One area where we're not doing well and it's causing real pain is home/apt building. No one could credibly disagree with the observation that we have a real housing crisis. Yet that's exactly where the current economy is coming up most short. Home builder's can't build (because they can't sell) in volume. And apartment construction has fallen off a cliff owing to the doubling of debt costs combined with equity having run to the sidelines (I'm a large scale apartment developer.)
So just when we need a large supply boost, and the YIMBY movement is making real headway on the entitlements front, the factors required for a big housing supply increase have run into a head wall in the form of the current economy.
I came here to say exactly this. And also to note that the drop in Median sale price does not necessarily mean home prices are going down, it may also (or entirely) reflect the mix of homes being sold.
Supporting Noah's comments about how the upper-middle feels, I believe that many feel trapped in their homes - with their home buying/upgrading plans frozen because homes and the debt to buy them are too damn expensive... See Bruce's comments.
"And also to note that the drop in Median sale price does not necessarily mean home prices are going down, it may also (or entirely) reflect the mix of homes being sold."
Typically, high end markets take a lot longer to drop than lower end. Instead, the sales just dry up. This is because high end sellers are not forced to sell as much as lower end sellers, so there continues to be a market at the lower end which changes the mix skewing lower.
Do you have a source for home builders not being able to sell? I would've guessed that home builders are selling even more now since home owners aren't willing to sell due to their locked in mortgage rates. Therefore, home builders are making up a larger % of home sells and coming out net ahead.
"Home builder's can't build (because they can't sell) in volume."
If there is such high demand - and there is in a number of areas of the country, how can this be true, unless the building costs (land, materials, labor, misc.) exceed what the demand is capable of paying (taking into account borrowing costs)? Is there an overabundance of brand new homes/condos/apartments sitting empty and unsold/rented out there?
Good points. I think the missing piece here is theres plenty of affordable homes they are just too small or in areas people don't want to live. There may be a shortage of relevant workers too- not enough construction workers in comparison with desk jobs.
As to your last point, I'm having a fancy pants storage shed built on our property. Took me a few years to find someone to do it since is a small job compared with building a house or large remodel. The crew I was finally able to hire a few weeks ago speak no English, but the google translation app solves a lot of problems, and my bits and pieces of school years Spanish is all coming back to me. And, they seem to be good builders for basic framing, siding, roof, doors and windows, wherever they learned their skills (these guys are in their 20s).
Coming back to this one year later. Apartment starts have in fact declined substantially. I'm in the business in a substantial way and so was familiar with what was going on last year in the industry, whereas the data lags of course.
This is now reflected in actual apartments starts: from almost 600k units in 2022 to under 400K units at the time the study was published in early 2024.
And knowing the industry, I'm aware that starts in 2025 will be off even further.
This is the consequence of the "current economy" that Noah asked about last year. "Bad" for apartment housing was my answer then, and is my answer today esp now that the data is coming in.
I'm not sure it is more on point when Joshua literally wrote "construction" — but in any case, even the starts numbers you link are higher than they were in every month from 1989 through 2018 except for June 2015!
Would seem like progress being made on this front but Americans still by and large want to live in low density housing and that's always going to create tremendous upward pressure on housing prices. Maybe over time these norms change as millenials get priced out of single family homes.
I remember when my credit card rate was 21% (early 90's) and mortgage rates 8%. The thing is that they aren't static. The rates go up and go down. If fewer people take out mortgages, banks will lower the rates.
“If people take out fewer mortgages, banks will lower rates.” - This simply isn’t true. Mortgages have to both be profitable (I.e. charge more interest than banks pay depositors) and pay something competitive to other places banks can lend (government treasuries, corporate bonds, etc.). Demand for mortgages has very little affect on market interest rates.
I think this misses an important point, which is that while INFLATION has gone down, PRICES haven't. Now, I know: inflation going down doesn't mean prices go down. Prices going down would be DEFLATION, and that's bad. Yes yes yes. But most people don't get this. For most people, inflation means "My groceries cost 15% more than they did two years ago!" And groceries still cost 15% more than they did two years ago. So inflation hasn't gone away. Again, I'm not endorsing that thought process, I'm just saying it's very common.
Sure. But if real purchasing power is higher than before, then it means that people's paychecks go farther under the new prices than under the old prices.
Handing out 15 pct of GDP between Dec 2020 and Mar 2021 in an economy whose supply the government was constricting and generating more inflation than real growth was those handouts was truly a genius move
A bit of inflation for everyone is much easier to recover from than unemployment for some fractions of the population. Of course, the latter is much easier for most people to ignore.
I still think the helicopter drop in 2021 should have been more focused on Americans with less savings. An easy way to have made it more focused on people with less in the bank would have been to do a $1 trillion reparations package that would have sent dollars to Native Americans and descendants of American slaves which are two groups of Americans with very little savings.
Yes. But groceries are still 15% more expensive, and that feels bad. Again: I'm not saying this is RATIONAL. I'm saying that this is what people are actually complaining about.
Yeah, when I see people talking on Reddit or Threads or X it is always "chicken breasts cost how much!?" and "fast food at Arby's is $21 now!?"
See this reddit post from today as just one of many many examples in the genre:
"How are people even affording groceries right now?
Tip/advice 💁♀️
Everything has gotten so freaking expensive. I find myself going to three different stores just to try to get decent prices. Meat/chicken is the only thing I “splurge” on anymore - as I’m buying from hyvee or Kroger instead of Walmart.
I feel like I am spending 70-100 for just me a week. And then I always have a few meals of eating out a week.
I read that and posted in it. First of all, I always went to a few different stores to save money. There is a tool called a price book I always used (or can just use an app for it too I guess but everyone's price book will vary depending on what they eat/keep in the pantry). Anyhow, I don't need to use it much anymore because week after week, the items/best prices become memorized/second nature. I almost always buy loss leaders in the quantity possible and necessary for the next sale and produce according to season. The prices at some places are very high (like Wegmans). I also utilize a food buying coop to keep my budget down. I feel some places will have higher prices so long as they can get away with it and it is up to the consumer to let their wallet go walking and allow them to either adjust their prices or go out of business.
It’s totally rational. People are still poorer after a major inflationary event until their wages catch up with the inflation (which is still continuing albeit abated). That wages start to grow again doesn’t mean that everything is back to normal.
I find actual price levels to be a lot more real, and the reaction to them more rational, than extrapolating people’s feelings from cherry-picked charts. But that is just me.
But, there is more going on there than just inflation.
The following comments invite correction. This is just what I've heard from the news.
Part of the increase in the cost of any chicken product is the bird flu. Producers had to destroy so many chickens that it had an influence on the cost and that cost will remain high until those chickens are replaced through new generations.
The weather and fires have destroyed so much land that also affects costs. Draughts affecting grain crops will affect flour and so bread prices will be higher.
Labor losses caused by migrants not being able to cross the borders will affect how much produce will be harvested before it spoils in the fields. The work is hard and Americans aren't lining up to do the work.
The Texas' war on Mexico destroyed the avocado market. (I love avocados).
The supply chains and what's happening globally will affect food costs in the cold months as well.
I think this is why there is a lag effect. People are mad about how expensive eggs are now. As inflation moderates, they'll get used to the fact that eggs cost $Y now and tend to forget that they used to cost $X a couple years back.
This is why I don't think it matters for Biden what people think about the economy *right now.* It only matters what they think in Nov 2024.
Where are the raises? Instead, folks are going to see pay cuts due to increasing taxes, inflation (another tax) and job loses. You’re looking at the past. Look over the horizon. Commercial real estate, escalating job loss, tightening of bank loans, and increasing criminal behavior. San Francisco a prime example.
This comment is almost the definition of vibes vs reality. Sadly, part of our negative polarization has lead to people wishcasting for the worst possible economic outcomes. That more than anything else is probably driving the narrative.
Real wages are rising which is very straightforward. Employees receive salary/wage increases greater than increases in prices. Wasn't this way earlier when inflation was +9% and even higher. However, it's that way now. Plus, if an employee adapts to, say, become proficient at using AI, not even programming it, that employee's labor is much more valuable and she'll get paid even more.
