Teens' mental health did surprisingly well in quarantine
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
2. American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, and would give the most "hostile workplaces" a run for their money. They suck for the nerdy kid who wants to be left to his / her own devices. They suck for the middling kids who don't want to be on the perpetual status treadmill.
Here in my country, most start at either 8 or 9.
As they get older of course, they want to sleep a lot later.
It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.
(We started at 7:00 and it was... fine? Quite possible to imagine?)
Between 5 AP courses and after school activities that kept him there until 9pm a few times a week, he was burning himself out last year. We'll be doing remote school until at least February and it's been great (for him).
Probably positive for self-esteem and growth. Perhaps schools now are too focused on academic scores alone and too ignorant of negative social dynamics.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with this view but I'm sure it has some grain of truth.
The cynical view is that school is there to manufacture good workers for 18th century Prussia. Serving the modern economy would be a major step up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_ba...
You sit at your desk most of the time in your classroom. The same way you do at home in an online class.
But home is relatively more comfy. You are allowed to eat, stretch, sit anyway you like, take a walk, go to washroom as many times as you want, and play a game on the side in an online class.
Less chances for kids to bully each other and if they did, digital evidence of it is available.
Some teachers behave better.
I wish some sort of hybrid will come. Activities that require sitting in a classroom should be shifted to remote while others can be built into a separate school.
Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. Parents-from-hell exist but at least when I was growing up, discipline was expected, teachers were given the benefit of doubt instead of always siding with the kids, kids actually used to be somewhat scared of teachers and the principal (I mean sure they would make fun of them behind their back but at least there was some amount of deference to authority) and the overall environment kept kids in line.
The kind of bullying that passes for normal in American schools would never fly. I mean it doesn't fly in American workplaces either. It's the kind of bullshit we only tolerate in schools for some reason.
I can confirm this is true of Chinese.
I went to a school where I got an all-rounded experience, but was fortunate and it's an elitist institution ( akin to a prep-school here), so out of reach of many.
You can criticize the American school system as much as you want, but for the most part it does a pretty good job.
Bullying can get bad, but some of it is also teaching you critical life skills. There is plenty of workplace bullying too, you know what you do, you grow some balls and stand up to the bully.
Which part of implementing this in American schools needs them to be the hell-holes they are?
A strict environment might be good for education, but I don't think helps reduce bullying.
In Asia kids actually respect their teachers as some honorable adults or even role models, it's a culture thing. The teachers are also graduated from good colleges and earning a decent pay. It's a whole different scenario.
by the way, as for the skin-color-based and gender-based AA admission policies, that does not exist at all in Asia.
In general I have heard of much more people being bullied in middle school compared to only one or two in high school.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but what??? I went through the biggest high school in my state. It was a meat grinder. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the nasty experiences I had in corporate America. I could write a book on all the nasty legally questionable shit I saw.
Going through high school now in my 30s would be trivial to my mental health, but to my underdeveloped teen brain, it was overwhelming and couldn’t have been more serious. Now of course I am not saying that means those problems aren’t important or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve them. I think we should specifically because of the unique mentally vulnerable position the teenager is in.
Furthermore, for self-directed kids, there's always the possibility of simply going mostly asynchronous, watching lectures and reading textbook at their own pace (which might be faster than regular class now that most distractions are removed!).
For the kids involved in sports, sure. That's not all kids.
Before high school, we had a physical education/"gym" class as part of our normal schedule where we would do various althletic things.
In high school, we needed a certain amount athletic credits in order to graduate. This worked out to be either 1 season each year on an actual team (competing against other schools); or 2 "seasons" each year of non competative play (e.g. pick-up games of ultimate frisbee, or joining the cross country team for training runs). They would take attendence each day, and you get credit based on how many times you show up (with no requirement that the days you show up are even in the same year; the only time a teacher would complain about you missing a day is if you need the credit to graduate).
You could also get credit for sports you do outside of the school.
Varsity football in a state like Texas or Florida where football is king? Definitely a huge value add even if you are not going to play football in college.
