I wouldn’t so much consider this childish, as I would consider it criminal. You may feel justified in doing it, but don’t fool yourself: this would be theft.
That’s the wrong question. The right one is whether the economic downturn would be worse if we had a multiple amount of deaths.
Additionally, we have saved lives (and animal lives) by shutting down parts of the economy. That should be included as a silver lining to the whole thing.
The other side of the argument is also just an opinion. What’s your point?
The way I read it is that we have no reason to think the economic drop would be less severe if we didn’t have a shutdown. This is because people dying could hurt the economy just as much, if not more.
It is assuming facts not in evidence to suggest the economy would be better off with more deaths but less of a lockdown.
There are other options of actions he could have taken that wouldn’t have involved shutting borders. Over the years, as well as not making obviously false statements, starting in late January. Those falsities created a republican resistance to the necessary actions, making it some sort of misguided windmill tilt about freedom.
Further, the entire culture he created — don’t speak truth to power, or you will be fired - is also responsible for the late actions and poor preparedness of the administration.
That is a charitable view of private equity - that it improves margins without hurting operations.
Another explanation lies in reputation mining. Think of it like doing something profitable but unsustainable.
Curious what kind of experience or data sources you base your first graph on — the Pareto principle piece makes sense. But isn’t it possible the very end of the tail is still profitable, albeit less so, than the head?
Or, it could spur some necessity is the mother of invention innovation for deployment.
Or a million other things could happen.
I am asking that you change your “would” to “could” to properly reflect the uncertainty.
We have a tendency to want to convince people of our views, which gets in the way of making our views more correct. This is challenging to fight, but necessary to learn.
Our best guesses are the best we can do. Are you familiar with the research around the bias bias? Or the fact that smart people tend to be more subject to biases?
Yes, certainty in future economic projections is delusional, but it’s a delusion that is well received by society. Humans prefer confidence over competence, and abhor uncertainty. Right now, we have a lot of uncertainty.
The difference is that flat earthers reject objective evidence. This is someone disagreeing over projections about the future. And, to be frank, nobody has a fucking clue how to estimate the medium term effects of this.
There exists a significant set of businesses who are overall profitable, but cannot manage cash flow. This mechanism robots the cash flow from incredibly bad times, into the future.