Violent never went up in the first place and is still below 2019 levels and low compared to similar cities. Property crime has remained the same (high compared to other similar sized cities).
But who is responsible for crime in big cities. Generally the mayor. But the biggest cause of crime, seems to me, is two things: illegal addictive drugs and a proliferation of guns of all kinds. While drug smuggling could rest with lax laws promoted by Democrats, the gun problem sits squarely in the Republican camp.
That means the median person's paycheck is going farther. By definition one half of the people are doing worse than the median. And almost all of them have the right to vote.
I often write succinctly and choose to leave out nuances, but I think we need an economy that works for more than 60% of the people. The bottom 25% of America is really suffering.
Let's assume that you are correct. In that case, the American lower classes are moving from a super awful experience to a very awful experience. If your annual income is $10,000 dollars, a 25% raise brings you up to $12,500. If your annual income is $15,000 dollars, a 25% increase doesn't get you to $20,000.
I consistently find that well educated people with numeracy, the kind of people who read this blog, who almost always have well paying jobs, simply cannot understand what it means to be poor. And, unfortunately that includes Noah. His focus is on the median. But there are two wings off the median— the wealthy who don't need our concern, and the poor who don't receive it.
I had a friend who was living on a $700 disability check + $180 In food stamps. Then they reduced his food stamp allowance to $80, because he started receiving Medicaid. He was recovering from cancer. We both thought that eating food is an important part of recovering from cancer.
You have to grant that the initial inflation period ate their entire wage increase, which kept them from falling back under the inflation but didn't give them any "breathing room". Landlords driving up rent costs ate whatever advantage they've gained in wage increases now. The housing market for investors is looking for greater profits and is making changes to the current housing stock that makes renting and housing purchases more expensive.
A car at much higher prices with a loan at double or triple the old interest rate? A 250,000 house with a 7 pct mortgage instead of 3 percent? Groceries?
Paychecks, yes, but (as indeed alluded to in your article), what about existing wealth? While mediated by a credit card because it's more convenient and offers more protections than cash, for all intents and purposes, I pay for groceries (and other purchases) out of my bank balance, not on credit - and inflation doesn't appear to have a uniformly positive effect on wealth held in equities (and obviously has a negative effect on the value of bonds other than, say, I-Bonds which are purchase-amount limited).
If you're accumulated assets, inflation would seem to have a high likelihood if being well approximated by "stuff costs more and you have the same amount of nominal dollars."
What percentage of people have seen their purchasing power go up though? Our expenses have inflated by significantly more than the CPI-U would indicate and our wages haven't kept up. That's not exactly surprising as CPI is not a real measure of any one person and we are somewhat higher on the income scale, but we have a huge advantage in that our housing costs have been more or less locked in with a low interest rate. The people at the lower end of the income spectrum who have had >5% annual wage increases I feel like are hit even worse by inflation. Anecdotes are not data, but it seems like more people are a little behind in purchasing power than not.
For people with financial assets that they keep up with fairly regularly, they maybe are being impacted by their drop in real wealth, which I think people tend to measure against the peak. Lots of people saw their wealth increase early through covid before the inflation hit, and even though the rise in asset value and inflation were mostly related and arguably should be seen as essentially happening at the same time, people feel like things were going well and they were "rich", and then inflation made them much poorer rather than thinking they were doing ok, then COVID spending drove a lot of paper wealth and also drove a lot of inflation that mostly netted out, and now they're still doing ok.
According to Atlanta Fed the median wage increase among the bottom 25% of workers (by income) and the next 25% of workers (so bottom half) is above inflation.
So we would think at least half of the bottom half had wage growth > inflation the last year, by a good amount.
Median wage growth in both quartiles since inflation started rising fast had kept up with prices.
So someone getting the median wage growth for low wage workers in 2020, 2021, 2022 and so far in 2023 has kept pace with inflation since 2020. Barely.
wages aren't keeping up with their monthly costs. They're not buying different stuff or getting better stuff it's just costing more for the same stuff. Think about replacing a tire. Think about the cost of air conditioning if you actually have it.
If the top 10% of earners earn as much as the bottom half of workers combined then -2% real wage growth for the top 1/10th can counter +2% real wage growth for the bottom half, etc.
Median wage growth for 0-25% (percentile, by income) and 25-50% of workers has exceeded inflation for a while. It's also matched inflation since the pandemic.
Median even of a smaller slice isn't everyone of course, your mileage may vary, but it is the median experience of just those workers.
Not according to the data I've read and is commonly reported. Those persons could leave their current roles and get hired elsewhere at higher rates most likely. Of all those you listed, how many do you know personally and know they've asked for higher pay? How many are union? I mean, if you don't ask, that's on the employee.
I wonder how much this is tied to the long extended period of quite low inflation (generally well below the 2% target). So, everyone got used to prices not changing much at all. So, when they went up, it was a bigger shock. Look at the inflation rate under Reagan in the 80s - noticeably higher on a regular basis than right now), but folks sort of got used to it.
And the price rises hit faster and quicker than wages going up. So, the period of unhappy dislocation.
Couple all that with the comments on upper middle class where the mindset is still that housing prices (and wealth) keep going up. Big burst in "housing wealth" in the last 5 years before now
Good observation. It's as if we experienced ~30 years of inflation in ~3 years or feels that way rather. Of course, that low inflation rate for much of the ~30 years was due to globalization which isn't entirely dead while it's pretty close.
Globalization isn't dead at all but it isn't expanding at the rate it had been. A very high proportion of our consumer products still come from overseas. That isn't globalization I don't know what is.
Given the threat China poses the USA as it seems every authoritarian regime with a modicum of power becomes, having them make consumer products as we move manufacturing to the USA and friendly countries, makes a lot of sense to me. I'm nearly certain, if I had to guess, that's the strategy in order not to decimate their economy built up these past ~30 years through globalization quickly; have them create non-geostrategically critical things such as consumer products and we'll create the geostrategically-for-national-security things here and at friendly countries. Hope it's enough to sate Xi for the time being, allow them to stand on their own and increase their domestic consumption, serve it as a sort of developed country. "Sort of" because I think we forget just how many persons in China live on poverty level incomes.
I've been looking and all the household goods that are in my house now were made in China. You have to really work hard not to replace household goods with something that is not made in China and don't count on Amazon to tell you where something was made.
I suggest you read Janet Yellen's comments in China on the issue of globalization (although she does not use the term.
She acknowledges that globalization defined as every country on Earth sourcing widely, and no one depending completely on home manufacture, is here to stay.
In fact Summers and others back then were pushing for massive fiscal spending to cure “deflation” and others pushed MMT…..and then we saw the fruits of that incontinence. Whoops
The Bush/Cheney regime shows MMT works as long as you pretend to oppose MMT. So for MMT to work you can never say that you support MMT because then people will expect you to print them dollars.
Why economists will not acknowledge that the economy is good I have no idea, but I know why the average person has a problem.
Inflation is deeply troubling—many of us spend a lot of energy trying to find low prices, and when prices go out of control, like $5 eggs and $5 gas, it's a shock to the system. And when economist tell us inflation is over, the prices are still way higher than what we were used to. And our wages probably have not gone up correspondently.
There's a similar problem with the term "recession." When a recession ends, that only means that the economy has stopped getting worse. It doesn't mean that all the damage done by the recession, especially lost jobs, has been repaired. The average person who's gone through a recession is still suffering significantly when the recession has been proclaimed “over."
Incidentally, the people who have the privilege to announce that an inflation or a recession is over, all have well paid secure jobs. That fact shows in their clothing and the serene look on their faces. That's why ordinary folks have trouble buying it.
What people forget is that inflation dropping does not also have to correlate with prices deflating eg negative percentages...they can just stop rising further at 0%, or slow their pace of increase eg 2-3%.