That’s utter nonsense. It takes more physical prowess to run 10 miles, sure, but there’s nothing mentally easy about playing the same damn four bars until you have the passage completely locked in, to put in the effort to go from ok to good to excellent.
I didn't mean that - I mean people applying for I don't know engineering or whatever having to compete by showing how good their extra-curriculars were.
Not only is that not typical, there seems to be no US in-person high school in the US that has 10,000+ kids (there are a few online/distance-learning high schools that big or bigger.) It looks like the largest in-person is Brooklyn Technical High School, which has ~6,000.
The national “top 100” lists of biggest high schools start in the low 3,000s; that's not typical, suburban or otherwise, either.
One easy way to demonstrate this is through extracurricular activity. If you founded a club, excelled in a sport, engaged in charity, won contests, etc., that's a sign that you're somebody who does things in a community and not just a test taker.
(There is room at even top schools for test takers—but you're going to need extremely uncommon scores to stand out that way.)
Meanwhile Asian countries select for skills and don’t hesitate to give 14hrs per day of courses at high school in China depending on provinces. Not that it is enjoyable, but we won’t enjoy much when we have to acknowledge their superiority.
A few spots for IQ160 people still excludes a lot of good workers. Perhaps we shouldn’t suppress our hard workers, perhaps we should even acknowledge them, even if they seem boring for normal people.
Meanwhile if those could actually help us socially, that would be a big win-win, if only because socially-excluded people are harmful to others, maybe also because most tax dollars comes from hard workers.
A lot of public colleges essentially create a formula (GPA and SAT/ACT) and the "soft factors" likes clubs and sports only decide when you are in the gray area.
Not that this would be the impact on kids' mental health, anyway, that would depend on whether they found sports to be satisfying and rewarding, or just one more stressful opportunity to be declared a failure. That, in turn, probably depends on the parents and the coaches.
I had the afternoon to myself, did a lot of reading and rode my bike around town and into the fields. I still know a lot about topics I just was curious about (alphabets and writing systems across the globe, must have spent hours reading books on those). All that I wouldn't have been able to do with a whole-day school. Although now as a parent, I have to admit that it surely is easier to have your kid in school all day while you are at work.
To be honest I would be terrified to let my kids do this, maybe because I grew up in a place where drivers are the leading cause of dead kids (the US).
This is very interesting regarding half day schools in Germany. We've considered moving to Germany for a while so our kids could learn German while they're young (also we just quite like the place). A half day school sounds enticing as well.
Thanks for sharing your experience, it's helpful to hear from someone who did it.
:(
The only good that came out of it was that I studied so freaking hard so I could get a job and move out.
There was no empathy for this demographic, but lots of empathy for 70+ year olds.
There was lots of empathy for young people, including from those 70+ folks; it's just the narrative can not sustain on a diet of empathy.
In the places where lockdowns have been both draconian and ineffective, the priority is more to give the impression that the politicians are "doing something", not to seek a good outcome on a balance of opportunities taken and missed.
Now I am not in the US, but I do wonder if so much would have been shutdown if it had been young people who died, like it was in 1920.
No school + get to see your friends? Yeah I can see that being good for mental health..
My 29 year old single male friends? Multiple told me they were going to try to get anti depressants. They refused to link it to the quarantine (politically they were in full support of the quarentine).
And me? Unemployment with my 1 year old was fun for 3 months. By month 5, the kid learned how to rule the household. I'm so glad I'm hired and the kid is in daycare.
Also, students would go to the bathroom and then just not come back and roam the halls and enter random classrooms and say hi to all of their friends in the middle of class.
absolutely, agreed.
> saying hello to a friend isn't a moral travesty
I'll be honest: if you didn't grow up in a school like this, you don't understand how disruptive it is for a student to burst into the classroom in the middle of the teacher explaining something and go around high-fiving everyone in the classroom with the teacher powerless to stop them. This was not an infrequent occurrence.
