The negative side-effects of lockdowns is so grossly under-represented in discussions, especially of those in power. Depression, joblessness, separation of families, separation of bi-national couples, suicides, financial stress, hunger, a collapsing economy.. These things need to be taken seriously.
Many politicians have been acting like these things don't exist while ordering more and more stringent lockdowns, giving passing condolences at best, and it borders on negligence. There needs to be a balance. Yes, avoiding the chance of death matters for you and those around you, but what is it worth if you're miserably suicidal and have lost hope as a result of it?
I know this has been said before, but I feel the need to keep saying it, as it's still a problem to this day.
But this article is about the US, where there have been no lockdowns. Only (mostly) unenforced stay-at-home orders, (mostly) unenforced business closures, and (mostly) unenforced mask mandates. I don't see the link. Lots of people have been out horsing around, doing whatever they wanted this past year, and sidestepping the token, unenforced roadblocks that were half-assed by governments. Something must be causing all these terrible things, but it's not lockdowns.
I would start looking at lack of government action rather than the little they actually did.
Santa Clara County in the middle of Silicon Valley aggressively enforced lockdown rules and fined hundreds of businesses. This wrecked many segments of the local economy, and drove people into poverty and hunger.
What wrecked the economies was the length of the pandemic. If we actually locked down for a month or so we might have had a shot at beating it with less long-term misery, but since covid was so politicized and government was too timid to actually do that, we half-assed it instead, and here we are a year later.
Go outside Silicon Valley and a few other metro areas, and you'll still see widespread lack of enforcement. Most of the good behavior has been voluntary. Good people/businesses listening to health guidance. Nobody is getting pulled over in rural America and fined for violating stay-at-home. If I wanted to, I could "unessentially" drive across the state of CA right now, sit down at a fully-open bar or restaurant unmasked, and nobody would lift a finger to stop me.
What exactly do you mean by "actually locked down"? That 100% of the population would be prohibited from leaving their homes? What about food? What about medical emergencies? What about a house burning down or a tree falling on the roof? What if a watermain bursts? There are endless edge cases that keep the virus around so when the lockdown ends, all you've done is delayed host exposure a bit. And this ignores the possibility of animals serving as reservoirs of the virus. It also ignores multi-family housing. What if most of the people on the 3rd floor have COVID the first week and then it spreads to the 4th floor the next week, the 5th floor the next, and so on? Now you have people exiting the lockdown who have just been infected and can spread it all over the place.
The only thing a lockdown can do is slow things down in order to have time to get more prepared. The notion that the virus can be extinguished by lockdowns simply is not workable. It's an idea that is attractive because it's simple but only because it ignores the logistic realities of a planet with nearly eight billion people, or on the national level, 330 million people.
Except, like, where it's worked. Australia, New Zealand, parts of South East Asia.
Just last week Brisbane Australia had a small outbreak of 3-4 people. We locked down the whole city/region for 3 days to allow contact tracing to occur.
We've now relaxed those controls again but are preventing groups of 20+ people from gathering.
You also must wear masks in all venues where possible, including public transport.
It fucking works. The fact that other western countries haven't been successful is nothing to do with the method but the implementation.
It also helps we force interstate and international travellers to enter quarantine for 14 days. But when I'm hearing friends families in Texas going to Prague for Christmas, and didn't have to quarantine when they arrived OR when they went home. Is it that much of a surprise the US and Europe is in such a fucking state?
Edit: just to add another reference to larger lock downs. Brisbane or the state of Queensland has previously had lock downs that went for months previously while we sought to prevent community transmission. Now for the last 4 months we've literally gone back to normal besides international holidays. Pubs reopened. Cafes opened. No restrictions. Dancing in night clubs. No masks.
Sure, when you have a group of people willing to go along with a lock down.
When it was suggested in the U.S., xenophobia quickly accompanied it.
Do the rich lock down? Nope. Look at how the athletes, people in power, and other celebrities do things when no one is watching. Rules for the little people.
Yeah, I get that. Willingness to trust the method gets you the results. We went (Australia) pretty hard on ensuring people were held accountable (e.g huge fines, charges and gaol time for
L those breaking lock down).
Edit: on accountability, the rich were also stopped. I can't recall the gentleman but a billionaire on his private yacht back during the biggest part of lock down bounced between states on the east coast last year.
When Queensland Police found out, they went to his yacht and forced him into hotel quarantine for the duration that everyone else is expected to.
There are exceptions. Some other billionaires and wealthy members of society have sought exceptions to quarantine at home. But even then it was with the caveat that they are willing to pay for 24/7 surveillance from security/police to ensure compliance.
You are an island. Our borders are porous. Sure, you can lock down and know that no one is sneaking across your borders. Sab Francisco locks down, and someone drives in from out of town and keeps the spread going.
The island excuse is getting old. Is there any evidence that “national border crossing by land only” was a significant source of spread, compared to community spread and air travel? On the contrary, there are non-islands that also were able to significantly slow the spread using actual lockdowns. And there were islands that did not control the spread due to not implementing lockdowns (UK). It doesn’t seem like Island is a really significant factor.
Even with that, we had controls on state lines, country boundaries and county boundaries. Literal army check points on these state lines during the harshest lock downs.