Especially when compared to other nations, the United States managed the Covid impact on the economy very well. Both the Biden Administration and The Fed deserve kudos for the job they have done. They will be taught in future economics textbooks.
The impact of the lockdowns created mass devastation and destroyed the health of hundreds and thousands of people, not to mention the low-trust society that resulted from the isolation. It could be argued that the economic shutdown was actually more devastating than covid itself.
I don't see this. It's not actually possible to do a counter-factual assessment of the damage that a no-lockdown policy would have caused, but the initial lockdowns appear to have had a strong impact reducing fatalities caused by combinations of Covid and hospital overload. The fatality rate for Covid declined substantially, which you'd have to count as saving hundreds of thousands of lives and as many case of serious/chronic illness, so holding that the lockdowns destroyed hundreds and [of?] thousands of lives tells me you're looking a statistics I haven't seen. What are they?
"Mass devastation" certainly does not describe anything remotely like life in the midwestern state I live in. Perhaps there are other areas of the US that are post-apocalyptic.
I agree that in retrospect, school closures went on longer than they should have, and created unnecessary learning loss, which was a serious error.
Agreed, other then school closures most "lockdowns" were "you can't sit down to eat in your favorite restaurant anymore" style restrictions. That caused some issues for sure but mass devastation and destroying lives? I don't see it
So what about people living in abusive situations with their spouses who couldn't leave their houses? People whose medical treatments were delayed? People who couldn't visit their dying loved ones in the hospital? People living in close and uncomfortable quarters with roommates? People with obesity and disabilities and who couldn't go to the gym or physical therapy? Just because a demographic is invisible doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Are we looking at society on a larger scale here or just zooming into the affluent?
Like I wrote there were no lockdowns like that in the United States, you are thinking of China maybe? If people couldn't get medical care obviously that's bad but I'm not going to pretend people living in uncomfortable conditions is having their lives "destroyed"
Did you live in NYC or SF during the lockdowns? Perhaps you weren't in either of these cities. Now imagine any victim of spousal abuse having nowhere to go during this period. Did you try getting medical care for a serious illness during this time? Now imagine people who were already next to death trying to get medical care for something besides covid during this time. Tell the mother who couldn't see her son dying of cancer in the hospital that her life wasn't destroyed. Tell the people who were evicted from their homes as the cities were shut down that their lives weren't destroyed. When you shut down the economy you shut down human life. Not everyone had the resources to pull through.
And in fact the US did a much better job of mitigating the economic harms to small business owners and their former employees than many other countries did.
But more people died from Covid than in other advanced countries. North Carolina got the balance the best which means Florida could have had 20,000 fewer Covid deaths with a strong economy had they just done the mitigation measures implemented in NC.
NY had 900 deaths per day from spread prior to mitigation measures and never got close to that over the course of the pandemic once mitigation measures were implemented. So that’s essentially a 9/11 over 3 days in NYC without 15 days to slow the spread.
Not quite sure what prior point you're addressing Pangolin, but if it's the appropriate use of "mass devastation" I think New York in those days might justify it. Ms. Haywire was using the term to characterize the consequences of the mitigation measures that brought an end to the city's initial crisis.
The initial mitigation measures were appropriate under the circumstances. Just allowing time for the medical community to develop best practices for treatment saved tens of thousands of lives which meant 15 days to slow the spread was necessary.
Obviously Hawaii did the best with mitigation measures because it doesn’t have an interstate running through it and so it could test people arriving on planes. The Florida Keys shows that just being difficult to travel to greatly mitigated spread of Covid and so travel restrictions definitely reduced Covid death rate.
I personally believe the states that found the best balance were the few red states with Democratic governors that continued to allow cities in their states to implement mitigation measures which reduced spread which can be seen clearly when comparing Covid death rates with the adjacent states they are generally compared to. So Florida could have had a significantly lower Covid death rate had DeSantis done what Cooper did in NC.
I'm not sure we can trust numbers coming out of China or other authoritarian countries given their general opaqueness. Still, we did have a unique problem in this country handling the crisis.
Good point, Slaw. Our response was terrible. But John E is right that accurate numbers would probably lower (in the good sense) our comparative profile seriously. It's not just authoritarian countries like Russia and Belarus: low income countries such as India and many African states clearly had vastly inadequate reporting infrastructure. One thing the US seems to have done exceedingly well is to count and centrally report cases and deaths.
But a disproportionately ineffective response doesn't equate to "mass devastation," as can be proven by walking around whatever city or town you're in. what was terrible about the US response? And bear in mind that this non-existent mass devastation, according to Rachel Haywire's comment starting this string, was not caused by Covid, but by lockdowns.
How is it non-existent? Please see above. People could not see their dying loved ones in the hospital or go to the gym when they were disabled. They could not leave the house to get away from their abusive spouses or roommates. A woman was stopped in the streets of San Francisco for jogging. NYC businesses closed, all at once, without any real warning. Hospitals that were treating non-covid related illnesses were overloaded and postponed treatments for thousands of people in need. These people may be considered outliers because they have a low SES, but we need to account for the full picture.
Yes. People could not see dying loved ones (especially the case in nursing homes and hospitals, as I well know) or go to the gym. Restaurants closed. And now I know a woman in San Francisco was stopped for jogging. (In my town, women still fled abusive husbands and were taken in by the local shelter, but perhaps not where you live.) If you consider these things to be "mass devastation" I have to wonder what term you would use for cases where there is truly mass devastation, such as the destruction of Bakhmut.
And what caused these things--apart from the jogger, perhaps--was not lockdowns but Covid. If people had visited dying loved ones some proportion would have spread the disease to the loved ones of others; if they had gone to the gym they would have carried the disease home to loved ones; if dining had continued as usual the disease would have spread to more people than it did. Making those avoidable deaths happen in addition to those that did would have brought us closer and closer to true mass destruction.
And as someone who had to postpone treatment because of Covid I have to wonder, what does SES have to do with this?
Slaw, Am I wrong here? To say that something is not "mass devastation" does not suggest in any way that it is therefore not an issue.
If you want to set the bar for "mass devastation" at one million lives lost in a country of 300 million then I can only accept the use of the term. For me the term connotes Hiroshima or Fukushima.
And recall that Ms. Haywire was not talking about deaths, she was talking about lockdowns.
This view ignores that there were no actual “lockdowns” in the US and that business would have still fallen off a cliff in a world where the US governments just ignored Covid and did business as usual. It might have been over more quickly, and probably with significantly more deaths, but it isn’t like people watching what NYC went through on the news weren’t going to change their own behaviors in the aggregate.
Too many schools stayed shut for too long, causing significant social and academic learning challenges for kids. A primary reason was that indoor air quality was not properly addressed both physically and informationally. Many schools should have been opened back up much earlier than they were with relatively low cost. My spouses school reopened for half-time school in October 2020 and full-time school in January 2021. If the CDC and schools were on top of it, they could have fully re-opened for the entire 2020-21 school year. But the air purifiers were only starting to be delivered in October 2020 in her school. I had already purchased two for her classroom in June 2020 once it became clear that would be a major contributor to safe reopening.
I haven't seen evidence of any other significant government-imposed closures after the initial month or two in 2020. Studies of credit card spending, etc. showed that people were shutting down their forays outside their home before any government edicts required them to. Similar to schools, much better communication on improved HVAC, including widespread use of standalone air purifiers, would likely have greatly improved the public's confidence in dining out etc. once vaccines started to roll out. Even now, I use a CO2 monitor to check public spaces and most are still pretty bad (including internationally known venues) for indoor air quality which is an issue for Covid, flu, RSV, and other respiratory diseases. I wear a mask to some performances and avoid some restaurants because of real-time measurements I do, similar to dealing with wildfire smoke. We have the opportunity to substantially improve our ability to avoid large waves of respiratory diseases, but public health agencies are largely refusing to acknowledge or publicize it.
Yeah it was actually the Trump administration which was responsible for the earliest measures to inject liquidity into the economy. Don't forget Dems pouring trillions onto an already hot economy in early 2021 with the American Rescue Plan Act which led to the inflation we experienced. That experience has unfortunately tainted everything else the Biden administration has done since.
