We'll be stuck in this recession for years, economists say | Hacker News Reader

We'll be stuck in this recession for years, economists say

erienewsnow.com

92 pointspaulpauper187 comments

The grandstanding against economists is disappointing.

Let's say you were driving at night with someone in the country, and because they either knew the road or could see farther ahead they said, "There's a boulder in a road ahead, we're likely going to hit it if you don't slow down and turn to avoid it."

And you do slow down and it allows you to turn to avoid a crash. How do you respond? Mock them for always being wrong about predicting a crash?

People mistake warnings about possible recessions, which have a probability attached, with forecasting an inevitable doomsday recession. There's no credit given to economists for the recessions or depressions avoided.

Often the warnings are about the risk of a recession with no intervention, and in an overwhelming majority of cases there is some action taken in fiscal and monetary policy to soften the blow or avoid the worst outcomes.

This is a very reasonable comment. Social sciences are frustratingly imprecise. But, understanding the history of various scenarios is useful. And, it can result in useful policy changes which avoid the worst, as you mentioned.

I think it helps to have a little charity when it comes to other fields, even if you're not completely on board, because you can end up accidentally limiting your understanding of the world.

I'm also sure a lot of people here can identify with feeling frustrated at hot takes about tech that lump all tech workers together as predators eager to violate your privacy.

The problem I have with economics after reading Debt: The 5000 years by David Graeber[0] (solid read, btw) is that the field was founded on some fundamentally flawed assumptions about its own history. The biggest one being that there's no evidence that a barter economy preceded a cash economy. We've all been taught that this was the case when there's no evidence it was true and there are a lot of unexplained problems with the idea of barter economies (i.e. how were people able to trade items of equitable value regularly, mutual goods exchange mismatch, etc.)

In our lifetimes, economists largely balked at the idea that the housing market could collapse, and then boom, 2008 happens.

I don't necessarily think that the entire field of study is bunk, but our capitalist society tends to prop them up like oracles without much scrutiny because they're the experts, and it's hard to provide a counterweight against that expertise, especially when their philosophy is used to create the vast wealth inequality we see today.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

> In our lifetimes, economists largely balked at the idea that the housing market could collapse, and then boom, 2008 happens.

I don't buy that without citations. Everyone knows housing markets are like most other markets and go both up and down in cycles. Like most other markets, the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust that follows.

To say that a majority of economists believed otherwise seems like pure hyperbole to me.

From an analysis by the Wharton school[0]:

“It’s not just that they missed it, they positively denied that it would happen,” says Wharton finance professor Franklin Allen, arguing that many economists used mathematical models that failed to account for the critical roles that banks and other financial institutions play in the economy. “Even a lot of the central banks in the world use these models,” Allen said. “That’s a large part of the issue. They simply didn’t believe the banks were important.”

They were fundamentally unprepared and many were unwilling to even entertain the idea that the housing market could collapse. That’s what made stories like The Big Short so surreal, they had all these experts telling them that they were wrong, and economists played a major role in that episode.

0: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-f...

> But it was the financial institutions that fomented the current crisis, by creating risky products, encouraging excessive borrowing among consumers and engaging in high-risk behavior themselves, like amassing huge positions in mortgage-backed securities, Allen says. <

Which is probably a big reason why many economists weren't watching harder. If the banks are reporting things are fine while incentivizing bad loans on the down low then it's not especially surprising that a data driven field was caught offguard by tainted information.

Obviously no one knew what form it would take, but people were pointing out inflated housing prices[1] and other shady tactics in the mortgage market for YEARS. There's always cranks on TV saying This Time Is Different (2000, anyone?), but its just incorrect to say that serious economists were "unwilling to entertain the idea that the housing market could collapse."

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=467926...

That's correct, but it's a far cry from the claim most economists were "unwilling to entertain the idea that the housing market could collapse."

Also 2008 surprised almost everyone, so saying economists couldn't predict it is not much of a slander. Neither could banks, governments, hedge funds, or multiple other groups whose business it was to watch out for events like that.

Good points, economics as a field certainly has its flaws. Many assumptions of history are also likely made in other fields as well. But even that said, I don't see why the alternatives put forth in "Debt: The first 5000 years" aren't also just that - assumptions...

I'll also just say one thing for the concept of bartering: I don't think bartering requires equitable trade in value. It's just of matter of two people getting what they want. As for an example, my grandfather bartered his land up until 2013 when he died. He owned a farm, but he didn't farm it. Instead he let his neighbor farm it for profit, in exchange for one of his neighbor's cows that we butchered for meat each year. Was this equitable in value? Probably not, but look at it this way: our family received free steaks that lasted us almost a year, every year and it costed us nothing - my grandfather still owned the land and he never planned on farming it. And on the flip side, his neighbor got to grow and sell substantially more crops without having to buy land... (albeit at the minor cost of a cow each year, but was nonetheless was profitable for him)

> There's no credit given to economists for the recessions or depressions avoided.

I don't think we have avoided any recessions, ever, based on the advice of economists. They just aren't that good at forecasting. They don't even agree on the policy that is appropriate to fight recessions when we know there is one.

The "grandstanding" against economists in this thread is entirely justified.

Also, economies aren't easy to control: We can't even get people to wear masks even though the economic impact of not doing so is obvious and relatively straight-forward to calculate.

An economist could come from the year 2100 with 500TB of economic data and news for the past 100 years, and there's a 0% chance that the public would ever heed their warnings.

Not at all. Sweden never wore masks and never shut down schools and yet they achieved comparable results to draconian lockdowns. They already have herd immunity.

It's likely we would get 2 economists from the year 2100 both giving opposite reasons for the next 80 years of events.

They don’t have yet herd immunity and their results are worse with respect to all comparable countries that had a lockdown. What you say is categorically false.

It’s not much worse as you would expect it to be, though.

There are definitely countries in Europe that locked down and yet have a higher per-capita death rate than Sweden.

Comparable aka Finland and Norway, which have similar climates, healthcare systems and culture. Check the numbers and tell me if Sweden is doing better.

No, their results by any metric aren't worse than all comparable countries that had a lockdown. They're in the middle of the pack and only because they had a lot of deaths in care homes, which lockdowns don't protect anyway. There are other regions that prove this like Belarus, South Dakota and others, but Sweden is proof positive that lockdowns aren't necessary and were never necessary.

