Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Why do you think these are conspiratorial? The Fed makes the data publicly available! The obvious explanation that growing the money supply by more than 40% in a couple years actually does increase prices substantially remains the obvious explanation. As an Occam's Razor appreciator, I don't really feel much need to find better explanations than that one. The only reason that inflation data isn't even more horrifying is that much of the newly created "wealth" wound up saved or stored in housing rather than actively circulating.
People believe the claim that the government had to do something about Covid, that lockdowns were a reasonable short-run response, and that shoveling money at people was necessitated because they couldn't just go earn it with normal economic transactions. This is the majority position. Bringing up your (and my) conspiracy theory that this was probably not a good idea will get a lot of, "yeah, but we didn't know that then" even from people that half agree.
On the hand, with regard to the pitchforks, you may have noticed that the Summer of 2020 really was marked by endless left-wing riots, then there was also a right-wing riot at the beginning of 2021. The federal government took sufficient action to persuade many right-wingers that they would not be treated as gently by the legal system as they had observed their left-wing counterparts being treated in 2020. Prosecuting a thousand or so people for whatever you can make stick has a way of dissuading many people from continuing with the same plan, at least in the short run.
The problem I have with your theory is the assumption that things would have just continued along as normal if it hadn't been for those meddling lockdowns and stimulus payments. The weekend before lockdown I was at a birthday party at a restaurant in Pittsburgh, and the place was practically deserted. This was at a popular restaurant at 7 pm on the Saturday of St. Patrick's Day weekend in one of the busiest nightlife destinations in the city. After businesses had reopened, owners complained about capacity restrictions, but even at 25% capacity I had no problem getting a table the few times I went out; it's not like people were lining up out the door to get one of the few available spots. I also think that the politics of the lockdowns shaped how a lot of people viewed the virus. If you thought the lockdowns were a prime example of government overreach, then chances are you also thought the virus wasn't that bad. I know I thought this way. I don't know that this happens to the extent that it did if businesses stayed open the whole time and no restrictions were put in place, the upshot being that conservative leaning people would have been more likely to be concerned about the virus since tribal politics weren't implicated to the same extent. If the virus began running rampant in some parts of the US in late March or April, there would have been a major depression of economic activity, even if it were clear that business closures weren't on the table.
A lot of businesses wouldn't be able to justify keeping staffing levels at pre-pandemic levels in such a scenario, and they'd be forced to make cuts. It's hard to see any scenario where there's no stimulus payments, no mortgage forbearance, and no student loan pause that still sees the COVID recession being as short as it was. People seem to forget that the market was in freefall in the early days of COVID, and it was only when it became clear that the US government would put some kind of protections in place that the market started to recover. If all the predictions the Treasury Department was making in March 2020 had come true, we could be in a situation now where instead of complaining about inflation we're complaining about a persistently high unemployment rate, and instead of complaining about housing costs we're complaining about a moribund housing market that's caused massive layoffs in the construction sector. I'm not trying to argue that the powers that be made all the right moves with respect to the pandemic, just that we aren't in a position to second-guess them and assume things would have necessarily been better had they done nothing.
As mentioned in my post, people believe that the government had to do something. I stand by the position that the panic was a result of media and government messaging rather than an organic development, but I obviously have no way of proving that. Whether I'm right or wrong about what the governments should have done and how people would have reacted, governments did what they did and it had the completely unsurprising consequences that we've seen play out. I think it's weird that people still defend it even with the current available knowledge, but it doesn't really matter what I think, it matters that most people think it was basically fine (or not aggressive enough!), so there are no riots over the consequences of lockdowns, restrictions, and helicopter money.
The initial wariness during early COVID was reasonable under ignorance. To sum up what my faulty memory tells me I thought in early 2020: "New respiratory virus, something about 5% death rate, seems to spread very quickly." It seemed reasonable to stay home a bit more.
I believe you're correct about government/media messaging, more correct as the pandemic (response) went on, but in the initial stage I think the "panic" was much more organic.
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I just can't understand people who think this way. If we had Athenian democracy by random citizens I could probably forgive this huge mistake, but the Experts™ who make up the administrative state literally have one job. They should at least all be purged and a full retrospective should be done on how to prevent this sort of policy disaster from occuring again. I've said it before, but the docility and lemming-like behavior during, but especially after, covid have almost completely convinced me that the vast majority of people should have zero political power.
Not sure about people having no power, but I'm with you in that it's very frustrating how willing people are to just forgive the massive, society shattering mistakes made during 2020 and the next couple of years.
We are only just beginning to see the negative effects play out, personally I think the fallout from kids losing socialization during developmental years will be massive.
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Their one job is to give options to politicians. The politicians then make choices based on that advice..plus an idea of what will be popular among the people they were elected by and want to be elected by again.
If most people want something done, then politicians will do something. This is a feature not a bug. Democracy isn't optimized for the best outcomes. It's the rough outcomes that the majority of people want, tempered by advice, depending on how strongly the people feel about it. That's it.
Giving people political power is not so we get better decisions, it's so that we get decisions that are somewhat representative of what the people want. Even if what they want is stupid or counter-productive. That's the deal.
I might agree with you.... except that approximately 9000% of the experts gave the advice of "lockdowns aren't severe enough, every single one of your constituents is going to die". This was blatantly wrong- it wasn't a best guess at the time, it's obviously stupid in retrospective, readily available data made it obviously wrong then, it was a political narrative to make ruling conservative parties look bad. And the experts constantly spitballing fantastic hypotheticals about how it could be true was something they fed to politicians as facts.
So yes, experts take the blame here.
I hear a lot of people talk like this and I genuinely wonder what ‘experts’ means here.
If it’s the statements of scientists as filtered through news or politics, then I don’t really think of that as ‘expert’ since it’s mixed with other idealogical frames. I don’t actually know what the expert is saying in that case, or if they even represent a qualified authority.
In general, when a headline references ‘Experts’ or ‘Researchers’, I replace it mentally with ‘Some guy’. Not because I don’t trust experts or researchers, but because broadly the media has a bad record of science communication.
That's a fair point, but communications given directly by government employed experts like Fauci and Wallensky were pushing the exact same trivially-false chicken little syndrome drivel, just with fewer basic math errors.
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This seems to not be correct. See the recent leaks from Boris Johnson, where he privately says the expert studies show him that lockdowns are not necessary and that the risk to under 40's is negligible. Then a week later announces another lockdown. Not because of what government experts were telling him, but because of public pressure on his MPs.
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