Maybe also losing 1.1 million people (according to the CDC's "excess deaths" website) wasn't that good for our economy either.
I've seen this thrown about and have to take this with a grain of salt because even the infirmed/elderly/retired are still part of the economy. They consume food and resources, albeit they aren't out buying durable goods and new cars, but they are paying rent/mortgage in their retirement communities, eating food, buying CPGs* (some of which fully rely on an older population).
I'll take the example of my two relatives that died from COVID, neither had underlying conditions: One was a 65 yo former airline mechanic on the verge of retirement with a McMansion in Houston area, he spent a lot of money keeping up that lifestyle, and when he passed my aunt moved back to a small town, and downsized, considerably shrinking her spending. They had planned to spend the next 10 years in an RV that is no longer going to happen. The other is my 46 yo cousin with 4 kids and was a seven figure earner in sales living in Kansas City area. Again, huge amount of spend and now his wife is getting by with a massively reduced house and budget.
* Did the hard candy industry take a nose-dive? Should I be shorting Werther's Original stock?
Only 1 in 20 deaths attributed to COVID-19 were between 0 and ~49.
Abstract models of "productivity" vs age peak close to where the covid death hockey stick turns upwards.
The 50-60 age bracket is where the big losses are, losing 100k-200k people near their prime and 5-15 years of remaining economic contributions. Younger populations saw much fewer losses, older populations mostly left the workforce.
I'm not sure that's true. Many civilizations, up to and including now, have the cultural practice of the weak and elderly destroying themselves (or being destroyed) when they become a burden on their relative/society. The most obvious example being the concept of east asian (Korean/Japanese) elders "going to the mountain to die".
You have to look very hard for a successful civilization that doesn't do this. Sparta, perhaps?
(This is also not really the point of the original comment.)
Second, a lot of people retired well before they usually would to stay out of the path of covid or covid-induced craziness. This is a big part of the school bus driver shortage, for instance. A lot of older people drove school buses for a bit of extra cash, and to be around kids. Wisely, a lot of them decided to stop doing that, and might not come back for a while.
So it isn't just deaths that are the reason for a reduced working population, although that has an impact, too.
Really? The elderly may not be likely to work, but they still consume (they consume lots of medical services in proportion to their numbers, for instance.)
> reducing the burden on the state for such things as retirement and Medicaid.
“the burden on the state for such things as ... Medicaid” is a chunk of economic activity. With taxes the same and that spending gone, alone, the economy shrinks.
To a ruthless cold-blooded optimizer, deleting the elderly should be good for the economy because you save on their maintenance costs and their resources get redistributed to more active investors. This might decrease GDP, but that only reflects on GDP being a problematic metric.
I guess it's true that smashing windows or providing medical care to the elderly would increase the "size of the economy", because it adds entries to the implicit "market's bid/ask order book". And you could measure the size of the economy by the size of that data structure.
Right, and the upthread discussion was about GDP, not some abstract unspecified quality of the economy.
In what proportion?
More dead people means fewer competitors for all resources except labor. What that means is fewer people need stuff and there are fewer people to make stuff, so the stuff the dead people had is easy to obtain for the living while employers have to pay more for labor because there is less of it.
As evidence the black plague was considered one of the major events that ended the dark ages and the oppressions (relatively speaking) of the peasant class. Suddenly lord's needed to start giving their peasants rights and things to do or risk losing them to a lord that would give them those things.
It's horrible and callous but it is also a fact, especially when you consider many of those deaths were not among the most productive segments of society.
Think about the networks effects of an economy. An economy of one person has a size of zero units. An economy of two people has a size of one unit, an economy of n people has a max size of n^2 units, or more really nlogn, when you take into account the Gaussian distribution of value between each node of the network.
But, that's the whole gist of our economy: lots of people needing stuff (consumers) and lots people making stuff (labor).