There's a reason why the Melbourne/Victorian outbreak which was the worst we've seen in Australia was kept to that city. Noting that exceptions were managed, we still allowed domestic travel for freight and similar so food and goods were still received and sent albeit with delays.
I'm not suggesting the US, Europe and other countries would been as successful as we have been. It's too difficult to say. But what I am saying, is the US and Europe didn't even fucking try.
One thing Australia does have in its favour, is every single state has its own separate state ran government. And each state held others accountable, there's been a lot of political mud slinging but our states enforced those borders and enforced them well. Where the Federal government did the same for international borders (with less success than state borders, e.g New South Wales and Federal Government made a mess of the Ruby Princess:
https://theconversation.com/ruby-princess-inquiry-blames-nsw...).
As I mentioned in my grand fathered comment. An anecdote for sure, but I know of people who literally went to Europe from the US for a holiday over the 2020/2021 Christmas. Little to no controls were used. This is why Covid was and is spreading. There's absolutely no desire for either Europe or the US to stop international travellers and Covid spreading events.
I was galled to find the UK didn't make international travel even difficult until the more/highly infectious UK Covid variant came to be and that was only in the last few months. What the fuck was happening prior to then?
I am sympathetic. Countries like Spain have been economically destroyed by Covid because they're so reliant on tourism.
Australia's regions where tourism is the largest part of the local GDP (Far North Queensland, Cairns as an example) are really struggling and even with the Federal Government printing money like there's no tomorrow. That relief is being wound down and it's now starting to bite. But even here we provided more support to business and local people more than what I've seen from other countries internationally.
It's appalling really. There just seems so little appetite from people on the ground or the countries ruling parties to commit to lock down and providing financial support to their workers so they can afford to not go to work.
But, I abhore the 'what you did wouldn't work here' rhetoric. It's bullshit. No one fucking tried.
Anyone pushing a univariate theory of virology, sociology, and economics in the context of a globalized economy of 8 billion people is pushing simpleton pseudoscience
> That 100% of the population would be prohibited from leaving their homes? What about food? What about medical emergencies? What about a house burning down or a tree falling on the roof? What if a watermain bursts?
Other countries actually addressed those questions. The most stringent example is china: They restricted everyone to their immediate neighborhood, then delivered food and other essential goods to each neighborhood in a centrally planned system. Medical emergencies were allowed to leave a neighborhood and drive to the nearest hospital.
You don't need 100%. There are parts of the world that have contained the virus (and may have eradicated it) even though essential services operated, even though people were permitted to leave their homes. Of course it can come back into those regions, but managing the spread is much less difficult once numbers are low enough for tracing. It becomes an exercise in public health regulations and targeted shutdowns.
The other question is: what are the alternatives? We didn't even have a vaccine prior to December. Now that we have a vaccine, there are the logistics of immunising everyone willing. Once the willing are immunised, we don't know whether it will be enough to stop the spread and mutation of the virus. On the other hand, ignoring the problem won't protect the economy. High absenteeism due to illness or self-imposed isolation of high risk individuals are the best we can hope for. There are far worse scenarios. Ignoring the problem won't protect the health care system. Even if it could handle the increased numbers without impacting mortality rate due to covid, many procedures could not be undertaken since the risk of infection would impact the outcome of those procedures.
The reality is that we are in a difficult situation. There is no perfect solution, simply solutions that improve outcomes. While vaccination may be a better long term solution, it is not a 100% solution. Also, the simplicity of lockdowns is about more than having time to get more prepared. It is about making the situation manageable. May it be through vaccination or isolation, creating a manageable situation is the key component to eradication.
> If we actually locked down for a month or so we might have had a shot at beating it with less long-term misery, but since covid was so politicized and government was too timid to actually do that, we half-assed it instead, and here we are a year later.
Looking at the situation from the outside, your point can't be emphasised enough. I live in a region that took the initial stay-at-home orders seriously, imposed self-isolation requirements for anyone entering the region, and got numbers low enough that tracking became a realistic tool for containment. Kids go to school, safely and with relative normalcy. Adults work at home when possible and in their workplace when necessary. Most of the restrictions we face are in the form of public health regulations rather than shutdowns. When there are shutdowns, they are targeted and of limited duration. Yes, certain parts of the economy have been hit hard. On the other hand, they would have been hit hard anyway. Accepting the pain at the start of the pandemic has also protected many other parts of the economy.
Two parts of your comment contradict each other... How is it that nobody was enforcing/following the lockdowns (so the economy could presumably function), yet pandemic ruined the economy and not lockdowns (implying lack of demand due to widespread voluntary compliance)?
My experience in WA and NV was that nobody cares. Even in "liberal" Seattle, a couple weeks after WA reopened indoor dining, we went out and couldn't find a spot in a restaurant in the entire neighborhood without a 20+ minute wait. We traveled to NV a few times in the last few months and it was always like that - everything that is allowed to be crowded, is.
Extended family in MA recently reported on the places nearby closing "due to the pandemic". Extended family in TX had a kid's birthday party at a water park. And, tangentially, MA has more cases and deaths per capita than TX...
