APRIL 2020 – As I write this, we are a few days from the projected peak day of death from the pandemic here in the United States. With that “light at the end the tunnel” economists are starting to predict what comes next for the economy. McKinstry this week published a prediction. TL;DR: U.S. GDP drops by 8%-13% in 2020. Personally I don’t understand how 15%+ unemployment...
The flood of ignorance coming from government leaders, the media, and social media is maddening. The world has suffered from and survived global pandemics before. The last one like 2020’s was just 102 years ago, in 1918. That pandemic’s infection rate was “flattened” in some cities, with social distancing and lockdowns just as we’re doing now. So while it seems that...
You may have seen this map of social distancing, with the commentary on how certain parts of the U.S. are not “getting with the program” about staying at home. Reuters Most of the commentary on why is about politics, despite the other fundamental, underlying issue of income inequality. Reuters When the same data is sorted by income, unsurprisingly the people with the lower incomes are...
As the Tibetans say, “Tomorrow will be worse.” March 3rd there were less than 100 known cases of Covid-19 outside of China, and the only lockdown was a few tens of millions of people in Hubei Province. April 3rd, over a million known cases, over 55,000 dead, and over 4 billion people locked down. We knew a pandemic was eventually coming, but the speed of this particular pandemic has...