The pledge of allegiance is another one of those things, that were it taking place in a hostile country, would be mocked incessantly - as brainwashing.
a. Because turns out the constantly suspending students is actually not that effective if our goal is to educate those students
b. Because suspending students goes on a school's record and the central office in urban areas wants to keep suspensions low.
c. Because the way they punish the disruption is oftentimes more problematic for ordinary students
ie. My school implemented hall sweeps where all of the teachers would lock the doors to their classroom and security would come through the halls and collect students for detention, but it would oftentimes catch students who were doing things like going from their classroom to the library or something.
It was also pretty clearly racially biased. I remember vividly a black student arriving maybe 10 seconds after the bell for class, getting into the class, and having security guards come into the classroom to take her out of the class because she was late. The security guards knew that the affluent, white student's parents were more likely to throw a fit if their child was treated like that.
This was honestly the most valuable lesson from that school: well-meaning discussion about how to enforce/stop certain behavior in a meeting translates into super unreasonable enforcement actions by school security. I doubt this principle is unique to schools, but I am lucky to be wealthy enough to be shielded from the brunt of the law.
Your school was probably very different from mine.
I'm really happy my mother made sure I knew she'd fight for me if a teacher wouldn't let me use the toilet. I didn't need her to, but my sister did.
Worth noting though: no, I don't think you can deal with it on a case-by-case basis at the level at which this occurs.
What the better teachers seemed to do is find a way to set up a system with students who would lock & unlock the classroom door for students who needed to go to the bathroom. (the door was never locked from the inside, just the outside)
I'm opposed to locked bathroom doors as well: Again, all it takes is one teacher saying, "no", and suddenly, the same student is out of luck.
Or we could be more lenient on students and not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
I mean, my school tried that - they implemented a hall sweeping program where teachers locked their doors and security would try to catch all the students in the halls. It didn't really prevent it because they couldn't constantly hall sweep all of the halls during the entire school day (and it increased the number of students entering other classrooms randomly to try to hide from the security guards) and it was also super racially biased in its enforcement.
> It can't be that many kids doing it every class and having teachers and staff monitor halls
No, it is quite a few students. You underestimate the dysfunction in the typical inner city school.
> Simple enough to take report that to whoever in the school handles discipline
And do what to discipline them? Kick them out of school?
> not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
In an urban environment, "not worrying about attendance" translates to a. to very upset parents (esp. among working-class parents who are not at home and view education as a route to success), b. failing low-income students, c. more crime.
Urban schools are hard to fix!
Pyramids got built for free right?
* When was the last time you had a nightmare about school? * When was the last time you had a nightmare about work?
Regardless of the average age, I would be surprised if you found that work nightmares are more common than school nightmares. The recurrence of school nightmares even seems to be something of a running joke in our society.
However, I've also had plenty of nightmares about my first job. It's never about my performance or my co-workers, mind you, but about my immigration status back then. Currently, in my (virtual) room of co-workers, many are also immigrants; I wouldn't be surprised that they've had similar nightmares.
Not gonna lie, the part about immigration status hit me very strong.
I keep getting those nightmares about once a month, despite all of my actual immigration-related fears in real life being completely gone after becoming a citizen. The nightmare is always about me somehow ending up in my old country (but at the present time, not me back then) without being able to escape. It always starts as just a minor inconvenience situation (e.g., flight got canceled, just gotta reschedule it, no big deal) and rapidly escalates to the most impossible situations to get out of (e.g., got arrested at a random place and stuck in a cell without being able to leave), while my normal life in the US going on as normal, just without me present, and nobody notices my absence.
In addition to that one, the only other one I often get is the very typical one about waking up to me being my college-aged self and realizing it is the final exam day, and it is for a class that i signed up for and completely forgot about until today.
I have never had a work nightmare, but since emigrating some of the school dreams have been replaced by visa-related ones.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sleep-depriva...
The 18 year old was multi-tasking his Eve Online account + school Zoom meetings. I've been remote like ~5 years and was impressed.
Hey, at least school is teaching him some important life skills!
They couldn't set a foot out of the door for 52 straight days and only walk around the block for a few more weeks, but they adapted perfectly, slept more, never were bored or sad, did great with their remote school tasks, enjoyed the extended family time and even had a fun and instructive peek into adult work life: they were surprisingly insightful and critical about the good and bad aspects of mom&dad jobs.
