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The world after the pandemic


Altherion

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9 hours ago, Risto said:

Well, the Orthodox Church in Montenegro called its congregation to stay at homes and follow the government's instructions. They informed the public that they will conduct religious services in churches and temples without people and that local priests will conduct communions. Now, the center of Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade now demands the end of state of emergency during Easter, which is truly nonsensical, but the Montenegrin branch has always been somewhat more sensible. I mean, the Pope himself conducted the Easter service in Vatican without believers. 

It's not about them being special snowflake. It is a very legitimate question about double standards. I mean, if you have construction workers working all day long, if you have crowded supermarkets, banks and post offices, what is the problem of having church being opened for clergy to perform sacred rites without congregation? 

A religious ceremony is not even close to the same as construction work, supermarkets etc. Those are services that are needed to keep society functioning. Religious ceremonies are non-essential. Its not double standards at all - the better comparison would be if sporting events were still being held but nothing said about them. Then I would agree, yes its double standards. But the answer would be to come down harder on sporting events rather than exempting the church too. 

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9 hours ago, Altherion said:

You are not given such an opportunity though. What might have done was refrain from bailing out the airlines. There are good arguments for this that pretty much all governments ignored, but even had this happened, it would not have changed air travel. All of the airplanes, airports, pilots and other infrastructure and personnel would still be there.

I considered that, but I think the coming economic crisis will destroy many airline companies even with some periodic bailing out.
In other words, because this is just the beginning, I think the industry will be in big trouble anyway.
And sure, investors can buy the assets to recreate companies, but that is only possible if there is demand, if there are enough potential tourists.

I'll develop below in my answer to HoI.

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

You seem to be living under the impression that this is as bad as it's going to get. [...] You haven't really explained how digging us deeper into that hole is in any way helpful

You have it entirely backwards. From the start I've been assuming this is going to be one of the worst economic crises in history, much closer to 1929 than 2008.
I think it being worse than 1929 is within the realm of possibility.

We obviously don't share the same ideologies, so forgive my pedantry as I explain how my ideological biases lead me to that thinking.

As a leftist I believe the economy, the market, works through demand. People need stuff, and businesses are created through time (more or less "organically") to meet that demand when possible. Conversely I don't believe in the politics of offer, the idea that investments drive the economy. In fact, I firmly believe that this idea is propaganda that was designed by American corporate croonies in the 1970s with silly notions like "capital formation," "supply side," the "Laffer curve" ... etc.
Don't get me wrong, it does work to some extent in a consumer society because demand can in fact be artifically created in some ways (advertisement & propaganda) when the overall structure of society is stable to begin with, but ultimately it is "natural" demand that decides what society truly needs, not offer.
Times of crisis reveal to us what the real economy looks like. The rest is all smoke and mirrors. You need to eat but you don't need the latest iphone. Obviously.
Anyway, the point is that I think investments and businesses only stimulate the economy when things are actually all right. In a limited crisis you can inject funds in a few key sectors to "prime the pump" and hope for everything to start again. But if things get too bad (as they're about to) you have to start all over again, by rebuilding demand. See, unless you can bail out all the businesses at once you're doomed to keep injecting money, again and again and again, so at some point it becomes much more efficient to simply give money directly to the workers through benefits and public works programs.
In the 1930s we called that "The New Deal." Today we'll call that UBI.

A much simpler way of saying it... I'm such a radical leftist that I don't have a lot of faith in capitalism and even less in finance. I think our entire "modern economy" since the 1980s or 1990s has been a gigantic house of cards, that the value of money has become a fiction untethered from reality, while neo-liberalism has weakened the foundations of a healthy, "natural" economy.
There are a combination of factors that should make this crisis unique and utterly devastating.
For starters, jobs are disappearing. Up to half of the jobs today were expected to disappear in the next 10 or 15 years, and the current pandemic will have accelerated this trend (even my job is no longer secure, and who'd have thought... ).
Second, the consumer society is absurd and unsustainable. I know you don't really believe this, but many people do. Again, this crisis will only have demonstrated that we can live without a number of things, will only have exposed the absurdity of some behaviors. Many people will want to go back to their previous habits, but not all. Point is, demand in some sectors will struggle to go back to previous levels ; those sectors will almost vanish in a matter of months. So even more jobs will disappear, thus starting a gigantic domino effect.
Third, the financial sector is unhinged. Too much deregulation and ridiculous speculation has made the entire financial sector a giant bubble. I'm not sure what this means exactly as of now, but I think of 2008 on steroids. This will worsen the two serious problems above because it will collapse the banking sector. Let's bear in mind that (according to my info) several huge banks were very fragile already in 2019 (I've heard of Deutsche Bank and a handful of really big French banks at least).
Oh, and fourth, let's not forget entire countries are in trouble.
Combine the four and you have the receipe for something so bad that we'll all think back on this conversation with a sad smile in a few years. Because of course, I'm only talking about economics here. Throw in some geopolitics in the mix and there's no limit as to how bad things might get.

