JF

it's anti-technocratic populism, rejection of rule by experts, media elites, etc. i think by positing ""the economy" vs. human life" as the issue, you're buying into the hysteria, which they point out is the tool of the technocratic elite and devaluing people's livelihoods.

I don't think it's any more hysterical or self-serving that posing the question as "the elites" vs "people's jobs", if anything the latter is less honest because lockdowns hurt both labor and capital economically and sacrifice business to prevent people from dying of disease.

the damage is unevenly distributed and there are benefits to some prominent sectors of capital (and some sectors of "labor"). given the low fatality rate, there is a lot of room for negotiation re: the response to the disease and how the damage lands on different people.

Yes, it is unevenly distributed, but that's not (or at least not significantly) because of elite manipulation. Aviation and hotels suffer because they require travel, tech benefits because diseases don't spread online. The extent that anyone engineered this outcome is minimal.

doesn't have to be a plan for differing interests to emerge. i don't think people generally allege that there is a conspiracy, though certainly some do, but that the way politics of the thing has unfolded reflect underlying interests as much or more than public health concerns.

I knew this was going to be the response. No, there was no happy confluence of interests either, my claim already adduces and rejects that. The overwhelming determinate of differential impacts is for technical, practical reasons, not the interests or influences of tech elites.

differing interests arise from differing impact. your previous reply speaks to claims that the impact itself was engineered, which i don't think i've seen from many people, at least not the types i think you're talking about in the OP.

Well, fine, but what I'm saying (and in fact said immediately in my follow-up to the reply in question) that this also applies to more mundane, plausible claims that the lockdowns were shaped and played out to benefit of elite interests in indirect, pedestrian sort of ways.