ARP/IRA did not cause inflation. The Fed caused the inflation going on too long. Some inflation was good and necessary to allow the economy to adjust to COVID/supply chain shocks.
I think the low rates continued for too long. With the large tax cuts of the Trump admin, there should have been a corresponding rise in rates-- nothing crazy but a rise nonetheless.
Managed LESS BADLY than many other countries. Vaccine roll out was too slow. There was no asymptomatic testing available until way too late, Vaccine messaging "it's safe" rathe than "its effective" was a disaster. CDC provided little guidance to decisionmakers about how to craft cost effective NPI's for their specific locales.
I agree that the Fed deserves kudos for management up through mid 2021. Then it went off course by being too late starting to bring inflation down and then may have brought it down too quickly. If there really is no recession this criticism will be wrong but post 2021 kudos are premature.
"Vaccine messaging 'it's safe' rathe than 'its effective' was a disaster."
I'd say the messaging that the vaccine only works if everyone gets it was a bigger disaster. I've had my share of tetanus shots in my life, and never was a told that they won't protect me from tetanus unless everyone else (or at least all around me) also get tetanus shots.
The messaging on vaccines was abysmal. The mRNA Covid vaccines are a major public health triumph. There are very few vaccines (effectively can be counted on one hand) that truly eliminate getting sick at all for 90%+ of the population. A vaccine that is 50% effective at preventing the disease at all and is 90%+ effective at preventing hospitalization is a massive success. Most diseases are still around because of the difficulty of creating a vaccine for them, not delivering it.
The "too fast development" argument was utterly bogus. mRNA has been researched since the 1980s for use as a vaccine. The big breakthroughs in making it usable were almost 20 years ago. The reason it hadn't been used yet is that the common vaccines already had massive supply chains, so they were working on really difficult vaccine problems like cancer and HIV for mRNA use. The delivery vehicle was already in place when Covid showed up and Covid was relatively easy to develop a vaccine for. It was essentially just a case of dropping a different engine into an already designed car.
Most vaccines typically start out as a killed or weakened virus. Sometimes a surrogate (e.g. cowpox instead of smallpox) can be used in the early days. It often takes years or decades to move onto safer alternatives. That is the brilliance of the mRNA vaccines - they can be coded quickly to mimic non-dangerous parts of the virus thereby skipping a decade or more of less safe vaccines.
Most of the "traditional" Covid vaccine development approaches crashed and burned due to many of the same challenges vaccine development and production has had over the past century which is why there was so much focus on mRNA development in the first place.
No, they went through a normal testing period, but it was unusually easy to collect test data because there was a pandemic, which is why the trials ended quickly.
Certainly. That's what you do in an emergency: cost/benefit trade-offs based on best available information. Our ordinary drug testing regimes are maximally cautious as a result of past instances of catastrophic mistakes (thalidomide being a major prompt). Catastrophic cases are rare but . . . catastrophic, so we give them great weight. But when the prospects of a pandemic are catastrophic, both in terms of health and social wellbeing, we make a conscious choice to cut corners, given that the odds of any one drug the survives short-term trials being toxic are low. It was a low-risk gamble, and we won.
"Tetanus is not an airborne virus that is coughed out and breathed out by human beings. Tetanus is a bacteria that lives in soil. "
I know. My point was that tetanus shots may offer me - personally - the guy getting the shots - protection against tetanus, but it has nothing to do with other people. They can get the same shots themselves, or not. Up to them. I don't demand they be fired from their jobs for not getting one. And I don't demand everyone around me have a" tetanus vaccine passport"
"The COVID vaccines had only a small impact on the transmission of COVID; they had a giant impact on how sick you became."
This was my point about the messaging. The zeal to fire and socially ostracize anyone not CVOID-vaccinated did a lot of damage and for what purpose if they had such a small impact on transmission? A elderly or otherwise vulnerable person may be foolish to not get the shots, but we don't need to ruin the lives of younger non-vulnerable people in all other aspects just because they make a decision different from the one I would make. Anyway, that's my opinion on COVID shot messaging.
". . . for what purpose if they had such a small impact on transmission?"
The purpose was to prevent transmission. The information that it did not have as large an effect on transmission as believed came later. Your argument relies on hindsight. When making critical decisions, the general rule is to choose the option with the best cost/benefit ratio based on available information. That later information changes the calculation does not mean that the initial decision was the wrong one to make.
It is also not correct to say that vaccines had no effect on transmission: you are less likely to contract Covid from exposure to vaccinated people carrying low virus loads than from unvaccinated people whose virus loads are unchecked by antibodies. This mattered most to those who unable to be vaccinated, either because of medical conditions or because their general low-risk profile kept them out of vaccine eligibility during the rollout.
I think it's correct to say that vaccine mandates appear excessive in retrospect in most cases. However, having grown up seeing the universal relief that the polio and MMR vaccines brought us in the '50s and '60s, and the way those major diseases were virtually eliminated in the US, what seems more perverse to me is that the fiction of vaccine danger and the force of political opposition to the incoming administration led to widespread vaccine resistance in the first place.
Maybe you remember things differently than I do, but my recollection is that it became very clear that the shots did not stop transmission by the middle of 2021. Yet, all the "appear excessive in hindsight" mandates continued well into 2022, some into 2023. such as the "travel to US requires covid vax" rule.
"It is also not correct to say that vaccines had no effect on transmission: you are less likely to contract Covid from exposure to vaccinated people carrying low virus loads than from unvaccinated people whose virus loads are unchecked by antibodies"
The crux of the biscuit. Just too many examples of vaccinated people getting and transmitting covid made people discount this notion.
Sorry to drag this into yet another covid policy circle-jerk. It's not the purpose of this blog or this article. You made a comment about "messaging" and my opinion is different than yours as to what part of the messaging caused the most harm. Yes, the "must get Trump" politics followed by the "I resent how you got Trump" politics didn't help.
A major purpose was also to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed which was causing mortality in its own right. People who refused to be vaccinated, got sick, and went into hospital sucked up massive resources that caused problems for many other patients who had other health problems. There is a tragedy of the commons issue with that aspect alone. The large number of excess deaths the US had in 2021 and 2022 were not just Covid deaths, but other deaths as well. Many elective surgeries for improving quality of life were also postponed for a long time because Covid overwhelmed the medical system.
Agree with your comments.
One area where we're not doing well and it's causing real pain is home/apt building. No one could credibly disagree with the observation that we have a real housing crisis. Yet that's exactly where the current economy is coming up most short. Home builder's can't build (because they can't sell) in volume. And apartment construction has fallen off a cliff owing to the doubling of debt costs combined with equity having run to the sidelines (I'm a large scale apartment developer.)
So just when we need a large supply boost, and the YIMBY movement is making real headway on the entitlements front, the factors required for a big housing supply increase have run into a head wall in the form of the current economy.
I came here to say exactly this. And also to note that the drop in Median sale price does not necessarily mean home prices are going down, it may also (or entirely) reflect the mix of homes being sold.
Supporting Noah's comments about how the upper-middle feels, I believe that many feel trapped in their homes - with their home buying/upgrading plans frozen because homes and the debt to buy them are too damn expensive... See Bruce's comments.
"And also to note that the drop in Median sale price does not necessarily mean home prices are going down, it may also (or entirely) reflect the mix of homes being sold."
Typically, high end markets take a lot longer to drop than lower end. Instead, the sales just dry up. This is because high end sellers are not forced to sell as much as lower end sellers, so there continues to be a market at the lower end which changes the mix skewing lower.
Or, maybe it's something else.
Do you have a source for home builders not being able to sell? I would've guessed that home builders are selling even more now since home owners aren't willing to sell due to their locked in mortgage rates. Therefore, home builders are making up a larger % of home sells and coming out net ahead.
"Home builder's can't build (because they can't sell) in volume."