And while the reason for it was bad and my wife and me were worried, anxious and sleepless, in retrospect our life was good in a lot of ways: The kids were OK, we ate better, we exercised, work got done beyond expectations, we had more free time and discovered that many of the disagreements and tensions in our marriage come from the outside. Being together 24/7 was easier than getting along living the usual crazy "normal life".
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm
Discussion by Glenn Greenwald: https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/the-social-fabric-of-the...
I find it somewhat incredible that the results would be going essentially in opposite directions so close in age range.
I wonder if the kids studied were more from higher socio-economic strata than the median. The methodology section of the appendix to the study linked[0] by the Atlantic article is vague on socio-economic status.
Since many of those who are on the high end have had significantly less disruption than those on the lower end. If the sample was skewed toward the higher end of the spectrum, perhaps that could account for the results.
[0] https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/final-teenquaranti...
Edit: Included the missing link.
To further clarify a 15% rate of depression in teens is higher than it was in 2017. The article lists in their survey for families who were well off during the pandemic still 15% which is really high. And 33% for those who were not. The fact the article ignores that fact is concerning to me. And makes this seem like a piece trying to claim social media isn't as "bad" as it seems. Claiming that sleep was beneficial for teens. When it in fact is suggestive otherwise that it is negligible.
I have the same opinion; there are like three of us.
They are failed experiments and need to end. There is no fixing them at this point and society is worse due to what they've become.
Anon, 4chan
[1] (and, unfortunately, projections and inferences and ad-hominems...)
On anonymous sites you may get into a generic argument, but you don't lose reputation, you're not personally attacked in your identity, and you can't be ostracised.
I don't really agree with that. Going to a bar or a club is absolutely social. And can absolutely be anonymous.
Granted, that does include personal contact, but there's no requirement to identify yourself, or if you do, provide accurate information.
I'd say the same is true for online interaction. When you interact with others (such as me responding to your comment) that's a social interaction.
Whether it's a meaningful or useful social interaction is a different question, but definitely social interactions, IMHO.
>On anonymous sites you may get into a generic argument, but you don't lose reputation, you're not personally attacked in your identity, and you can't be ostracised.
That's absolutely true. At the same time, it doesn't make those interactions not "social interactions," just anonymous or pseudonymous ones.
Just like the ones you might have on a subway or in the checkout line at a supermarket.
And pushes down a point in that, if social media is so bad, why are we here?
HN is social media.
Algorithmic marketing platforms that use AI to drive engagement in service of selling attention?
There is nothing social about them.
If anything it drove more gatherings at each others homes. I have seen an entire wrestling team at homes along with parents around. Seems there was this super brief restraint that suddenly blew out especially when so many didn't want to be inhibited.
My 16 y.o. son is not struggling with quarantine at all, but his education is taking a massive nosedive - something he's not yet mature enough to worry about. So yeah, mental health-wise he's fine. Education-wise he's in a bit of a pickle. I say "a bit" because we've been supplementing his education with STEM tutoring for the past 3 years or so, which is not something poorer people can afford to do. _Those_ kids are fucked like you wouldn't believe. I think we'd be better off canceling the entire school year, furloughing all teachers, and keeping kids in the same grade for the time being.
But, as a parent myself now, I can see that my children have stayed in contact with their friends almost continuously with text messaging and audio and video calls. I think that technology has been a tremendous help.
Even school continued remotely on its normal schedule. As others have mentioned, this also allowed more pupils to sleep until later in the morning, which was probably a good thing as well, though obviously the level of physical exercise plummeted.
It's also less stressful, it's ok to skip stuff. Results don't matter as much.
Next year when some of their parents are still unemployed, expectations back, but some kids will be further behind. Everything that seems to matter now will be forgotten.
That's when I'd expect to start seeing them top themselves at an increased demographic level.
Given that, I would take this with a grain of salt. Half of that time is summer, when teens normally aren't in school anyway.
So if being able to socialize with friends and peers is an important part of teens' mental health (I think it is), then this study doesn't really cover that very well.