As for herd immunity, Google "sweden covid cases" and look at that graph. Then change it to deaths. Sweden is practically done with the epidemic. Cases will never drop to absolute zero due to high testing levels and false positives, but it's now down to tiny levels and deaths have hit zero with no "second wave" in sight. At least based on current data it appears Sweden is over and done with it.

Sweden's got 10m people, and 87k cases as of mid-Aug. That's less than 1%, so claiming "herd immunity" is BS. They also have almost 6k deaths. Analysis from a month ago projects Sweden's GDP falling 4.8% in 2020, and eyes a 3.6% growth in 2021 - overall down 1.4% across both years.

Denmark's got a little over half the population, 1/5 the cases, 1/9 the deaths. Projected GDP is down 5.1% this year, up 4.0% next year, overall down 1.3%.

Norway's got half the population, 1/11 the cases, 1/22 the deaths. Projected GDP is down 4.7% this year, up 3.7% next year, overall down 1.2%.

If you're saying Sweden didn't lock down and achieved comparable economic results to their neighbours, I'd say yes you're right. A little bit worse on GDP, but very comparable. But they also had thousands more deaths, and tens of thousands more cases with uncertain futures, to no economic _benefit_ that I can see.

Sources: - https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in... - https://www.focus-economics.com/regions/nordic-economies

We don't know the real herd immunity threshold. It had been previously estimated at about 70%. However daily average deaths in Sweden are now down near zero even though there are minimal pandemic control measures, and seroprevalence studies have indicated an exposure rate probably below 20%. So what accounts for the current situation?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

Seroprevalence only measures anti-body resistance, but SARS-CoV-2 is quite similar to common cold viruses and it appears many people have pre-existing immunity to it for that reason. Or so goes the theory.

The 20% antibody threshold seems to be fairly common across many countries however, at least outside non-China Asia/Pacific countries that were not badly affected at all. The body learns how to fight viruses and can do so quite quickly.

The 87k are the verified cases, there are a magnitude more cases. So there is some herd immunity in some areas which may with the current or possibly a bit more lax precautions be enough to keep the new cases at a fairly low level in the fall and winter. Still of course no full herd immunity in all areas.

Some epidemiologist say that we'll live with this virus for 30 years and that pretty much everyone will get it sooner or later. If that is the case some countries have only postponed the inevitable.

Or vaccines or better treatments will soon be available and distributed to a couple of billion people, in that case the harder lockdowns saved some lives or months/years of living.

Public policy, monetary policy, and fiscal policy all have empirical evidence in support of them, demonstrating the usefulness of the field. Your comment does not.

Backing you up here. There is a clearregime change in the data before and after the advent of central banking. Recessions and financial panics are less frequent, and less severe. Just looking at the US, there were ~15 recessions since the adoption of central banking in the 1910's. In the same time period during the 1800s there were >25 recessions, and that's not even comparing for severity. You can see the Wiki[1] for an overview.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

Are you counting the recessions caused by central banking policies being mistaken or outright wrong? There have been at least two in the USA in the past century that can be directly linked to the Federal Reserve, and who knows how many in other countries.

In the USA the two are the Great Depression (which the former Fed chief Ben Bernanke has argued was largely the result of Fed policies) and the early 1980s recession caused by the Fed increasing rates in an attempt to combat inflation. (It worked, inflation dropped, but many people lost their jobs.)

Sure, many people make that argument. The recessions happened regardless of their source. But the financial panics that preceded lenders-of-last-resort and countercyclical monetary policy were significantly more frequent and severe than anything we've seen in recent history.

Edit: just noticed your edit, Bernanke never said that monetary policy caused the Great Depression, but it is the consensus view that policy was too tight during that period and exacerbated it. A mistake that no one is keen to repeat. Certainly the interest rate rises in the 80's caused a contraction, one could argue whether the subsequent recession was worth the cost of fighting inflation. I think all would agree that the stagflation that prompted that maneuver was not ideal.

It's also worth mentioning that older folks alive during the Great Depression had a perspective on it vs the panics during the 19th century. Many observed that the Great Depression, which was the worst in a generation, was tough but manageable compared to the Panic of 1983 where people literally could not buy food.

Yup, there is a lot of interesting perspective you get from reading journals and correspondence from the period. Sources from the late 1800s will include bits from the lives of every day people, almost always along the lines of: John opens a store, panic occurs, his business fails and he moves to a different town; becomes a partner in a canal shipping company, panic occurs, his business fails and he moves to a different town; etc.

s/1983/1893/.

All economists can do is project current trends into the future.

Economists do not have -- to use your analogy -- a good theory for predicting when there will be a rock in the road. When economists act like they have such a theory is when people start rolling their eyes.

Economics isn't about making some projection like "GDP number going down so will go down more!" Current behavior contradicts this outright. Economists are broadly warning against being too optimistic about interpreting the current upward trend as meaning that a speedy and full recovery, without any economic damage, is inevitable.

There are many ideas and models about economic shocks and recessions that had important predictive value in demonstrating how this recession unfolded. It's not like this is something beyond understanding when you can compare the actions other countries took compared to the US.

Well, they really don't have much onus of evidence this time, but...

How often do governments follow economists predictions? Govs mostly react to things after they happen, much more so in monetary matters. When they do follow predictions, it's some stupid, politically based one, not an economics consensus.

Besides, we trust that guy on your scenario because he has a verifiable model of how accidents happen. For some reason, the people that make macroeconomics theories really dislike verifiable stuff, with very few exceptions.

> How often do governments follow economists predictions?

Central banking and monetary policy lowering interest rates? The relief package earlier this year? Seriously?

> the people that make macroeconomics theories really dislike verifiable stuff, with very few exceptions

What are you even talking about?

> Central banking and monetary policy lowering interest rates? The relief package earlier this year?

Those are examples of politicians reacting to events that were already occurring or had occurred.

Counter-point, most respectable economists said that the 2017 Trump tax cut was a bad idea, it was too expensive and helping the wrong people. Fast forward to this year, and now the deficit is ballooning due to said tax cut, leaving the government very little wriggle-room.

Economists are a priest class that enables the ruling class to make stupid and short sighted decisions.

