Ask HN: Economy after coronavirus – what can we do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Economy after coronavirus – what can we do?

47 pointsTeMPOraL75 comments

As all of us are acutely aware, the current pandemic is dismantling the economy worldwide. With luck, few months from now the world will either recover or adapt to the new reality, but we'll still end up with seriously damaged national economies. Particularly hurt are all the people whose livelihood is tied to physical workspaces - gastronomy, services sector, manufacturing, etc.

My question is a call for ideas and analyses. What can we do to help our economies recover faster? That is, to help those badly hurt by present disruptions recover? What do you think the needs will be? What market opportunities?

Don't be reluctant to share your best ideas - after all, execution is king, and in the post-pandemic world, there will be plenty of space for competing approaches.

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One interesting idea I've heard recently is gift cards - essentially a way for people with enough disposable income to sustain gig workers across a shutdown. I know I'll be back at my local coffeeshop and taqueria as soon as I can. I know I'll be taking Lyft again. I know I'll be wandering through bookstores and going to theaters and so forth. And I'm not spending that money right now because I'm staying at home.

If I can buy gift cards for these sorts of services and that money can be used to fund workers, that's going to help them with cashflow. There's still going to be this several-week gap of lattes and tortas that went unpurchased, but it can be smoothed out a little bit.

There are logistical difficulties to sort out here to make sure money gets to the right place, including that food service workers rely on tips and that gig workers (like Lyft drivers) aren't the platform (like Lyft itself). So probably this would have to be worked into the concept of a gift card to make it solve the problem properly.

That's an interesting idea. Do you know if any store or operation is trying that?

I think it might need some additional promotion to work, in particular with feedback to the customers - otherwise it turns into a prisonner's dilemma situation. If I'm about to spend the next few months burning through my savings, I'll not be willing to buy gift cards to support a local coffee store unless I know others are doing the same; otherwise I take a meaningful hit on my savings while not ultimately helping the business at all. I wonder if such businesses could organize a Patreon/Indiegogo-style funding, declaring e.g. "we need $50000/month to keep our venue and 5 employees", with a visible progress bar?

Supporting gig workers with gift cards might be tough also because AFAIK they're considered a disposable and easy-to-replace resource, often not directly affiliated with the companies they serve most.

Right, I think this is specifically marketed with people with steady jobs (either people with WFHable jobs like tech workers, or people who are going into work anyway like doctors and retail workers) who are continuing to earn their usual income during the lockdown. If you're not getting paid yourself, it doesn't make as much sense for you to be a buyer.

At least where I am, enough of the customers of independent coffee shops / food places / stores / etc. are people with steady, WFHable jobs that it seems like simply managing cashflow and making sure it gets to the right people is helpful in and of itself.

I don't have a good answer to the gig-worker problem (well, my preferred option is government-run safety nets; the other option is regulations saying gig employment should be disallowed, but those have their own problems), but I want to throw it out there for brainstorming. One potential option is the platforms offer zero-interest loans to their workers, e.g., "here's $1000 now, but we'll want $100 back per month when this is all over, if you continue driving for us we'll automatically take $100 of your earnings per month, if you don't you'll just owe us." Of course many platforms can afford to do that on their own, but they could also fund the program with gift cards from customers. That is, there are two levels of gift cards here, one from customer to platform, one from platform to worker.

That's a good idea. Gift cards are effectively interest-free loans, so they give you a way to "loan money" to local businesses which can later be "paid back" by cashing in on the goods and services.

I don't know how well it'd work out for Uber/Lyft and "Uber for X", though.

Of course, following the loan analogy, there's a risk of default. If your local taqueria goes under before things return to normal, all of those burrito bucks you bought are effectively worthless.

Hopefully you aren't buying enough burrito bucks to put yourself underwater :P Yet, if everyone buys some, that could still be enough to keep the business from going underwater.

If they go bankrupt, yes. If they simply decide to go out of business in advance of running out of money (e.g., the owner is like "I've been thinking of retiring and now is a pretty good excuse"), write the terms of it so there's some obligation to refund the card.

That said, there have been enough Patreons/GoFundMes for local businesses, so I think that people understand that going bankrupt despite best efforts is a risk and enough people are willing to pay anyway to try to keep their local coffee shop open.

Tbh I'm not gonna buy a giftcard for a place that has a high chance of going under in a few months.

Yes, I know that can help cause it but still. We're staring down the face of a global recession and I'm got a family to look after.

