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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.

To be honest, I'm shocked at how little C19 changed the world.

In March-April 2020, if you asked me, I thought that the gym and movie theater industries would be dead, the restaurant and bar industry permanently crippled, retail permanently shifted online, New York city as I've known it since Bloomberg would see rents crater and yuppies flee to be replaced by something lower rent and very new and different, a postmodern Warriors. I thought forcing people to abandon their habits of going out for three months would change those habits, that people with new home gyms would cancel gym memberships; that once people stopped going out to bars they wouldn't start up again.

Virtually none of that has come true. Gyms and restaurants are crowded, movie theaters are continuing a more or less orderly retreat along the same lines as 2019, there are more and better bars around me than there were in 2019, and NYC hums right along. Violence and crime is up a little in NYC, but not enough to change the basic makeup of the city, which is what I saw coming.

Even weirder, responses to COVID seem to be irrelevant, no one cares what you did or thought at the time. China has neither gained significant prestige by not having 1mm+ citizens die, nor lost it locking down in perpetuity. Neither has the USA suffered as a result of a Megadeth among its citizens, and Russia's and the EUs wounds seem unrelated. Desantis and Trump took very different responses in 2020, it seems to be a non issue in their upcoming showdown. Despite it being this earth shattering event ne plus ultra, it's irrelevant.

Put another way, the news in January 2023 seems like it would be more legible to someone who fell asleep in August 2019 than the news from summer 2020 would have been to our short term rip van winkle.

I think there's been some cultural impacts. Weirdly dating culture essentially getting shepherded onto the apps has proven stickier than people'd expect, but yeah as a whole the whole thing's been a bit of a nothingburger. Probably pointing towards it being hysteria.

Even a mass elderly die-off likely'd have been shrugged off after a year or two, in the hypothetical worst case scenarios.

I think we're all experiencing the effects of a bottleneck on restaurants/bars. Things (obviously) started with a pre-covid supply and demand of restaurants/bars at some equilibrium, and then Covid started and the demand fell through the floor when lockdowns prevented customers going to restaurants. No customers caused the establishments already on the brink of financial trouble to collapse, the number of bars/restaurants open after Covid decreased. If there's the same amount of market demand (or even higher) than there was pre-pandemic, all of the restaurants/bars will be packed with customers, but because there's fewer restaurants open, the market found its equilibrium just at a higher price point.

the restaurant and bar industry permanently crippled

I mean, I'm seeing severely curtailed restaurant and bar hours by me still. Nothing's open until the legally mandated closing time anymore.

Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take?

This is certainly something you could argue, but you have to, you know, actually argue it? Like, why should anyone take this hypothesis seriously unless you present evidence and, ideally, address some likely counter-arguments? For example, if COVID is an issue, why now, and why such a big emphasis on tech? The economy did go through a rocky period, but then seemed to recover; what about the pandemic response, which as far as I can tell has been basically non-existent for almost a year, is impacting the economy now? Some individual tech companies are dealing with specific poor decisions (Metaverse) some of which could be roughly tied to the pandemic/response (Stripe--but even in this case, the mistake seems to have been assuming they would keep their pandemic-related growth up after the pandemic ended), but what this has to do with the rest of the economy isn't clear yet.

Similarly, regularly recurring viruses like flu already vary in intensity from year to year. Is the difference between now and 2019 within normal variation? And what side effects could there have been? I assume your hypothesis here is something like "people's immune systems were weakened against flu because most people avoided exposure during lockdowns. But A) we might have driven 1 strain extinct and B) this hypothesis might mean that extra cases this year are just cases from last flu season that have been delayed (see also https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality).

Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.

Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?

It’s because you are taking so much of it for so granted that the only tech products you realise are the ones explicitly providing entertainment to you. What was the last time you looked at, say a water bottle and thought about the CAD software used to design it, embedded and PLC softwares running on the production machines, ERP systems used by companies producing and distributing it, navigation and tracking systems on board the ship bringing it from China, messaging apps used to communicate between manufacturers and importers, payment systems etc etc.

When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.