Many weren't on board with the tax cut bill that passed under the current administration.

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/tax-reform-2/

Yes for any given tax policy proposal you can always find one economist who supports it and another who opposes it. Does that tell us anything useful?

As a counter argument it seems to me that if you are an expert in a field you can generally predict disasters and be wrong and people tend to not care so much, but if you predict a more positive outcome and you are wrong people will never forget. I think this kind of societal reaction pushes experts to being more willing to give severely negative predictions.

Another factor that might cause economists to sound doom and gloom is that once you do hit a certain point it's much more difficult to get out of it using conventional policy tools. You run an increased risk for an actual prolonged depression and start doing greater amounts of long-term economic damage.

This is why it's referred to as "the dismal science".

I don't think your analogy is a correct one.

Here's something from 538:

"A 2018 study conducted by Loungani and others looked at 153 recessions in 63 countries between 1992 and 2014 and found that the vast majority were missed by economists in both the public and private sector. This was painfully true in the case of the global financial crisis in 2008, which wasn’t officially declared a recession until it had been going for almost a year."

Economists apparently can't predict the future. And they don't seem to be able to "predict" the present, or the recent past.

So I guess in your analogy, it would be something like, "We were driving at night with an economist in the country, and they said, 'There are no boulders ahead that I can see'", and then you hit a boulder, car was totalled, you were severely injured, spent months in recovery, and then 9 months later the economist gets back to you with, "Recent data confirms that we did, indeed, hit a boulder."

I think your argument is an argument from authority. If you can't "predict" the past, you are not an authority.

The "economists" you see on TV have been calling boulders in the road for the last decade and we are in the middle of Kansas. They have no credibility.

Skip to the actual survey of economists:

https://files.constantcontact.com/668faa28001/65165cb5-5c8f-...

Summary “Nearly two-thirds of the National Association for Business Economics members who participated in the August 2020 NABE Economic Policy Survey believe the U.S. economy continues to be in a recession that began last February,” said NABE President Constance Hunter, CBE, chief economist, KPMG. “Almost half the respondents expects inflation-adjusted gross domestic product to remain below its fourth-quarter 2019 level until the second half of 2022 or later. And 80% of panelists indicate there is at least a one-in-four chance of a ‘double-dip’ recession. “The panel is split in its view on Congress’s fiscal response to the recession, with 40% calling the response insufficient, 37% indicating the response is adequate, and 11% saying it is excessive,” Hunter continued. “Nearly three out of four panelists believe the optimal size for the next fiscal package to be $1 trillion or greater, compared to 17% who favor a smaller package.” “More than three-quarters of panelists believe that the current stance of U.S. monetary policy is appropriate, the largest share holding this view since 2007,” added Survey Chair Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist, Oxford Economics. “The majority of panelists—58%—expects the federal funds rate range to remain unchanged at 0-0.25%, or even drop lower, by the end of 2021. Most participants—84%—expect that the funds rate target will be higher by year-end 2022, but still within 100 basis points of where it is currently.

Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future. For some reason otherwise smart people don't realize this? I think it's something about economists being associated with the university system.

I see this assured economic doom repeated so much without being questioned as anything but guaranteed I wonder where this incredible confidence is coming from? We have literally no idea what 2021 holds for us, in the same way we had no idea 2020 would be so uh unique.

When it's a survey of many economists I tend to put stock in what comes out. In this case if 80% say there is a 25% chance of a second dip, thats a much more informed opinion than I could ever have on the subject. I now know it isn't likely so don't plan my life around waiting for the second dip, but also don't be too surprised if we do see a second dip.

> When it's a survey of many economists I tend to put stock in what comes out. In this case if 80% say there is a 25% chance of a second dip, thats a much more informed opinion than I could ever have on the subject.

Who do you think has a higher chance of being right:

* macroeconomists when predicting the future of the economy

* fund managers when predicting the future of stocks

Just because people are smart or know a lot of things doesn't mean that that knowledge translates into useful ability.

> Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future.

That's unfair to astrologists, economists are not going to be that good. :-)

To be fair, the better economists work by creating models based on reality. But we don't have a rich dataset about modern economies responding to pandemics. It's not that they are stupid, it's that economies are difficult to predict in general, and we don't have the data sets to give any confidence for this case.

I don't think the term "economists" refers to an easily generalizable group. In my experience there is more world-view variation among economists than one might expect looking at the differences between bayesians vs. frequentists, etc. Some economists don't embrace modeling as a means of arriving at policy recommendations at all, for instance. Others do of course, but influence doesn't seem as tied to quantitative assessments as other fields.

It's true that some use quantitative models, and some don't. But all experts use past experience as a guide. As the present becomes more different from the past, it becomes more uncertain that past experience is relevant.

How accurate were those same economists with their previous predictions? Were they more accurate than random people off the street?

Yes, they’re more accurate than random noise. Unfortunately like with any science which seems impactful on people’s lives, there is a lot of drama around people who try to become famous by making predictions and then failing. But the science itself is on firm ground.

Do you have actual data on prediction accuracy for economists versus non-economists? I'd be interested to read the research.

>Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future.

[citation needed]

>I see this assured economic doom repeated so much without being questioned as anything but guaranteed I wonder where this incredible confidence is coming from?

All the stock market gains are from big tech. Any other markets are flat or down. ( https://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec&st=ytd )

Quick Google search, nearly top result. Committing the sin of just reading the headline but man this is not hard to find evidence: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-28/economist...

Or maybe? https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/economists-are-bad-at-p...

"All of the gains are from big tech". All of the gains are always from some companies and all of the losses are always from others. This is just how the pie got sliced 2020. I don't think it has any special meaning we can divine from it?

Economics isn't a sliced pie like that.

I just used that as an expression, no special meaning intended.

(2013) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stock-market-gains-come-from-fe...

The market cap of the five largest companies as share of the S&P 500 hasn't been higher in more than four decades.[1]

The way the pie is sliced currently isn't really an indicator of stability.

[1]: https://www.isabelnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Market-...

> https://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec&st=ytd

This viz is amazing

The stock market gains are because TINA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative ).

It doesn't really matter that it is big tech, if the ROI would have been highest in Agri, it would be those stocks.