Boost unemployment payouts in the USA, make it 60 or 90 days with ~80% of what you made at your job. Then taper it down after that on a monthly period (and you can improve that in times of crisis). You will need to pump up contributions, but the gov can seed that with bailout money. Long term you gather those payments with a progressive tax per business, not the silo model we use now. Some countries in the EU do something like this, basically, your unemployment is pegged to your salary.

This makes it somewhat "easy", if a restaurant in Seattle sees foot traffic at an 80% decline they fire their team and hunker down for 2 months. Then start back up once we get this thing beaten. And, this invests in labor/consumption and doesn't have the negative side effect of keeping businesses afloat that shouldn't be.

High rent is a killer, that is a harder one to solve. But, you could start a rainy day fund (and seed it with a bailout). Basically offer a 0% loan to any business that needs to pay rent during a time of officially declared national crisis, but the deal is the loanee has to take ~50% off the rent payment for the month in order to get it. And, make that work its way of the pyramid. The idea being the person running the building takes a hit, the bank with the mortgage takes a hit that month...

Note - In the USA unemployment maxes at 790 a week, and it scales depending on some calculations. It doesn't include tips too so most people who work in restaurants are really in trouble.

I can speak about Italy right now: we should (they are still debating) froze employment tax, consider that as an employer for each 1$ i give to my employee I pay roughly 0.60/0.80 in tax, this means i am cutting my costs of 60/80%. We have frozen any mortgage or installment for business and individuals. Obviously this would not be a long term procedure but even if it holds for 5-6 months this gives a lot of possibility to invest.

About rent i can give you my experience: Most landlords here are boomers who don't need rent money so they prefer to keep prices high rather than rent for lower fares. I am confident those boomers will start panicking and lower rent.

Thanks for sharing, sending good thoughts to Italy and hopefully it starts leveling off in 10 days or so. I live in Spain (but I am American). Everyone here is on the first day of lockdown and in high spirits.

In the USA the payroll tax is around 20%, so that isn't going to do as much if they pass that through to employees (esp as people employed are less a worry). Better to help on unemployment as the service industry is all going to get fired shortly if not already in the USA. The problem in the USA is unemployment is the pay is not based on your salary but maxes at 790 a week / 2800 a month. And it scales all the way down to a minimum of $188. Even worse tips don't count against insured wages.

What industries will be unaffected? Most big tech, media, healthcare. What industries will take a huge hit? Small business, retail and travel. Will this leave permanent effects? My theory is that consumer discretionary industries will struggle and that may last a long time. Biotech may be eclipsed for awhile by the outbreak. It's been said that eventually we would transition to a post-consumer economy and it seems like this outbreak could be a major catalyst to making our goods, services and distribution almost exclusively digital with the exception of food and necessary items. It seems like now is the time to capitalize on escapism and "netflix and chill" culture, (i.e. games, eBooks (or paper books) and VR). I've seen tons of user-generated home cooking/and home projects happening. If your company is direct to consumer and enables people to eat or make perishables like food/bev/cannabis (with some DIY aspect) it seems like a good bet for the next few months.

> What industries will be unaffected? Most big tech, media, healthcare.

Healthcare will be completely shot everywhere in the Western world. Quite possibly everywhere on the planet, period. Some media industries seem to be affected already - video production is cancelled to protect actors and staff, trade shows no longer happen. A lot of tech is just a component or service to meatspace-based operations, so I expect our industry will feel the damage too.

That said, tech and media may indeed be some of the least affected sectors.

I agree that this may be the catalyst for a much stronger push for switching some physical goods and services into digital. But can we start using this to re-employ people laid off from exclusively meatspace businesses?

On a somewhat related note, seeing as most of Europe just went into lockdown and is going to face huge unemployment problem a month or two from now, I wonder if this isn't the time to bite the bullet and introduce UBI.

>I wonder if this isn't the time to bite the bullet and introduce UBI.

Former presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan has making this very plea for UBI lately.

How is UBI supposed to work without major price controls?

As a general rule competition should do that, people will still buy the $1 widget over the identical $2 one. More may be need to deal with specifics though, like supply shortages from the virus or certain market segments like real estate.

I don't think proper competition exists in certain areas where people spend a decent chunk of paycheck: telecommunications/internet providers and rent (any others? Healthcare?). I think UBI would be a handout to these industries, maybe it would do some good too, I don't know.

that may be US centric issue, and if you are doing UBI surely you need to do that alongside socialised healthcare?

I personally don't think UBI works. Period.

But some kind of financial relief may be in order to try to prevent worse things. Having no money easily creates situations where "the battle was lost because the nail was lost."

any reason or evidence for why you think it doesn't work?

Yeah, lots of reasons and lots of what I believe is evidence, but nothing most people think makes sense.