All this is a long way of saying that I've been genuinely puzzled by Scot's or your argument that my ideas would "dig us deeper into the hole" or mean more "upheaval and destruction." lol guys, really. The reason why I evoked not saving airlines (as an example) was because I didn't see it as that radical a proposition.
Because obviously the economic crisis will be so bad that most of us won't be able to fly anyway. I'm pretty sure we'll have much bigger fish to fry soon enough.

From my perspective it's already about thinking about the way out. I don't think the usual strategies (fiscal policies, stimulus packages... etc) are going to work. I would expect that at some point we'll move past the concepts of "deficit" and "debt" as well.
The real problem is going to be the value of money.

Originally I was saying that the discussion in the next months (and probably years) will be about politics of offer versus politics of demand. What I should have added was that as a leftist, I think the politics of offer will fail, and that the system will be so close to collapsing at that point that there will be a real opportunity to deal it a death blow at long last.
Altherion is correct that UBI cannot really work within the current framework. There are too many problems linked to stuff like "deficit," "interest," "inflation" ... etc. We're talking about it nonetheless. I think, because ultimately the value of money is linked to trust in the socio-economic order. If things get too bad, will people still trust in money that is issued by the private sector for the private sector?
I think that trust could revert back to the nation-state and the monetary creation of the central banks, under the direct supervision of governments. It's a long shot, and there are a bazillion factors involved, but I can see that goddamn way out.

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8 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

A religious ceremony is not even close to the same as construction work, supermarkets etc. Those are services that are needed to keep society functioning. Religious ceremonies are non-essential. Its not double standards at all - the better comparison would be if sporting events were still being held but nothing said about them. Then I would agree, yes its double standards. But the answer would be to come down harder on sporting events rather than exempting the church too. 

They are perhaps non-essential to you and me, but for many others they are not. People watched Pope's service via the Internet, they prayed in their homes and probably, they were more peaceful that day. We can not disregard people's faith as part of their psyche. I am not saying that churches should be filled with believers, but I don't see the problem of having several priests in one church holding a service that could be transmitted via TV or Internet. This is not a question of people coming to churches, this is a question of allowing priests to hold the service for Easter in empty churches and temples. I am sorry, but I believe the latter one should not even be a question. 

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7 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I think that trust could revert back to the nation-state and the monetary creation of the central banks, under the direct supervision of governments. It's a long shot, and there are a bazillion factors involved, but I can see that goddamn way out.

But as extreme capitalism is being replaced at an ever accelerating pace now due to this global medical catastrophe -- and very soon food -- being replaced with mafia cronyism -- and nowhere do we see it more blatantly than in the US, closely followed by Italy -- I dunno.

 

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One consequence of the pandemic: the conservative Anglo-American politic-socio-economic system is shown to be a fair weather bullshit Bingo system. In other news Trump ordered to stop payments to the WHO. childish scapegoating and blame-shifting. The international reputation of the US is on an all time low around the world. And the bad thing: not because they are so strong and „evil“ but because the country is a parody. Very bad. Be feared, be loathed but never be ridiculed or seen as incompetent. That’s the beginning of a hard downfall for every empire. Just ask the Soviet Union after 1986. If Trump is re-elected in November (I think he will) then the Western Alliance is done and gone. 

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6 minutes ago, Arakan said:

One consequence of the pandemic: the conservative Anglo-American politic-socio-economic system is shown to be a fair weather bullshit Bingo system. In other news Trump ordered to stop payments to the WHO. childish scapegoating and blame-shifting. The international reputation of the US is on an all time low around the world. And the bad thing: not because they are so strong and „evil“ but because the country is a parody. Very bad. Be feared, be loathed but never be ridiculed or seen as incompetent. That’s the beginning of a hard downfall for every empire. Just ask the Soviet Union after 1986. If Trump is re-elected in November (I think he will) then the Western Alliance is done and gone. 

