Lockdowns Don’t Affect Productivity

[Martin Hash]

The world, America specifically, learned that many, perhaps most, workers don’t do anything productive enough that it affects the wholescale economy, especially if the buying power of those people is not diminished. Apparently, millions of restaurant workers don’t provide anything that doing without has the same affect: no servers, no entertainers, no bartenders required, and only enough cooks to meet the diminished demand. Same result for almost all low-tier jobs: no janitors, no attendants, no groomers; though yard maintenance seemed undiminished. The biggest tell is the lack of need for almost all public service workers. Whatever it was they did, which was difficult to discern even before the lockdowns, has been totally exposed as redundant, or possibly even counter-productive.

Lockdowns made bare the unpleasant fact that America pays a lot to instill work ethic into its population; tens-of-millions of worthless jobs that might be better left undone except for the social value they bring. All can easily be supplanted by simply handing over free money, few questions asked. This brings up the question of how many workers actually do something? And how many of them can be expected to support everybody else? Is it one-in-ten? One-in-hundred? What percentage of America’s citizens, and non-citizens alike, can stay at home to watch television, play videogames, and sit in their dark bedrooms pretending to be somebody on social media without affecting productivity, as long as the check’s in the mail?

[DBTrek]

...From the most recent peak in the fourth quarter of 2019, the United States experienced two consecutive quarters of declines in GDP; it even recorded its steepest quarterly drop in economic output on record, a decrease of 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2020 (Bureau of Economic Analysis [BEA] 2020a; authors’ calculations). To put this contraction into historical context, quarterly GDP had never experienced a drop greater than 3 percent (at a quarterly, nonannualized rate) since record keeping began in 1947 (Routley 2020).



Figure D shows the percent change in employment relative to business cycle peaks. COVID-19–related job losses wiped out 113 straight months of job growth, with total nonfarm employment falling by 20.5 million jobs in April (BLS 2020b; authors’ calculations). The COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic shutdown created a crisis for all workers, but the impact was greater for women, non-white workers, lower-wage earners, and those with less education (Stevenson 2020).

https://www.brookings.edu/research/ten- ... s-economy/

Imma have to disagree.
Brookings institute calling out the steepest decline in GDP in the history of the nation.

[Martin Hash]

All economic numbers have entered the realm of Climate Change & Shamdemic. All I have to do is look around to see that nothing has fundamentally changed. I could go to Home Depot right this minute and buy anything I need to do anything, just like always, and the vast majority of prices haven’t changed, and the ones that have, like lumber, trace straight back to Fascist monopolistic practices.