Also, July was a few months ago. It's possible things get worse over the long haul.
School system here is basically hell, they picked the worst parts of USA and EU styles of education and mixed them into some kind of unholy beast designed to break children.
Here many schools have the building literally designed after prisons, something that kids DO pick up (the most important school in my town had the nickname when I was teenager, of "Cadeião", that means "big jail", a nickname also used to refer to supermax prisons).
Although we don't get a ton of mass shootings like USA, non-mass shootings are normal (and mind you, in a country where guns are banned... people still find a way to get guns anyway, also axes, knives, etc... we had a "mass axing" here...), violence between not just students, but students and teachers.
Much of this I suspect is because my country is one of the few ones in the world where homeschooling is 100% illegal, with no exceptions, attempting homeschool here is a serious crime that results in the parents being arrested and the kids sent to orphanage, so you have schools full of kids that DO NOT want to be there, ever, so they focus their time on making life hell for everybody around them, hoping that maybe someday, people will kick them out of the system (but they won't, because it is illegal).
About EU vs USA vs Brazil schooling system:
I lost the excellent article I read about it years ago, but basically in USA the students can choose what classes they want, this including theoretically let them switch what classes their are going if they want to avoid a certain student. Meanwhile in Europe the classes are fixed, everyone go to same classes, but in many places you can choose the curriculum, so if you want to be an engineer for example you can pick an engineering focused curriculum, classes will be fixed, and all students you see every day won't chance, but you will learn more about what you want.
In Brazil the government decided somehow, that the best path was not choose anything, all schools have same curriculum, all university entry exams are obligated to ask some mininum about subjects even if they are irrelevant (ie: if you are offering a physics course, you still need to ask literature questions in your entry exam), you can't choose time, can't choose curriculum, nothing. Basically you go to school when it opens, stick with same students even if they hate your guts, see the same subjects as everyone else, even if they are completely irrelevant, and then you go home, and you keep repeating this until you have to get into a university, when you then have to take a government-ran test (that often includes propaganda) and whatever test that the universities you want to enter have, such test must ask along whatever the university wants to know, also some questions about subjects the government wants all universities to ask to all students, no matter if it is completely irrelevant or useless for their lives.
I had to go through an x-ray and metal detector to get into my school starting in 6th grade. I think many of the problems you identify with the Brazilian education are not unique to Brazil.
I'd lie. I don't want to get singled out for home abuse or bullies. There are people that have it worse. And having to talk to people that are powerless to remove bullies is a huge mental drain.
According to other research boys are coping mentally better with COVID than girls.
I purposefully shown some online games to my daughters so they can socialize with friends. But looking around, it was quite exceptional move for parent of girls. They had more schoolmate boys playing with them although they normally socialize more with girls. And some of those girls were the ones I told the parents about the option. I did not asked single boy to join, they were already gaming.
But then the bullying never really goes away for either gender. It's disguised and legitimised as various commercial, professional, political, and social activities, but the motivations are similar - just more covert.
This is like saying "I had no idea how severely boys beat or insult each other". It is absolutely true that such problem exists among boys. But you still have a lot of groups where boys don't beat each other.
He may have been referring to research that suggests girls generally cope better with the American school system's structure and approach than boys:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...
Too bad this is going to last a lot longer...
Does not look "mentally well" to me.
Donald Trump learned that ignoring science doesn't make it go away to his detriment; I really hope others will take note and follow prevailing medical advice to keep themselves and their loved ones safe, rather than pretending it's political.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-gdp-falls...
A more relevant comparison is Sweden with its neighbors. If you simply compare Sweden to Denmark (which was the worst performing Swedish neighbor), Sweden which never had an official lockdown, still saw its economy contract more than all its neighbors, had a death rate 5x that of Denmark (and 10x other neighbors) and a case rate 2x that of Denmark.
Of course, it's hard to compare different economies, but the initial evidence indicates that not locking down does not help the economy either.
Another interesting bit of evidence is that mobility data showed that in cities that were affected by the virus, reduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns. Which indicates that the economy would be affected negatively irrespective of the lockdown.