If there were no lockdowns, the economy would have been mostly fine all along. The unemployment rate divergence across states seems to bear this out.
The economic victims were the businesses that voluntarily closed and their employees, and the ones in the few regions where business closures were enforced. The businesses that horsed around and didn't close were mostly fine, but contributed to a public health disaster.
Hopefully the lesson learned in 2020 is that actual lockdowns work (see the countries that actually did them), but if you're too timid to enforce lockdowns (like the USA), then don't send mixed messages and do it half way. We could have 1. done a lockdown and gotten on with life after a very short period of economic hardship, or 2. ignored it and let a whole bunch of people die. Somehow our government managed to pick a worse option: 3. implement unenforced and unevenly enforced measures, which both craters the economy long term AND lets a whole bunch of people die. Great work, USA.
Per capita cases/deaths in the USA are not worse than many major European countries, so I am not sure why you singled out the USA.
Moreover, I am not sure the strictness of lockdowns really correlated with outcomes - Sweden is a famous example, Belgium vs Netherlands another iirc. The only lockdowns that worked (so far) were either islands (meaning very few points of exchange that are easy to control) or totalitarian (e.g. China).
Or a little bit of both, like cops barging into somebody's home in Australia over a Facebook post. At that point I'll take liberty over safety, thank you.
This doesn’t jive with reality. My brother lives in an Asian country with very few Covid cases. It’s still not “back” to normal. Plenty of unemployed, plenty of businesses going under, plenty of government assistance for the desperate.
> I would start looking at lack of government action rather than the little they actually did.
The simple reality of it is that there was a colossal finance related economic crash, similar to 2008, that was blamed on the lockdown when the lockdown wasn't really to blame. We're still in the "dead cat bounce" phase of that crash.
Hit the nail on the head. The pain of the 2008 crash was just kicked down the road by bailing out banks. We will have to reckon with the consequences of government economic meddling at some point. Shutting down the economy was just a shove towards the cliff.
I think that we are going to really see the crash kick off whenever the eviction moratorium is lifted. There is no way that all landlords are able to service their loans. Anybody that has been patient with savings will be cleaning house snatching up cheap properties and businesses.
The eviction moratorium is overblown. Forbearance on mortgages is an extremely cheap way to keep landlords from feeling the pain, and lenders have little upside and much downside from mass selling among landlords when financing is so cheap nowadays. Anyway NY state is $61b estimated lost rent which is comparable to student loan debt (like $40b), neither of these things matter as much as people think they do.
Why? These people are already in default. The renters who need the moratorium were already “in default,” you just didn’t account for it yet. To the degree that the market has known NYC and LA renters’ rent was “too damn high” for decades now, it’s hard to see how people predictably on the verge of default (ie economic default) now having to live somewhere they can afford (ie accounting default) will cause a crash. If anything REITs prices will rise as information (ie who is really capable of paying rents) flows into the system. The renters who can actually afford to live in NYC and LA are richer, and the people who move out will be richer than many people where they’re moving to.
Another way to look at this is that CDOs were responsible for the 2008 crash. Not people taking mortgages they can’t afford.
Constantly economic crashes are the result of derivatives. My feeling is that we will find out what toxic derivative will crash the economy for real when someone takes a long look at PIPEs for SPAC transactions. Another place I would look for nasty derivatives is untaxed cash of large corporations in offshore accounts, especially of the major tech companies.
Yeah sure lol, the federal reserve is willing to float asset prices indefinitely. Neither party wants to be incumbent the one that deals with the fallout of raising interest rates. Anyone who has been patient with savings will get wrecked by inflation.
Only if you're savings is in USD. If you have the foresight to see the impending crisis you would also have the foresight to exit USD well before it happens. Savings isn't just cash.
The way I see it playing out is the government is going to try to print prosperity. Foreign governments stop buying our debt and move on to a new reserve currency without the US. If the US is willing to use force to try to maintain USD reserve status things get really ugly. Domestically this is a world of hurt for middle and low income classes. Any country that is preparing for this eventuality is going to do better. But, all countries are playing the same monetary debasement game. Just a few countries are increasing their purchase of gold and decreasing their purchase of US debt.
> We will have to reckon with the consequences of government economic meddling at some point.
Not necessarily, the Fed isn’t obligated to unwind its QE purchases. They may not even be willing to, see ‘taper tantrum’ and Oct-Dec 2018. We won’t see another bear market without another black swan.
House prices may come down when the moratorium is lifted, back to 2020 prices. There won’t be as much selling by landlords as you think, lots of them likely qualified for forbearance which makes non-payment of rent a virtual non-issue. It’ll take a 2.5-3% 10y yield to really push mortgage rates up enough to where it starts to affect house prices, or the Fed needs to stop buying MBSes, or both.
The Fed doesn't need to unwind its purchase to kill the dollar. All that needs to happen is the people lose trust in the dollar. There is nothing special about the dollar. It is worth just as much as any other national currency. Some people have already realized this. When the masses catch on it is already too late.
What percentage of landlords do you think are qualified for forbearance? It certainly isn't all of them. What percentage of landlords need to default before there is a crisis?
I wouldn't be looking at the Fed to change their practices. They believe they are in the right and can fix the economy with what they are doing.