Exactly. The Fed has pumped trillions of dollars in an economy that is stuck, nothing new is being done except for tech. No wonder this money has to flow into tech stocks, and I tell you that it won't stop until something changes in the economic scenario, or the Fed for some reason decides to stop its super-easy-money policy.

I'd love to see a multi-currency valuation of the S&P 500 over the next few years.

Part of the issue of saying the Market is "up" is that we keep changing the size of the unit.

Is the market worth more now in Yen, Indian Rupees etc? Or are people just willing to part with more USD (that asset specifically) for the underlying asset (the stock)?

> Is the market worth more now in Yen, Indian Rupees etc? Or are people just willing to part with more USD (that asset specifically) for the underlying asset (the stock)?

Those are...pretty easy questions to answer. The dollar is down about 10% since its March high compared to a basket of other major currencies: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy

Can you help me figure out the maths on that. So how much of the stock gain is from currency devaluation (against other currencies) and how much is due to appreciation (of investors willing to pay more real value) ?

Say .INX was 3250 in Jan and is 3500 now. -> 7.7% increase. But currency has lost about 10% of its underlying value.

If something loses 1/10th of it's value we expect people to pay 11% (1/.9) more of that currency. So the 7.7% increase in stock market is actually a 3.3% decrease in a mixed currency basket?

GP mentioned 10% drop from the _March_ highs, not from the January. S&P 500 grew 50%+ since March lows.

Currency devaluation doesn't just happen against other currencies. It also happens against particular goods/assets (another currency is just another good/asset). If I have $10 and 10 goods, and suddenly have $1000 and still 10 goods, each good should come to cost 100x more. Or to say it backwards, the $ becomes worth 100x less...

To bring CPI into this, the reason we don't see common inflation metrics such as food/gasoline spike, whereas assets suck as stocks do, is more a matter of supply/demand for the corresponding goods than anything else.

Said differently: if food was the only good there was, and we suddenly doubled the money supply, food would in time come to cost double.

However the market consists of many more things than what CPI looks at (which is why it's a bad measure of inflation). Stocks being one of such things. Real estate another. Right now, demand for stocks is higher than demand for food, and given the more money available, naturally we see stock prices rise, but food/gas prices staying relatively the same...

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/01/09/a...

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable," John Kenneth Galbraith, an irreverent economist, once said. ... Over the period [1999-2014] there were 220 instances in which an economy grew in one year before shrinking in the next. In its April forecasts the IMF never once foresaw the contraction looming in the next year. Even in October of the year in question, the IMF predicted that a recession had begun only half the time. To be fair, an average-growth prediction also misses 100% of recessions. One model does better, though. Our random-number generator correctly forecast the start of a recession 18% of the time."

Theoretically, predicting what the economy will do depends on also predicting most other major events. For example, to know in advance how the economy would do in 2020, you would have had to predict the pandemic. You also need to predict wars, natural disasters, the weather (snowstorms affect the economy), elections, and which new laws will pass for things like stimulus bills.

Sure, sometimes it averages out. But often it's the opposite, more like catastrophic cancellation. The outcome of a close election is inherently unpredictable because large opposing forces mostly cancel out.

It's odd how, whenever we talk about what will happen next year, we forget how we were blindsided this year.

𝙴̶𝚌̶𝚘̶𝚗̶𝚘̶𝚖̶𝚒̶𝚜̶𝚝̶𝚜̶ People are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future. I don't know if there's any groups that can make broad, societal predictions - the only predictions you can trust tend to be incredibly specific.

i agree. it would be interesting to see a historical version of this poll and see how accurate they’ve been in the past.

if economists were so great at predicting the economy they’d all be rich

>> Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future.

Well, it doesn't help that they don't have control over external factors. Like the Fed reducing interest rates to 0, and buying corporate bonds. Very hard to predict something when there's no free market where things just play out with no external influence.

On the other hand, they are predicting the Fed's actions, that's always a significant part of the models, and the Fed and the government etc aren't random actors, they are somewhat predictable (and stability is their goal which helps in that regard). But they aren't really the market makers by themselves, so even if you get those predictions right, you might still be far away from being correct.

They're pointing out the obvious. Do you think tons of people are going to start dining out again? Going to gyms? Going to the movies? Large parts of the economy will be soft for years. Much of it will never come back due to semi-permanent shifts in behavior.

I do. In many areas people are already doing those things.

But how many? Probably not the same percentage is before COVID. There will, of course, be activity. It just won't be the same as before.

I think it'll be close to the same percentage, but I don't really know how to substantiate that either way.

And maybe we'll start to realize our 'robust' economy was based on so many frivolous activities instead of durable manufacturing and private home ownership.

People are going to realize how much of their spending was unnecessary. For example, did I really need to be going to coffee shops 5x or 6x a week? Dining out every other meal? It's healthier for me and my wallet to make this lifestyle change... covid accelerated it. I should've done it anyway.

It's the frivolous activities that make life worth living.

> Do you think tons of people are going to start dining out again? Going to gyms? Going to the movies?

When the first lockdowns ended in Europe, people started to do just that. Restaurants in many countries are like normal, gyms that I walk past on the street look about as full as they have ever been. I have spent two months of this summer traveling around, and I found some tourist destinations crowded with people who had come all the way across Europe to get there, including a lot of elderly pensioners who one would imagine would be the most at-risk group. If there wasn’t uncertainty about flight cancellations, even more people would have taken their holidays abroad this summer regardless of the virus.

Because of the high case numbers in the USA and the sheer uncertainty about the prevalence of the virus and public health measures’ effectiveness due to political indecision, I understand that a lot of Americans are panicked and truly afraid of going back to normal for the moment. But I suspect that with time, there will simply be a COVID fatigue and many of these same worried people are eventually going to go back to their same old routine.

Maybe in Europe that is reasonable, where leaders were responsible and actually did their jobs. Around here (US), some people still even refuse to wear masks. I saw a guy in line in a store just the other day, totally ignoring the signs. There is an executive order in this state requiring it.

Things will return to normal, absolutely. I just think it won't happen in 2021.

> Around here (US), some people still even refuse to wear masks.

A number of European countries do not mandate masks at all, or the mandate is de facto only enforced in the largest cities and not in smaller towns. In many places where masks are a mere recommendation, only some people wear them and other people don’t. Observance of the "safety distance" in queues can be very lax indeed, and among the supermarket aisles people move around each other as closely as they ever have.