For someone who hates Trump so much, you sure do sound a lot like him 

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10 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

For someone who hates Trump so much, you sure do sound a lot like him 

Very witty :). Though we are not in a rap battle. Deliver hard data and let’s discuss. But as I know, useless with you. Deliver arguments and not soundbites.

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14 hours ago, Zorral said:

But as extreme capitalism is being replaced at an ever accelerating pace now due to this global medical catastrophe -- and very soon food -- being replaced with mafia cronyism -- and nowhere do we see it more blatantly than in the US, closely followed by Italy -- I dunno.

There is indeed no certainty that the current crisis will expose the flaws of our socio-economic structure sufficiently.
There is always the possibility that any radical movement will either lead to a reinforcing of the existing power structures or be coopted and corrupted by them.
There's just no way to know what will happen.

The one thing that's becoming clear is that the coronavirus crisis will have accelerated political time and fueled nearly all political movements simultaneously, as almost everyone can interpret the events as validating their positions and politicians will all seek to derive some form of advantage from it.

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If one tightens the screws sufficiently by plague, famine and war, I guess all western democracies will turn out as "fair weather systems" or, as we already see, they will restrict a lot of the liberal and democratic procedures that would usually govern and organize society. So I doubt that we can already clearly see that the slightly more statist continental European system is superior in a relevant way to the anglo-american system. Recall that in the last few years both the Bertelsmann foundation as well as the Leopoldina public think tank recommended closing about half or more than half of German hospitals because supposedly the gains in specialization and efficiency would trump the loss of covering more rural eras. So it seems slightly dishonest to pat ourselves on the back, only because such measures have merely been suggested, not yet put in practice.

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44 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

I doubt that we can already clearly see that the slightly more statist continental European system is superior in a relevant way to the anglo-american system.

I would certainly not frame this in those terms. The UK had an excellent welfare state for decades and still has UHC through the NHS. Conversely, Germany's ordo-liberalism doesn't necessarily translate into more social programs and has quite a few perverse effects.
I really wouldn't link ideology to geography, it's always more complicated than that.

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As a member of the so-called voting electorate, citizen by birth as were mine grandmammies and grandpappies before me unto the generations before the War of Rebellion, but not back to the founding Mayflower cronies -- I have seen this nation as looking like a failed idiot, insane state (as opposed to merely plundering, inequal, racist, and opportunist with a ridiculous number of ignorant citizens) for a very long time.  The opinion only started consolidating as a failed, ridiculous and totally insane state in all things around the Mission Accomplished - Heck of  Great Job, Brownie back in aughts.  But ... we still had ... hope (not hope outta Arksansas, as Hillary more than amply demonstrated). Not longer.  We are now Italy, where the mafia is entirely in charge.

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On 4/14/2020 at 9:58 AM, Rippounet said:

I considered that, but I think the coming economic crisis will destroy many airline companies even with some periodic bailing out.
In other words, because this is just the beginning, I think the industry will be in big trouble anyway.
And sure, investors can buy the assets to recreate companies, but that is only possible if there is demand, if there are enough potential tourists.

...

From the start I've been assuming this is going to be one of the worst economic crises in history, much closer to 1929 than 2008.

I cherry-picked the last sentence from elsewhere in your post because I think this is the point where we fundamentally disagree. There is broad agreement that we're in a recession and the unemployment numbers are literally breaking various historical graphs, but in the long term, I don't think this will be as bad as 2008. At some point in the next year or less, the pandemic will end (either because somebody comes up with a vaccine or treatment or because enough people have already had the disease) and economies around the world will reopen.

On 4/14/2020 at 9:58 AM, Rippounet said:

Times of crisis reveal to us what the real economy looks like. The rest is all smoke and mirrors. You need to eat but you don't need the latest iphone. Obviously.

I think you are overestimating the clarity with which this crisis reveals anything. Yes, the things we absolutely need are (in order of urgency) air, water, food, shelter from the elements and waste disposal... but these have not been the entirety of a human economy in millennia and even with the crisis, they are not the only things people are working on. For example, here is the list of services considered essential in the US. This already includes a whole lot of people, but note that there are way more people than that who are still working because a lot of non-essential personnel can work from home -- that's nearly the entirety of the tech industry and a substantial fraction of scientists, educators, etc.

