It’s amazing that "lockdowns didn’t cause the economic crisis, the pandemic did", a statement that is *obviously* retarded when used to argue there can be no economic case against lockdowns, has gained almost universal acceptance among the sophisticates.
See this thread for an elaboration of this point. Tl;dr; "the pandemic caused the economic crisis" doesn’t imply "lockdowns couldn’t make it worse" and they almost certainly will in many cases. If you don’t understand this very simple point, you may not be as smart as you think.
https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1322219704170274819
Please, before you reply, note that I didn’t say lockdowns could *never* be good for the economy. This is almost certainly false, but it depends on the context and in many contexts the fact that lockdowns can sometimes be good is irrelevant.
https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1318610711606591492
Those are very basic points, anyone who isn’t cognitively impaired can understand them, but somehow every very intelligent person on Twitter just keeps repeating simplistic, dumb slogans like "there is no tradeoff between health and the economy".
Can we please not be retarded and have a serious debate about this? I guess we can’t, but that’s a pity. There is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement, you don’t have to use obvious non-sequiturs to defend your position 🤷♂️
Oh and, to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that only health and the economy narrowly construed matter for the debate about lockdowns. It also hinges on complicated questions about distributive justice (both intergenerational and socioeconomic), how to deal with uncertainty, etc.
It’s okay to have a strong opinion about this, I sure as hell do, but you have to recognize that it’s a very complicated debate. If you think it’s not, I can *guarantee* you that it’s because you haven’t thought hard enough about it. It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are.
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