I am always amazed at people from the USA speaking of Europe as if everyone on this continent is deeply committed to what these Americans consider the proper public-health etiquette, but that just isn’t the case.

Anecdotal, but in my area (Eastern Europe) restaurants are still half empty, even after accounting for the reduced number of tables to allow for social distancing and after accounting for the indoor areas being closed. So at best, they are probably doing a quarter (probably less for most) of the business they were doing before. This is in the largest city in my country.

Gyms are also almost empty. Tourism is surprisingly less affected, and I would imagine that restaurants in tourist places are much more full. But outside of those, it is definitely NOT business as usual.

From Philip Tetlock's Superforecasting [0] to Robin Hanson's Futarchy [1], there's a strong argument that predictions are entirely valueless without "skin in the game", be it in reputation score, or dollars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...

[1] http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

> Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future.

That's not fair. Paul Krugman has predicted seven of the last three recessions.

There was a study comparing the accuracy of predictions made by pundits, and Krugman came out as one of the best.

Here is the data if you want to judge for yourself:

https://www.hamilton.edu/news/polls/pundit

Economics is much worse than other disciplines as far as endemic conflicts of interest. The problem has more to do with companies writing up claims that serve their interests and getting economists to rubber stamp them without disclosures. Economists were hotly debating among themselves whether to adopt any kind of code of ethics less than 10 years ago. The insularity of other academic fields has its drawbacks, but the kind of behavior economists have broadly engaged in is much more representative of the business world than academia, and a result of their close ties to those interests.

I would suggest you pay attention to the economic stories and not the human interest stories when it comes to this virus.

Did you know that 50% of San Fransisco's stores have closed? Half. HALF. https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Half-of-all-San-Fran...

Did you know 250,000 evictions are looming in Las Vegas alone? https://www.ktnv.com/news/coronavirus/las-vegas-could-face-e...

These are very real threats - not some fun internet discussion about inflation or gold or bitcoin. Your poo-poo'ing of economists is very out of context in this case.

The evidence is right in front of your face and you can find it on Google News.

Las Vegas, a town where the majority people are employed in the hospitality/leisure industry (casinos, restaurants, convention prep, etc.)

SF where a huge amount of the residents have left the city since a majority of the white collar employees are WFH for the foreseeable future.

Not sure how you can take these places and extrapolate for the economic health of the entire country...

You can special case any city or town. I don't think WFH is endemic to SF, for example. And economic effects cascade down.

> I don't think WFH is endemic to SF, for example

Certainly not. I don't think it's bad either, but some people (owners of expensive offices) do.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53925917 -- Warnings of 'ghost towns' if staff do not return to the office

As to shareholders of chain coffee/lunch stores -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53939526

> I don't think it's bad either,

Of course, but it has a significant, fundamental impact on huge aspects of "the economy" as we know it. Large segments of commerce - particularly in the U.S. - pivot heavily on people spending time and money commuting, spending time in an office, eating and drinking at nearby establishments, etc.

The effects will take some time to shake out.

It will be interesting to see if they invest that extra money, and add to the boom of the economy.

Big losers in UK would be

Overpriced coffee shops (not Central Perk style ones in neighbourhoods - takeaway chain ones)

Daily Mail (the metro readership will vanish)

The trains will be interesting - especially in London. UK rail infrastructure is built to cope with large numbers of peak time commuters travelling with large discounts. That infrastructure won't vanish, but the income will (a £3k a year discount for a season ticket still means you're paying £4k a year - if that goes, times a million, it's a lot of operating revenue with little drop in costs)

Wow...

Sure, 'some' of the stores closed, but store rent didnt even budge. Then we have this https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/july-home-sales-spike-a-reco... home prices _and_ sales up.

I’ve seen impending economic doom being pushed on HN since 2016

To be fair, the insanity of both the stock and bond markets started becoming really apparent around then.

Still hasn't gotten any more sane, unfortunately.

Or maybe it is perfectly sane, and you just don't understand mechanisms at play?

In so far as the stock market is supposed to reflect the real economy, it's entirely insane.

Bonds are being sold that pay less money back than their sticker price. The equivalent is the bank charging you 400k for a 500k mortgage. That's pretty insane.

Stocks are apparently worth 30 years of their current profits, even for those stocks without a history of consistent profit (i.e. Tesla, Netflix etc).

I understand that lots of this is happening because of incredibly low interest rates, but pointing out that this is crazy is a public service in these ridiculous times.

There's a quote that I sadly can't find the origin of but goes a little like:

>Carlyle called economics the "dismal science". He was half-correct; it is indeed dismal.

> Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future.

Yes, but a survey of economists or astrologers predictions it's still probably better than the survey of randomly chosen people, if for another reason then both of them are in the business of surveying your broad range of signals from a broad range of people to inform their predictions.

Any individual is capable of being wildly wrong in their predictions regardless of their title.

I liked a quote I cannot find that referred to any study that has "schools of thought", like economics, as not studying reality but tribes at war seeking changes / power for ideological ends.

The numbers are already there, Yelp says 50% of restaurants have closed down permanently https://www.eater.com/2020/6/26/21304219/over-50-percent-of-... It's not some far fetched doomsday scenario, the stimulus has helped the US economy from completely crashing.

Imagine if we could control the weather. Weatherman forecasts a hurricane, so weather control does what they can to get rid of it.

Economics is like that. Economists predict horrible downturn. Economic policy makers do what they can to avoid or lessen its impact.

For example, economists predicted that Boeing (among others) was going to need a massive bailout to survive. The Fed purchased a ton of corporate bonds with printed money to juice the bond market and allow Boeing and others to refinance their debt. Do we blame the weatherman for being wrong when steps were taken to change the forecast?

I have no idea how accurate economists tend to be at predicting the future of the economy. I think its fair to say that economics has done a fair job of coming up with tools to deal with economic issues as the come up, and even preventing a fair amount that we never are even aware of.

I wish people would stop calling the CARES Act a ‘stimulus package’. It was a relief package. Stimulus refers to creating a secular demand in an economy that is not operating at full employment to prime the virtuous cycle of employment and demand. Relief on the other hand means to replace lost income due to the natural disaster of the pandemic and the necessary public policy response. I think conflating the two could end us down a bad path.