It was not enforced at all where I live. We had a mask mandate in our county for less than a week this summer. Businesses chose what measures to take and they were all over the place. Thankfully it's a pretty well-to-do county. Only 2 counties in my state had any kind of regulation and there were no mandated business closures to my knowledge in either.
I don’t live there, but isn’t there a large portion of the student population that is returning to schools after a year? I doubt most parents in that case were setting up play dates, so in effect this has been almost a lockdown for those children.
That seems to be the exact problem - why weren't parents setting up play dates?? It's shocking to me how many families seem to think that their kid has no opportunity to talk to another child until schools open again.
Your emphasis on "unenforced" ignores the fact that there's a huge amount of people trying to do what they're told is the right thing, even without a gun to their head.
Unenforced orders are kind of a worst of all worlds where you get most of the economic harm of a lockdown (because the force of guidance and the potential of enforcement gets enough compliance to slow economic activity significantly), but very little of the public health benefit (because a critical mass of noncompliance keeps disease spreading.
>But this article is about the US, where there have been no lockdowns. Only (mostly) unenforced stay-at-home orders, (mostly) unenforced business closures, and (mostly) unenforced mask mandates. I don't see the link.
Your privileged, pedantic ignorance of the major socioeconomic problems caused by the covid 19 response perfectly illustrates OP's point.
No it doesn't. We have been doing the whole spiel for over a year now, running different experiments in different countries.
Lockdowns are not silver bullets - what drives viral spread is behaviour, not legal measures. In fact, if everybody would stay at home for 14 days, the virus dies (decays exponentially).
What actually happened is that folks made the wearing of a piece of cloth, meant to protect others, a political statement and a 'restriction of personal freedom'.
You're disingenuously ignoring that those pushing for mask wearing destroyed their credibility by earlier claiming masks didn't work. It doesn't matter what the goals of their lies were, they were lies and the costs of loss of credibility is at the heart of all of this. Spin it all you want and try to win political points on your ideological enemies all you want, nothing can change the fact that lies were knowingly told and that's the seed that started the skepticism about masks. No amount of gaslighting and screaming that it didn't happen or that it was for everyone's own good will undo that damage. Denying this only harms the credibility of the cause even more.
What does that have to do with the major socioecomic hardships that were created and exacerbated for millions of poor people around the world which are largely ignored by politicians and many other people as evidenced in this thread?
Members of the WHO covid team have estimated that lockdowns may well end up doubling world poverty.
Until you acknowledge these negative side effects, rather than narrow mindedly defaulting to american partisan politics, your response again further helps illustrate OPs point.
“Many politicians have been acting like these things don't exist while ordering more and more stringent lockdowns, giving passing condolences at best, and it borders on negligence. There needs to be a balance. Yes, avoiding the chance of death matters for you and those around you, but what is it worth if you're miserably suicidal and have lost hope as a result of it?”
I personally am very happy not to have to make decisions in this situation. Unless you have dumb luck (the pandemic is not as bad as thought originally but there was no way you could have known that) either you will get heat because businesses are dying or you will get heat because people are dying. Or both. It pretty easy to criticize what’s going on but how can you make decisions with very little input data and dire consequences either way?
Us techies want people to believe us on tech matters because we are subject matter experts but it seems we are not willing to believe what scientists in multiple countries are recommending because somehow we know better. Brazil clearly shows that ignoring the pandemic is not exactly a recipe for success. So what’s a leader to do?
One reasonable thing would be to keep businesses open as much as possible while having super strict masking and disinfection requirements. But somehow there is this correlation between people wanting businesses to be open and at the same time not wanting masks. Reminds me of the abortion situation. Abortion opponents also up often oppose sex education and contraception. So they oppose the one thing that would help their cause the most.
Credibility matters. That's the main lesson public health officials should learn from this but it appears instead they're going to endlessly keep doubling down and further destroy their already damaged credibility. If they care about public health, they'll work on regaining the trust they lost instead of playing even more games trying to trick the public into doing what they want.
What do you think is what they want and what games are they playing? It seems you don’t believe they are doing what they believe is best for the situation. don’t forget that the response is very similar in a lot of countries around the world.
> Depression, joblessness, separation of families, separation of bi-national couples, suicides, financial stress, hunger, a collapsing economy.. These things need to be taken seriously.
It seems to me as if many politicians have never taken those things seriously, before the pandemic or during it.
I've also noticed that some politicians suddenly say that they care about those problems during lockdowns, yet they haven't pushed for any legislation to actually help mitigate those deep-seated issues. It seems to me like they're just using those issues, and the suffering of others, as tools to complain about policy they don't like.
The difference is that before you could try and do something about those problems, even if politicians didn't care. Now those problems still exist, but people are forced to stay at home because keeping a low infection rate is all people care about.
There are certainly responses politicians could have made to help with mental health, loss of income, hunger and homelessness before the pandemic and during it. The problems existed before the pandemic and required a solution, and the problems still exist during the pandemic and require a solution.
The issue is that the solution to either of those problems upset those who finance politicians. There are powerful people who would rather have others starve, die from exposure and go without treatment for their mental illnesses than give them the resources they need to live dignified lives.
