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Consider this speculative curve, capturing that fear... that past a point the economic breakdown is apocalyptic and irrecoverable
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I won’t attempt to sketch the compound speculation but there are 2 cases here: A: the minimum death point lies before the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B: the minimum death point lies after the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B is a fake case, why?
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Because if the min point is past the knee than the assumption of steadily falling covid deaths is wrong.... there’s no hospitals in a true economic collapse. And I don’t mean collapse in numbers bankers care about, I mean actual collapse of the economy.
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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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