Comment by dmix
6 days ago
Short term thinking dominates economics these days. Managing the current downturn is most important, when people ask about longterm implications do a bunch of hand wavy stuff about it being temporary and then kick the can to the next guys who do the same thing.
> Short term thinking dominates economics these days.
Especially among people criticizing the response to 2008/2020.
Failing to mitigate sickness in capital markets and the economy in the short term would have inflicted far more damage in the long term.
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You are assuming that there was any good way of dealing with a year where nobody went to work because of a global pandemic.
The economic pain of inflation was far preferable to the economic pain of active economic destruction, as short-term disruption to business would have resulted in long-term destruction of real value. It was far less painful long-term to print money and have the economy on pause for a year, with bills still getting paid, than it would have been to have the economy collapse over that year.
If it weren't for those mitigations, we'd all still be sitting around a tire fire, trading bottle caps for ammunition.
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