If there is such high demand - and there is in a number of areas of the country, how can this be true, unless the building costs (land, materials, labor, misc.) exceed what the demand is capable of paying (taking into account borrowing costs)? Is there an overabundance of brand new homes/condos/apartments sitting empty and unsold/rented out there?
Good points. I think the missing piece here is theres plenty of affordable homes they are just too small or in areas people don't want to live. There may be a shortage of relevant workers too- not enough construction workers in comparison with desk jobs.
As to your last point, I'm having a fancy pants storage shed built on our property. Took me a few years to find someone to do it since is a small job compared with building a house or large remodel. The crew I was finally able to hire a few weeks ago speak no English, but the google translation app solves a lot of problems, and my bits and pieces of school years Spanish is all coming back to me. And, they seem to be good builders for basic framing, siding, roof, doors and windows, wherever they learned their skills (these guys are in their 20s).
The Biden administration should do a Housing Improvement Act.
Apartment construction has not fallen off a cliff. In fact, we're at a near 40 year high in MFH building starts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F
This chart is for 5+ units but if you dig into the numbers you see this is dominated by buildings with 20+ units, or Noah's "fish tanks."
Single family home starts *have* dropped a lot recently, though starting to move back up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F
Coming back to this one year later. Apartment starts have in fact declined substantially. I'm in the business in a substantial way and so was familiar with what was going on last year in the industry, whereas the data lags of course.
This is now reflected in actual apartments starts: from almost 600k units in 2022 to under 400K units at the time the study was published in early 2024.
And knowing the industry, I'm aware that starts in 2025 will be off even further.
This is the consequence of the "current economy" that Noah asked about last year. "Bad" for apartment housing was my answer then, and is my answer today esp now that the data is coming in.
Fig 7: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/six-takeaways-americas-rental-housing-2024
and
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F
> Home builder's can't build (because they can't sell) in volume.
?!? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NHSUSSPT
> And apartment construction has fallen off a cliff
?!?!? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON5MUNSA
Useful info, but I think starts is more on point than those under construction (which may reflect supply chain issues): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F
I'm not sure it is more on point when Joshua literally wrote "construction" — but in any case, even the starts numbers you link are higher than they were in every month from 1989 through 2018 except for June 2015!
Interesting, here is some more data:
https://www.cbre.com/insights/briefs/looming-multifamily-oversupply-likely-will-be-short-lived
Would seem like progress being made on this front but Americans still by and large want to live in low density housing and that's always going to create tremendous upward pressure on housing prices. Maybe over time these norms change as millenials get priced out of single family homes.
I remember when that was a good rate.
I remember when my credit card rate was 21% (early 90's) and mortgage rates 8%. The thing is that they aren't static. The rates go up and go down. If fewer people take out mortgages, banks will lower the rates.
“If people take out fewer mortgages, banks will lower rates.” - This simply isn’t true. Mortgages have to both be profitable (I.e. charge more interest than banks pay depositors) and pay something competitive to other places banks can lend (government treasuries, corporate bonds, etc.). Demand for mortgages has very little affect on market interest rates.
But you can always renegotiate if rates go down. O
I think this misses an important point, which is that while INFLATION has gone down, PRICES haven't. Now, I know: inflation going down doesn't mean prices go down. Prices going down would be DEFLATION, and that's bad. Yes yes yes. But most people don't get this. For most people, inflation means "My groceries cost 15% more than they did two years ago!" And groceries still cost 15% more than they did two years ago. So inflation hasn't gone away. Again, I'm not endorsing that thought process, I'm just saying it's very common.
Sure. But if real purchasing power is higher than before, then it means that people's paychecks go farther under the new prices than under the old prices.
Average person experiencing quick rising wages and prices:
1) Wages go up: I did this
2) Prices go up: the economy did this
Result: I'm good, economy is bad
^^^^ A simple but brilliant analysis.
The wages for those workers went up the most ...
Agree. And it is (would have been) important for the Biden administration to push the "Prices go up: Fed/COVID did this. "
Handing out 15 pct of GDP between Dec 2020 and Mar 2021 in an economy whose supply the government was constricting and generating more inflation than real growth was those handouts was truly a genius move
A bit of inflation for everyone is much easier to recover from than unemployment for some fractions of the population. Of course, the latter is much easier for most people to ignore.
I still think the helicopter drop in 2021 should have been more focused on Americans with less savings. An easy way to have made it more focused on people with less in the bank would have been to do a $1 trillion reparations package that would have sent dollars to Native Americans and descendants of American slaves which are two groups of Americans with very little savings.
Yes. But groceries are still 15% more expensive, and that feels bad. Again: I'm not saying this is RATIONAL. I'm saying that this is what people are actually complaining about.
Yeah, when I see people talking on Reddit or Threads or X it is always "chicken breasts cost how much!?" and "fast food at Arby's is $21 now!?"
See this reddit post from today as just one of many many examples in the genre:
"How are people even affording groceries right now?
Tip/advice 💁♀️
Everything has gotten so freaking expensive. I find myself going to three different stores just to try to get decent prices. Meat/chicken is the only thing I “splurge” on anymore - as I’m buying from hyvee or Kroger instead of Walmart.
I feel like I am spending 70-100 for just me a week. And then I always have a few meals of eating out a week.
It never used to be this way."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/15cvjns/how_are_people_even_affording_groceries_right_now/
I read that and posted in it. First of all, I always went to a few different stores to save money. There is a tool called a price book I always used (or can just use an app for it too I guess but everyone's price book will vary depending on what they eat/keep in the pantry). Anyhow, I don't need to use it much anymore because week after week, the items/best prices become memorized/second nature. I almost always buy loss leaders in the quantity possible and necessary for the next sale and produce according to season. The prices at some places are very high (like Wegmans). I also utilize a food buying coop to keep my budget down. I feel some places will have higher prices so long as they can get away with it and it is up to the consumer to let their wallet go walking and allow them to either adjust their prices or go out of business.
It’s totally rational. People are still poorer after a major inflationary event until their wages catch up with the inflation (which is still continuing albeit abated). That wages start to grow again doesn’t mean that everything is back to normal.
I find actual price levels to be a lot more real, and the reaction to them more rational, than extrapolating people’s feelings from cherry-picked charts. But that is just me.
But, there is more going on there than just inflation.
The following comments invite correction. This is just what I've heard from the news.
Part of the increase in the cost of any chicken product is the bird flu. Producers had to destroy so many chickens that it had an influence on the cost and that cost will remain high until those chickens are replaced through new generations.
The weather and fires have destroyed so much land that also affects costs. Draughts affecting grain crops will affect flour and so bread prices will be higher.
Labor losses caused by migrants not being able to cross the borders will affect how much produce will be harvested before it spoils in the fields. The work is hard and Americans aren't lining up to do the work.
The Texas' war on Mexico destroyed the avocado market. (I love avocados).
The supply chains and what's happening globally will affect food costs in the cold months as well.
All of this and more affects the cost of food.
That's true. People don't realize the savings they get when meat packing co. employees are undocumented aliens.
I think this is why there is a lag effect. People are mad about how expensive eggs are now. As inflation moderates, they'll get used to the fact that eggs cost $Y now and tend to forget that they used to cost $X a couple years back.
This is why I don't think it matters for Biden what people think about the economy *right now.* It only matters what they think in Nov 2024.
Where are the raises? Instead, folks are going to see pay cuts due to increasing taxes, inflation (another tax) and job loses. You’re looking at the past. Look over the horizon. Commercial real estate, escalating job loss, tightening of bank loans, and increasing criminal behavior. San Francisco a prime example.
This comment is almost the definition of vibes vs reality. Sadly, part of our negative polarization has lead to people wishcasting for the worst possible economic outcomes. That more than anything else is probably driving the narrative.
What tax increases? Mine haven't increased. You must make more money than I do.
Real wages are rising which is very straightforward. Employees receive salary/wage increases greater than increases in prices. Wasn't this way earlier when inflation was +9% and even higher. However, it's that way now. Plus, if an employee adapts to, say, become proficient at using AI, not even programming it, that employee's labor is much more valuable and she'll get paid even more.
