LogFAQs > #979933013

OhhhJa posted...

Which is why many people were saying a near full on shutdown of the economy was a terrible idea and now we're seeing why. It's taking years to recover and really it never will fully recover because let's be real... these prices are never reverting back to pre covid levels. Now people are barely surviving, and in many cases, they aren't surviving. So we've effectively created a global economic crisis when many people were saying that was absurd and it wouldn't happen.

No one who was paying attention was under any illusions that there would be major economic costs to the full shutdown - one does not simply mothball the economy without consequence, after all. However, I disagreed - and still disagree - that the alternative would have been any better.

The US actually showed us this firsthand, because a lot of Republican-led states tried to minimize their lockdowns and were the first to come out of them. Yet their economies suffered just as much, if not moreso, than the blue states that went long on their lockdowns.

The problem with a global pandemic is that the economy was doomed to suffer no matter what people did. Shut down large parts of the economy? You get the results we're seeing today. Don't shut down anything? A lot of consumers and workers will stay away anyways, because people don't want to risk their lives just to make their corporate overlords an extra percentage point on the quarterly profit report, and those who don't will have their ranks winnowed by the disease you're fighting, which is going to make everything worse (by both weakening your labour force and reducing consumer confidence, which is exactly what happened in those red states that opened up early). Turns out that filling up your economy with sick workers and turning your places of business into plague houses isn't good for the economy either.