https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/bill-ackman-pleads-to-trump-...
'Some investors have been confused by remarks. To clarify, I am confident the president will do the right thing in temporarily shutting down the country and closing the borders. If that happens, we can win the war against the virus and the markets and the economy will soar.'
' That is why we are buying stocks. These are bargains of a lifetime if we manage this crisis correctly.'
Kind of an "undefined behaviour" sort of thing - one branch of the conditional "cannot" happen, so you can assume it doesn't.
It is. The quarantines/border-restrictions are not permanent measures, and acting swiftly is the correct way to nip it in the bud.
> Shutting down the country destroys everything.
Empty hyperbole. Death tolls in the tens of millions is a far worse outcome, as is stressing our current healthcare systems well beyond their capacities.
Two months? It’s difficult to think what will happen.
Economies don’t have a pause button. Companies, banks, and families quickly become insolvent.
But at any rate, lives > economy. Only one of those is a renewable resource.
Not sure I follow. Are you saying the economy is not a renewable resource? Cause I'm creating a new life as we speak.
Nearly 10 million people die every year from hunger [0]. How much progress are we going to lose on that by putting the economy into a recession?
Global warming is an incoming emergency that threatens global stability. What are the odds that it leads to widespread war, widespread famine, or both? How much are we increasing those odds by starting a recession instead of continuing our R&D work at full speed hoping to find a (actually implementable) solution?
How many lives will be lost due to less funding for medical care and research? Both in the US where poor people can't afford it, and the rest of the world where less wealth means less taxes means less funding for the health care system? What if the next virus that comes along is more akin to the one that wiped out the American Chestnut trees (100% death toll) instead of just doubling your chance of dying when you get it?
[0] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty...
It's wayyyyyy to late for that.
I'm not sure I want to be in their camp.
Even with all the generational resentment in the world, destroying the economy may be better than destroying lives.
But “Silent Generation Remover” is equally distasteful and doesn’t rhyme.
It will be actually "destroyed" if the virus is not stopped.
For God's sake people stop thinking about your S&P500 index funds for a second. Also, if you still want to be selfish, your index funds will go down to ~zero if the virus is not stopped.
It’s not clear to me that letting the virus run it’s coarse would hurt the economy.
Some (but certainly not most) very old people would die, but they are not in their productive years. Their assets would pass to younger people who would be more inclined to put them to use in the economy.
The difference in death toll would be minimal, but the difference in the economic recovery will be substantial.
As raw numbers but not percentages. 13% each of the past 3 days is better than the 15-25% (mostly nearer 25%) of the past few weeks.
I dont think Italy is over the hump yet
That is a huuuge emotional toll.
Don’t be dismissive of these concerns, they are very real.
We can and should essentially shut down the country
I don't think we can make such a blanket assertion. The US markets have lost 10T in value over the past month. If the virus infects 70% of the US population with a 2% mortality rate, 4.2M ppl will die. It's obviously not so simple, but we're sacrificing $2.4M in market cap per life saved. At some point, the tradeoff makes no sense in light of the fact that we could invest in life saving technologies/solutions that save more lives down the road.
Even doubling that does not "destroy everything"
So if it was as simple as you say, then sure. Let's shut it all down. But shutting it all down is not going to save us from Covid19.
Plus when hospitals get overloaded, patients needing critical care for problems other than covid-19 will die as well.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese...
But in the last few weeks I keep wondering if our reaction to covid-19 is consistent with our reactions to other causes of mortality. For example:
- 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year, yet we have collectively decided that abandoning cars is too large a sacrifice to make.
- global warming has the potential to cause huge devastations and millions of death, yet we fail to make the adequate sacrifices to limit our emissions.
So, is there something different about covid-19 that warrants these differences? Is the fatality rate higher, for example?
Or could it be a difference of game theory? For example for global warming, everybody has to participate in order to see gains.
Or maybe humans have a natural fear of germs and react stronger to contagious diseases than to other risks? I remember reading that argument in Factfulness.
In 2016 in the US 37k people died in car crashes.
At 2% fatality rate and 70% infection rate the virus will kill 4.6M Americans.
That's over a 100x difference.
Now show me a cause of death that involves 108 million people that's not taken seriously.
This is a serious pandemic.
Car driving fatality is fairly bounded. 124 ppm/year in USA.
Coronavirus 19 has the possibility to mutate and keep waving over the world, killing an unbounded number of people, which is downright terrifying. The best-case estimate of fatality is 5000 ppm and >50% of Americans getting it, that's 20x more deadly than cars.
We can have some faith that this virus is a one time event because
- A vaccine will probably be invented before long.
- Effective treatment will probably be discovered.
- If there is no vaccine and no treatment for some reason. You probably can't catch it twice, maybe everyone gets it once, but after that only kids get it, and kids don't die from it anyways.
people are willing to take drastic measures over a short period of time to prevent a large number of deaths. this doesn't imply they are or should be willing to take the same drastic measures indefinitely.
Our under-reaction to other serious threats is probably both psychological and evolutionary. Psychologically, COVID-19 is salient because it’s a novel threat and our brain is hardwired to notice and react to changes. Evolutionarily, humans have encountered and survived infectious disease, but car crashes and global warming are historically new.
Applied to the whole world, the risk is killing easily 10x as much as cars.
If cars suddenly became 10x more dangerous, I'm sure it'd cause mass panic. Especially if cars became 20 to 30x more dangerous specifically to our parents or grandparents.
If we can treat this as hitting the pause button on the economy, and find a way to fund it during this period, then we can press the play button and carry on where we left off. Of course that would require Russia, OPEC and the US to stop pumping oil. And a billion other details. But there's a lot of us, and we don't have much else to do.
This could be an economic disaster, but it doesn't need to be.
Sure, another alternative is we kill all the old people and all the doctors and nurses. Apparently some people aren't worried about the old people, but surely their self interest benefits from not killing all the doctors and nurses?
The other approach is what we have now in the US, which is rolling quarantines as we put out virus outbreaks like brushfires. It disrupts everyone's life and makes it harder to get supplies to those most at need as everyone is constantly preparing themselves for a personal lockin.