I see this argument more often and I don't fully understand it. No elected official (in a Western democratic society) wants lockdowns. The electorate does not want lockdowns. I do not want lockdowns. Nobody I've spoken to has said, let's keep lockdowns. Lockdowns are bad for exactly the reasons you've described. No elected official I know has said, well, the economy, children's mental health, education, joblessness - these are just minor issues, let's do lockdowns. Not at the county, district, state or national level.
We are currently in a loose-loose situation - either way people will suffer, and different (Western democratic) societies are sharing this suffering differently. E.g. in the US, the consensus has been to trade more loss of life for personal freedom than in European countries.
I do not want you to suffer. In fact, if you are in a state of distress through no fault of your own, I do want my taxpayer money to go directly into your pockets.
No elected official I know has said, well, the economy, children's mental health, education, joblessness - these are just minor issues, let's do lockdowns.
This is precisely the problem. Our leaders refuse to acknowledge that their myopic quest for safety from covid at all costs has serious repercussions. They bluster on citing data from the CDC and all, but without more than a wink at the collateral damage - all the time buoyed by sycophantic supporters chanting, "follow the science!". It's as if biology is the only science, and there's no need to consult economists.
I do not live in the US, so YMMV, but I can only re-iterate that this has absolutely not been my experience.
Have you actually spoken to somebody 'in power'? Go to the next council meeting, speak to your local mayor, call a local representative. We have been doing this for over a year now and in my experience they know very well what the toll of lockdowns is.
I think you've completely misread that comment. When it argues that none of them say 'these are just minor issues', you think it means that politicians haven't even mentioned them. I am pretty sure it is supposed to mean that politicians have been looking at them seriously and not being dismissive.
On the other side, I see many positive side-effects, we're forced to adapt, to take care of others who can't, to eliminate non-necessary things and consumption from our life, which is good
I have seen this claim multiple times, and I am yet to find any specific example of a politician who has not addressed these issues. I have seen decisions made that I disagreed with, but not because they didn't consider these issues. I have seen a lot of work at all different levels of government put into addressing them.
What would it have to look like for you to feel that politicians and others in power were taking these issues seriously?
we're starting to hear it. Fresh air (part of APM/NPR and typically much less factual than NPR news) noted that drug overdoses were up by 26% last year although I'm not sure they attributed it to the lockdown.
Every country has had plenty of people who fall through the holes in whatever assistance programs they have in place, and the US media has downplayed their downsides compared to what the US did. For example, there's been a tendency in the American press to push the UK's furlough program as better than the US approach because it kept more people off unemployment, but as far as I could tell the US enhanced unemployment was substantially better for the worst-off amongst you than UK furlough, and those who didn't benefit from furlough and had to go on unemployment - for example, because their employer went out of business, or they were between jobs, or had started a new job too recently - were much worse off here.
A lot of my peers are in a certain age that should be dating. But it's been 1 year now, and there are paranoia and concerns about safety. It's really tiring. Missing out on 2 years of developing a healthy social relationship with other people -- it really is a lost of time in a prime age.
I can't honestly imagine how bad indirect negative impact of all related to covid will be, I would say at least on scale of direct deaths / long time sufferers (although those things are obviously not directly comparable). And yet despite all these costs, most of the world failed desperately and repeatedly in handling it and the show is far from over.
Meeting the other sex is a topic on its own - all normal venues often just disappeared, especially here in Europe. No bars, no restaurants, concerts, schools, group sports, and most importantly not that much work in the office, arguably the most common place for folks to meet their significant other.
I am just a remote observer of this, we were lucky to get married in summer 2019 - one year later the marriage would be with 6 guests max if it would happen at all. But still can't wrap my head around all this no matter which angle I try to look it form.
Me, my wife and my son been through covid in February, my parents back home are going through it now and I really do have respect from this unpredictable sickness. But as damage mounts in each one of us and there is always this fleeting political promise that in next 2 months it will be much better, I am getting tired of largely inefficient yet very restrictive constraints and starting to lean more towards 'fuck it, keep basic measures mandatory everywhere and lets go back to behavior as it was before covid'. It may be just a stupid kneejerk reaction, but over 1 year wears one out
The most tiring thing isn't missing out on life, it's seeing all the people who are vagrantly choosing to ignore safety precautions and continue on with THEIR life while others are distancing, staying at home, avoiding people, etc.
By far the worst part about this has been the feeling that I have wasted a year, while others chose not to. My mistake I guess, but for everyone who chose to ignore the rules, many spread the virus.
The other day my daughter asked why I listen to tsunami alerts and head uphill when the the waves arent much bigger that a normal wave by the time they get to us (inside island). I told her that I'm not going to be the dummy that gets killed by not heeding warnings.
I think the same applies here. You do you and dont worry about all the folks taking risks to go out. Statistically, some of them are responsible for someone's death from COVID or died from COVID. I would rather not be part of that statistic just because I felt like I missed out.
Certainly years of this are not sustainable. That’s why the approach taken by a few countries to eliminate local transmission are preferable (China, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea).