The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat."

This was also basically what communism was supposed to be and that went spectacularly badly.

We do have a few places where people get their share of a local natural resource. Both Alaska and at least one Middle Eastern country give all residents a check from their oil wealth.

But it's tied to something in specific: Oil. So we have a good idea of how to make adjustments to the payout and under what conditions it would end. It isn't a promise of "forever."

Historically, we had nuclear families with one primary breadwinner and benefits for others through that person. That's largely dying out for various reasons. We need a new system that allows for some people to work (for pay) and some to not and more or less everyone to get access to housing, health care, etc.

We mostly aren't talking about that. UBI sounds like a rich persons fantasy of hush money. "We'll just cut a check and the problem will go away."

Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value.

I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea.

Maybe some kind of expanded earned income credit would make sense. In the US, we would benefit tremendously from fixing our health care system.

But I think just passing out money/resources to "everyone" has a long history of failing every time it has been tried in some fashion. It actively undermines a lot of social contracts that are the very basis for civilized life and replaces it with "You and all your friends just won the lottery and the rules don't apply to you anymore."

From what I gather, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt in five years. This is another piece of evidence that you can't fix life, the universe and everything by just throwing money at it.

Norway have done a similar thing, except they reinvested their oil income and use that to find social services for the population, prevents the money being pissed up the wall by one or two generations. I think there will be free loaders, but those exist now. Anywhere a welfare scheme exists someone will want to take advantage of it. but not the majority. I don't know the solution but I think it's worth investigating.

I'm trying to agree that, in the near future, we probably need to do something to give people financial relief because of coronavirus. Hopefully most people can agree on that whether they are believers in UBI or not.

I don't really like arguing about UBI. If I had realized you were pro UBI and basically looking for an excuse to tell me I'm wrong, I wouldn't have bothered to answer you.

I'm not pro or anti it. I know very little about it. what I have read has always been pro UBI because it is being pushed by people wanting to bring it about. my response to you was just an off the cuff reply. it was not meant to argue your point, but maybe more to formulate my thoughts a little.

> The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat."

UBI/welfare works very differently in a scarcity economy like the Pilgrims' and in a close-to-post-scarcity economy like ours. In fact, I wonder to what extent we're already post-scarcity, we just don't have the logistics worked out to make it realistic. I think that's a much more interesting question than whether UBI is a good idea in the abstract. It seems to me it's an obviously bad idea when the risk of people not working is an existential threat to your society, and an obviously good idea when it's not.

For instance, if wizards showed up tomorrow with the ability to create unbounded amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medicine, it would make little sense to deny those resources to everyone who needed them.

> Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea.

I agree with that, but I also think that this already applies to the rich. Once you own a certain amount of money, our existing systems already discourage human labor and encourage you to spend your time re-investing your money, paying other people for labor, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems discourage even that and encourage you to spend your time moving your money to offshore banks, lobbying the government, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems encourage you to spend money trying to just be the government.

So we need to figure out how to cope with a society of people who are disconnected from money in that way, independent of whether UBI is a good idea or not.

Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor - no engineers with windfalls from their employer's IPOs, no business magnates, no trust funds or inheritances enough to pay for more than your college education, etc. Everyone needs to keep working until retirement, and nothing you do will let you retire early. I suspect that option is too politically distasteful to everyone (probably even to myself) to make it viable. (That said, most obvious way to do it is extremely heavy taxation, at which point you can afford a generous welfare state.)

Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor

Just for the record: This is not something I'm suggesting and I absolutely don't agree with it.

This is part of my mental framework:

Americans are slaves to the grind in part because cheap housing options simply don't exist anymore and our health care system has very serious problems with regards to the financial end of things. Addressing those two issues would give Americans real relief. Instituting UBI in the US without first addressing those things would actively discourage the US from trying to address those issues. If you don't address them, no amount of "free money" fixes our problems.

This is not argument. I just don't want other people to come through here, read what you have said and go "well, that must be what she means and I'm not for a system that denies people leisure time and retirement."

If people want to know what I think, they can ask me what I think (or read my writing elsewhere in some cases). Please don't rely on other people's mental models to decide what I supposedly think.

Sorry, yes - I don't mean to imply that's what you think.

And I do actually think that's a coherent system, and I personally think that it is in some ways more humane than our current one, so I don't even mean that such a system is negative. I also don't think such a system needs to deny people leisure time and retirement: I did specifically suggest that such a system would involve retirement, just no early retirement. Since the vast majority of people in our current society have that option closed off to them in practice, this doesn't strike me as unjust.

