Agree with habryka that I don’t agree with all of this but it’s well stated. I don’t think it much disagrees with the claims in OP, even the implied claims, rather it’s making a different argument.
I think the opening of the comment interprets my claim about how much of our current response is unproductive in a way that I didn’t intend and don’t endorse. I agree that some of our spending has been worthwhile on the margin, if the only alternative was to do nothing beyond preventing action. And I agree that if government is determined to prevent useful private action (e.g. “We have 2020 values”), it does not then have the means to prevent local private costly preventative action, so doing basically no prevention isn’t a real option.
Which is that under 2020 values and 2020 technology, and with the only choice being ‘prevent more’ or ‘prevent less’ that preventing less backfired on all fronts when nations tried it, because preventing less meant more private prevention that proved more expensive e.g. Sweden and Brazil. Because that’s the only thing we are capable of executing—the government can shut down useful private responses and not do anything itself, but in terms of realistic choices we can talk about, it can neither do better useful things or allow others to do them, only do more of standard-issue-prevention or less.
I do think that if you compare different US state responses, you get a different answer than comparing Sweden to Norway (which I understand why people think is fair but is a very high bar to clear). I don’t know to what you compare Brazil, a country that has had shrinking GDP and a death spiral economy for many years now. Is this economic response bad? E.g. EWJ is +10% YoY, which underperforms Argentina but outperforms Mexico. Argentina was previously growing, and shrunk more in Q2 than Brazil, etc etc.
Anyway, that’s all for me here, calling the comments to a close for the week for Shabbat.
Agree with habryka that I don’t agree with all of this but it’s well stated. I don’t think it much disagrees with the claims in OP, even the implied claims, rather it’s making a different argument.
I think the opening of the comment interprets my claim about how much of our current response is unproductive in a way that I didn’t intend and don’t endorse. I agree that some of our spending has been worthwhile on the margin, if the only alternative was to do nothing beyond preventing action. And I agree that if government is determined to prevent useful private action (e.g. “We have 2020 values”), it does not then have the means to prevent local private costly preventative action, so doing basically no prevention isn’t a real option.
Which is that under 2020 values and 2020 technology, and with the only choice being ‘prevent more’ or ‘prevent less’ that preventing less backfired on all fronts when nations tried it, because preventing less meant more private prevention that proved more expensive e.g. Sweden and Brazil. Because that’s the only thing we are capable of executing—the government can shut down useful private responses and not do anything itself, but in terms of realistic choices we can talk about, it can neither do better useful things or allow others to do them, only do more of standard-issue-prevention or less.
I do think that if you compare different US state responses, you get a different answer than comparing Sweden to Norway (which I understand why people think is fair but is a very high bar to clear). I don’t know to what you compare Brazil, a country that has had shrinking GDP and a death spiral economy for many years now. Is this economic response bad? E.g. EWJ is +10% YoY, which underperforms Argentina but outperforms Mexico. Argentina was previously growing, and shrunk more in Q2 than Brazil, etc etc.
Anyway, that’s all for me here, calling the comments to a close for the week for Shabbat.