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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.
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.
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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.
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