restrictions are often in > battleground or red states. That’s the only way I can possibly begin to > rationalize the 71 million. To me, overlooking those things is unacceptable. > It’s not useful to exercise any empathy for them. They made a deal with > the devil. 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