Just looking at your list:

Google has so many crucial infrastructure products that it is difficult to imagine a modern company without it. Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, Meet, Translate, Search, Android, Ads, Analytics are just the ones that almost any business will be using daily.

Amazon is essentially a logistics company with a large tech arm. AWS is also the single most important piece of web infrastructure at this point and drives most of Amazon's profits.

Apple's products are not "crucial" for businesses, but there is a reason iPhones and MacBooks are preferred so often as company devices by places that can afford them. They are amazing for design/development/regular office work.

Facebook itself is probably not that important but they own WhatsApp and outside of the US WhatsApp is what people think when you talk about sending a message. I have witnessed the workings of a food import business between China and Peru for example and almost entire business dealings happened through WhatsApp with Google Translated English.

Netflix.. yeah okay. But it has barely 10k employees so it is more on the same league as Twitter.

I don't know, but it seems relatively easy to search for. Maybe ask on /r/badeconomics. However, while a lot of what tech companies produce is not a necessity, it also has low marginal cost. Many websites, like facebook, reddit, twitter, etc. are free to use. More active entertainment like spotify, hulu, netflix, Steam, Blizzard games, etc. are also either free to play or require a cheap monthly subscription. If you're unemployed, they're probably substantially cheaper per hour than going to a sports bar, movie theater, etc. Especially if you have lots of free time, you're going to be looking for low-cost ways to kill time. What will happen is that companies dependent on advertising will see a drop in revenue, but in terms of magnitude it should resemble the rest of the economy and in terms of timing it will depend on whether their advertisers see the recession coming or not.

I think you're taking a really narrow view of the average tech worker. Most software engineers don't work for the silicon valley companies and I haven't actually noticed this supposed tech job apocalypse. My department and the departments of all the tech workers in my social circle seem to be expanding. My job is not speculative, I create software that directly and immediately helps my coworkers make the company more money. I think this is actually probably true for the vast majority of tech workers. You just hear more from these big speculative projects than the guy making boring loan management software. And with many people still having trouble navigating an email client and the next generation broadly not understanding file systems at all us well compensated midwit software engineers aren't goin anywhere.

Eventually, the huge bidding up of labor prices that led to current high software dev pay will collapse amid layoffs, and devs will (mostly) go back to being skilled technical workers paid as other skilled technical workers in other disciplines are.

Wishing ain't going to make it so. I'm sure you'd like it if finance could reclaim the elite salaries all to themselves again, but this sort of pullback happened in software in 2008 as well (and 2001, though the cause was different) and things just started growing again.

They're doing dull, rote work that often amounts to little more than taking someone else's code or architecture and adapting it very slightly to fit a specific new situation.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as? Because that... actually kind of fits the description of secretaries and computers (as in, the job title), but in practice (in 2022, but it was true in 2010 to a large extent too) it's a little different than that. And I can kind of see it with more imperative "only do this thing" FORTRAN and, later, Excel-as-programming language, but it's weird that it doesn't apply to software as a whole (though MS' Power Apps platform might have something to say about that).

I think that it might be worth looking at the tooling and tools; I believe that software and developers are just uniquely bad at writing good documentation and it's to the point where you actually have to do heavier analysis to get anything done any more.

Maybe having to dig hard to get anything done in all these damn frameworks was job security after all?

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as?

In essence, it never was. That's a just-so story spread by tech SJWs and their predecessors, mostly based on the ENIAC programmers and one article by Grace Hopper which was trying to encourage women to become programmers. The ENIAC programmers were women mostly because it was built during WWII when (young) men were in short supply. As of 1960 (first figures I can find), only 31% of "Computer Specialists" (there was no further breakdown) were female. (And yes, that's higher than programmers today)

I'd bet that "computer specialists" includes computer operators who just typed things in and didn't program.

