The coronavirus pandemic is laying bare quite a lot of the normally hidden features of our modern capitalism system. And the government reactions to the economic shutdown is demonstrating that we don’t actually live in an capitalistic system, but something of a hybrid with the incentives and rewards of capitalism (when times are good) but the downside cost of socialism (when the economy...
Over 100,000 people have (so far) been killed by Covid-19. More than the 119,686 listed on the John’s Hopkins website tonight. Those are just the dead who passed away in the hospital, who were already tested for Covid-19 before they passed away. As the weeks of deaths roll by, what is becoming clearly evident is that a lot of people are dying at home, dying in the ambulance on the way to...
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...
It it times like these when we should look first into history for answers before we repeat the same mistakes. Case in point, the Governors, President, and others people in power make it sound like “flattening the curve” is a novel idea. It’s not. Been there, done that, mistakes were made. Only that was back in 1918, and few people know what happened. National Geographic reported...
I’m worried for Africa. I’ve spent the last month dropping into the rabbit hole researching, analyzing, and experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, and I have seen just one minor analysis of what the pandemic means in Africa. I’m American, but have met and taught hundreds of African entrepreneurs, personally visiting many of their businesses in Africa. In the past week I’ve...
All week I’ve had conversations with people from across the U.S. and from around the world who still don’t understand how epidemics work. It’s not at all intuitive. I get that. Three weeks ago I posted this great video to help build that intuition. Daily updated from Dr. John Campbell help as well. Today let’s try making it simple. Today let me explain the pandemic as a...
Beyond the blog, I’ve been answering a lot of questions about Coronavirus and its economic consequences over on Quora.