Is crime still increasing in San Francisco? I thought that happened in 2020 and 2021 but it’s started to come back down.
Violent never went up in the first place and is still below 2019 levels and low compared to similar cities. Property crime has remained the same (high compared to other similar sized cities).
But who is responsible for crime in big cities. Generally the mayor. But the biggest cause of crime, seems to me, is two things: illegal addictive drugs and a proliferation of guns of all kinds. While drug smuggling could rest with lax laws promoted by Democrats, the gun problem sits squarely in the Republican camp.
Has payroll taxes increased?
That means the median person's paycheck is going farther. By definition one half of the people are doing worse than the median. And almost all of them have the right to vote.
If the median person is doing better, then that by definition is what it takes for most people to be doing better.
I often write succinctly and choose to leave out nuances, but I think we need an economy that works for more than 60% of the people. The bottom 25% of America is really suffering.
I thought they’re the ones that are actually in the most improving situation and it’s the top 25% that are having real incomes fall!
Let's assume that you are correct. In that case, the American lower classes are moving from a super awful experience to a very awful experience. If your annual income is $10,000 dollars, a 25% raise brings you up to $12,500. If your annual income is $15,000 dollars, a 25% increase doesn't get you to $20,000.
I consistently find that well educated people with numeracy, the kind of people who read this blog, who almost always have well paying jobs, simply cannot understand what it means to be poor. And, unfortunately that includes Noah. His focus is on the median. But there are two wings off the median— the wealthy who don't need our concern, and the poor who don't receive it.
I had a friend who was living on a $700 disability check + $180 In food stamps. Then they reduced his food stamp allowance to $80, because he started receiving Medicaid. He was recovering from cancer. We both thought that eating food is an important part of recovering from cancer.
Except real purchasing power is not higher than before, at least not for those of us who are low income.
I thought the low income brackets is where wage increases have most exceeded inflation.
You have to grant that the initial inflation period ate their entire wage increase, which kept them from falling back under the inflation but didn't give them any "breathing room". Landlords driving up rent costs ate whatever advantage they've gained in wage increases now. The housing market for investors is looking for greater profits and is making changes to the current housing stock that makes renting and housing purchases more expensive.
Purchasing power for what?
A car at much higher prices with a loan at double or triple the old interest rate? A 250,000 house with a 7 pct mortgage instead of 3 percent? Groceries?
Paychecks, yes, but (as indeed alluded to in your article), what about existing wealth? While mediated by a credit card because it's more convenient and offers more protections than cash, for all intents and purposes, I pay for groceries (and other purchases) out of my bank balance, not on credit - and inflation doesn't appear to have a uniformly positive effect on wealth held in equities (and obviously has a negative effect on the value of bonds other than, say, I-Bonds which are purchase-amount limited).
If you're accumulated assets, inflation would seem to have a high likelihood if being well approximated by "stuff costs more and you have the same amount of nominal dollars."
What percentage of people have seen their purchasing power go up though? Our expenses have inflated by significantly more than the CPI-U would indicate and our wages haven't kept up. That's not exactly surprising as CPI is not a real measure of any one person and we are somewhat higher on the income scale, but we have a huge advantage in that our housing costs have been more or less locked in with a low interest rate. The people at the lower end of the income spectrum who have had >5% annual wage increases I feel like are hit even worse by inflation. Anecdotes are not data, but it seems like more people are a little behind in purchasing power than not.
For people with financial assets that they keep up with fairly regularly, they maybe are being impacted by their drop in real wealth, which I think people tend to measure against the peak. Lots of people saw their wealth increase early through covid before the inflation hit, and even though the rise in asset value and inflation were mostly related and arguably should be seen as essentially happening at the same time, people feel like things were going well and they were "rich", and then inflation made them much poorer rather than thinking they were doing ok, then COVID spending drove a lot of paper wealth and also drove a lot of inflation that mostly netted out, and now they're still doing ok.
According to Atlanta Fed the median wage increase among the bottom 25% of workers (by income) and the next 25% of workers (so bottom half) is above inflation.
So we would think at least half of the bottom half had wage growth > inflation the last year, by a good amount.
Median wage growth in both quartiles since inflation started rising fast had kept up with prices.
So someone getting the median wage growth for low wage workers in 2020, 2021, 2022 and so far in 2023 has kept pace with inflation since 2020. Barely.
wages aren't keeping up with their monthly costs. They're not buying different stuff or getting better stuff it's just costing more for the same stuff. Think about replacing a tire. Think about the cost of air conditioning if you actually have it.
That's average wages.
If the top 10% of earners earn as much as the bottom half of workers combined then -2% real wage growth for the top 1/10th can counter +2% real wage growth for the bottom half, etc.
Median wage growth for 0-25% (percentile, by income) and 25-50% of workers has exceeded inflation for a while. It's also matched inflation since the pandemic.
Median even of a smaller slice isn't everyone of course, your mileage may vary, but it is the median experience of just those workers.
Their wages have been increasing faster than anyone else's.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010
Not according to the data I've read and is commonly reported. Those persons could leave their current roles and get hired elsewhere at higher rates most likely. Of all those you listed, how many do you know personally and know they've asked for higher pay? How many are union? I mean, if you don't ask, that's on the employee.
I wonder how much this is tied to the long extended period of quite low inflation (generally well below the 2% target). So, everyone got used to prices not changing much at all. So, when they went up, it was a bigger shock. Look at the inflation rate under Reagan in the 80s - noticeably higher on a regular basis than right now), but folks sort of got used to it.
And the price rises hit faster and quicker than wages going up. So, the period of unhappy dislocation.
Couple all that with the comments on upper middle class where the mindset is still that housing prices (and wealth) keep going up. Big burst in "housing wealth" in the last 5 years before now
Good observation. It's as if we experienced ~30 years of inflation in ~3 years or feels that way rather. Of course, that low inflation rate for much of the ~30 years was due to globalization which isn't entirely dead while it's pretty close.
Globalization isn't dead at all but it isn't expanding at the rate it had been. A very high proportion of our consumer products still come from overseas. That isn't globalization I don't know what is.
I'm not a globalization expert per se.
Given the threat China poses the USA as it seems every authoritarian regime with a modicum of power becomes, having them make consumer products as we move manufacturing to the USA and friendly countries, makes a lot of sense to me. I'm nearly certain, if I had to guess, that's the strategy in order not to decimate their economy built up these past ~30 years through globalization quickly; have them create non-geostrategically critical things such as consumer products and we'll create the geostrategically-for-national-security things here and at friendly countries. Hope it's enough to sate Xi for the time being, allow them to stand on their own and increase their domestic consumption, serve it as a sort of developed country. "Sort of" because I think we forget just how many persons in China live on poverty level incomes.
I've been looking and all the household goods that are in my house now were made in China. You have to really work hard not to replace household goods with something that is not made in China and don't count on Amazon to tell you where something was made.
I suggest you read Janet Yellen's comments in China on the issue of globalization (although she does not use the term.
She acknowledges that globalization defined as every country on Earth sourcing widely, and no one depending completely on home manufacture, is here to stay.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/08/economy/us-china-yellen-visit-presser-intl-hnk/index.html
Yes, I think decades of low-to-no-inflation left people psychologically unprepared for what a modestly large inflationary episode would feel like.
Economists were remiss in not making a bigger stink (hardly any stink at all!) about the Fed undershooting its inflation targets 2009-2020.
In fact Summers and others back then were pushing for massive fiscal spending to cure “deflation” and others pushed MMT…..and then we saw the fruits of that incontinence. Whoops
The Bush/Cheney regime shows MMT works as long as you pretend to oppose MMT. So for MMT to work you can never say that you support MMT because then people will expect you to print them dollars.
Disinflation vs. deflation is good go understand.
Not all deflation is bad, and much of it is good such as when electronics deflate due in part to Wright's Law.
Inflation or Deflation by Merle Hazzard and Bretton Wood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fq2ga4HkGY
Why economists will not acknowledge that the economy is good I have no idea, but I know why the average person has a problem.