Furthermore, it's true that you do not need the latest phone right now... but that's mainly because you already have a phone and a computer and clothes and practically every other thing that is for sale in the various stores that have been forced to close. It's not that you won't ever need to buy these things again -- electronics eventually break down, clothes wear out and so on -- but you don't need them now or in the next few months (unless you're one of the unlucky people whose phone or laptop picked this time to malfunction). In fact, this crisis has shown how useful the electronics really are: they allow us to talk to family and friends without being near them and enable working from home without which the unemployment would be a whole lot worse.

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1 hour ago, Cpl. Tunny said:

Yea, it's as if some here are wishing and praying for the downfall of our nation...hell, their nation. Quite odd, indeed.

You could just hop on those planes before you shut them down. *eye roll*

Nope.  Just a better world that is better able to respond to challenges like this.

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2 hours ago, Cpl. Tunny said:

Yea, it's as if some here are wishing and praying for the downfall of our nation...hell, their nation. Quite odd, indeed.

You could just hop on those planes before you shut them down. *eye roll*

A nation willing to prop up businesses over people deserves to fail.

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20 hours ago, Altherion said:

I think you are overestimating the clarity with which this crisis reveals anything.

Well, yes, there would be no fun if I wasn't.

That list is interesting though, and the fact that it exists is in itself interesting. However, for anything to be "clear" one would have to compare different such lists from different countries.

Of course, this may be more of a philosophical point than a strictly political one, and philosophical points, however clear, do not always translate into policy, or even general knowledge. It can take time for them to have any kind of influence.

20 hours ago, Altherion said:

I cherry-picked the last sentence from elsewhere in your post because I think this is the point where we fundamentally disagree.

I don't think I necessarily want to be right on this one.
But I think it's reasonable to point out that on the one hand there is no certainty that we can prevent a major economic crisis and on the other hand that we should strive to derive lessons from the pandemic.
For the second point, it shouldn't be controversial to want to do better next time (to be better prepared). However, even without my biases, it should be clear to everyone that it is difficult to address the demands of our societies when it comes to healthcare without also tackling socio-economic and ideological issues.
When Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-Ind.) says that he would rather preserve the "American way of life" than American lives, I think it reveals something deeper about the nature of the dominant ideology, something that is so dark that no reasonable and empathic human being should condone it... Because simply put it literally becomes an existential threat to our species - in our lifetimes.
Given this fact, I think it would be criminal to simply focus on returning to "normalcy," to that "way of life" that is supposedly more precious than human lives. It was criminal enough not to do much before, but how much worse is it if there is any kind of opportunity to change things?

As to the first point, if I look at the US I don't know if gving 1,200$ to many people is enough to do much more than sustain demand in the short-term. Because without trust in the future (or even the means to consume), it seems more likely that most people will use that money rather sparingly. So I'd argue that this can sustain demand enough to prevent the immediate collapse of the US socio-economic structure, but that it won't be enough to prevent a depression.
But even if I'm wrong... That's just the US. In a world where all national economies and forms of economic activities are interdependent, how can there not be a "weak link" somewhere? Many people were predicting a crisis before the pandemic, and most don't have my biases.
Where my biases show is that I think there are underlying flaws to the system that sooner or later should reveal themselves. And I guess that ultimately I'd rather that happened sooner than later. Obviously destroying the environment is not enough to condemn the system, there will always be some who don't want to care about the future, so the only hope we have is that the system collapses before it destroys the environment.
So while I don't necessarily want to live through the worst economic crisis ever (for myself), the fact that someone like @ljkeane can openly say they don't care enough about the future to sacrifice their way of life makes me think the collapse of the current system would actually be the best case scenario for our species. It is precisely the selfishness of individuals, regularly expressed on this forum, that has convinced me that collapse is desirable.

 

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42 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

So while I don't necessarily want to live through the worst economic crisis ever (for myself), the fact that someone like @ljkeane can openly say they don't care enough about the future to sacrifice their way of life makes me think the collapse of the current system would actually be the best case scenario for our species. It is precisely the selfishness of individuals, regularly expressed on this forum, that has convinced me that imminent collapse is desirable.

 

Well my position is slightly more complex than that and I don't really want to repeatedly go over it because people have a tendency to get a little overwrought on this subject but I'll give it another go.

