I don't know why we're so hesitant to just close bars and restaurants everywhere, pay the staff generously, and leave the rest of the economy open. At least in the UK I think it would have stopped us from having a second lockdown.
This is especially the case in non-island nations that cannot control their borders as easily.
Some work still needs to get done. Society won't work if everyone sits on their bum for a year, pandemic or not. Among the jobs which need to be done, however, there are no restaurant workers.
God I wish we would go back to the gold standard so that the cost of government expenditures would be more obvious to the general public via payment from increased taxes or from allocation away from some other government expense. Instead, people are left thinking the government could magically solve all of our problems by printing more money, but for some reason doesn’t because it doesn’t care.
We could just print all the money we need.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the inflationary effects of adding more dollars to the money supply, then we have to talk about where those dollars come from and why they do and don't create inflation. Talk about what the real demonstrable alternatives are, and whether or not a higher inflation is really the devil that so many claim it is.
The real demonstrable alternatives are those we had prior to eliminating the gold standard. We are now able to print our way out of recessions, at the cost of an incredibly destabilized economy comprised of asset valuations that are so high they lead to perfect correlation downward when there is a shock to confidence.
Financial assets is far too broad a category, but "markets can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent" isn't some new statement. I'd argue that this is more a consequence of a confluence of factors including the end of general scarcity of capital, low interest rates, and low taxes.
Medical and Education costs are structural issues within the US, see most of Europe for a counter example.
As far as outsourcing, well that has lifted over 1 billion people out of poverty...so yea, I got nothing for you if you think American's being able to buy more goods for fewer dollars while simultaneously making the world a better place is something to be concerned about.
And our economy is far more stable today then any time in the history of the US. Or are we going to pretend that multiple depressions didn't happen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The only reason that the 2008 recession was as bad as it was, was because of a lack of political will to spend money.
Do you think this is sustainable in the long run? Will they keep giving us more goods/services than they get? What would happen if they decide to not use US dollar as reserve or they start demanding another currency for trade?
About $15T USD exist [0]. $5T are held by foreign banks [1], because the USD is the world's reserve currency. All of those countries want the USD to remain stable, so their own economies can work smoothly. The countries cooperate with USA and side with USA in disputes. This benefits USA greatly. If USA went to the gold standard, this benefit would disappear.
Currencies on a gold standard experience inflation and deflation due to changes in the value of gold. The value of gold is primarily driven by demand for jewelry and manufactured products [2]. Demand fluctuates with the business cycle. Gold value is also affected by supply fluctuations. On a gold standard, these would become extra unwanted currency fluctuations.
Only $9T of gold exists above ground in the world. USA has only 3,000 tons of gold, worth 3,000 t * (1,000,000 g / t) * (oz t / 31.1 g) * (USD$1840 / oz t) = $177B. So to get $15T of gold, USA would need to mine or purchase 250,000 t of gold. This is equivalent to 72 years of the world's current gold production. So to make it possible, gold production would need to increase dramatically. And it would take a while. Meanwhile, the US economy keeps growing, increasing the need for currency.
Gold mining produces huge amounts of crushed ore which continually leaches heavy metal pollution into the environment. Gold mining uses cyanide which occasionally leaks and sterilizes a river or lake and kills all the birds and other wildlife nearby. Increasing gold mining would increase suffering around the world.
Another option is to increase the price of gold. This would negatively affect industry, especially electronics manufacturing. It would also cause an enormous wealth transfer to India and other countries that hold a lot of gold jewelry.
On a gold standard, governments have limited ability to solve problems in money supply, and their currency is subject to business cycle fluctuations and interference from cartels. USA will have difficulty getting enough gold to back its currency. Increased mining will poison people in many communities and devastate parts of nature.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/Current/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-e...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Consumption
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Production
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_prod...
