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So yes, we should ramp up test-and-trace because it can’t hurt and will improve the decision, but it won’t actually spare us the hard reopening-speed vs death-rate choices. Perfect measurement diesnt solve the actual problem. It only frames the moral dilemma more sharply.
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But what nobody is talking about, because it’s fun to pretend the economy only matters to bankers, is a *different* surveillance problem. Not test-and-trace but location of collapse knee. It’s not about symmetrical V recovery vs asymmetrical V It’s about recovery vs no recovery
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What’s the point of no return for the economy? This ain’t the low-tech works of 1918/Spanish Flu. This is 2020. We live in a very complex world atop an enormously complex tech stack. It can undergo far deeper collapse than the 1918 stack. There IS a knee to the collapse curve.
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A big part of confusion is that “the economy” is being conflated with “wealth machine favoring the wealthy” on the one hand (Economy A) and with “measure of state of health of physical machine of civilization” (Economy B) on the other. Economy A is politics. B is engineering.
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Both are broken. Rich people want to save A and sacrifice a lot of B that they don’t use. Poor people want to save B and sacrifice a lot of A that they don’t use. Save stock values, sacrifice food banks OR Sacrifice stock values, save food banks
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So we’re actually talking about two separate, coupled things when we talk about saving the economy — the machine itself, and the ownership value of the machine. The early reopen people are wealth-savers/machine-vandals. The late reopen people are machine-savers/wealth vandals.
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Here’s the thing — the later the reopen, the more wealth will be destroyed to save the machine. Politically this means one of two things: socialism (via nationalization of financially distressed assets) or state collapse (via public bankruptcy to bail out wealth). Choose.
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It’s fairly clear that we’ll choose BOTH. Only question is in which order? You might have nationalization followed by reprivatization a la Russia, leading to a gangster-oligarch state. Or you might have massive bailout followed by socialist revolution to reclaim looted public.
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