As a straw man, let's say minimum wage is N, and taxes cause your net earnings to approach 1.2N asymptotically as you make more and more income. You can apply for government support if you make less than N for good reason, or if you hit retirement age. That puts strong pressure on housing and healthcare to be reasonably priced, because people can't pay more than a certain amount - nobody has it. But it also ensures that everyone, rich and poor alike, must work to eat. (That is, in this system there's no UBI; there should still be some sort of social safety net for people who can't work, but no support is provided for people who can work but won't, until retirement age.) At most, you can take a sabbatical every 6 years, in theory; in practice it'd be less than that. Such a system will strongly incentivize the richest among us to support generous labor conditions (vacations, leave for childcare, etc.) because problems will apply to them just about as much as to anyone else.

There are a bunch of practical flaws with this straw man proposal, but I would argue that if we genuinely value the link between how much money you have and your labor, we should be thinking about systems that more closely resemble it than the ones we have now. I'm just genuinely undecided on the value of that link, because I don't have enough information - we don't have a good idea of what a society looks like when you can set up that link and you have copious amounts of "free money" to go around.

I don't frame this problem space at all like you do.

I think there is value in doing work, but I don't think we need a system that ties your income to your labor per se. It's fine if the system ties your income to your ability to add value to the system in some way.

Education, know how and stewardship are all important ways to add value to the system. They are all ways to add value while reducing our own direct dependence on labor per se.

I'm fine with rich people owning shares in a company.

I'm fine with founders getting rich.

I'm fine with college grants and a system that actively encourages and financially rewards the pursuit of education.

I'm not okay with a system that cuts ties between human choices and financial outcomes because I think when you do that, you will eventually kill the goose that's laying your golden eggs.

People need to know "The goose is sacred. Don't kill the goose. This how the gold gets made."

And UBI sends the signal that it comes from nowhere for doing nothing and I think that's a fast track to cutting our own throats.

Insisting humans need to still figure out how to effectively interact with the system so the system produces things of value is intended to protect the ability of the world to keep producing things of value. I think UBI destroys that.

I think it is a superficial, inelegant answer. We need deep and elegant answers.

We aren't going to find them if we don't even bother to look because we went with UBI.

Thanks, that's helpful.

My personal vision of UBI is that it should provide what you need to live but not what you need to have a good life - i.e., if you so much as want a Switch with Animal Crossing, you have to contribute to the system and earn it (via labor or otherwise - in this system you could still get arbitrarily rich, and you can reinvest your earnings), but if you want (non-fancy) meals and (personal) housing and medical care, nothing is required from you, we treat that as an inalienable right. I think such a system still maintains the link you want to protect, right?

Maybe this is not really what people mean by UBI? (Perhaps I should call this "welfare without means-testing" or something?)

There are various policies that generally shrink the individual burden in a way that also shrinks the public burden.

One of those is a good health care system. It benefits the public to make sure everyone can see a doctor if they need to, even if they are broke.

Letting poor people just get sicker and sicker tends to negatively impact other people and force costs up. When done well, universal health care doesn't inherently have adverse incentives. It doesn't actively encourage people to get sick so they can consume more medical care.

Another area that can simultaneously shrink individual burden and public burden is good housing policies that make it possible for people of limited means to find adequate housing that supports a reasonable quality of life.

In America, "affordable housing" has more or less become synonymous with slum housing. Slum housing tends to help trap people in poverty by limiting access to education, jobs, shopping, etc.

We have a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. I mean actual affordable housing, not slum housing.

Off the top of my head, health care is something crazy high, like 20 percent of GDP. For most households, housing is the single biggest household expense in the budget.

Transportation is typically the second largest expense because America makes it nigh impossible to live without a car. That fact is largely rooted in and tied up with housing policy.

If you provide universal health care and shrink the overall cost of health care while making it a lighter burden for individuals with health issues who are likely to have trouble earning an adequate income because of their health, you will remove a big chunk of the financial burden for America generally and especially for the most burdened Americans.

So just spitballing here, if you theoretically make health care free, you theoretically remove up to 20 percent of the financial burden from people -- possibly more for many people.

Some people are paying more than half their income in rent, and another like 25 or 30 percent on transportation. If they can have a life without having a car and can find a home for far less money, you begin to get to the point where a part-time minimum wage job can keep body and soul together.

If you have a small retirement check or something like that, intermittent gig work can be enough to make your life work adequately well.

That's currently out of reach for the vast majority of Americans. It shouldn't be.

It should be readily possible to find a small, cheap residential space, live without a car and get medical care even when you are flat broke. Then, you only need some really minimal income to get by and you can dream of better things and work towards them.

