Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

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"I pity the poor sod who is incarcerated"

There are literally billions of people on the planet right now incarcerated in their homes.

The economy is a patient whose heart has stopped pumping - we've injected Trillions in liquidity to hold off 'total death' and even that aid will only hold out for several more weeks. The 'system is collapsing' very, very quickly. The numbers are off the charts like anything we've seen before, all the buzzers in the cockpit are going off at once.

'Contact Tracing' more like chemotherapy, until there's a cure or vaccine, the South Korean model is basically the only example we can expect to try to follow.

Edit: I should add, I don't care about 'the economy' as an arbitrary thing, I don't care about investors or 'the stock market'. But 'the economy' is made up of very real things, like your job, whatever you do - and it's all going down like dominos. The headlines talking abut x% reduction in GDP etc, - those are the 'don't panic it will be ok numbers'. When >80% of the population is staying at home, the system as a whole cannot move forward - it's an 'existential decline' just 'some lower amount of GDP'. It's going to be cataclysmic and will be very, very difficult for the community at large, life-threatening in many circumstances.

The population at large I think has a visceral sensitivity to 'pandemic' - we've all seen the film, we know what 'getting Covid' means to us. But the notion of the economy going down like a house of cards is more intangible to most people, so it's less of a populist issue, but it should be.

Korean style contact-tracing looks different in that light.

Incarceration is knowing you cannot move two steps to the left without being severely punished.

Social distancing is an inconvenience; it is not incarceration.

Why would you try to split hairs about the editorialization of a word ... and then provide a totally false definition of the term?

There are no forms of general incarceration wherein 'moving two steps will get you punished'.

But it's beside the point:

Billions of people are forcibly confined to areas and activities in the most blindingly and openly transgression of 'liberty' in the history of civilization.

If I go and visit my mother - if I go pick up a frame for that painting - if I walk down the street with a friend - I face an $800 fine and actual 'classical' incarceration.

This is considerably more aggressive than marshall law in many ways.

To ignore this while at the same time making 'pre Coronavirus' arguments about 'contract tracing and privacy' is deeply unwise. Obviously privacy matters, obviously we have to be worried about the state gaining too much influence whilst using the calamity as an excuse.

How much of the economy is truly essential to living? Tourism is great but I can live without the old way of doing it. Widget production and selling has diminishing returns, even for pleasure.

Perhaps a social-distancing-world is incompatible with consumerist capitalism. Yet I hope for all the suffering from the virus and lockdowns we'll at least gain a new perspective on life and work.

Edit: forgot 'world'

Without the government providing free food and healthcare, consumer capitalism is all we have to sustain ourselves. It's easier to give freedom pursuit of property than to give out property directly.

o.O

I have family that live most of the year in self-sustaining collectivist communities in the jungles of Peru.

I wouldn't choose that life, but there's definitely alternatives to consumer capitalism.

Cuba, despite _generations_ of _severe_ trade sanctions is a good example of this.

Capitalism doesn't have to be totally focused on unsustainable consumption. With healthy and un-captured regulation (protecting people not companies from their competition) markets can still do much good. We don't have to live in a survival of the fittest economy.

"How much of the economy is truly essential to living? Tourism is great"

That's fine, but this is the wrong way to think about it in the short run.

>>>> You can over time reorganize our economy along many different lines but you can't do it quickly, and often not even organically.

There are much deeper, more systematic issues you'd have to get at in trying to address such things, particularly with respect to property ownership, etc - and these are hugely existential questions.

You're going to be telling 100 of millions they're going to lose on all that they've worked on for their entire lives etc.

Like changing the rules mid-game.

>>>>> This is not an academic discussion - the world is burning down.

Every piece of the economy is interconnected. Large downturns in some areas radically affect others.

The economy is a dynamic equilibrium that only has so much capacity for shifting around.

'Tourism' is a huge part of the economy (a few points) and if that goes, then you see the cost of social services go up dramatically, unemployment, consumption goes down.

It's not just the 'resorts and hotels' it's all the subsidiary businesses. They all go down.

Airlines generally operate on thinner margins - if tourism goes, then airlines go down for sure. There is no alternative but government takeover / Chapter 11 / restructure - or total collapse of airlines. Sales drop for aircraft, Boeing lays off and cancels new plans. That's restaurants, hotels, construction, real estate, manufacturing, massive supply chain - all down.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Central Banks around the world are printing money like it doesn't matter, balance sheets are exploding to the point wherein normal conditions we would have nations declare bankruptcy.

