Serious coronavirus thread. No deniers

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I agree, if it were up to me I'd just let them (and other wild plants like the violets that practically cover our whole backyard) grow, but unfortunately we have a homeowner's association that can get on our case about having too many dandelions. When my brother and I were kids, my mom would pay us for the dandelion flowers we brought her, because each one was another one that wouldn't go to seed and make more.

Zeus, a “mentally ill,” oddball self described mystic from the beach (he’s entertaining.. he does tarot card readings and says he’s honed his skills by watching Jerry Springer and I think Dr. Phil) anyways, I hear he makes a decent dandelion wine. Heh. I don’t think I’ve ever tried dandelion wine but I’m not opposed to making some someday. I guess it was probably a more popular thing to do back in the 70’s than it is now. Fortunately there are still some real hippies left at the beach.

Are you familiar with the phenomenon of hyperinflation?

Money is fake. Goods are real.
You could experience it very much in the "Second World" where local money was largely useless. Things, information and connections had real value.

The point is not to keep money flowing but to keep basic goods available. Money flowing is currently considered the most efficient way to achieve this but it doesn't fundamentally stretch to all possible situations.
If a crisis is really, really bad, rations may be more useful. I don't think the current crisis would ever reach that point, though.

Hyperinflation happens when too much money is printed.

Read up on Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation. And the hyperinflation which occurred during the 1920s in Germany.

That's exactly why governments can't "just print more of it via central banks whenever they want" without serious consequences.
In particular, people don't need money, they need goods - food, place to live, medicine, fun, etc. If people can't buy what they need for money, the money becomes useless.

Don’t worry about that one. a certain someone was letting off frustrated steam

Well, as magz pointed out directly above money isn’t value, it’s a symbol of value: actual things like food, drink, clothes, work are real value. Rationing is an option that is available to the British State should things get that bad, the same goes for utilities and rents: there are almost no functional limits on the power of the British State over it’s territory and population. In normal times it can and does function as a free, democratic system: but in emergency situations virtually dictatorial power can be wielded via the Queen’s Council and Orders in Council (that’s the Henry VIII powers they were all going on about a few years back). Currently for that, normally hidden, system to come into operation we need Boris to fully recover, and Keir Starmer to be sworn in as a member.
Once operational however they can take command of any industry they wish, nationalise rented housing if they want: anything and everything they deem practical and necessary to stabilise peoples lives and keep the country together.

Yep: a lot of businesses are going to go under during this crisis, and there will be a huge rise in unemployment. No way around it and it’ll be very tough for a lot of people. It is, however, a surmountable problem: competent usage of the powers indicated above can maintain the necessary core of our country’s economy ready for recovery after the crisis has passed.
However, every vested interest out there is currently engaged is mass propaganda campaigning to get themselves first in the queue for government support, and to get special loopholes in the current lockdown regulations: and the news is reflecting that with it’s normal mix of experts and pseudo-experts (think tank representatives) prophesying doomsday if they don’t get what they want. Basically they’re trying to turn this crisis into an opportunity using mass public panic and alarm as the primary mechanism.

World Recessions happen every so often and are normal events, they are always followed by period of low global growth and growing international antagonisms followed by some kind of crisis in which a lot of what were previously regarded as “rules of the game” are torn up and rewritten, the last three were:
• Long Depression 1873-98 (colonisation of Africa being the big shift)
• Great Depression 1929-50
(WW2, End of the European empires, rise of the US and Soviet Union)
• Nameless One 1973-1991
(Fall of the USSR and integration of China into the world market)
• Current One 2008 - ?
We’re still in the process of finding out, but we have Trump, Brexit, trade wars and proliferation of conspiracy theories in the cultural mainstream, increasing levels of authoritarianism in governments around the world: all pretty normal symptoms for such a series of events.
So yes, it’s most likely going to be a very unpleasant decade to live through ahead, and many folks will most likely die prematurely, it’s awful and sorrowful to contemplate: but the apocalypse it ain’t, and if Johnson and Starmer can work together to wield the awesome power of the British State they can between them keep us relatively safe and ready for the better times in the recovery that will follow.

True^
I actually think that staples such as oil, salt, rice, tea, coffee should be stocked up before there is a shortage. Governments may need to hand out food rations. I just had 150 USD ( equivalent) put in my bank to pay for Passover food as did all pensioners.