At that point, most people can find some way to muddle through.

I would be for expanding our military medical benefits such that any term of military service gives you access to the military medical system for life.

I would be for expanding and enhancing our Earned Income Credit on federal taxes.

I would be for being freer about providing food stamps with a lot less means testing, etc.

But a universal basic income makes no sense. Elon Musk doesn't need a check from the government for $10k annually.

Anyway, I'm running a fever, not feeling well and no longer sure where to go with this ramble. You have a good day.

no one said it would. but I imagine that they would be an easier sell to politicians and the populace if we see more of the sort of price gouging that is going on with hand sanitizer and masks.

also, morbid I know, but if we lose a lot of the older segment of the population then we also remove a significant burden on healthcare and welfare to free up money for UBI

It seems clear to me that the economically productive section of society is going to be in hiatus for a significant period of time, which in itself is going have a massive and widely shared impact on the consumers of their production, but the elephant in the room is to what extent the rentier class is going to take its fair share of the pain.

If families and businesses are going to be hitting pause, through necessity and for the public good, then we can't have landlords expecting to be paid in full all the while.

Of course some of them will take a hit anyway when their tenants go to the wall, but it would be better for all concerned if the economically productive can do what they can, without the threat of the rug being pulled out from underneath them.

Start thinking in terms of years from now, this isn't going to be papered over like last time in 2008. Don't execute any business plan without revenue in sight immediately. Shun all forms of debt. Raise capital. Protect what is close to you. Be safe out there.

so... long SPY? 12-18 month recovery has to be right around the corner. at the worst, 60 months

not wsb, please don't bring that.sort of comment here, I may also be guilty of it myself but let's not redditify HN, or at least let's slow it down.

Amazon, shipping, streaming games/media, ebooks, healthcare, internet-based medical services will be fine.

Many people are about to have enormous amounts of idle time to dedicate towards home-based hobbies, creative projects or entertainment, especially elderly told to self-isolate for several months.

Domestic healthcare product manufacturing will be high-incentivized for a decade or so.

Disposable income industries, especially travel and tourism, will be in free fall for months to a year. Luxury goods tend to also mostly dry up.

New ventures should focus on much improved (and defensible) essentials and better delivery of essentials that aren't as painless as ordering from Amazon.

I've been thinking about this a lot and will be writing a blog post soon in terms of thinking about risk post-COVID-19. Thanks for asking the question because it's an important one -- it's easy to lose sight of the longer-term implications, given that we DO need to focus on saving lives in the short run.

There are a few things I'd say...

(1) COVID-19 is destroying international trust. The EU nations are closing their borders to each other, there is hoarding of supplies between countries, and stories are coming out now that countries might want to have exclusivity to vaccines. This is NOT supposed to happen with allies, and I think countries will have major trust issues and collaboration issues post-COVID-19.

(2) A lot of the economic stimuli will lead to significant increases in debt, but also NEW monetary and financial strategies. Countries are discussing encouraging central banks to buy stocks, mortgage-backed security, nationalize factories, and more. This means government debt will increase significantly, and corporate debt will be an issue as well. As earnings announcements are made for Q1, Q2, etc... we'll see just how bad this has gotten.

(3) Small businesses will be shutting down. Even if there are debt forgiveness programs driven by government debt (i.e., #2 above), the stress and short-term cashflow issues of many small businesses will likely cause many to shut down.

I can go on and on... I can also provide citations for any part you'd like to see.

Having said all of that, I think a few things are important:

(1) Promote social cohesion. People are scared, nervous, unsure what to do -- organize online events, reach out to people, etc.

(2) When it's safe, SPEND MONEY with SMALL BUSINESSES. I think this will be critical.

(3) Encourage your governments to work with other governments, and speak out against the politicians/governors/MPs/whatever that specifically were irresponsible during this period. Don't let them get re-elected.

... I can go on and on... Just let me know. :-)

Why do should we spend on small businesses? I know this sounds a little harsh, but do we really need to keep them from shutting down? A lot of big businesses today had their start during an economic downturn. If a small business shuts down, the owner often ends up working in another more robust business and gets a good ride up.

I don't think it's harsh -- I think it's a good attitude to question this stuff.

I put myself in the shoes of the gym, coffee shop, or restaurant owner... The businesses that contribute to our communities but likely won't be consolidated into bigger companies. They add value to our communities without necessarily being hugely profitable. I think it's good to support those businesses.

I wish I had a stronger economic argument but I don't, right now.

After responding to a few other posts, I came across an important number -- about 50M Americans work for businesses that are 99 people or less in size. That's a lot. Even if a small percentage of these businesses go under during this entire crisis, that'll lead to a big shock to the financial/economic system.