"Computer Specialists" was later broken down into "Computer Programmers" and "Computer Systems Analysts" (and the very small "not otherwise specified" category), neither of which would just be typing; there were other categories for that. It's possible there was some misclassification, of course, but I doubt it was all that significant. There were ~13,000 computer specialists in 1960, 31% of which were women. By 1970 (I have no intermediate data) there were 258,000, 20% of which were women. In 1990 35% of the 974,000 in the equivalent occupations (according to me, anyway) are women, and that's the absolute peak; we see a nadir of 22.5% in 2009 and it's been stuck around 24% since then.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as?

Frankly, programming now is far more complicated than it used to be for developers. There are far more moving parts and our expectations of what an engineer has to know and do continue to expand at an insane pace.

Some of that is because of what we expect out of applications, others are self-inflicted wounds by bad software architects.

Consider what someone would consider a simple CRUD application that one day would be maintained with:

dull, rote work that often amounts to little more than taking someone else's code or architecture and adapting it very slightly to fit a specific new situation

That app will still have:

  • A Database using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design

  • A middle tier using a language used nowhere else in the application, with its own infrastructure and design. It must account for security, access to the database, and working with various clients (usually the front end).

  • The middle tier may itself integrate with other applications, and each of them use a specific security model. It has to translate information from the model used in those external apps into its own (and then sometimes back out)

  • A front end using language used nowhere else in the application. It too must account for security and access to the middle tier. It utilizes a dizzying collection of packages (along with the worst package manager in the industry) and has to translate information from the middle tier into its own models. It has to handle user input, control-flow logic for users, and routing.

  • All of this will be managed and deployed with an ALM tool and pushed out to the cloud (if you're lucky). There's a whole 'nother set of security concerns here, the idea of environment progression, tracking work and generating release notes, running tests, and provisioning infrastructure as code itself in YET ANOTHER language used nowhere else in the application.

There are ways to simplify all this - for instance, you could in theory use a single language across an application, though that has serious downsides too.

And of course setting all this up is a solid order of magnitude harder than updating it.

But a typical bug is going to cross-cut against every one of these components. Compare that with writing an accounting program that performs an equation on a couple of numbers that are sent as input into the system, which is mostly what legacy computing was when women were equally represented. You could write out an entire program on a sheet of paper if you were doing it in english. Not the case at all with modern development.

There are ways to simplify all this - for instance, you could in theory use a single language across an application, though that has serious downsides too.

Well, it would also help if the only language to be used in this manner wasn't fucking JavaScript, and it would also help if there was market space for any competitor to Microsoft, since they're to my knowledge the only ones who actually seem to try to unify stuff (and when they don't, they just buy the companies that sell and do hostile takeovers on the ones that don't; press F for Borland). Of course, that costs money and there's always that Embrace-Extend-Extinguish thing going on... which will almost certainly haunt that company for the rest of its days.

Meanwhile, the software development community at large would rather just sit there and suffer with (comparatively) sub-par tooling; it's telling that people brag about their favorite development environment being a shitty 1970s text editor in a way unique among tradespeople (like an electrician choosing to do knot-and-tube wiring for a new install).

It's a weird trade to be in, for sure.

I used to think software dev tools were bad until I started interacting what an average mechanical or electrical engineer have to deal with. We are simply too spoiled with free open access to an incredible array of tools and like to bitch whenever something is slightly subpar.

Wellll re: Microsoft in theory you can build a full stack app almost entirely in C# with Blazor and Entity Framework :)

Which I would know if I was a disgusting .NET - loving peasant.

Which of course I'm not.

Knowing the languages is the very easiest part, IMO. Getting to know which parts of your application interface with which other ones and which external services how exactly and how the entire CI pipeline works, that's what seems to get more complicated by the day.

Freemcflurry might have the right of it.

Or the field may have been so niche that expertise was randomly distributed. Hopper was certainly doing “real” programming and probably had a staff of card-sorting interns.

This is also compatible with a theory that women got pushed out as soon as the field became prestigious/expensive enough to attract a larger talent pool of men.

My understanding is that "computer programming" as we think of it today was never women's work. What the Buzzfeed articles called programming was more like taking a program written by a man and transcribing it on to punch cards, similar to how a secretary would take dictation in shorthand and then type it up.

That job was called "keypunch operator" and as far as I know was never considered "programming".