Inflation is deeply troubling—many of us spend a lot of energy trying to find low prices, and when prices go out of control, like $5 eggs and $5 gas, it's a shock to the system. And when economist tell us inflation is over, the prices are still way higher than what we were used to. And our wages probably have not gone up correspondently.
There's a similar problem with the term "recession." When a recession ends, that only means that the economy has stopped getting worse. It doesn't mean that all the damage done by the recession, especially lost jobs, has been repaired. The average person who's gone through a recession is still suffering significantly when the recession has been proclaimed “over."
Incidentally, the people who have the privilege to announce that an inflation or a recession is over, all have well paid secure jobs. That fact shows in their clothing and the serene look on their faces. That's why ordinary folks have trouble buying it.
What people forget is that inflation dropping does not also have to correlate with prices deflating eg negative percentages...they can just stop rising further at 0%, or slow their pace of increase eg 2-3%.
Especially when compared to other nations, the United States managed the Covid impact on the economy very well. Both the Biden Administration and The Fed deserve kudos for the job they have done. They will be taught in future economics textbooks.
The impact of the lockdowns created mass devastation and destroyed the health of hundreds and thousands of people, not to mention the low-trust society that resulted from the isolation. It could be argued that the economic shutdown was actually more devastating than covid itself.
I don't see this. It's not actually possible to do a counter-factual assessment of the damage that a no-lockdown policy would have caused, but the initial lockdowns appear to have had a strong impact reducing fatalities caused by combinations of Covid and hospital overload. The fatality rate for Covid declined substantially, which you'd have to count as saving hundreds of thousands of lives and as many case of serious/chronic illness, so holding that the lockdowns destroyed hundreds and [of?] thousands of lives tells me you're looking a statistics I haven't seen. What are they?
"Mass devastation" certainly does not describe anything remotely like life in the midwestern state I live in. Perhaps there are other areas of the US that are post-apocalyptic.
I agree that in retrospect, school closures went on longer than they should have, and created unnecessary learning loss, which was a serious error.
Agreed, other then school closures most "lockdowns" were "you can't sit down to eat in your favorite restaurant anymore" style restrictions. That caused some issues for sure but mass devastation and destroying lives? I don't see it
So what about people living in abusive situations with their spouses who couldn't leave their houses? People whose medical treatments were delayed? People who couldn't visit their dying loved ones in the hospital? People living in close and uncomfortable quarters with roommates? People with obesity and disabilities and who couldn't go to the gym or physical therapy? Just because a demographic is invisible doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Are we looking at society on a larger scale here or just zooming into the affluent?
"couldn't leave their houses?"
Like I wrote there were no lockdowns like that in the United States, you are thinking of China maybe? If people couldn't get medical care obviously that's bad but I'm not going to pretend people living in uncomfortable conditions is having their lives "destroyed"
Did you live in NYC or SF during the lockdowns? Perhaps you weren't in either of these cities. Now imagine any victim of spousal abuse having nowhere to go during this period. Did you try getting medical care for a serious illness during this time? Now imagine people who were already next to death trying to get medical care for something besides covid during this time. Tell the mother who couldn't see her son dying of cancer in the hospital that her life wasn't destroyed. Tell the people who were evicted from their homes as the cities were shut down that their lives weren't destroyed. When you shut down the economy you shut down human life. Not everyone had the resources to pull through.
And in fact the US did a much better job of mitigating the economic harms to small business owners and their former employees than many other countries did.
But more people died from Covid than in other advanced countries. North Carolina got the balance the best which means Florida could have had 20,000 fewer Covid deaths with a strong economy had they just done the mitigation measures implemented in NC.
ok, so where in the USA were people physically locked inside their houses and couldn't get out for *any* reason?
NY had 900 deaths per day from spread prior to mitigation measures and never got close to that over the course of the pandemic once mitigation measures were implemented. So that’s essentially a 9/11 over 3 days in NYC without 15 days to slow the spread.
Not quite sure what prior point you're addressing Pangolin, but if it's the appropriate use of "mass devastation" I think New York in those days might justify it. Ms. Haywire was using the term to characterize the consequences of the mitigation measures that brought an end to the city's initial crisis.
The initial mitigation measures were appropriate under the circumstances. Just allowing time for the medical community to develop best practices for treatment saved tens of thousands of lives which meant 15 days to slow the spread was necessary.
Obviously Hawaii did the best with mitigation measures because it doesn’t have an interstate running through it and so it could test people arriving on planes. The Florida Keys shows that just being difficult to travel to greatly mitigated spread of Covid and so travel restrictions definitely reduced Covid death rate.
I personally believe the states that found the best balance were the few red states with Democratic governors that continued to allow cities in their states to implement mitigation measures which reduced spread which can be seen clearly when comparing Covid death rates with the adjacent states they are generally compared to. So Florida could have had a significantly lower Covid death rate had DeSantis done what Cooper did in NC.
I'm not sure we can trust numbers coming out of China or other authoritarian countries given their general opaqueness. Still, we did have a unique problem in this country handling the crisis.
Population age, diabetes and obesity.
That said, I'm certainly on the side of "US NPIs were overdone."
Good point, Slaw. Our response was terrible. But John E is right that accurate numbers would probably lower (in the good sense) our comparative profile seriously. It's not just authoritarian countries like Russia and Belarus: low income countries such as India and many African states clearly had vastly inadequate reporting infrastructure. One thing the US seems to have done exceedingly well is to count and centrally report cases and deaths.
But a disproportionately ineffective response doesn't equate to "mass devastation," as can be proven by walking around whatever city or town you're in. what was terrible about the US response? And bear in mind that this non-existent mass devastation, according to Rachel Haywire's comment starting this string, was not caused by Covid, but by lockdowns.
How is it non-existent? Please see above. People could not see their dying loved ones in the hospital or go to the gym when they were disabled. They could not leave the house to get away from their abusive spouses or roommates. A woman was stopped in the streets of San Francisco for jogging. NYC businesses closed, all at once, without any real warning. Hospitals that were treating non-covid related illnesses were overloaded and postponed treatments for thousands of people in need. These people may be considered outliers because they have a low SES, but we need to account for the full picture.
Yes. People could not see dying loved ones (especially the case in nursing homes and hospitals, as I well know) or go to the gym. Restaurants closed. And now I know a woman in San Francisco was stopped for jogging. (In my town, women still fled abusive husbands and were taken in by the local shelter, but perhaps not where you live.) If you consider these things to be "mass devastation" I have to wonder what term you would use for cases where there is truly mass devastation, such as the destruction of Bakhmut.
And what caused these things--apart from the jogger, perhaps--was not lockdowns but Covid. If people had visited dying loved ones some proportion would have spread the disease to the loved ones of others; if they had gone to the gym they would have carried the disease home to loved ones; if dining had continued as usual the disease would have spread to more people than it did. Making those avoidable deaths happen in addition to those that did would have brought us closer and closer to true mass destruction.
And as someone who had to postpone treatment because of Covid I have to wonder, what does SES have to do with this?
Slaw, Am I wrong here? To say that something is not "mass devastation" does not suggest in any way that it is therefore not an issue.
If you want to set the bar for "mass devastation" at one million lives lost in a country of 300 million then I can only accept the use of the term. For me the term connotes Hiroshima or Fukushima.
And recall that Ms. Haywire was not talking about deaths, she was talking about lockdowns.
This view ignores that there were no actual “lockdowns” in the US and that business would have still fallen off a cliff in a world where the US governments just ignored Covid and did business as usual. It might have been over more quickly, and probably with significantly more deaths, but it isn’t like people watching what NYC went through on the news weren’t going to change their own behaviors in the aggregate.
Too many schools stayed shut for too long, causing significant social and academic learning challenges for kids. A primary reason was that indoor air quality was not properly addressed both physically and informationally. Many schools should have been opened back up much earlier than they were with relatively low cost. My spouses school reopened for half-time school in October 2020 and full-time school in January 2021. If the CDC and schools were on top of it, they could have fully re-opened for the entire 2020-21 school year. But the air purifiers were only starting to be delivered in October 2020 in her school. I had already purchased two for her classroom in June 2020 once it became clear that would be a major contributor to safe reopening.
