The range of potential outcomes we're looking at right now has something like "stumble through with many tens of thousands of deaths and a borderline depression" as the best-case scenario. The more serious outcomes are "constitutional crisis and mass social uprisings."
It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that the national political class isn't looking at enormous breadlines, reports of millions upon millions of people out of work, and a timeline of at least a year and thinking that they should be working around the clock on policy solutions.
There's no turning back the clock to February. We got locked into a much worse range of possible outcomes than some other countries quite early on, and subsequent decisions have made things still worse. That's path dependence.
This is an incredibly volatile situation - incompetent politicians who don't grasp the scale and nature of the problem, lots of people out of work and close to the edge, and a literal pandemic - and there are a lot of paths that lead to bad, bad outcomes.
I'll be beyond ecstatic if I'm wrong about all this, but we all need to be thinking a lot more about the worse range of those outcomes and how to avoid them.