C19 - Catchall term to refer to all covid mitigating restrictions such as lockdowns, capacity limits, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, money printing, eviction freezes, etc. Not the disease itself, Which specific item should be contextually obvious.

There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now

  1. America is relatively shielded from the C19 fallout relative to the world. So you are actually limiting the strength of your argument by limiting it to the US. There are certain very very bad things [1,2] happening in the third world that is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt is caused by C19.

  2. Your list is far far from exhaustive. And all of it becomes really dizzying when they confound a few times over and you get into nth order effects.

major tech layoffs

Quite obviously very related to C19.

Tech companies got much more traffic as people spent their sTimMiEs and could only shop online; and as a result hired a whole load of excess staff that they now have to fire as the money printing can't go on forever and said money printing induced inflation mitigation measures are put on by the fed.

inflation

Obvious.

I'm not going to make an technical economic argument because there are many people who can do it much better than me.

But much like the The First Law of Thermodynamics and Newtons Third Law; There Ain't No Such a Thing as Free Lunch. Closing businesses, closing factories, closing ports, all of it has a price, a rather steep one. You can cushion the punch in the gut of doing that for a long time, but there is no escaping the punch in the gut. The longer you cushion it, the harder you get hit.

I am absolutely bamboozled at anyone who questions this notion at all. The Economy is the creation/exchange of goods and services, not abstract numbers on a monitor, you have less of those going around, it doesn't matter what the numbers say. Seriously anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be allowed to talk about economics ever.

Also ridiculous amounts of wealth transfer can make the aggregates look good. But the AUC will be less.

Will the left ever talk about C19 being class warfare? I'll not hold my breath.

people's immune systems now failing

This is the hardest one to find a causal link for but I wouldn't discount it at all. My priors are much aligned with this being true than not.

And the mechanism for that doesn't have to be rocket science.

Bad health -> Bad immune system

Ofcourse staying at home and watching movies all day or months on end, working from home, not getting any sunlight, only eating dogshit you ordered off delivery apps, drinking more, is not good for health.

And that is discounting physiopsychological effects!

like Russia's invasion of Ukraine

I think the Ukraine war really was one of the best things that happened to The Establishment in a long time. It can act as a scapegoat for a plurality if not majority of the bad things caused by C19.

The fact that some of the bad things are a result of C19 is not even within the public consciousness.

It's always the supply chains or this things price going up or that things factory closing, when you dig into okay "why did that happen?"; It almost inevitably leads back to C19.

Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.

We don't need to prove that public health interventions caused harm. Those who decided to implement them had to prove that they are safe and effective, just like we do with medicines.

A lot of inflation in Europe is not related to Ukraine. Maybe prices for energy could be explained by war in Ukraine but food is very questionable. Even if the price of grains is determined by global market prices, their impact on total food should not be that much.

Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.

The whole COVID debacle illustrated pretty profoundly how much public health academica is a circlejerk of people who called for lockdowns then marking their own homework. Honestly the way that the period has killed a lot of trust in science & politicans will be one of the bigger legacies.

My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.

I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.

Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.

From my reading of the literature:

Most comorbidities don't amount to much compared to just age + being male. There's no way to give a young person enough comorbidities to make them at high risk as an old person without also making them instantly die from their comorbidities. You'd need to be a quintuple amputee with stage 11 cancer and multiple organ failure. Governments incorrectly communicated the risk of comorbidities and never rescinded this communication (and also never properly communicated the sheer impact age has), resulting in plenty of 20 year olds with asthma thinking they're more likely to die than their grandparents.

Chance of dying from OG covid correlates pretty much 1:1 with your chance of dying in the next year once you are over 30. Below 30, this pattern doesn't hold, as teens and 20-somethings have a bump of risk of dying from suicide/violence/vehicles and under-5s have infant mortality effects despite being unaffected by covid.

