1\ Classism is FAR more invidious than racism and sexism
I suspect this is because, in our evolutionary past, status gradations were the key to reproductive success, whereas ingroup/outgroup distinctions were malleable and not fundamentally about race
2\ Modern society is worm-eaten with classist policy:
Usury laws
Sugar taxes
Vice taxes
Building codes
Minimum wages
We are grossed out by the choices faced by the poor, so we "help" the poor by taking away those choices through regulation
3\ Nobody can point to laws that are actually racist, and when they try, they end up pointing to the classist stuff I mentioned above
In the US, class is often co-extensive with race, so things like minimum wage laws that have disparate race effects are really just classist
2\ They live in a city of a few million where many of the doctors are from a close-knit ethnic community
Well, the Karen side of the family sent around a philipic written by a local doctor, telling of COVID patients dying in hallways, etc, and warning people to mask up
3\ Locally, the thread went viral, mostly on WhatsApp
Well, my lady used to be a local pharma rep, and she knew the doc who was supposedly stepping over bodies to get to his ward
1\ People compare COVID-19 hysteria to the Salem Witch Trials, to various political movements, and to other mass delusions of the fairly distant past
But the best model for understanding lockdowns is 1980s USA, when the world hallucinated a sprawling, satanic child rape pandemic
2\ As with COVID-19, there *was* a small kernel of truth beneath the hysteria
Horrible things did happen to a few kids, just as in a world of 7.7 billion, a handful of healthy youngsters have died from COVID-19
3\ As with COVID-19, the child rape hallucinations were endorsed by credentialed public officials of all stripes: educators, prosecutors, social workers, investigators, doctors
As with COVID-19, *most* experts didn't believe the hype, but only the most hysterical got media play
If you can identify the jobs that a policy will "create", that policy almost certainly destroys net jobs
If you can identify the jobs that a new technology will destroy, that technology almost certainly creates net jobs
2\ In the first case, the usual reason you know a policy will "create" jobs is because you know it is replacing an efficient process with an inefficient one
E.g. replacing fossil fuels with solar "creates" energy jobs, but destroys net jobs by making society diffusely poorer
3\ In the second case, a technology can "destroy" the jobs it makes redundant, but by allowing resources to be better allocated, it frees society to employ labor in novel roles