I haven't seen evidence of any other significant government-imposed closures after the initial month or two in 2020. Studies of credit card spending, etc. showed that people were shutting down their forays outside their home before any government edicts required them to. Similar to schools, much better communication on improved HVAC, including widespread use of standalone air purifiers, would likely have greatly improved the public's confidence in dining out etc. once vaccines started to roll out. Even now, I use a CO2 monitor to check public spaces and most are still pretty bad (including internationally known venues) for indoor air quality which is an issue for Covid, flu, RSV, and other respiratory diseases. I wear a mask to some performances and avoid some restaurants because of real-time measurements I do, similar to dealing with wildfire smoke. We have the opportunity to substantially improve our ability to avoid large waves of respiratory diseases, but public health agencies are largely refusing to acknowledge or publicize it.
I don't even think it "could be argued" anymore...
Yeah it was actually the Trump administration which was responsible for the earliest measures to inject liquidity into the economy. Don't forget Dems pouring trillions onto an already hot economy in early 2021 with the American Rescue Plan Act which led to the inflation we experienced. That experience has unfortunately tainted everything else the Biden administration has done since.
"Yeah it was actually the Trump administration which was responsible for the earliest measures to inject liquidity into the economy."
https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-unveils-much-simpler-stimulus-plan-giant-money-cannon
ARP/IRA did not cause inflation. The Fed caused the inflation going on too long. Some inflation was good and necessary to allow the economy to adjust to COVID/supply chain shocks.
I think the low rates continued for too long. With the large tax cuts of the Trump admin, there should have been a corresponding rise in rates-- nothing crazy but a rise nonetheless.
Managed LESS BADLY than many other countries. Vaccine roll out was too slow. There was no asymptomatic testing available until way too late, Vaccine messaging "it's safe" rathe than "its effective" was a disaster. CDC provided little guidance to decisionmakers about how to craft cost effective NPI's for their specific locales.
I agree that the Fed deserves kudos for management up through mid 2021. Then it went off course by being too late starting to bring inflation down and then may have brought it down too quickly. If there really is no recession this criticism will be wrong but post 2021 kudos are premature.
"Vaccine messaging 'it's safe' rathe than 'its effective' was a disaster."
I'd say the messaging that the vaccine only works if everyone gets it was a bigger disaster. I've had my share of tetanus shots in my life, and never was a told that they won't protect me from tetanus unless everyone else (or at least all around me) also get tetanus shots.
Tetanus is not an airborne virus that is coughed out and breathed out by human beings. Tetanus is a bacteria that lives in soil.
The COVID vaccines had only a small impact on the transmission of COVID; they had a giant impact on how sick you became.
The messaging on vaccines was abysmal. The mRNA Covid vaccines are a major public health triumph. There are very few vaccines (effectively can be counted on one hand) that truly eliminate getting sick at all for 90%+ of the population. A vaccine that is 50% effective at preventing the disease at all and is 90%+ effective at preventing hospitalization is a massive success. Most diseases are still around because of the difficulty of creating a vaccine for them, not delivering it.
The "too fast development" argument was utterly bogus. mRNA has been researched since the 1980s for use as a vaccine. The big breakthroughs in making it usable were almost 20 years ago. The reason it hadn't been used yet is that the common vaccines already had massive supply chains, so they were working on really difficult vaccine problems like cancer and HIV for mRNA use. The delivery vehicle was already in place when Covid showed up and Covid was relatively easy to develop a vaccine for. It was essentially just a case of dropping a different engine into an already designed car.
Most vaccines typically start out as a killed or weakened virus. Sometimes a surrogate (e.g. cowpox instead of smallpox) can be used in the early days. It often takes years or decades to move onto safer alternatives. That is the brilliance of the mRNA vaccines - they can be coded quickly to mimic non-dangerous parts of the virus thereby skipping a decade or more of less safe vaccines.
Most of the "traditional" Covid vaccine development approaches crashed and burned due to many of the same challenges vaccine development and production has had over the past century which is why there was so much focus on mRNA development in the first place.
No, they went through a normal testing period, but it was unusually easy to collect test data because there was a pandemic, which is why the trials ended quickly.
Certainly. That's what you do in an emergency: cost/benefit trade-offs based on best available information. Our ordinary drug testing regimes are maximally cautious as a result of past instances of catastrophic mistakes (thalidomide being a major prompt). Catastrophic cases are rare but . . . catastrophic, so we give them great weight. But when the prospects of a pandemic are catastrophic, both in terms of health and social wellbeing, we make a conscious choice to cut corners, given that the odds of any one drug the survives short-term trials being toxic are low. It was a low-risk gamble, and we won.
"Tetanus is not an airborne virus that is coughed out and breathed out by human beings. Tetanus is a bacteria that lives in soil. "
I know. My point was that tetanus shots may offer me - personally - the guy getting the shots - protection against tetanus, but it has nothing to do with other people. They can get the same shots themselves, or not. Up to them. I don't demand they be fired from their jobs for not getting one. And I don't demand everyone around me have a" tetanus vaccine passport"
"The COVID vaccines had only a small impact on the transmission of COVID; they had a giant impact on how sick you became."
This was my point about the messaging. The zeal to fire and socially ostracize anyone not CVOID-vaccinated did a lot of damage and for what purpose if they had such a small impact on transmission? A elderly or otherwise vulnerable person may be foolish to not get the shots, but we don't need to ruin the lives of younger non-vulnerable people in all other aspects just because they make a decision different from the one I would make. Anyway, that's my opinion on COVID shot messaging.
". . . for what purpose if they had such a small impact on transmission?"
The purpose was to prevent transmission. The information that it did not have as large an effect on transmission as believed came later. Your argument relies on hindsight. When making critical decisions, the general rule is to choose the option with the best cost/benefit ratio based on available information. That later information changes the calculation does not mean that the initial decision was the wrong one to make.
It is also not correct to say that vaccines had no effect on transmission: you are less likely to contract Covid from exposure to vaccinated people carrying low virus loads than from unvaccinated people whose virus loads are unchecked by antibodies. This mattered most to those who unable to be vaccinated, either because of medical conditions or because their general low-risk profile kept them out of vaccine eligibility during the rollout.
I think it's correct to say that vaccine mandates appear excessive in retrospect in most cases. However, having grown up seeing the universal relief that the polio and MMR vaccines brought us in the '50s and '60s, and the way those major diseases were virtually eliminated in the US, what seems more perverse to me is that the fiction of vaccine danger and the force of political opposition to the incoming administration led to widespread vaccine resistance in the first place.
Maybe you remember things differently than I do, but my recollection is that it became very clear that the shots did not stop transmission by the middle of 2021. Yet, all the "appear excessive in hindsight" mandates continued well into 2022, some into 2023. such as the "travel to US requires covid vax" rule.
"It is also not correct to say that vaccines had no effect on transmission: you are less likely to contract Covid from exposure to vaccinated people carrying low virus loads than from unvaccinated people whose virus loads are unchecked by antibodies"
The crux of the biscuit. Just too many examples of vaccinated people getting and transmitting covid made people discount this notion.
Sorry to drag this into yet another covid policy circle-jerk. It's not the purpose of this blog or this article. You made a comment about "messaging" and my opinion is different than yours as to what part of the messaging caused the most harm. Yes, the "must get Trump" politics followed by the "I resent how you got Trump" politics didn't help.
A major purpose was also to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed which was causing mortality in its own right. People who refused to be vaccinated, got sick, and went into hospital sucked up massive resources that caused problems for many other patients who had other health problems. There is a tragedy of the commons issue with that aspect alone. The large number of excess deaths the US had in 2021 and 2022 were not just Covid deaths, but other deaths as well. Many elective surgeries for improving quality of life were also postponed for a long time because Covid overwhelmed the medical system.