The average age of covid deaths, and life expectancy tables, come together to yield a result that the average person who died from covid probably had 7 years left to live. Eyeball-tier adjustments for how the average person who dies of covid is frailer than the average person of the same age probably reduces this to ~4 years. This doesn't sound good for lockdowns as it means, in a circumstance where as much as 1% of the population die from covid, that's still only two weeks lost per person. Does not bode well for stealing multiple months away with lockdowns.

However, our counting system for covid deaths introduces all kinds of oddities, because the more ill you are, the greater the chance of you incidentally dying shortly after catching covid even if covid plays no role in it. There's a double whammy when you add in nosocomial infections. In the UK, there have been periods where it is likely that as many as 50% of recorded deaths are incidental, simply as a by-product of the number of positive tests * the chance of dying in any random 28 day period.

High level court officials were giving completely misleading data about how many kids have been hospitalized due to covid and how many of them died from covid. I cannot simply trust any officially published data now. I will need several confirmatory sources with good methodology and tested by rigorous review process.

I work at the pharmacy. Some children we dispense medicines to are wheelchair bound. In fact, they have severe disabilities, including mental disabilities. In vulgar language such a child is sometimes called “a vegetable”. People talk like that although I am conscious that some people will consider that it is very disrespectful to use such a word. In any case, one of them died from covid. It is sad but I am sure the parents saw his death from covid as mercy. He had no chance of fulfilling life and was only suffering every hour of his existence.

Elon Musk refused to reinstate Alex Jones on twitter because he was using child tragedies for personal gain. I agree with this decision. But I think that many people were using those rare child deaths from covid to spread fear and push their narratives. Their actions are abominable similar to Alex Jones'.

Modern food productivity is largely a byproduct of natural gas derived nitrogen fertilizers (which were heavily exported by Russia and Ukraine and who both exported a significant proportion of the natural gas used by Europe to make their own fertilizers. Since the Ukrainian War started, natural gas prices meant that European fertilizer manufacturers shut down their plants which raised costs and prices even in places that didn't buy Russian wheat or fertilizer directly (their cheap fertilizer came from Russian gas).

As I mentioned above, the electricity prices has quadrupled in Latvian and yet the price for whole range of energy dependant services haven't increased significantly yet. I don't that gas price accounts for 50% of, let's say, of the price of milk. I have been offered such narratives bud do the calculations work out? By my rough, very approximate estimate, they don't. I am not an expert in this and might be wrong but I suspect that this narrative is not correct either.

Considering Ukraine and Russia are both massive food exporters I think the war could very easily explain surging food prices. A sharp drop in supply could send ripples through the global market.

No, most of the food in Latvia is not imported from Ukraine/Russia. Only very few products are actually imported from there.

Price shocks on a global market will still effect local consumer prices. If the supply of wheat goes down 10% you'll see prices rise across the board as countries and businesses globally bid up the price for a now scarcer resource. Latvian farmers can now sell their goods abroad for a premium to plug a RussoUkranian sized hole in the market, so Latvian locals still end feeling the pinch.

Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.

Some goods and services are more elastic price wise than others, but I think a fairly massive war between two countries that combined account for 25% of global wheat exports could explain most of the sticker shock in the food sector.

Yes, but it is not 25% of total global wheat production either. And in the EU agriculture is subsidised, and the prices farmers get hasn't changed much.

Ukraine played the role but I suspect that the usual reasons for inflation (like free money, supply chain disruptions etc.) played even greater role.

If you are making a causal claim, at the very least you need to 1) demonstrate that the phenomenon that you are purporting to explain is actually happening; and 2) there is a plausible mechanism whereby the factor you propose caused said phenomenon would have a causal effect. But you don't seem to do a great job at either.

First, you say that "novel bad things are happening," but of the three you mention, one of them (tech layoffs) is hardly novel, and re another (increased serious illness) you present no actual evidence that it is actually occurring.

Re the causal mechanisms, it is not obvious how lockdowns that ended a year ago would cause tech layoffs now, nor why other areas of the economy would be experiencing labor shortages, rather than imposing layoffs. Re serious illness, again, it is not at all obvious why lockdowns would cause increased serious illness.