Diversity and locality are healthy. An economy made of only large companies is less resilient and more likely to stagnate. For an extreme example, look at Boeing.

yes but you can't have a mom and pop jumbo jet manufacturer.

Because our economy shouldn’t collapse because we paused for 2 months.

And 2 months is optimistic.

> ... I can go on and on... Just let me know. :-)

Please do! :). And please let me know when you have that blog post up, I'd love to read it. My mail is in the profile.

Oooook, if you insist. :-) I'll repeat my points to make this a fuller response. The numbers here correspond to the original numbers above... Beyond that, the rest of the numbers are not in a good order yet. I'll fix this in the blog post.

(1) Erosion of international trust. As I mentioned earlier, this is a big issue. However, I think it's actually going to get worse after the COVID-19 crisis. EU member states are closing borders and not collaborating on a EU-wide solution; this is after having annoying post-Brexit budget debates where they struggled to agree on an EU-wide budget. How do you come back to the table in a post-COVID-19 world and trust each other to rebuild the EU? It will be tough.

(2) We've already seen TRILLIONS of dollars pumped into national economies. We're seeing countries with deficits and huge debt-to-GDB ratios printing money or committing funds they'll have trouble paying off. No one is questioning how Italy, Spain, etc. will pay for their financial support... The same goes for the US. I don't think it's important to question all of this in too much detail right now, but we'll have to figure out how to recover economically in the longer run.

This is even worse for individual companies. Airlines, airports, travel companies will all have to be bailed out. What other industries will suffer? Performance and ticketing companies, retail... These are industries that are always on the brink of collapse from a financial perspective, and now you'll have one or two quarters of significant drops in revenue. They might not be able to recover.

Case in point, we have nearly 5 million Americans working in retail. Retail isn't feeling the hit of COVID-19 in the short-run, but just wait until everything is locked down[1].

(3) Small businesses. They will receive some support -- loan obligations might be deferred, employment insurance might help their employees, etc... There are 50 million Americans employed in firms with 99 employees of less[2]. How many of those will be put at risk.

(4) The dynamics of the economy itself will likely change. The challenge with a lot of the debates around helping people today is, "How do we operationalize this?" For example, you can't simply let people not pay their mortgages; this will lead to lenders struggling financially.

The WSJ was reported that the Fed is considering buying Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) to help those with mortgages get some relief with regards to payments and interest rates. The Financial Times reported that the Spanish government is considering buying factories and businesses to support the economy. There's been talk that the Fed might buy shares in companies as well.

Think about how much of a HUGE change and precedent this is... Especially given the vitriol around State-backed enterprises in China. I'm not arguing for or against, but this is a big change.

(5) Supply chains. We're going to see companies invest in more resilient supply chains, risk monitoring, etc. This will lead to tons of interesting opportunities.

(6) WHO becomes less relevant. Given that no country is following WHO guidelines -- the WHO guidelines they all negotiated together -- I wonder how this will end for international organizations like WHO? The same goes for the EU, given the issues above. Play this out and you have an erosion of major alliances and thus, I believe, more conflict.

(7) Aggressive governments will take advantage of number 6 above... Think about the oil price war right now. Is this really necessary right now, or is this simply a fantastic opportunity to hurt certain countries' oil interest and businesses? Kick industries while they're down, so to speak.

The scary part here is if someone decides to use COVID-19 as a pretense for a foreign armed conflict or invasion... Or simply starts a war because they know other countries don't have the necessary willpower to defend the invaded/wronged party. I'm not saying this will happen... But if I were an aggressive world leader, I'd be considering my options here.

I'll stop but will let you guys know when I write a formal post. :-)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales-workers.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt

Thanks for elaborating!

The war angle worries me. In particular, there's one thing I expect to happen that you didn't cover: to the extent Chinese numbers are accurate - and I don't have a reason to doubt the rough accuracy - it seems to me that after all this, China will emerge as the dominant global power. The US is about to get economically devastated by it, and if the UK plan fails, they'll be in deep trouble too. Meanwhile, China seems to be already recovering and they're scoring points with Europe by sending aid. Then, there's Russia, which is a great unknown to me - they fell off the media cycle pretty much immediately as the pandemic started. With the balance between these three powers upset, the tensions may grow significantly.

RE supply chains, I've recently discovered this little-known subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/supplychain/. Its daily updates on COVID-19 give tons of insight on how supply chains are affected by the pandemic.

Yes, 100% agree with you. The geopolitical trajectories this is changing (or setting) are very different from what we were on before.

