Worries grow over a K-shaped economic recovery that favors the wealthy
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I’m trying to sort out better plans for patronizing businesses, donations and generally investing more locally. Not much else I can do about it.
Much of the lower-middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. They have significantly less disposable income currently because they're likely to be unemployed. They aren't shopping because they fucking can't afford to, and because social distancing is important right now - in that order.
So yeah, the pandemic is partially why people aren't spending as much. But it's also just a core problem that existed pre-pandemic.
So does that mean we're all rich?
I mean, objectively we are in most senses of the word.
But that's generally not what people mean when they say "the rich"
The gist of it is that if the stock market goes up X% and generates a billion dollars of capital gains, the percentage of that billion that Joe Schmoe gets is vanishingly small compared to Buffet or Bezos or Gates. Sure everyone is up, but most of the gains went to those that already have the most (by definition, since that's how capital gains works, yknow).
If you have 5% of AMZN, Besos has 95%, I have none and AMZN stock doubles in value, you can easily calculate the outcome in terms of dollar gains and how much inequality had risen.
That's a subjective value statement, not an objective fact.
To be clear, I'm not condemning this system. Just explaining that this is what a K-shaped recovery might mean. That those with very little are left out when most of the "recovery" comes from the Fed propping up asset prices while everything that isn't sufficiently similar to a security crumbles.
(on the evacuation of Cambodian cities)
"On arrival at the villages to which they had been assigned, evacuees were required to write brief autobiographical essays. The essay's content, particularly with regard to the subject's activity during the Khmer Republic regime, was used to determine their fate...those occupying elite professional roles were usually sent for reeducation, which in practice meant immediate execution or confinement in a labour camp"
If this is genuinely something you're worried about, maybe a good idea to head it off at the pass by supporting a more equal society today.
Consider whether the billionaires you're (indirectly, you say) defending are similarly concerned with protecting your own well-being.
The only problem is with the homeless guy next to the station who also matches this definition. May be he's also rich in some sense?
It looks hard, but not so hard that you will let the experts do it, so everyone makes the same cliched mistakes, even some of the experts.
This author does not demonstrate a K shaped graph and as near as I can tell there are none in the links either. Frustratingly, one of the first graphs would be a K-shaped graph if they had plotted Group A vs everyone else, but they did not.
You have every right to be confused.
Shocking.
On a purely factual point, the way to get it over with quickly is not to stop people coming in to close contact with one another. Everyone seems to have forgotten what the original and only purpose for the lockdown was: to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
0.9 new cases per existing case and it goes away. 1.1 new cases per existing case and it grows uncontrollably. There isn’t a true middle ground.
Also, I think that in reality this isn't actually as scale-free as the nice simplified models suggest, and having 100x the population would make it harder to stamp out spread within the country. Remember, the number of cases per existing case isn't some fundamental physical constant - it's an average over a bunch of different opportunities for transmission with wildly varying expected numbers of new cases per existing case. 100x the scale means 100x the opportunities for low-probability superspreading events that ruin your day.
Reaching that point 4 months ago was a completely reasonable goal. Sure, our current situation is improved by some herd immunity, but that’s far from the only effect in play.
People shit on Iowa at every turn for our pandemic response, but we've got a functioning economy and a whopping 3% of our population has tested positive for the virus so far.
You are less than two weeks from a peak of covid cases being diagnosed, schools are being pushed to open, and at this point it is no longer a question of whether you will see new covid diagnosis peaks by the end of the month but rather how high it will jump.
There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them.
I work in Ames and live in the next town over.
As I said before, and as I will repeat any time it comes up, for a place that is supposedly doing "everything wrong", there is very little impact on daily life.
As in, literally zero.
You wear a mask to the store. Other than that, life continues mostly as before.
People are in my opinion making a serious mistake holding Iowa up as the picture of failure because Coronavirus is literally a non-event in most people's lives here.
I've been told for months now that we're on the cusp of everything going wrong.
It's been one big nothing after another.
I've been told every time it comes up since April that Iowa is on the cusp of being the next New York given how terribly we're handling everything.
It hasn't happened.
It's not going to happen.
Maybe you're right, but you're missing the point.
Looking at the number of cases in Iowa, they are slowly ticking up, but cases are a terrible way to determine if covid is getting to be a problem. You need to look at percentage testing positive, hospitalizations and deaths. And if Iowa is anything like California, Florida, and Texas, there will be a spike in cases among younger people, and a slow increase in hospitalizations. But it won't be as bad as everyone pretends it is, and in many cases, it won't help to start locking things down again or for the first time, you'll simply push the curve out. Nearly the same number of people will get sick, just over a longer time frame. In fact, that was the whole point of flattening the curve, it wasn't to stop covid, it was to push the cases out so that our healthcare system is not overwhelmed. The area under the curve would likely be similar to a non-flattened curve.
I don't see any evidence that Iowa will be overwhelmed, but perhaps you have better data that you can point to that shows everything going wrong.
In countries with a functioning government non-essential businesses shut down fully but temporarily and the government ensured people got the basic necessities without being forced to go out in public and spread the disease.
We have only had 190k deaths, so we saved 90% of the people that were going to die to date.
We absolutely cannot know that.
The wealthy have very good schools.
Democrats protect wealthy schools from undesirables by preventing people from choosing which school their kids can go to. Unions slow societal progress (Police and Teacher’s unions for example)
Absolutely.
> The wealthy have very good schools.
Yep.
> Democrats protect wealthy schools from undesirables by preventing people from choosing which school their kids can go to. Unions slow societal progress (Police and Teacher’s unions for example)
Aaand you lost me. This sort of poorly thought out Ayn Rand POV is unfortunate to see so often here on HN.
I'd also wager that your blaming of democrats here is obviously flamebait and is against the rules. There's no interesting discussion to be had when you just dismiss an entire portion of the population right off the bat. Nothing to engage with when you've already decided I'm part of some conspiracy to keep kids from having a decent education.
Stop acting like you know the field - you clearly have only a basic (and wrong) view of the situation.
It seems reasonable to hand those families a check to help them to escape than to keep perpetuating the injustice.