If only there was a term for a prolonged economic retraction, like a recession, but longer and worse.

A really long and protracted economic contraction is just depressing to think about.

Great Recession!

I like the terminology "y-shaped recovery". Basically, everything goes down at the start, then some things (and new things) emerge, and other things never recover.

This seems like a more accurate way to think about the economy, in that new industries will emerge and some industries are going to never really recover.

A recession that last years is called a depression. It's not like not saying the D word will avoid anything ...

Within the field of economics, depression is not a well-defined term. When phrasing survey questions it's ^not desirable to have the meaning of the question itself subject to variation if you want the responses to be useful.

I think we've reached the point where politicians shouldn't pretend that they want to prevent recessions.

It's like with day trading: once you realize that volatility is all that matters, it explains why key players are in favor of recessions and even actively work to cause them.

Some of the biggest fortunes in history started when someone had a little extra money to buy undervalued revenue streams when the economy was down.

So yes, there will be a recession, but it won't be triggered by fundamentals. It will be due to things like politicians politicizing mask wearing. And killing the financial regulations that smooth out economic highs and lows. And removing the social safety nets that help people get back on their feet again by avoiding long-term unemployment.

This basically all comes down to spite. The powers that be can't stand that FDR instituted the New Deal, starting with the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933, resulting in almost 70 years of relatively stable economic growth. So they repealed it in 1999 with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. That along with telecom deregulation and countless other things put us back on 10 year boom-bust cycles so that the elite could amass fortunes again.

We've already had the dot bomb, housing bubble pop and now the looming COVID-19 recession (caused by the Trump administration's hands-off approach to governing) in just the 20 years since I graduated college. This is so not the future I signed up for. My finance friends think it's great. But it's pretty much the worst possible outcome for makers. Which is why I consider the 2000s and 2010s to be lost decades, with another one looming.

Are we actually in a recession right now?

Was just about to say this. My equity funds are back to ≈85% before pandemic on average. One of them is better than before it. And that is coming from a very highly valued market due for a correction for years.

Whether we’re in a recession is not determined by stock prices. There were recessions before the stock market was invented.

Stock market =/= economy. I think a big part of the gains is that everyone is flush with cash with nowhere to invest since the interest rates are basically non-existant/negative.

The stock market isn't the economy right now, but in the long run it is meant to approximate the net present value of a big chunk of the economy.

Stocks are being buoyed by interventions from the Fed. There's a decoupling of the stock market and the economy. Those of us in Tech don't feel the pain much, but in the wider economy layoffs and pain are beginning to spread. Companies that took PPP money had to agree not to lay off people until the fall. Those stipulations end soon and there are large employers (airlines, banks, etc.) that have already announced that they'll have large layoffs in the next month or two. Add in small businesses that are going under (restaurants being hit hard, for example).

Many here are doing much better, because they invested in specific tech.

Considering the unemployment rate, yes. Considering the stock market, no.

I believe that a recession is technically defined in terms of economic output. Not sure what the current statistics are on that, though I'd be surprised if they didn't indicate a recession.

It seems like we have 2 economies now. One that works, and one that doesn't. The one that works seems to be much more exclusive.

It's been that way for decades. Top two quintiles and deciles have been far outpacing the rest, who are basically flat or in decline. Last few years were a little bit better for them, but that came to an end of course.

It's not so much 2 economies as it's that we injected 2-4 Trillion dollars into the stock market to prop it up.

As of 2013, the top 1% of households owned 38% of stock market wealth. The top 10% own 81% of stock wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

There's an easy explanation for that. The stock that is driving the stock market boom is stuff that can replace "inefficiencies" in old school companies with massive scale and lots of cheap staff - Amazon being the best example. They, unlike classic retailers, are not bound by long term expensive rents and high amounts of (relatively) expensive staff, they can sell, even including delivery costs, much cheaper product - and for perishable goods they have the advantage that they can exactly steer demand with supply which means that unlike a traditional supermarket where people expect fresh groceries at 8 in the evening which leads to a LOT of waste due to reserves held across different locations in a city, they have one fulfillment center outside of the city that needs way less buffer.

Less than 50% of Americans have any stake in the stock market, which is a good reason we base economic forecasting on the behavior of GDP and not market indices.

Although if we were really smart we'd weigh financial services less, since that tips the scales upward when it isn't building as much value.

Yes. We have experienced 2 quarters of negative GDP.[1] This is the conventional definition.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

I see so many bear cases and they all play to my expectation. What I would like to see are thoughtful arguments why this won’t be the case.

Many businesses will not come back or be replaced because they were marginal - worth keeping open, but not worth starting. Restaurants that weren't all that great, small clothing shops, old hardware stores hanging on - gone and won't be replaced.

It won’t be just a year or two. This is going to have long term repercussions. Basically everyone from the age of 5 to 22 will have a year or two of missing education. We’re losing tons of immigrants and non-immigrant foreign workers, of the latter many of which are doctors or advanced degree holders. Many Chinese are simply leaving the U.S. on their own accord, even if they aren’t caught up in the travel bans or other such issues, because life is better for them in China right now. Many businesses are gone and won’t come back. Nearly everything in the U.S. is happening in slow motion. Everything takes at least twice as long as it did.

People act as if even if Trump is voted out and a vaccine suddenly appears, that everything will turn back on. No. Not only have things been delayed during Trump’s presidency and during the pandemic, they have explicitly regressed. The government has basically been shutdown for the past four years, just bleeding money and limping along, and that’s especially true for the past eight months or so. This is not a one or two year thing. We’re talking multi-years if not decades of reverberations.

The question is how long the actual problem is going to last, not how long we'll see reverberations from it. We still see reverberations from the Cold War, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to say the Cold War ended in 1991.

> Basically everyone from the age of 5 to 22 will have a year or two of missing education.

This this this a thousand times. And it's not just the missing education - it is graduating into a recession that has really fucked up follow-up effects. The generation that graduated in 2008 ff has still not recovered from the wage cuts.

The fact that a reasonable comment such as this one is being downvoted just shows how much people want to avoid facing the reality of the situation before us. Long term damage has been done to the economy and society by the combination of a pandemic and the haphazard response (if you can call it that) by a corrupt and inept POTUS.