And that is an AWESOME subreddit!! Thank you for sharing that.

I realized you're Polish, after I responded. What's up with us Poles being into geopolitics? :)

I'll reach out to you soon either way because your blog is great!

> What's up with us Poles being into geopolitics? :)

Perhaps being pawns of various powers over the past few hundred years makes us interested :). Or maybe it's just fascinating.

Re/ 1. I think the conclusions are false. If anything there is more open collaboration; china released sequences of the virus very early and ppl around the world are working openly. Trump’s brainfart about the vaccine aside , distrust doesn’t seem to have caused issues (china is even sending aid to Italy).

The EU border crossing is not real sign of distrust, it’s prudent and to be expected, its simply an extension of domestic containment measures (esp. in Shengen countries which dont have any border controls). Also, there isn't a european health Organization because frankly it hasn’t been needed , and is not needed now either.

It's easy to send aid and researchers, but those are minor investments in a relationship and at worst, actually just tokenistic actions. The WHO has specific guidelines for pandemics[1] and these include things like NOT closing borders, NOT preventing exports of medical supplies, and reporting transparently on infection rates. All of these things are not being done.

Don't get me wrong -- it's great that researchers are collaborating, but it's precisely the sort of small gestures that enable a state to build an argumentative defence around actions that aren't conducive to solving the problem properly (or the way we all said it should be solved).

I don't think that the EU closing their borders is at all an issue between the member states. it is seen as a reasonable precaution and, what we are really talking about is stopping tourism.

Germany is confiscating medical transports intended for other EU countries at the border.

source?

Ok, I'll be that guy... I think this recession will hit bigger companies rather than smaller one, small means resiliency. Online consumer companies like Amazon wins because of their ability to cut prices, what if: Sending goods will be more expensive than having a retail shop? If manufacturing goods will be cheaper in your home country? I think we will see local industries flourish at expense of multinational who will be not able to change that fast. Any tech business that is able to support local business with their daily troubles and help them cutting costs will build the future.

a small business, e.g. a hair salon will shut down if having to pay people without any customers for a month. Amazon can wait

My 2 cents. Interest rates are so low that central banks will no longer be able to use that lever to stimulate economies. One idea is salary tax holidays i.e. do not tax wages for a period of time such as one or two months. More money will be in the hands of people to spend in the local economies.

A key issue for parents is kids stuck at home. Parents can't work, even remotely (very well), with kids cooped up for months. There is a huge lack of childcare now and it will be worse on the way back to normal until schools are open.

My idea is to facilitate linking teens to nearby families with younger kids for babysitting. This already happens normally, of course, but in cities like SF it is less common. With dual working parents solving the childcare issue is a requirement.

There are lots of service workers who are about to be in trouble. In places where white-collar workers are staying home, baristas and waiters and Uber drivers are still at it. If they aren't sick enough to be hospitalized, they're probably still at work, because they can't afford not to be.

What opportunities might there be for "Uber for X" that people can do from home? Amazon's Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I can't think of any others. And usually when the only present solution is a catch-all, there's space for more niche solutions that can thrive by specializing around specific sub-markets.

I think that, in the long run, we will see a de-urbanization movement pushed by all the works that, being potentially done from remote, will be done from remote.

This will bring _a_lot_ of consequences like a drastic drop on rent and prices of apartments, a fast reduction of small shop/pub/restaurants inside the big cities, a change in the way universities make courses, etc...

It is going to impact every aspect of life considering we pushed urbanization to its limit in the last 6-8 decades.

I wish a fraction of the employers right now asking people to work from home realized "shit, people could work from home all of the time, not just during a global pandemic"

Old world managers would freak.

Urbanization has been a hot mess of disease for the last 5000 years. And our biological evolution hasn't had time to catch up.

See "Against the Grain", by James C. Scott (https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States...), and also "The Story of the Human Body", by Daniel E. Lieberman (https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease/dp...).

I'm seeing guidance to, over next weeks and months, increase ventilation, open windows, and socialize outdoors instead of inside. Fortunately, it's spring here in the Northern Hemisphere.

Long term, the WFH trend may only increase. Maybe light industrial work could disperse as well?

I was struck by NY Times list of the workers who face the greatest coronavirus risks (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/15/business/econ...).

Least risk? Loggers.

move more of it online. Thanks to decades of e commerce the economy can already function without brick and mortar. More of this, in a health-conscious way (e.g. special uniforms for deliverypeople, drop-off stations for products, contactless payments). It needs to be deployed fast, too

http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

While I agree with the essay, keep in mind this is peak survivorship bias.

Agree.

Be more self sufficient,localize production

This will be rambling, and I apologize.