Basically I think people on both sides of the argument on climate change have a tendency to either not grasp the magnitude of what's involved, lie to themselves about it or deliberately underplay things to try and convince people to agree with them. That makes talking about it without it descending into bickering a bit difficult.

On the opposing climate change action side of things it's pretty clear that people either undersell the magnitude of the problem or overestimate the likelihood of dramatic technological solutions solving all our problems.

On the other side it tends to be very understated how much of a change in lifestyle will be required to achieve the kind of cuts in emissions necessary to have a meaningful impact on climate change. The developed world really needs to be net zero for greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That means cuts in household emissions in the range of 80% or more. That doesn't require moderate lifestyle changes here and there, it means drastic reductions in standards of living.

We aren't just talking about people not taking flights. Just to take you for example. I think you said you had a second home you went to to get out of Paris? I'd guess you probably have a car to get there. You definitely shouldn't have either of those things to be living the kind of lifestyle that everyone's going to need to adopt. There's a lot more restrictions needed beyond that.

Fundamentally my position is people aren't gong to be willing to voluntarily make their lives that much worse. That means it isn't going to happen. As a result I don't see the point of making my life worse (but probably not making enough changes to reach the levels of cuts needed in the case of most people) in a futile effort.

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The best system is useless without the right mentality/mindset whatever you want to call it. Abstract philosophical, ideological-theoretical, political or socio-economic studies etc often lack that one true factor. Mentality. Mindset. That’s hard to grasp because it’s not based on cognitive underlying factors but more on affective-emotive ones. 
A simple example (good article on cnn in that regard).
USA vs. Germany: both comparatively similar federally structured countries with the same sorts of benefits and costs to it. In both countries you often see clashes between the federal government and the „states princes“. Very similar. But in this crisis the situation cannot be more different. 
Trump USA: competition mindset. Win at all cost. Partisan bullshittery at its worst. Dick measuring. 
Merkel Germany: consensus mindset. Finding the best solution at all costs. Ego-trips very unwelcome right now. 
 

Nothing of the above has to do anything with an abstract system discussion. It’s all a question of mindset, a question of how far you as a society are willing to accept egomaniacs and narcissism. 
 

„fake it until you make it“. A phrase beloved by many „entrepreneurs“ or „influencers“ especially in the US. A phrase I hate more than anything. You make it, you don’t fake it. You don’t brag, you let action speak. You let facts speak. You stay down to earth. Personal Integrity. 
 

This is the most fundamental change necessary if this global world ought to have a good future. 

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1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

Fundamentally my position is people aren't gong to be willing to voluntarily make their lives that much worse. That means it isn't going to happen. As a result I don't see the point of making my life worse (but probably not making enough to changes to reach the levels of cuts needed in the case of most people) in a futile effort.

Not trusting individuals to act directly is fair, but to use this as a justification not to support collective decisions is fallacious.
If you will neither act as an individual nor as part of a collective, then you refuse to act in any way. That's bad enough. But if you then support action to preserve the status quo it becomes even worse.
This is like game theory, a giant prisoner's dilemma.
It is difficult to count on individual actions (choosing not to fly). It is easier to support collective action (from "green taxes" on commercial flights to laws outright banning the worst kinds of mass tourism). And it is even easier to not do something at a crucial juncture, i.e. not bail out airline companies if they need it.
From a purely moral standpoint there is a shift. Inaction can be undestood. However, when a government bails out corporations that are part of the problem we completely change the nature of the moral problem, because by then we are actively working to keep destroying the environment.

And I think it's remarkable how, caught in the prisoner's dilemma, you, or others, will do everything to avoid any kind of individual responsibility, to the point where you will be reluctant to even call out human activities that are problematic.
Problem is, from a moral standpoint you move from doing nothing to actively fighting to prevent finding a solution. Because you understand this is a prisoner's dilemma, you would rather engage in whataboutism (What about you? What about China? What about private planes?) than begin to think of solutions.

But I'm not here to blame or shame, or even convince, I'm not a fanatic (and if I were I wouldn't focus my efforts here, that would be idiotic). I'm interested in what this all means. Because if collectively we move from doing nothing to taking measures to keep our way of life, even when it is easier to consider changing it... It also changes the nature of the political debate around climate change. At some point it is no longer about schoolgirls asking heads of state to do something ; it becomes people who are acting to save the environment versus people who are acting to destroy it.
And we come back to why I was saying that the pandemic will accelerate political time and fuel political movements in the first place.
 

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