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Comment by twelve40 | Hacker News Reader

How is it very literally unprecedented? Spanish flu had much deadlier properties, "work from home" wasn't even possible, there were no antibiotics and almost none of the modern med tech, yet there is no mention of a "1919 economic collapse". Death toll in the US was <700k, which is not great, but actually less than some of the insane apocalyptic predictions you hear about this time around, especially considering that in 100+ years we probably improved just a bit.

So I'd say it looks very much "precedented", and during the last precedent the situation was much much worse, and the world moved on just fine for another decade after that.

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Another feature of the 1918 economy in most of the world was it was a lot less global, a lot more localized. There was a lot more regional self-reliance, which meant that the nature of the impact on the economy looked very different.

One of the biggest differences is the enormous growth of what is not very usefully termed "the service economy" since 1918 (really, since maybe 1960 or so). A huge percentage of the population now gets paid to do things that had no real equivalent in 1918, things that you can simply stop doing (at least for some period of time). Restaurants, hotels, therapists of many different kinds, artists, musicians, retail .... these have all exploded, emply lots and lots of people and are all inessentiall to basic living (though essential to meaning for most of us).

Spanish flu was very closely intertwined with the war, because of which people were kept in the dark almost everywhere. Lack of reporting translates to lack of awareness of the pandemic which translates to people working and shopping fearlessly.

The difference now is that people know there's a pandemic, and many would be averse to go out working, or shopping even though the scale is much lower than that of Spanish flu.

Random tidbit:. It's named Spanish flu because that's one of the few places where it was reported, because it wasn't involved in ww1 and had no reason to shut down the press. Everyone thought the flu epidemic was in Spain.

During the Spanish flu pandemic, entire cities and towns would get sick and everything would stop. There were also shelter in place orders given during this time. 1918 wasn’t the dark ages, we had telephones and radios. People knew what was happening.

> and radios

According to wikipedia first news on radio came in 1920.

"The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#20th_century

Downtown Abbey didn't get either a radio nor telephone until after the war. They had telegram.

> Death toll in the US was <700k, which is not great, but actually less than some of the insane apocalyptic predictions you hear about this time around, especially considering that in 100+ years we probably improved just a bit.

The US population was also only ~103 million in 1918, compared to ~327 million today. Proportionally, we should expect about 2 million deaths from coronavirus to be merely "as bad" as the Spanish flu.

There was a depression in 1920/21. Of course, there were multiple factors that led to that not the least of which were lots of soldiers returning from WWI.

Also, lots of people worked from home in 1918. 40% of people lived on farms in 1900 so probably not much change from that by 1918.

It's unprecedented in the sense that the world was so different during the Spanish Flu that it's far from clear what lessons can be taken from it.

Yes, life will go on. But it's worth trying to minimize the misery in the meantime.

I think you misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that a pandemic is unprecedented. I’m claiming that a pandemic in the post modern economy is unprecedented, as is a prophylactic shutdown of 1/3 of the economy.

That being said, my point is that economic predictions are especially difficult given that we’ve never seen this before.

For comparison, consider the many economists who at the time expected the depression to reappear after the demobilization following WWII. Despite their good intentions and good data, they too were dealing with a unique situation, and they turned out to be very wrong.

> "work from home" wasn't even possible, there were no antibiotics and almost none of the modern med tech, yet there is no mention of a "1919 economic collapse"

Probably because there was no choice but to barrel forward towards herd immunity and deal with the suffering and loss of life.

In 2020, we're delaying and dragging out the tragedy at the cost to the economy.

On top of that, the economy was far more distributed and local. With globalization, things are much more interconnected and interdependent.

Restarting local commerce is much much easier.

It also occurred during World War I. That changes the situation somewhat.

Changes how? I'd say being in WWI was much much worse, no? And yet you still don't hear about a great 1919 depression.

depression of what?

The end of world war 1 had an enourmous impact on continental europe, with many nations simply ceasing to exist at the end of the war.

Germany for instance, had a state of near constant poltical and economic anarchy during the weimar republic. And the austrian-hungarian empire ceased to exist.

Many people seem to forget that world war 1 was suchs a massive shift in terms of the geopolitical landscape that many nations simply had no functioning economy or proper goverment to speak off.

If I have to clarify down to the last word, I'm talking about the total implosion of US economy, which is what a lot of people are currently hyping up and clickbaiting on. You don't hear about a great 1919 economic disaster in the USA despite a much more vicious illness and no modern tech (no antibiotics, no concept of a ventilator, etc etc etc). I can't answer for Austria, Hungary, Germany or any other collapsed empires past or present, I don't have any data on that.

Yes, the Spanish flu led to one of the biggest economic booms in history: the roaring 20s

Correlation doesn't imply causation. This was around the onset of mass production, electrification, and the first time that cheap credit was a thing.

That's certainly fair, but the black plague also led to several economic benefits to the working and laboring class, so I do think there are typically economic benefits from a pandemic. Although, we'll see to what extent the stimulus and money creation might affect this.

> How is it very literally unprecedented?

What's unprecedented is the reaction... some might say overreaction.

The trouble with exponential growth is that if you wait to react, for fear of over-reaction, then it's too late.

For a pretty good example of this, look at Spain and the UK.

Antibiotics aren't actually useful against viruses. We are currently in roughly the place with antiviral drugs that we were a century ago with antibiotics: the first clinical and theoretical hints are there, and a few things have been tested and found to work in isolated cases, but there simply is no systematic, industrial-scale way to pump out (antiviral) pills or syrups that can be thrown at whatever new (viral) pathogen comes out of the wilderness this year.

Antibiotics are useful for fighting secondary bacterial infections that occur as a result of a viral infection.

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