Conversation

I’m guessing 10 more weeks before we see the first signs of economy reboot. This is going to get really brutal. I’m not seeing any historical comparable for what we’re headed for. Not WW2, not the Great Depression, not the Spanish Flu. This is a totally sui generis cataclysm.
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The perfect storm is the combination of an extremely complex and integrated energy-intensive global society and a pandemic materially blacking out random large swathes of it. Wall Street people are still thinking of this in “market crash” terms. It’s something much worse.
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In between writing stuff and shitposting on Twitter, one of the things I’m trying to do is sort of imagine a plausible economic recovery pathway. It’s like trying to predict recovery from a tsunami about to hit a town by crawling under sinks and checking state of plumbing.
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Edit: I *can* think of comparable but they all come from Tainter’s book Collapse, not from the continuous history we’re all by definition a part of it 😬 I don’t think this is a collapse event but it’s definitely a crash event. Recovery isn’t restarting, it’s rebuilding anew.
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The short term and long term are easy to predict. Short term is just emergency response and triage, economy edition. Long term is just the Next Big Thing pulling us out of the hole we’re now digging ourselves into. It’s the medium term that’s the bitch to prep for. 6-18 mo period
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My theory: there is no plan, and there will be none, for 6-18mo phase 2. It will be a distributed, improvised survival scrum by any means necessary. Top-down aid will just run out of fuel by then. Money printer will stop going brrr. But wealth printer will not have restarted yet.
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One thing we can expect: prepare for a lot of social closing, as people move into larger households in suburbs/smaller cities to make ends meet. Financially distressed people simply moving out of expensive cities once evictions moratoriums end and credit cards start maxing out.
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I was initially trying a sort of war game approach to analyzing the recovery pathway but the war metaphor is mistaken, this is *more* complex than a war recovery. There aren’t even obvious things to rebuild like bombed-out buildings. Mostly just shattered lives.
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New thought is to maybe track this with sort of a recovery ooda loop focused mainly on rapidly identifying and imitating successful local recovery patterns. An integral (as in calculus) OODA loop that accumulates rebuild patterns. A pattern inventory. Bottom-up DIY Marshall plan.
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