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.6 replies 6 retweets 79 likesShow this thread -
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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Replying to @vgr
Here's my take on this - using your social vaccination idea from not that long ago. I see a good chance to "R-design" society and economy, more resilient and with less transmission risks.https://beamberlin.com/the-health-of-nations-economy-and-society-in-a-post-corona-world/ …
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Replying to @DetlefGuertler
I had a social vaccination idea? I can’t recall
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Replying to @vgr
Detlef Guertler Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
Of course you had. A long time ago - more than a week. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1235436624801984512 … Bad luck for you to be governed by anti-vaxxers though.
Detlef Guertler added,
Venkatesh Rao @vgrThis is the generic resilience debate that’s long overdue, via a “case study” that’s somewhere between a fire drill and the real SHTF thing. This is almost like the world itself is being administered a vaccine in the form of a partially deactivated crisis trigger.Show this thread2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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