I think we can also have more fine-grained policies. In Scotland they simply disallow serving of alcohol in restaurants and pubs, and restaurants have to close by 6PM. Unsurprisingly Scotland seems to be doing somewhat better than England and has avoided a second nationwide lockdown.
The basic idea is if we can target the 5% of the economy that is causing most of the spread, you can keep the other 95% open.
because despite the fearful hype, there's no evidence restaurants are significant sources of spread. bars, at least, are more plausible (because of social dynamics, not fluid or viral ones), but still not conclusively proven to be significant transmission localities. transmission is primarily happening in private social gatherings, not in public places like restaurants, gyms, or grocery stores where we see so much attention being misdirected.
this paper, like similar others, paints a possible but unlikely picture of how a couple infection cases might be related, out of probably thousands (millions? billions?) of other possibilities. it's a classic case of availability bias--creating an explanation based on the limited observed information at our disposal, while expressly ignoring the much vaster array of information we don't, or can't, observe.
it's clues tied together to create a pat narrative, not conclusive, nor even particularly persuasive, proof on how transmission happened in this scenario. it's only one possibility among many.
this quote sums up their findings:
> "The average risk of transmission scales positively with the closeness of social interactions: the average per-contact risk is lowest for community exposures (including contacts in the public transportation system and at food and entertainment venues), intermediate for social and extended family contacts, and highest in the household. The average transmission risk in the household is further elevated when intense physical distancing is enforced, and for contacts that last longer."
the intuition is also pretty straightforward--we let our guard around those closest to us, who also happen to be those we spend the most time with. those are the two primary factors (closeness and contact time) for transmission. social gatherings are that layer just beyond the household where we are most exposed on those dimensions.
How is this possible? Distancing _elevates_ within-household risk?
One obvious mechanism: Enforced distancing makes it less likely you get COVID from a source outside of the household, which (since infection usually provides some period of immunity) thereby increases the risk you get it in the household, on average.
it's unrealistic to expect families to social distance from each other for months on end for a pandemic of this severity (~0.5% fatality rate heavily skewed to the aged, as opposed to the 1918 flu with ~10-20% fatality rate across the age spectrum).
so the most impactful, and realistic, action to materially lower infection/death rates is to alter our behaviors around private social gatherings only (distance or mask indoors). focusing our efforts there would be spending our collective goodwill budget wisely, as opposed to the pointless political theater around masks and restaurants. instead, all of the focus has been on curtailing public settings (easier for the government to control), where only a small minority of transmission is happening (moreover, public behaviors changed without needing government intervention). it'd be farcical if it weren't so tragic.
Well, wouldn't that be because public settings are more controlled, as you said?
It seems strange to suggest wearing a mask at home, in private, but not in public. Or did I misread?
Restrictive measures do not increase your absolute risk at home. The paper was talking about the relative risk between two scenarios - which allows for misunderstandings. The last sentence which was omitted in your quote was:
"These lines of evidence support that SARS-CoV-2 transmission is facilitated by close proximity, confined environment, and high frequency of contacts."
What the paper ought to have said was, when more restrictive measures are in place, it then becomes important to focus and step up measures for the people you interact with most - because those people in this new and different scenario now become the most likely people for which you will catch an infection.
The people you interact with have not suddenly become more risky in an absolute sense, but they become a more important risk factor when situations change.
Trying to draw conclusions between the relative risks between two different scenarios is not the same as absolute risk. This is the trap!
[edits: for clarity]
Here is a different example to try and illustrate the problem:
Is 10% larger than 5%?
It is not possible to answer this question if the basis on which the percentages are calculated are different.
What if I said the 10% was 10% of whatever you last spent money on, but the 5% was 5% of Google's annual revenue. Which is larger?
The same thing is happening in the above - it isn't okay to calculate the probabilities in two situations and then try to cross compare them for size.
Sadly this error seems to be cropping up quite a lot! Matt Parker (Stand-up Maths) has an example of this and related to a recent election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8. His explanation is likely better than mine.