The Coronavirus

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-27-2020, 10:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: States that relax too early will get spikes. If people think that times are rough now for local economies, then think of how times will be when people avoid whole states  because of a dangerous epidemic.

Some of us have the choice between prosperity and life and between action and life. Prosperity means nothing if one is dead.

The best that anyone can hope to do is to outlast this plague.

But let’s assume Warren is right. The more population dense your people are, the closer together everyone is, the greater the risk. Some states are more at risk than others. If your population density is low enough, the trade of between the most safety and the best economy is very different.

Rachel had one farmer and a dump truck full of potatoes. He had this nice contract with all sorts of restaurants. It just went poof. Thus, he gave away free potatoes which he otherwise would end up destroying. Food banks desperate for potatoes were glad to take them off his hands.

Something similar happened in New York, where many dairy farmers had contracts with the city’s school system. What happens when the schools close? How do you find a way to keep the economy running and get the milk in the right hands? Any hands? How long can the food producers keep running charity before they need someone to step in and grease the operation with some cash?

That doesn’t mean, however, that you can escape risk or avoid it all. I can think of a couple of reasons one might get in trouble in an agricultural state. You might have a job at a meat processing plant. If you don’t go to the meat packing plant, will you be fired?

You might want to go shopping in the big city. You wind up going to a high risk high population area. A question arises about what is essential. Are you shopping for basic groceries, or jewelry? Did you just exclude everybody who produces stuff that isn’t necessary, that is a luxury? Didn’t we just spend a couple of decades ratcheting up the economy by producing luxuries?

Right now, the meat packing plants are one of the more obvious examples of a vital function that has been optimized for a small thus close together assembly line operation. Very efficient. The best way to do things in normal times. How much do you have to change things if a worker takes one animal and goes all the way from killing the beast to packaging the finial product? He is safe, but how efficient is he? How much more space does it take? How much equipment would have to be purchased for each worker? How do you best trade it off between worker safety and worker efficiency?

There ought to be some ground between business as used to be usual and shutting it all down. We may be spending too much effort on one or the other impossible extreme, and not enough on trying to find a middle ground.