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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30739 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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That doesn't sound like a crazy position to me. I think the lockdowns are a proximate cause, e.g. the inflationary policies of covid-aid funds weren't necessary without lockdowns. The tech-sector wouldn't have been able to become over-valued so quickly if it weren't for everyone staying home.

On the other hand, we don't have a lot of good data for what would have happened if we hadn't done lockdowns. Places who did fewer lockdowns still have to deal with the overvaluation of tech, global supply chain issues and cost of housing increases. So we can't really blame these issues on the marginal lockdown. (Although I'd be curious to see how if places that didn't lock down have better flu/RSV situations)

I'm not even sure who we can blame for lockdowns. Places like Sweden who avoided mandated lockdowns still saw large segments of their economies "shut down". Are ordinary people to blame? There's also very little variance in the responses from different countries/institutions, which suggests 'elite culture' bears responsibility.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.

Also likely massive wealth-transfer effects as the elderly moved on inheritances.

Sweden is relatively small country that depends on global connections and trade. Things that happened in Europe affected it regardless of their own policies. The same applies to inflation.

Yes, I mentioned that not doing lockdowns when everyone else is doing one would still result in many of the similar consequences.

That said, Swedes' private behaviour is also partially responsible for some of these consequences. Even without lockdowns, many Swedes stayed home, didn't go to restaurants, moved into a bigger house to comfortably WFH. The Swedish government also had distributed relief transfer payments. All of this contributes to inflation.

One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.

So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.

People voluntary locking down is a very strong argument against mandatory lockdowns. There was no need for police fining people jogging in park when the same result can be achieved voluntary, letting people themselves to decide what is more important for them.

However, the governments should have decided to leave certain services running, for example, schools.

The last thing – idea about difficulty to avoid large numbers of deaths completely ignores that covid risk was strongly age stratified. Some governments still ignores that by pushing vaccination to young children who all already have had covid.

don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.

Fair enough.

Ironically “showering people with money” was very successful monetary policy in the situation where there was no political will to avoid lockdowns. It certainly lessened economic impact. We still got inflation later but I still prefer inflation to recession whatever the cause.

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