04-05-2020, 04:25 AM
One of the telling marks of a 4T culture in contrast to a 3T culture is that the economic elites start looking at the long term. Obviously America will get out of this plague with its physical infrastructure undamaged, with a consumer-driven economy, the free-enterprise model still largely enshrined (if stripped of 3T cruelty). If a large part of the populace should die, then the main harm to the capitalists will be the disappearance or reduction of economic rents because fewer people will be bidding up the price of real estate to renters, because people will be able to take shorter commutes, and because fewer people will be competing for the same low-paying jobs. Economic rents are pure profit that do not lead to greater prosperity except for passive investors.
The big negative will be that, at least in the short term, new construction on residential and commercial property will stop after the completion of existing projects.
I once saw the pattern in Greater Detroit, whose population growth seems to have come to a halt around 1970. Taking Michigan 153 west from Dearborn in 2008 I could see development from the 1960's (as I could tell from housing styles) as I went west, and suddenly I started to see property plotted for the next wave of development that never happened. Then came farmland. Then came Ann Arbor. Had Greater Detroit kept growing along Michigan 153 as many other cities did, then Greater Detroit would be extended so far west as to include Ann Arbor.
No viral plague hit Detroit, but the auto industry that once made Detroit the technological and economic equivalent of Silicon Valley in recent years became less important, and much of the auto industry got dispersed to places with lower costs of doing business and of (when Detroit was a giant city, once the fourth-largest in America) living costs.
People are putting off special and even normal delights to reduce their personal and collective risks. As personal and collective dangers merge, then the economic and political ways tend to merge. (I predict that Donald Trump, who has been far behind the curve, will be caught up in failure and will become the scapegoat of history much as Herbert Hoover was for decades). This said, people expect again to watch movies, dine in restaurants, attend cultural and sporting events, visit museums, and go to the beaches again. But not if one catches COVID-19 and dies of it!
The big negative will be that, at least in the short term, new construction on residential and commercial property will stop after the completion of existing projects.
I once saw the pattern in Greater Detroit, whose population growth seems to have come to a halt around 1970. Taking Michigan 153 west from Dearborn in 2008 I could see development from the 1960's (as I could tell from housing styles) as I went west, and suddenly I started to see property plotted for the next wave of development that never happened. Then came farmland. Then came Ann Arbor. Had Greater Detroit kept growing along Michigan 153 as many other cities did, then Greater Detroit would be extended so far west as to include Ann Arbor.
No viral plague hit Detroit, but the auto industry that once made Detroit the technological and economic equivalent of Silicon Valley in recent years became less important, and much of the auto industry got dispersed to places with lower costs of doing business and of (when Detroit was a giant city, once the fourth-largest in America) living costs.
People are putting off special and even normal delights to reduce their personal and collective risks. As personal and collective dangers merge, then the economic and political ways tend to merge. (I predict that Donald Trump, who has been far behind the curve, will be caught up in failure and will become the scapegoat of history much as Herbert Hoover was for decades). This said, people expect again to watch movies, dine in restaurants, attend cultural and sporting events, visit museums, and go to the beaches again. But not if one catches COVID-19 and dies of it!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.