It's also not all that surprising. The reality is that the majority of people are not gonna want to be active while a deadly disease for which we have no cure/vaccine is running rampant. So a lockdown effectively only affects the behavior of those at the margin. Their activity affects the economy linearly, but will affect the spread of the disease exponentially.
The marginal linear economic benefit of not having a lockdown could very easily be dwarfed by the economic impact of the greater spread of the virus.
That being said, now that we have a much better understanding of the virus and how it spreads (we had absolutely no idea in the beginning when the blanket lockdowns were issued), targeted and limited lockdowns should be more than sufficient in societies where people generally tend to follow rules.
In Montreal, the coffee shops were almost empty when the PM's wife was diagnosed, some time before the official shut downs.
It may very well be that social interaction is only partly controlled by 'shut downs'.
I suggest that there is probably a 'form of staying open' that would actually limit COVID spread, and that if the communications used by government were more effective (i.e. 'instead of going to the coffee shop, make sure to buy coffee takeout) - we may have been able to 'have our cake and eat it' which is to say keep the economy running while limiting infections.
The economic shock is real, I don't think people realize how upside down our system is right now. We've been basically avoiding total social meltdown by printing money out of thin air in historical proportions.
If we don't play our cards right, and we screw this up, it will be 'Weimar Republic' all over again and things could melt down very badly. Someone much worse than Trump will come along and take advantage of that.
Have a look here [1]
In 10 years the US Fed has gone from 800B in assets to 7 Trillion. It's very scary.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
The question is more - in places where the population voted for people who did lockdown, would lifting the lockdown lead to a resumption of economic activity? The answer to that question appears to be a tentative no. The best way to resume normal activity is to control the pandemic.
I think you're not as informed as you think you are.
I live in NYC and we started opening back up in late June. In fact, pretty much everything but indoor dining, gyms and large indoor gatherings have been open since August.
We've had some hot spots recently which have necessitated geographically isolated restrictions, but the majority of the city is open, as is indoor dining and gyms.
Sure, there has been a goodly bit of economic impact, as many continue to work from home (before the pandemic, the population of Manhattan would roughly double on a working day) which has impacted much of the hospitality industry.
Broadway theaters, the Opera and the Philharmonic are all closed until at least next summer, but those require being in large groups indoors to be profitable.
But museums are open.
NYC is certainly not "back to normal," but in a place where the population density is 27,000/sq mi (what's the population density where you live?) that's not surprising.
What is surprising is how low we've kept the infection rate since the end of May[0].
In fact, given the circumstances, once we got things under control (mid March- late May were horrific and deeply disturbing here), we've been doing really well.
> Sweden's GDP fell 8.6% during the second quarter of the year, according to its statistics body.
> The fall is sharper than its neighbors — Denmark registered a 7.4% fall, and Finland a 3.2% fall.
US GDP fell 30% during lockdown.
If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down, that's a win overall.
which was split over the second & third quarters, so not as massively different from the Scandanavian numbers as it first appears
> If not locking down is approximately as bad as locking down, plus the lifestyle benefits of not locking down,
minus the drawback of Grandpa dying
These all require that you actually implement these things effectively and comprehensively of course.
And just for the record, I think in early March we absolutely made the right decisions, and the "lockdowns" that are still in place are still the right way to go considering how terribly the US has managed all this. In general though, this doesn't seem to be the only or even the best tool we have in our toolbox to fight a pandemic like this. Had the NYC area started an extensive test and trace program when we were in our lulls in August (NJ was down to under 300 cases a day across the state), and enacted forced quarantines with criminal consequences, I think we would be in a much better place now.
As an aside on a personal level, I am livid that I am being forced to go back in the office on Monday 5 days a week despite being able to be able to do my job 100% effectively. Its completely irresponsible and has permanently damaged my view of my employer.
There's no reasonable evidence suggesting, for instance, that a shutdown is causing more deaths than it is preventing, and yet we continuously hear that take.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/who-official-urges-...
I'm pretty sure these conditions applied when the lockdowns were imposed in most countries.
So the WHO does not disagree with the poster at all.
