Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020
The Hood has in recent weeks come together to support our local restaurants. Every week there is a joined order to Taim (Thursday) and Shouk (Saturday). Seeing I do not like any of the food item on either of the menus and cooking is one of my great past times, we have so far not participated in these shared take outs. Yesterday however the owner of Dellabarba Pizza offered delivery to his house a block away, so today we are participating in the collective order and had, I think for the first time in months, pizza. Turns out these pizza were humongous! We will be having pizza breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next three days.
In Europe many small restaurants are staying afloat with order & pay now; eat later, which a number of regular customers are partaking in to support their favorite locals. I think that is a wonderful idea but have yet to see this with nay of the places in the Woodmont Triangle.
One of the places I am not likely to support is Ruth Chris Steak House who - like a number of other big franchises - have dipped into the fund meant to support small businesses. I find that completely unethical. Or maybe my definition of small business is just different. If I think of small business, I think of the small Deli on Western Ave or my nail spa or hairdresser or carpet shop and so on. All of these small proprietor run businesses with maybe a handful of employees. Not some conglomerate with hundreds or thousands of employees. Big businesses should have either have sufficient reserves - aka retained earnings normally distributed to shareholders – or the ability to access liquidity through banks (and let’s also not forget the US$ 500 billion bail out fund).
The model Europe has embarked on is basically paying firms to keep thier staff, with salaries up to 80% out of the rescue funds made available by governemtns/ the EU. This seems like a superior approach as it keeps unemployment numbers down, ensures insurances - such as health adn unemployment insurance - are maintained, and resources of unemployment funds are not drained. It also has the advantage that companies can easily restart once business reverts to normalcy. Instead there appear to be more tax cuts in the new round of funding approved by the Senate this week. Possibly economic policy in this country is the outcome of an ideology of radical individualism along the line of one Tennessee protester's sign put it "Sacrifice the weak/Reopen T[ennessee]," which Heather Cox Richardson posted in her ‘Letters from an American’ yesterday followed by a note that “in 1883, during a time of similar discussions over the responsibility of government to provide a social safety net, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote a famous book: What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. Sumner's answer was... nothing. Sumner argued that protecting the weak was actually bad for society because it wasted resources and would permit weaker people to dilute the population. Far from helping poorer Americans, the government should let them die out for the good of society.” I had to go look up Sumner of course. Accorindg to Wikipedia William Graham Sumner (October 30, 1840 – April 12, 1910) was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any other major school. Sumner wrote widely within the social sciences, with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology.Sumner was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire economics, as well as "a forthright proponent of free trade and the gold standard and a foe of socialism. He had a significant and long temr influence on conservatism in the USA. And some of what I read about him sounds like it could have been expressed by the current adminstration, so maybe he wrot etheir playbook.
On the good news front there are indications that the virus provides an opportunity to redesign cities and address climate change. Cities shutting down and roads closed is like an experiment for the future, showing we are able to live with less cars for example. Likewise, the current crisis is giving rise to new business models while old models are being reconsidered, with a greater focus for instance on regional produce. IF the pandemic did lead to humanity taking lessons learned to seriously address climate change would that not be nice?
Presumably the oddest read of the day was an article on where airplanes come to die.
For the time being humans continue to die. Total infections today are at ~2.5 million with deaths tolls reaching 165k, a third of these in the USA alone, where newly reported infected range around 100k per week. At least Germany has begun clinical testing of 4 different vaccines and Switzerland is planning to conduct tests on a vaccine by July, hoping to potential have a vaccine available for its population by October, which I find very hard to believe. Early results of clinical studies of the anti-Malaria drug Hydrochloroxine indicate that it has no positive effect when applied as treatment of COVID-19, if anything it may even negatively impact patients.
Oh well, not everything can succeed I guess.