This idea that people are actually going hungry due to poverty in the US is absurd. A full day's worth of calories can be had for less than $3. And I'm not just talking about going to McDonalds and ordering off the dollar menu, which is certainly an option occasionally. I mean real food. https://www.upstart.com/blog/lowest-cost-per-calorie-foods
And in fact, it is firmly established that it's the poorest people in America who tend to be the fattest. And what free school lunches often solve is not hunger but neglect. There are lots of shitty parents who don't care enough to deposit lunch money in the school account or pack lunch for their kid, or who make appalling dietary choices for their children.
I wish people would have a little more skepticism and apply some independent common sense when consuming statistics. People getting food from food banks or consuming free lunch doesn't mean that they are otherwise going hungry. It means they are accepting something offered for free. There are myriad, complicated reasons why those patterns would change. But it's a strong, unjustified conclusion to say it's because they would otherwise go hungry.
I used to wonder this too, and it's a much more nuanced (like everything!) problem than just money/calories. But the point you make is more or less addressed in any literature or documentation on food issues in the US should you care to find it. I suppose here's the modern starting point for most people engaging with a topic they don't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
There are other factors besides money at play. I only know the basics so I'm sure someone can do a better job, but a few examples:
* Food deserts. Many low income neighborhoods don't have grocery stores, so residents would need to take public transport both ways with all of their groceries.
* Building on above, it takes time to cook your own food. Especially if you're riding the bus to the store, and to work, and to pick up the kids, etc.
* Education. Many low income people are taught mcdonalds is the cheapest food, and so thats what they buy. Can you blame someone for something they do not know?
* Financial planning and decision making. Same as above.
Its difficult for us to understand the low income situation. A family member of mine is a counselor at a high school for kids who get expelled. All these kids want to be lawyers, police officers, or government workers when they grow up because they've literally never seen a white collar worker in real life. They don't know that data science exists, much less step 1 in getting there.
Food deserts are a matter of lack of demand, not supply. Where poor people want fresh food the market is quite willing to sell it to them.
> THE GEOGRAPHY OF POVERTY AND NUTRITION:
FOOD DESERTS AND FOOD CHOICES ACROSS THE UNITED STATES
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.
Supply/demand is a feedback system. Both are the cause. When trying to change a feedback system, you don't look for a root cause because it's literally an infinite loop. Instead you either look for a way to break the loop, or look for a variable you can change that has the best ROI.
In the case of a food desert within a residential area, it's probably a lot easier to boost demand by artificially increasing supply, rather than the other way around.
Thankfully the researchers considered that point. From the above abstract
> Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand.
On the topic more generally
> Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
> School and Residential Neighborhood Food Environment and Diet Among California Youth
> No robust relationship between food environment and consumption is found. A few significant results are sensitive to small modeling changes and more likely to reflect chance than true relationships.
If all of your money is going to rent, health bills have bankrupted you, and you don't have the energy and clarity of mind that comes with healthy food and a stable home, you're expecting such a person to have the mental energy required to cost-optimize on $3/day?
Cost-optimization is a hard problem, which is why companies spend a lot of money for consultants to do it, and programmers spend a lot of time figuring out ways to optimize CPU/RAM, for example. So yes, it's actually very easy to end up in a situation where you would go hungry without food banks, even in America.
If you can't make the decision to spend your government food stamps card to buy food to eat, then I don't know what society can do for you. What do you want? Prepared food delivered to the home of everyone who lacks the "energy and clarity of mind" or the "mental energy" to make such a simple decision?
Believe it or not, America is a welfare state and while not as generous as Europe, no one is lacking for $3 to buy food unless they are blowing their government money on something they shouldn't be.
"Lived experience" is just a fancy word for "anecdote". I can also point to the lived experience of millions of Americans that enjoy dinner every day (myself included), and we'd be no better off in understanding what the truth is.
I can't help but feel confused how the US can spend so much per capita on social welfare, yet I hear all those horror stories about medical costs, people having to work multiple jobs etc.
Because our medical (and other professional) cartels are powerful. A massive amount of that money is literally directly transferred to the world's least-efficient healthcare industry. The vast majority of that money is never given to people.
Believe it or not, the United States has a higher median income PPP adjusted after taxes and transfers than pretty much every European nation; it's ranked #3 in the world:
Also, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security, ranked higher than Canada, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Australia (to name a handful): https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index
Only a small fraction of those experiencing food insecurity are homeless. Not every solution needs to cover every single person in order to be valuable. Solutions for feeding the homeless are different than the solutions for feeding a single parent with five children living in social housing.
Isn't this just embarrassing? A country that sent people to the moon decades ago and spends 2,600 USD per inhabitant per year on their military can't even feed their people today?
Like the only reason that children get shamed for not having money for school lunch is because some people like it that way. There's no lack of resources.
USA stopped being a democracy a long time ago. It is a country run by large corporations and billionaires. If you want to experience well functioning democracies then you need to look at European countries like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
It's widely considered that if you feed people for free, they will have no incentive to work. They will live off of your effort, have more children who will learn from their parents that work isn't required, and possibly commit crimes to obtain more. There is a genuine fear that they will literally lead more comfortable lives than you do by working.