And yeah, no one thinks lockdowns should be the primary or only way of addressing the pandemic.
Look at the poster’s comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776722
The poster is talking about a ‘not worth it crowd’ dismissively, and as if they are inherently wrong.
The WHO supports the idea that it is almost always not worth it and that the conditions in which it is worth it are narrowly defined.
Whether or not the conditions obtain for it to be worth it is therefore a very valid discussion.
Dismissing (with bulverism) the concerns of those who question the value is not valid.
It is also certainly not true that we know that all of the lockdowns were justified based on the WHO’s advice.
In the US we have a full year from when the epidemic hit until the next set of elected officials are seated.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775774.)
am i crazy/too old? no one else?
COVID-19 proved corporate capitalism invalid. I would have rather seen socialism succeed than capitalism fail and certain I wish we hadn't had to see over a million people die because of our economic system, but nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the left. Universal basic income is now a mainstream position. Trump, who would have probably be winning if COVID-19 hadn't happened, is now the underdog.
I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are, for the first time in their life, experiencing mental distress, serious ill-health, and disability. I don't mean to understate that. I'm not happy that COVID-19 happened, and I don't think anyone is. For me, though, the uncertainty has kept me going. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there's also cause for hope. It is now not merely a growing sentiment but common knowledge that our economic elite must be overthrown, no matter the cost.
The question is how do we get there without becoming Venezuela and eating rats.
Corporate capitalism is theft, but that doesn't mean all socialists are good or that no socialists are thieves.
And don't forget, Venezuela isn't really led by folks that care about their people nor do the elections seem free or fair. I think one of the real issues in doing socialist policies in the US is that the US's level of corruption and lack of care for other folks (at a government level) is more reminiscent of Venezuela and other corrupt regimes - and has been for years. There is not much trust in government and government doesn't seem keen on building such a thing.
We could go and base things more off of Nordic nations, but it is going to require more transparency, front-facing government that simply works without punishing people for not being perfect, and some major trust-building. (Initiatives like the reworking of the Indiana DMV are in order: I no longer hated the DMV there, and it can be even better with some work). We don't necessarily need any of this for some socialist policies, such as health care. There are plenty of examples around the globe we can source from to customize it to our population. We can make the tax code easier for average people in most situations to deal with as well simply to remove some friction.
They're very much capitalist though.
"Socialism never works."
"Norway is socialist and they're doing great."
"They're not socialist! They're capitalist countries with strong welfare systems."
"Then let's adopt those policies!"
"No, that's socialism!"
There are so many little things you just couldn't do in the US. For example, the largest dairy coop - Tine - has to distribute goods from smaller dairies. I buy my wine and liquor at a state run store, which is nicer than any liquor store I knew in the US.
Health care is so much more efficient and you get things you can't have in the US: For example, they send a nurse to your house up to 6 times a day before you qualify for a nursing home. The nurse is free: The nursing home is a percentage of your pension (and everyone gets one). A bonus is that folks live longer than they did going to a nursing home sooner.
The state inspects chimneys to cut down on fires. Schooling doesn't really depend on the taxes in your local area, though is run more locally (as is some of the health care), and the libraries are nation-wide and can get books from other places.
Comparatively, socialist.
There is always an excuse and yet after some 20+ experiments the pattern is always the same. The only thing that keeps changing are the excuses.
The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claimed (and claim) to be "communists".
The problem with capitalism is that it has no history, no memory. It doesn't get better, and it doesn't learn. It's the same shit today that it was in the time of the Pinkertons. Government did get better at regulating it, but in the past 40 years it has gotten worse at doing so.
Socialism on full blast will eventually run itself dry especially if enough people just seize to work driving down the profits keeping the system running.
Here's some reality about the global GDP rising since the industrial revolution:
https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/01.html
https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/images/web/figure...
You write, I reply, you reply to me and so on. You do your neighbour a favor and remember that. If you keep doing them favors and they won't help you, you'll stop helping them. The list of examples is long and and pattern is the same: humans keep track of "balances". This isn't a system that we invented or discovered, it's who we are and how we work.