Thanks for the response. I disagree. The positive economic impacts of the Black Death are a widely researched topic, despite its poor taste. Poor taste doesn’t change the math. I do, by the way, agree with you about the poor taste thing. We sometimes speak ideas that are in poor taste around here though.

There are a lot of other ones I didn’t cover at all. For instance, it would be a relatively straightforward mathematical question to ask “how many retired people need to get hit by a bus to make Social Security solvent again?” Is C19 going to reach that threshold? Probably not, but it might get us closer. This question is in very very poor taste, but an answer to that poor taste question exists, mathematically, and C19 might answer the question for us.

The Spanish Flu wasn’t an economic boom. But it was different. It affected the young, middle aged, and old in a generally more equal measure than C19. C19, statistically speaking, really really targets retired people. The people who are mostly done producing. And largely spares the people who are still producing. If I were a crazy tin foil hat conspiracy theorist and believed this thing was engineered, I wouldn’t think it was engineered as a weapon against countries. I would think it was a weapon engineered by the global elite to clear out the less productive people efficiently and increase global economic output. I don’t believe that. Not for a moment, because I’ve spoken to virologists who are sure that this isn’t engineered, by looking closely at the proteins. But the fact remains that this thing has curious properties in who it spares, that are an economic positive.

I do agree wholeheartedly that colleges are doomed, but the question is over what time scale. I think it would probably take a decade for them to die pre-C19, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see many of them die in the next two or three years because of the C19 response. Same for telecommuting. These were both inevitable long scale things that are being hastened. I think they both count. You may disagree, and that’s fine, because we live in a cool country where people have the freedom to disagree.