I know the American press has been pushing hard on the idea that the US is uniquely failing to deal with this and it's all Trump's fault because it's an election year and that's the most effective tool they have, but that doesn't make it true. In particular, things are heading in a really worrying direction throughout Europe right now, with countries that already saw overflowing hospitals and much bigger drops in GDP than the US the first time around experiencing rapid increases in cases again.

Spain is particularly alarming - they're now above the US in terms of new cases per capita over the last week, they suffered a much bigger decline in GDP and quite a lot of deaths the first time around, and it's doubtful if they can afford a second lockdown or there's the political will to carry one out - but countries throughout Europe seem to be heading in the same direction, just a little bit behind them. Not that you'd probably realise this from the US reporting. Countries are also much more limited in how respond to this economically due to the Eurozone, and the negotiations over loosening this have made US politics look frankly farsighted and empathathetic by comparison.

This is false and a garbage perspective.

The US is objectively doing far worse than any other nation going by infection numbers and death tolls alone. I can’t imagine how a reasonable person can believe that this is anything but a disaster of epic proportions.

Second waves were always a possibility and they will almost certainly happen without a significant testing and tracing infrastructure. Just because EU has not been perfect doesn’t mean it’s comparable to the disaster we have in the US. 180k official deaths as of writing.

Actually, the EU had about 130k deaths itself. If you add the UK to that, you get just as many as the US basically (172k vs 180k). So I don't think the EU really did much better than the US in this regard, overall. There are exceptions in specific countries, especially in some of the more Eastern countries, and Germany to some extent, but overall the EU countries did as badly as the US.

Not to mention that the EU itself did basically nothing to help with the pandemic crisis, especially in the first months - even arranging travel conditions was beyond them.

You need to look at per capita numbers.

Yes, and? thisisliff said what the per-capita numbers said; do you dispute them?

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ per-1M total cases in US: 18k; in Spain (highest of EU large countries): 9k. About 2x difference not in US favor.

OK. You're looking at total cases; thisisliff is looking at mortality. So Spain had more people die, but the US had more people get it. So, 1) the US has a healthier population, 2) the US has a better healthcare system, 3) the US did a better job of detecting the disease among those with less severe cases.

1 or 2 support your position; 3 doesn't (because we don't have accurate data to tell whether it spread more in Spain). And we don't have enough data (that I have seen) to tell the difference between 1, 2, and 3.

So I don't know where we are. But you did in fact have data to support your position, and (since the question was the spread of the virus, not the mortality) you were citing the correct column in the reports.

All-time total case numbers from EU countries aren't that meaningful because pretty much all the countries that experienced massive, hospital-overwhelming outbreaks also massively undertested during them compared to the US during its outbreak. I know that in particular Italy and the UK were more or less only testing people who were hospitalized for Covid during the bulk of it. It looks like Spain may have done a little better, which might explain why they reported so many cases compared to others.

Partly this is because of the timing of the outbreaks, and partly it's because the US ramped up testing to an extent that hasn't really been replicated elsewhere. So you'd likely run into similar issues comparing New York case numbers with anywhere else in the country due to their big outbreak being earlier, or with comparing the current surge in cases in Europe with the first one.

I was curious so I looked up some data: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, sorting by the deaths/100k people, the US is below Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy and Sweden (in addition to some others). That data seems to support the situation in the US isn't exceptionally different than the situation in the EU.

The fact that Europe is also struggling is a distraction from the fact that the U.S. is struggling deeply with the pandemic. It isn't particularly surprising given their previous economic struggles. But in the U.S., it isn't just the pandemic. The U.S. has been dealing with a president who was handed a strong and recovering economy and relatively sane policies on a platter but literally does nothing every day but Tweet and watch T.V., takes on a couple meetings at best, and lets a third generation Jewish immigrant who somehow hates immigrants and is a white supremacist write his policies for him.

If and when Trump gets voted out of office or finishes his second term, we will have another Trump-like candidate. His cult of personality is here to stay for generations to come.

I think what Trump's presidency has shown, if only because he is a catalyst for hate and ignorance and little else, is that the sentiments that drove the civil war never actually went away and have probably gotten worse and drifted even further apart. His presidency gave a conduit for these things to bubble up to the surface. And there's a certain political party that partially shares the more hateful sentiments but also just wants to profit from them and manipulate the very people who are a subset of people that their policies hurt.

Asking an economist to diagnose is to ask the doctor who operated on you and removed a kidney when you were just there for a root canal to fix the problem. He goes in and performs a lobotomy but you are so taken by their lab coat and academic credentials and best paper awards and citations that you ask them to fix it. They go in and install a stent. A few days later you are dead because your forgot to take your anti-rejection drugs because of your lobotomy.

Obligatory Nassim video dunking on Economists:

https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/nassim-n-taleb-and-rob...

Wait, are you saying we left the 2008 recession already?

We can soothe ourselves with the thought that Economists are usually wrong.

I'm a bit shocked that that seems to be the take here.

You don't need to have a background in Economics to see what has been happening even before the pandemic, and what is certainly to come. What is happening in the bond market? What has the Fed been doing for about a year now? What is the normal rate of zombie firms? What is it now? How many companies simply won't reopen? I could go on for hours.

This isn't tea-leaf reading. The signs are 100ft high and in neon.

always remember: social science isn’t science. no matter how bad they want it to be

But employers aren't in business to supply jobs, though, right? If the revenue and profits aren't there they can't print up their own money.

EDIT: parent comment now empty initially said that companies should hire more people to help keep the economy going.

This is essentially the reason behind Keynesian stimulus, isn't it? Something's gotta bootstrap the recovery.

It’s much easier to give a company back money they already earned in the form of a tax cut than it is to expect a business to create new revenue out of thin air.

And what do you expect them to do with that money?

I thought that in Keynesian stimulus/theory, the government, not the private sector, provides the recovery?

Yes. This is not something the private sector can or should do.

I think we're saying the same thing :)

The government provides money to people (how can change, new deal style job corps or stimulus checks, etc), and now they have money to spend in businesses, the businesses can hire more people, and there goes the flywheel again.