Again, I suspect you think I'm exaggerating, or that this is an extreme minority opinion. This is a very common opinion among Americans -- effectively universal among conservatives, and significant among progressives.
We don't choose better because the things that you think of as "better" are supported by only a minority of Americans. Most Americans think it will make us lazy, weak, and stupid.
This is like the ultimate example of this, coincidentally at the very beginning of the pandemic (before anyone could know how bad it would be) the previous administration proposed to cut SNAP, or what is commonly called food stamps by ~30%:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/presidents-202...
It would also make work requirements for adults to be eligible.
I believe. You can ask them what's their plan for a moment when their job position gets replaced by a robot or an AWS Lambda function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUuWWnfRsk
I don't want to speak for the other poster, but school lunch programs are a pretty stupid place to exercise this preference.
Kids do better in school when they aren't hungry, there, we don't need to discuss what incentives their parents should have because there is a good reason to feed them.
I think that a guarantee of having enough money to feed yourself is better than just about any other option. I think people individually and collectively benefit from others holding jobs, but they can also benefit from unpaid activities like family caregiving. I think the idea that having jobs is good but nobody would do it if they didn't have to, and therefore it is good to threaten people with hunger until they are motivated enough to get one, is absolutely terrible.
they can also benefit from unpaid activities like family caregiving
And creating art, and starting new software companies, and volunteering. There are lots of things that are worth doing but that nobody will pay for (or won't pay enough to live on). And people want to do them, but instead get pushed into literally any kind of work -- even work that we'd be better off automating or simply doing without.
I think the point is that people want to be useful, especially if they're good at something. If people can't work (for whatever reason), we really shouldn't be trying to make them. That just burdens their coworkers/peers with their lack of productivity and/or bad attitudes.
We need to abandon these protestant values because they're not doing anyone any good.
> “It got really ugly,” said Silvia Baca Garcia, 33, a Phoenix resident from Honduras who scrambled to feed her three children and granddaughter during months of unemployment caused by the viral outbreak. “It had been a lot easier when my two boys were in school and getting their hot breakfasts and lunches everyday.”
It's not explicitly stated, but many of these examples are very, very likely to be non-legal immigrants, who do not qualify for SNAP aka food stamps. That is a huge political hairball. I'd be pretty surprised if many citizens fell into a similar category.
(with older adults I'm not sure what's going on, but my guess is communication or service literacy problems are a large part of it. ie, just getting people registered who don't know that they are eligible.)
Why would that example not be someone on food stamps? SNAP is not that much money, and it's obviously being stretched a lot further when she suddenly had an extra 40 meals per week to provide. This affected tons of citizens - that's why the USDA approved and funded school lunch replacements, like central pickup points and in some places lunch deliveries.
That same country is ranked higher in food security than several other high quality of life industrial nations in the world: https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index
Did you read the same article I did? Because it seemed to be talking about all the programs that exist that feed people. Is your issue that sometimes private groups do it, and sometimes the government does it, and you would just rather have the government do it all?
We do fund programs to feed people - for example the federal food stamps program, which is formally known as SNAP (https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assista...). Around 10.5% of households in the US experience food insecurity, a term that includes both households with uncertainty but no disruption to eating patterns (for example households successfully relying on federal food assistance programs), and also households that experienced disruption to food patterns at some point in the year (at least once). The definitions of these terms are at the USDA website (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...), and there we see 4.1% experienced "very low food security" in 2019, meaning they experienced disruption to normal eating patterns at least once during the year.
SNAP covers 11% of Americans, and its covered benefits were expanded by 40% at the start of the pandemic (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...) - so it's not like no effort was put into trying to manage food insecurity under the pandemic. However, we don't have very precise metrics on how well people are covered by SNAP. Because the definition of "very low food insecurity" includes those with disruption to eating patterns at least once in a given year (from self-reported surveys), we don't have measures for sustained malnutrition or hunger.
The graphic in the article is telling. While the coronavirus is shocking in the severity with which the lack of response has impoverished people, it is only a 1.5x worsening of the situation! This tells a story of longstanding institutional neglect that allows millions to remain in a state of impoverishment indefinitely.
Moreover, the chart shows that food distribution was growing prior to the pandemic, which could mean the problem was worsening (or more locations appeared, or more food was distributed per capita).
Impoverishment of lower classes is the direct result of monetary debasement. There is simply no way to move up when what little you earn buys less each year. Monetary debasement is also why we have seen an increase in the wealth gap.
If money was truly debased, you'd see wages and product prices rise. The asset classes we've seen increase in price are stocks, bonds, healthcare, education, and property. What we haven't seen increase are food, consumer goods, or wages. You can say that the currency is being debased, but the numbers are the same for 2010 as they in 2020. The issue is that there simply is no way to accumulate wealth on the amount earned -- there's nothing left after expenses. Inflation or deflation wouldn't help this.
Wages haven't grown with monetary supply inflation. Every dollar earned buys less each year and wages stay mostly the same. Without debasement what you earn buys mostly the same amount of stuff the next year. Then you are able to save and count on your money actually being worth something when you need it. We have had over 100 years of debasement that increased in rate after 1971. You need to look at a longer time frame to see how badly we have all be fucked.