It's clear that people generally have no idea what's happening in our systems. This is not 'a recession' ... we're facing 'total implosion' unless we act responsibly.

> You're going to be telling 100 of millions they're going to lose on all that they've worked on for their entire lives etc.

Does it have to be this way? Why not put certain things like rent, utilities, mortgage payments on pause--even if just for those on furlough?

I realize those who are heavily leveraged may suffer, like airlines who bought back stocks instead of maintaining a war chest. And ultimately I agree that lockdown isn't practical in the long term.

"Does it have to be this way?"

Yes, pretty much.

I'm really struggling to deal with the odd economic intuition here in the comments section. I'd urge readers to start to think about how every bit of the economy is interconnected and that it just can't magically 'stop'.

"Alberta's premier, Jason Kenney, unveiled projections for the province's unemployment rate on pace to reach 25 per cent." [1] and this is in the short run!

Have a look at this jobless claims graph [2] - and it's already out of date.

Even if we could magically deal with massive reduction in GDP (maybe we can, but probably not) - the economy cannot realign itself quickly.

Such an adjustment would take decades to do organically. We have no ability to centrally re-allocate every aspect of the economy. We can do it in some parts of some of sectors - banking and finance for example (sometimes with mortgages), but even that is risky and very unfair.

It's not just 'airlines' - it's vast swaths of the economy, that take down other parts of the economy. At least travel, energy, tourism, hotels, restaurants, entertainment, most manufacturing - just to rhyme of a few are 'shut down'. That's a monster part of the economy.

" Why not put certain things like rent, utilities, mortgage payments on pause--even if just for those on furlough?"

Because everything is connected ... the money that goes to your rent, utilities, groceries, gas, it's not some magical place obviously. There are economic endpoints there, jobs, consumption, taxation - and a lot of them.

The banks employ millions of people doing lending. There are millions of people that act as landlords and who depend on that income. They're also mortgaged often. Utilities employ a lot of people, they also buy services.

And what about the people like my parents who don't rent and have no mortgage?

Consider the both the scale and timeline of the economic intervention right now: we are printing money and doling out literally Trillions of dollars (!!) very quickly, willy nilly. Unbelievable numbers. What this means is the government/central banks are realigning the economy temporarily and 'deciding arbitrarily and quickly' who is going to win and lose - and then putting off payment to taxpayers in the future - and this will last generations. This is happening on a global scale.

If that's not shocking enough - all of this is a temporary fix! All these massive bailouts won't last very long.

The various programs announced in Canada for example last about 4 months, but Covid will last probably 18-24 months.

Again: Contact tracing (with intervention) is not only a reasonable solution, it's basically the only current viable option to get going outside of a cure or vaccine.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/jobs-unemployment-rate-covi...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-weekly-jobless-claims-rec...

> Again: Contact tracing (with intervention) is not only a reasonable solution, it's basically the only current viable option to get going outside of a cure or vaccine.

Based on the rest of your comment, I am having trouble understanding how this statement is related. IMO the rest of your argument very clearly explains why the economy is interconnected; and could even be said to be an argument for the need to re-open the economy. However, it does not address how contact tracing would be a part of this. Is it your assumption that "if we implement contact tracing, then we can safely send people back to work, thus saving the economy"? If so, I think your argument would benefit from more explicitly contacting those dots.

I assume that people understand that the 'contact tracing' strategy, borne out of Korea, implies no lock-down. There's not much point in 'contact tracing' if we have everyone locked in their homes.

But yes it could have been more clear, though I'm three comments deep here and it was in my original.

Korea and Taiwan really are the only countries to have contained Coronavirus without 'total lock-down' policies. Taiwan has eradicated it and now controls everyone coming to the island to make sure there are no new infections.

Korea uses the contact tracing approach.

As Western nations try to 'lift' the restrictions over the next few weeks, it does not bode well - there's no reason to believe Covid won't just bounce back. Nothing really has changed from several weeks ago before the lock-downs when there was 'social distancing' but Covid was still exploding.

Perhaps the weather is a little warmer, we have more testing capability, people are a little smarter ... but there's nothing on the policy front that indicates a new approach, we have not identified spread vectors or primary means of infection. We're just going back to 'basic social distancing' which didn't work well.

We need to look to Korea it's the only exemplary system and it relies on contact tracing.

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