I don’t know enough economics to have great thoughts here, but I almost wonder if it’s something like people’s ability to trade has been eroded. The “market”, i.e., place where you trade, has been lost. I would still purchases handmade cocktails and live music experiences if I could and you would still produce them if you could, but now we’re no longer able to trade, no longer able to exchange value.
My experience seemed in the opposite direction. The government was like: “stop buying face masks, you worthless muggles will waste them on yourselves, and there will be not enough left for doctors,” and my neighbors on Facebook were like: “so I am staying at home with nothing much to do, and I happen to have a sewing machine, so if anyone would like to have a nice face mask for $X, just send me a private message; there are also kid-sized ones with pictures of cute animals”. And in a few days I brought home a full bag of them. So it’s like industry: 0; government: 0; random agenty individuals: 1.
Many shops and restaurants who didn’t do this before, now offer online shopping. Sometimes starting with amateur solutions like: “I am not allowed to let people enter my restaurant these days, but cooking and selling food is technically still allowed, so if you send me a private message, I can meet you in front of my restaurant and sell you the food in a box”. And a month later you see an official web application that obviously needs some more testing, but hey, it mostly works, and now you can pay online and come for the product. Not only food, but also other products which are considered non-essential, so it is not allowed to open the shop, but buying online is allowed, and this hybrid “you pay online, then you knock on my door and I give you the box in front of my shop” is technically considered online shopping.
I think it is likely I could buy a handmade cocktail on Facebook.
The problem is, this is mostly black market. My neighbors who sell the face masks are almost certainly violating dozen different regulations. But they can relatively safely assume no one would snitch on them. (Because they trade with neighbors; and because they provide something that is considered necessary but difficult to obtain using the official channels.) Offering home-made cocktails would probably be more risky.
In the economy full of regulations, trading on the market has a non-trivial fixed cost. I wonder how this worked a century or two ago. The sellers probably had to pay some fee for using the marketplace, and for many things some guild had a monopoly. But if you just tried to sell some apples?
I think perhaps one of the directions that line of thought takes us is that in this type of recession the impact is nearly uniform—none of us are buying handmade cocktails and live music where as in other recessions some of us were not while others were.
The other difference is that many (most) of us could buy/produce those goods and services but are not allowed to. Not sure if that will offer the opportunity for all of us to “walk in the other person’s shoes” and so have a bit of a better insight to just what others have experienced in the other recession where we kept our jobs and had the income to live our lives as before. Perhaps producing more social unity over division?
I don’t know enough economics to have great thoughts here, but I almost wonder if it’s something like people’s ability to trade has been eroded. The “market”, i.e., place where you trade, has been lost. I would still purchases handmade cocktails and live music experiences if I could and you would still produce them if you could, but now we’re no longer able to trade, no longer able to exchange value.
I’m not sure where this line of thought leads.
My experience seemed in the opposite direction. The government was like: “stop buying face masks, you worthless muggles will waste them on yourselves, and there will be not enough left for doctors,” and my neighbors on Facebook were like: “so I am staying at home with nothing much to do, and I happen to have a sewing machine, so if anyone would like to have a nice face mask for $X, just send me a private message; there are also kid-sized ones with pictures of cute animals”. And in a few days I brought home a full bag of them. So it’s like industry: 0; government: 0; random agenty individuals: 1.
Many shops and restaurants who didn’t do this before, now offer online shopping. Sometimes starting with amateur solutions like: “I am not allowed to let people enter my restaurant these days, but cooking and selling food is technically still allowed, so if you send me a private message, I can meet you in front of my restaurant and sell you the food in a box”. And a month later you see an official web application that obviously needs some more testing, but hey, it mostly works, and now you can pay online and come for the product. Not only food, but also other products which are considered non-essential, so it is not allowed to open the shop, but buying online is allowed, and this hybrid “you pay online, then you knock on my door and I give you the box in front of my shop” is technically considered online shopping.
I think it is likely I could buy a handmade cocktail on Facebook.
The problem is, this is mostly black market. My neighbors who sell the face masks are almost certainly violating dozen different regulations. But they can relatively safely assume no one would snitch on them. (Because they trade with neighbors; and because they provide something that is considered necessary but difficult to obtain using the official channels.) Offering home-made cocktails would probably be more risky.
In the economy full of regulations, trading on the market has a non-trivial fixed cost. I wonder how this worked a century or two ago. The sellers probably had to pay some fee for using the marketplace, and for many things some guild had a monopoly. But if you just tried to sell some apples?
I think perhaps one of the directions that line of thought takes us is that in this type of recession the impact is nearly uniform—none of us are buying handmade cocktails and live music where as in other recessions some of us were not while others were.
The other difference is that many (most) of us could buy/produce those goods and services but are not allowed to. Not sure if that will offer the opportunity for all of us to “walk in the other person’s shoes” and so have a bit of a better insight to just what others have experienced in the other recession where we kept our jobs and had the income to live our lives as before. Perhaps producing more social unity over division?