Interesting concept. Maybe the coronavirus and changes after it will be the thing to end the current recession? Maybe?

We're living in a rapidly changing world, I attribute it to technological progress - there was some stability of post-neolithic, farming-based, hierarchical societes, with peasants - sometimes slaves - on the bottom, kings on the top, professional warriors between them, clergy as the educated class and merchants kind of on their own right.
With the industrial revolution, this system became less and less adapted to the reality. It started massively collapsing with the French Revolution and, in my opinion, it hasn't reached the equilibrium yet.
States and cultures are relatively slow to adapt to rapid changes of technological reality. I think this is the source of repeated depressions that come when systems get misadapted enough.
In my opinion, we need to face future with flexibility.

Well, it’s not my observation in essence: although how I’ve presented it is to a degree my take.
It known as “the long-wave hypothesis” originally outlined by Nikolai Kondratieff in his 1926 pamphlet The Long Waves In Economic Life (Stalin had him shot for publishing it). It’s gone in and out of fashion as an economic concept ever since, usually depending on whether there’s a global boom or a global slump.

Yes: I’d agree that industrialisation, capitalism and the massive forward rush of technological development is something we don’t yet have fully functioning theory and practice to cope with, yet.
Various attempts have been made, and the pragmatic flexible ones have thus far had the best outcomes: probably because they’re not wedded to this that or the other motivated thinkers multi-thousand page hot-take.

CV19 as motivating event that heralds the turn back to recovery through a “baptism of fire” of the global system, in the sense that the partition of Poland was in 1939?
Maybe... it’s certainly “on schedule”, although I’d be sceptical of the idea that there’s a strict schedule to this sort of thing.

I need to read into it, thanks!
Actually, there are so many things I would like to read into... and I end up entering endless discussions on WP, instead


I hope there will be less fire into the baptism this time...
I think the global world should adapt better to epidemic outbreaks. With the sheer population size and ease of travelling, any local outbreak of a new disease has potential to become global.
Our global culture needs to learn ways to cope with it.

Yeah: the original pamphlet is barely twenty pages long, a bit of a let down if you’re expecting some kind of big revelation (it was only an outline essay for a larger work he hoped to get soviet funding for).
I think it would be fair to say it’s cross-pollinated in my mind with a host of other books I’ve read since the financial crash. Many of them only loosely connected to economics if at all.

With you on the hopefully less firey!
Yes, current international institutions are not sufficiently funded and empowered to adequately fulfil their remit... no idea how we solve that one though

I always thought dandelions were poisonous for people if eaten. Quick googling told me I'm wrong (yes, I doubted you guys, sorry about that.)

Now the question is: why did I think they were poisonous in the first place?

Maybe your parents freaked out every time you tried to eat dandelions when you were a toddler?

@Karamazov, I read one of the explanations of K-waves are technological innovations.
I don't see this phenomenon as waves, though. Rather as an earthquake-like phenomenon: sudden releases of energy accumulated by a slow, continuous process.
To ease it, we would need to soften the system, so the energy gets released before it accumulates to catastrophic amounts.

Darwin said something along these lines " It's not the fittest who will survive but the most flexible." I believe this too.

"It Is Not the Strongest of the Species that Survives But the Most Adaptable ..." Darwin

^ here is the exact quote for you lovely aspies

Last edited by Teach51 on 16 Apr 2020, 10:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah, that’s his original idea technological innovation combined with fluctuations in credit markets and the effect this has on debt-funded investment, with the pricing of staple goods converted from currency to gold as a proxy measuring system.
His original essay is overly schematic (Russia, 1920s, to be expected) so he tries to tie everything down to wage/staple good price ratios measured in gold and Marx’s overproduction hypothesis to explain crashes, and then technological innovation plus debt-investment as the way back to recovery, escalating debt over multiple predictable length cycles, final crisis, communism!
Which doesn’t really convince me: dates of global slumps don’t fit a predetermined schedule, and as I noted above the bringing in of large areas of land with their populations and resources to the overarching industrialised global market seems (to me at least) to have been a more significant factor in recovery (cheap labour & materials at the new periphery, lower prices & more consumption at the established core, up goes the global GDP and average standard of living).
I read more history than economics, I believe it’s more useful for understanding civilisations.