Exactly. Like in the 30s the government should step in and hire people. Companies can't do that in a recession/depression. However, the other side of Keynesian economics that's not as often cited is that during the good times the government saves up for the inevitable bad times - we haven't done that for a long time.

You'd need a New Deal [1] effort to do so, but both political parties in the US have no appetite [2] for that sort of legislative effort. It might happen if the quantity of suffering increases, but we're not there yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

[2] https://www.vox.com/2020/8/19/21375039/dnc-2020-democrats-pl...

I think the Dems would be open to a New Deal-like effort. They've got the Green New Deal proposal.

>Like in the 30s the government should step in and hire people

What does the government usually hire people to do in this situation?

In the 30s they hired people to build stuff. They hired artists to create public art as well - Woody Guthrie was paid to write songs, for example.

We definitely could do similar now. Lots of infrastructure needs updating. We could accelerate the move to green energy (like the Green New Deal proposal). We could also hire a lot of people to do contact tracing until the end of the pandemic - this could include folks to do datamining, etc.

In the 1930s, it was the PWA which built tons of long-lasting infrastructure including the Hoover Dam and many substantial other projects;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration

That was probably the best use of funds at the time since there was broad based unemployment among a largely unskilled population. This time around, it seems like it's mostly service businesses that are struggling so it's not so clear what the best use of labor would be..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

Why not? The Federal Reserve has been printing up their own money this year like there's no tommorow.

“To lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account they have with the Fed. So it’s much more akin, although not exactly the same, to printing money, than it is to borrowing.” --Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

Employers could simply use the same Sorcery to supply digital jobs.

The Federal Reserve is not "employers".

The Ploy thickens! I get so excited about stories.

Right. That's perfect. Now with shrinking profits and a recession they will pay them with...?

I trust this about as much as I trust my horoscope. There is a reason economists are scolded left and right, and it's because of ludicrous claims like this.

> There is a reason economists are scolded left and right, and it's because of ludicrous claims like this.

Ludicrous? Not at all. With evidence of people re-infecting themselves with different strains of coronavirus appearing (https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-reinfections-confirmed-in-...), we are looking at years of dealing with a deadly pandemic - which means that anything regarding travel and major events is out of the question for a long time, and that assumes that people religiously vaccine themselves (a bold assumption given the rise of conspiracy myths about "vaccines being used to implant mind control chips" and further absurd).

That in turn has many effects: economies like Croatia which are dependant on foreign tourism will be straight fucked, they will not survive without massive aid - while the EU may prop up at least their governments, the situation for other primarily tourist economies is even worse. The effect will also hit many industries and their supply chains - most obviously plane makers and car makers, both of which are huge cash cows and mega employers, as demand from industry (airplanes) and private consumers falls to rock bottom (people will hoard all money they can).

To make it worse, Chinese demand of its rising middle class has been the thing that propped both their and our economy - in fact, depending on manufacturer, anything from 24-40% of cars sold in 2018 went to China. And that's just cars. With the trade war looming to escalate (which is one of the few things of Trump that were an actually good idea) and that no matter if Biden or Trump wins, China won't prop up the world economy again, Europe is too busy to save its own butts, the US is too much in debt plus its social construct is falling apart left and right...

Reinfections aren't a serious concern. Symptoms tend to be much less severe the second time due to the actions of immune system memory cells. SARS-CoV-2 is just like every other coronavirus in that regard. For example see the natural history of the OC43 coronavirus.

> Reinfections aren't a serious concern

They are, because reinfected people can infect people that have not had corona before and it makes vaccine success rates lower (similar to the seasonal flu).

In the essence it will lead to yet another attempt of "herd immunity" and a shitload of deaths.

Experts and health officials were already expecting vaccines to be only 50-75% effective, so this isn't new information.

That's what's so frustrating to me about the "herd immunity" discourse. Health officials have consistently said there's no way the disease is going to be eradicated, but because of the way it gets discussed, a lot of smart people have become convinced that the goal of a vaccine is to make sure nobody catches it.

I'm inclined to believe the upcoming economic doom simply because anecdotally, I hardly know anyone who is against continuous lockdowns for as long as needed.

In fact, people even seem to believe that the dead economy brings positive change: no more pollution from aircraft, no more racist tourism to other countries, and so on.

> I hardly know anyone who is against continuous lockdowns for as long as needed.

I’m sure that comes up a lot in conversation on line at the food bank.

We aren't "stuck" in a recession. It is entirely man-made. In the past, a recession was significant because it was a market indicator. Now, however, this recession is artificial, so it does not indicate any market defects.

I believe we will have a V-shaped recovery and we will get back to normal soon. In a market-based recession, the fear is how to get back to normal. In this artificial recession, there is no fear, we just end the lockdowns. The only issue is when.

It's like growing your lawn. If your lawn starts dying, and you don't know why, that is like a market-based recession. However, if you turn off the irrigation and the lawn starts dying, all you have to do is turn the irrigation back on.

If we get rid of all of the lockdowns, and force people to act as if everything is normal (they won't) how will we handle the millions of people dying?

On the plus side, the few left alive will be able to command any salary they wish for.

Do you honestly think that the lockdowns saved lives, rather than simply delaying deaths for several months? Keep in mind that the lockdowns are merely a rate limit, not a cure.

We are already in an uncontrolled situation re: covid. We are not seeing millions of deaths. In most parts of the country literally nothing is being done, yet we are not seeing bodies piled up in the streets.

Lockdowns prevent disease spread when actually implemented. The US never bothered with an actual lockdown, and instead did arbitrary, self-enforced partial closures. These half-measures predictably slowed the spread, but did not stop it. US is at 181,000 deaths total and 1500 deaths per day (which is increasing). Canada fully locked down for two months, and is at 0.8 deaths per day, and decreasing. Canada will have saved lives. The US did not.

As for "no bodies in the streets": This is a long-lasting disease, you're sick for days before you die. People don't die in the streets, they die in hospitals and they die in their homes. The bodies are piled in morgues and refrigerator trucks.

Same as we do every year? It's not an economic problem for a few million people to die. Even if tens of millions die, we can make up the labor market shortage with immigration.

The issue is that we shouldn't cause millions of people to die for rich people to make more money.

I'm not arguing we should not lock down. I'm saying, we can lift the lockdowns anytime we choose, and we have removed the economic defect.

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