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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do.

Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.

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Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized.

Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.

> are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do.

yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.

There is always work to do. However there is often a mismatch of skills and unwillingness to learn the right skills. Sometimes there is an unwillingness to work for the price people are willing to pay.

Traffic in general is also much more efficient with a small reduction in traffic.

If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s

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