Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

To be even more fair, there's absolutely no reason to think these types of events are independent; there's good reason to believe they're positively correlated. This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened. (But if you're lucky and it doesn't happen again the chances decrease further, giving you an average of 100 years between them again.)

View on HN

> This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened.

or more likely, it happens, but because of prior experience, the event is no longer as calamitous as the first time.

Looking at the GFC in 2008, the monetary policy back then was too tight (hindsight 20/20 and all that of course), causing the recession to be extended longer than it would've.

This covid disaster would've caused a similar problem, imho, if the Feds did not loosen up like never before. It "solved" that same problem the GFC produced. Had the GFC not occured, the pandemic would cause a double wammy - a medical problem, and also a monetary problem.

I can believe a pandemic might cause a global economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or the Great Recession, but I my imagination isn’t giving me any ideas how the latter might cause the former?

... poverty causes a rise in consumption of bush meat, like bats in Wuhan[1] or primates in central Africa[2]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS

By the economic catastrophe causing us to elect a president who dismantled a group that worked to monitor and respond to global health issues to prevent them from becoming a pandemic. I think it's hard to say if that group could have prevented Covid-19. Nor am I necessarily saying that the economic crises of 2008 caused us to elect Trump. But I think you could possibly find a path from one one to the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com