Even re inflation, you don't even make the effort to show that areas which did not impose lockdowns, or imposed only brief or minor ones, are experiencing low inflation. For example, Sweden isn't

First, you say that "novel bad things are happening," but of the three you mention, one of them (tech layoffs) is hardly novel, and re another (increased serious illness) you present no actual evidence that it is actually occurring.

I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not be have been hit in the face constantly with evidence of either of these things over the past month. Google it if you haven't.

it is not obvious how lockdowns that ended a year ago would cause tech layoffs now, nor why other areas of the economy would be experiencing labor shortages, rather than imposing layoffs

f3zinker does a great job of explaining it in his reply.

Re serious illness, again, it is not at all obvious why lockdowns would cause increased serious illness.

That seems like the most obvious thing of all. People were sheltered from all illnesses for years. I know I couldn't talk with any pro-lockdown people without them telling me how great it was that they never get sick anymore over the past few years. Now that society's basically fully opened again, their immune systems are getting walloped by common sicknesses.

That doesn't sound like a crazy position to me. I think the lockdowns are a proximate cause, e.g. the inflationary policies of covid-aid funds weren't necessary without lockdowns. The tech-sector wouldn't have been able to become over-valued so quickly if it weren't for everyone staying home.

On the other hand, we don't have a lot of good data for what would have happened if we hadn't done lockdowns. Places who did fewer lockdowns still have to deal with the overvaluation of tech, global supply chain issues and cost of housing increases. So we can't really blame these issues on the marginal lockdown. (Although I'd be curious to see how if places that didn't lock down have better flu/RSV situations)

I'm not even sure who we can blame for lockdowns. Places like Sweden who avoided mandated lockdowns still saw large segments of their economies "shut down". Are ordinary people to blame? There's also very little variance in the responses from different countries/institutions, which suggests 'elite culture' bears responsibility.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.

But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.

Also likely massive wealth-transfer effects as the elderly moved on inheritances.

Sweden is relatively small country that depends on global connections and trade. Things that happened in Europe affected it regardless of their own policies. The same applies to inflation.

Yes, I mentioned that not doing lockdowns when everyone else is doing one would still result in many of the similar consequences.

That said, Swedes' private behaviour is also partially responsible for some of these consequences. Even without lockdowns, many Swedes stayed home, didn't go to restaurants, moved into a bigger house to comfortably WFH. The Swedish government also had distributed relief transfer payments. All of this contributes to inflation.

One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.

So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.

People voluntary locking down is a very strong argument against mandatory lockdowns. There was no need for police fining people jogging in park when the same result can be achieved voluntary, letting people themselves to decide what is more important for them.

However, the governments should have decided to leave certain services running, for example, schools.

The last thing – idea about difficulty to avoid large numbers of deaths completely ignores that covid risk was strongly age stratified. Some governments still ignores that by pushing vaccination to young children who all already have had covid.

don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.

Fair enough.

Ironically “showering people with money” was very successful monetary policy in the situation where there was no political will to avoid lockdowns. It certainly lessened economic impact. We still got inflation later but I still prefer inflation to recession whatever the cause.

Everything can be summed up with “we live in an immoral nation”. H1bs lead to reduced salaries and later tech layoffs. Poor food quality and poor education on nutrition and two-parent working households lead to ill health later on. Etc etc. Even without COVID lockdowns we would be getting worse in all measures of real life qualify

Yes. Incredibly fair. Especially economic gains which were essentially illusory inflated 2020 ones which people are now endlessly crying about giving back to the market.

Admittedly I work in Crypto-adjacent fields and the amount of people who seem to feel that 2020/1 was pure inborn skill and that 2022 is somehow totally unanticipated..

We're also barely touching the tip of the iceberg of the lockdown fallout. Education disrupted, cultural shifts and all for... what, exactly

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Those are the lines that have been going through my head about this bout of inflation. I was surprised it took more than a year for the problem to assert itself, but the Gods of the Copybook Headings, as Kipling says, are both slow and inexorable.

I personally think it’s fair, but then again, I’ve watched it happen in realtime. I can’t imagine what people who’ve only watched one side of the news have gone through.

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