We haven't had obvious consumer price inflation because the money supply is hitting the financial class first. Instead we have seen asset prices increase rapidly. With the stimulus checks every citizen has had a taste of what has been happening with banks for a century. But, we have had price inflation. Instead of raising the price at the store most manufacturers have opted to reduce package sizes for the same price. They didn't do this for your health. The price creep up is slow enough that it can be hard to notice. I am not sure how old your are. Think back of how much a dollar bought you when you were young. Can you buy those same items for a dollar now? How about 5 dollars? This is the pernicious result of debasing the currency.
The US is the most wealthy country in the world. The price increases in fundamentals and stagnation in wages reflects the growing power of the upper classes. If wealth was evenly distributed across the labor force, each worker would make $140k per year. If distributed evenly across the population, it would be closer to $70k. Instead it's closer to a $50k median wage with a huge tail of extremely poor people.
This doesn't even approach the idea that money and debt are fake anyway and are political choices that have been chosen to impoverish weaker citizens.
The growing power of the upper classes largely the result of the way currency debasement is performed. Banks get the money first. They get to spend the fresh money before anybody even gets a taste or prices have a chance to catch up. It is a wealth transfer from the lower classes to the upper class. Without debasement and government meddling the playing field is much more level.
It's not a coincidence that a number of New Deal programs were focused on meeting the basic needs of kids (e.g. school lunches and the CCC) and the elderly (e.g. Social Security and Medicare).
in history, it is also one of the first needs people who want to gain power deliver. (think of gangsters feeding communities, or revolutionaries establishing schools in occupied territory).
Certainly people may be reluctant to visit grocery stores or senior centers because of covid and school lunch programs may be unavailable when schools are closed.
However, there is also a general economic crisis due to people losing their employment or business income due to the pandemic and lockdowns. People whose income has suddenly been lowered have trouble affording all sorts of basic necessities: food, clothing, household supplies, rent, utilities, health care...
Unemployment insurance can help but it may not be enough. Rent has been mitigated somewhat due to anti-eviction policies but those will expire eventually and the rent will come due.
Yeah this one really tears at the heart strings. Google "food insecurity charity" or Charity Navigator or Charity Watch to find one you trust if you'd like to help.
None of these issues will be improved, much less solved, through shaming and moralizing, hoping 330M individuals will make charitable contributions and recycle.
Give a can of food while doing your Christmas shopping so the super-corps can pay less tax and claim it gives to charity.
Just another systemic problem pushed to the individual, and swept under the rug.
Through all of history, charity has never been enough to solve those issues. It would be wrong to think that your charity alone is enough to solve those problems.
However, while the solutions to those problems aren't being implemented, charity can help soften the blow. It would be correct to think that your charity helps somewhat, but much, much more needs to be done.
Get involved with charity, but also get involved in policy at all levels, local to federal.
To give an example about why this is important, several places I've lived have criminalized things like addiction, homelessness, feeding people who need food, and community gardens.
It was local and state activism that made so that if an overdose was called in via 911, everyone who helped the victim didn't get arrested as a result. That stopped the trend of people not getting help for overdoses, as well as disturbing trends like overdose victims being left on the side of the road.
Local and state activism helped get affordable housing measures passed, as well.
>shaming and moralizing, hoping 330M individuals will make charitable contributions and recycle
My response was neither meant to shame or moralize, but rather to give people who decide "I'd like to do something right now" a way to do it and get maximum benefit from their contribution.* Should there be other and better responses? Undeniably. Will that prevent me from responding in the meantime and telling others how they may also respond if they want to? No, it will not.
* Before anyone gets pedantic I mean maximizing a charitable contribution's impact by going to an org that uses the majority of the donation to help their target community rather than being sucked up by administrative overhead.
Which is fine. A good leader is one who will endure some discomfort in order to benefit those they lead. Doing the right thing despite knowing it will keep you from getting re-elected is something a good leader does. Those whose greatest goal is to cling to power no matter the damage to the people they lead are not good leaders.
As an aside, without comment on this particular issue: we really need to stop using words like "crisis", "emergency", "justice", etc. I am very much desensitized to these words from their overuse, especially since very often the terms are used in a hyperbolic fashion for maximal effect when pushing political goals. I find them to be imprecise and unhelpful.
Did anyone in the comments even read the article or did they just skim the title and decide to chide America since that's so du jour right now?
The gist of the article is that an enormous crisis created strains on connecting people and free meals, but various entities stepped up to the plate and came up with flexible solutions (school districts delivering meals on school buses or making food available for pickup, cities paying restaurants to feed seniors, expansion of federal funding, food banks and churches expanding their food operations, etc.).
The title could've been "US system of free and subsidized meals bends but does not break", but that just doesn't get clicks, does it? Negative title creates negative emotions, which leads to negative thought patterns (America sucks!!), and then the cycle continues.
Many politicians have been acting like these things don't exist while ordering more and more stringent lockdowns, giving passing condolences at best, and it borders on negligence. There needs to be a balance. Yes, avoiding the chance of death matters for you and those around you, but what is it worth if you're miserably suicidal and have lost hope as a result of it?
I know this has been said before, but I feel the need to keep saying it, as it's still a problem to this day.