I run r/GigWorks on reddit and I run some websites aimed at helping people trying to do GigWork.

I've been batting ideas back and forth with someone about a website called The Butterfly Economy, inspired by a comment I made on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732

That website is currently a landing page.

While homeless, I developed an online income. It's never been enough, but it was better than not having it. I've been trying to lay the groundwork, both online and in meatspace locally, to help homeless individuals and others to connect with earned income via the internet.

I'm not getting a lot of traction and I'm not sure there's any point in continuing to push for something that no one else seems to want. I end up feeling like the world would literally rather let a bunch of people die than listen to me and I don't have a solution for that.

And talking about it that way is probably the worst way to talk about it, but a decade of getting kicked in the teeth and not taken seriously has taken its toll. I don't know how to escape that mental space while still stuck in that reality where I don't get taken seriously and so forth.

The old guard never seems to voluntarily step down. Perhaps this crisis is an opportunity.

From what I gather, people online are saying things like "Yeah, my boss, who always told me my job can't be done from home, is letting me do it from home now because of coronavirus. The asshole."

So I feel like we've long had the pieces in place to move to a different way of working and of living, we just dug our heels in and refused to jump on the bandwagon. But people are beginning to embrace it more now that the other option is death, basically.

I think -- and have thought for a long time -- that with 7 billion people on the planet, we need to change how we do things or there will be a massive die back of the human race. We do a lot of things that worked when population levels were lower and I think a major sticking point is germ control.

I'm aware of that because of my medical situation, but I get literally told I'm insane and making things up. So it's been impossible to tell people "I think you should do things differently." That's point and laugh at me, at best.

I'm tired and short of sleep and feeling pretty hopeless about a lot of things. I hope to be more productive on various projects in coming weeks.

And it's probably a mistake to answer this in public, but you and I aren't good friends and I don't want to bug you privately and blah blah blah. So there's some of my thoughts, fwiw.

Don't apologize, I enjoy reading your ramblings. And feel free to bug me about this privately. I'm very grateful for the advice you sent me last time; we've implemented some of it.

With all your experience with homelessness, what's your opinion on how the homeless population will handle the pandemic, and what can be done to help them? Somewhat surprisingly to me, I've seen exactly zero comments about this in the press, and I've been a COVID-19 news junkie for the past two weeks. It's like these people don't exist.

I actually posted a thing about how this is impacting the homeless in the US less than 24 hours ago. It got no real traction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580519

I don't have solutions. I live in a hundred year old building and nothing is square anymore and there was a really terrible storm one night some weeks back with both rain and high winds. The curtains and window sill inside my unit got soaked and the curtains molded.

I planned to remedy that quickly, but new policies delayed my tax refund by like an entire month. So that was dealt with about 10 days ago and I'm still running a fever and coughing up phlegm.

This is likely a large part of why I personally feel hopeless. I'm not getting much of anything done at the moment. I expect that to change in a few days.

But I really, really wish the US would stop it's nutty housing policies and begin building SROs and Missing Middle Housing and stop objecting to how "But those are tenements and that's a bad thing!" when that de facto means people are homeless because of it.

And I've studied the history of housing in the US for a long time. It's why I had a class in Homelessness and Public Policy. I wanted to be an urban planner and I was pursuing an environmental studies degree with a concentration in Housing as preparation.

So I know just a whole lot about housing and I never know how to succinctly and compellingly make my points. It's a source of personal frustration.

I'm quite confident that an updated version of the SRO with some modern amenities would go a long ways towards remedying a lot of problems in the US. And I have absolutely no idea how to get there from here.

I hope you and your family are well. They are closing the Walmart at night now here. It was open 24 hours and we were shopping there in the middle of the night to avoid the crowds and I'm starting to feel like the pandemic is doing more than being a minor inconvenience for me at this point.

But I very seriously doubt me or my sons will get sick from it. We are too careful about germ control as a matter of course because two of us have CF and the other is a carrier.

Thanks for your thoughts. Sad that this post got no real traction. It's an important issue, both from ethical and epidemiological POV.

My family and I are well; we went into full social distancing mode, only going out occasionally to a store. We've cancelled everything that didn't already cancel itself (this week, Poland implemented shutdown of shutdown of bars, restaurants, cinemas and all other kinds of non-essential, gathering-inducing businesses).

Do get to that Walmart and stock up a bit if you can (as a low-pass filter). The virus will definitely affect you, if not directly then by the panic it induces in people. Get well, and stay safe.

put extraordinary effort on developing suitable antiviral and a vaccine in a fraction of the ordinary time period.

UBI

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