My question is a call for ideas and analyses. What can we do to help our economies recover faster? That is, to help those badly hurt by present disruptions recover? What do you think the needs will be? What market opportunities?
Don't be reluctant to share your best ideas - after all, execution is king, and in the post-pandemic world, there will be plenty of space for competing approaches.
If I can buy gift cards for these sorts of services and that money can be used to fund workers, that's going to help them with cashflow. There's still going to be this several-week gap of lattes and tortas that went unpurchased, but it can be smoothed out a little bit.
There are logistical difficulties to sort out here to make sure money gets to the right place, including that food service workers rely on tips and that gig workers (like Lyft drivers) aren't the platform (like Lyft itself). So probably this would have to be worked into the concept of a gift card to make it solve the problem properly.
This makes it somewhat "easy", if a restaurant in Seattle sees foot traffic at an 80% decline they fire their team and hunker down for 2 months. Then start back up once we get this thing beaten. And, this invests in labor/consumption and doesn't have the negative side effect of keeping businesses afloat that shouldn't be.
High rent is a killer, that is a harder one to solve. But, you could start a rainy day fund (and seed it with a bailout). Basically offer a 0% loan to any business that needs to pay rent during a time of officially declared national crisis, but the deal is the loanee has to take ~50% off the rent payment for the month in order to get it. And, make that work its way of the pyramid. The idea being the person running the building takes a hit, the bank with the mortgage takes a hit that month...
Note - In the USA unemployment maxes at 790 a week, and it scales depending on some calculations. It doesn't include tips too so most people who work in restaurants are really in trouble.
If families and businesses are going to be hitting pause, through necessity and for the public good, then we can't have landlords expecting to be paid in full all the while.
Of course some of them will take a hit anyway when their tenants go to the wall, but it would be better for all concerned if the economically productive can do what they can, without the threat of the rug being pulled out from underneath them.
Many people are about to have enormous amounts of idle time to dedicate towards home-based hobbies, creative projects or entertainment, especially elderly told to self-isolate for several months.
Domestic healthcare product manufacturing will be high-incentivized for a decade or so.
Disposable income industries, especially travel and tourism, will be in free fall for months to a year. Luxury goods tend to also mostly dry up.
New ventures should focus on much improved (and defensible) essentials and better delivery of essentials that aren't as painless as ordering from Amazon.
There are a few things I'd say...
(1) COVID-19 is destroying international trust. The EU nations are closing their borders to each other, there is hoarding of supplies between countries, and stories are coming out now that countries might want to have exclusivity to vaccines. This is NOT supposed to happen with allies, and I think countries will have major trust issues and collaboration issues post-COVID-19.
(2) A lot of the economic stimuli will lead to significant increases in debt, but also NEW monetary and financial strategies. Countries are discussing encouraging central banks to buy stocks, mortgage-backed security, nationalize factories, and more. This means government debt will increase significantly, and corporate debt will be an issue as well. As earnings announcements are made for Q1, Q2, etc... we'll see just how bad this has gotten.
(3) Small businesses will be shutting down. Even if there are debt forgiveness programs driven by government debt (i.e., #2 above), the stress and short-term cashflow issues of many small businesses will likely cause many to shut down.
I can go on and on... I can also provide citations for any part you'd like to see.
Having said all of that, I think a few things are important:
(1) Promote social cohesion. People are scared, nervous, unsure what to do -- organize online events, reach out to people, etc.
(2) When it's safe, SPEND MONEY with SMALL BUSINESSES. I think this will be critical.
(3) Encourage your governments to work with other governments, and speak out against the politicians/governors/MPs/whatever that specifically were irresponsible during this period. Don't let them get re-elected.
... I can go on and on... Just let me know. :-)
My idea is to facilitate linking teens to nearby families with younger kids for babysitting. This already happens normally, of course, but in cities like SF it is less common. With dual working parents solving the childcare issue is a requirement.
What opportunities might there be for "Uber for X" that people can do from home? Amazon's Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I can't think of any others. And usually when the only present solution is a catch-all, there's space for more niche solutions that can thrive by specializing around specific sub-markets.
This will bring _a_lot_ of consequences like a drastic drop on rent and prices of apartments, a fast reduction of small shop/pub/restaurants inside the big cities, a change in the way universities make courses, etc...
It is going to impact every aspect of life considering we pushed urbanization to its limit in the last 6-8 decades.
I run r/GigWorks on reddit and I run some websites aimed at helping people trying to do GigWork.
I've been batting ideas back and forth with someone about a website called The Butterfly Economy, inspired by a comment I made on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
That website is currently a landing page.
While homeless, I developed an online income. It's never been enough, but it was better than not having it. I've been trying to lay the groundwork, both online and in meatspace locally, to help homeless individuals and others to connect with earned income via the internet.
I'm not getting a lot of traction and I'm not sure there's any point in continuing to push for something that no one else seems to want. I end up feeling like the world would literally rather let a bunch of people die than listen to me and I don't have a solution for that.
And talking about it that way is probably the worst way to talk about it, but a decade of getting kicked in the teeth and not taken seriously has taken its toll. I don't know how to escape that mental space while still stuck in that reality where I don't get taken seriously and so forth.
The old guard never seems to voluntarily step down. Perhaps this crisis is an opportunity.
From what I gather, people online are saying things like "Yeah, my boss, who always told me my job can't be done from home, is letting me do it from home now because of coronavirus. The asshole."
So I feel like we've long had the pieces in place to move to a different way of working and of living, we just dug our heels in and refused to jump on the bandwagon. But people are beginning to embrace it more now that the other option is death, basically.
I think -- and have thought for a long time -- that with 7 billion people on the planet, we need to change how we do things or there will be a massive die back of the human race. We do a lot of things that worked when population levels were lower and I think a major sticking point is germ control.
I'm aware of that because of my medical situation, but I get literally told I'm insane and making things up. So it's been impossible to tell people "I think you should do things differently." That's point and laugh at me, at best.
I'm tired and short of sleep and feeling pretty hopeless about a lot of things. I hope to be more productive on various projects in coming weeks.
And it's probably a mistake to answer this in public, but you and I aren't good friends and I don't want to bug you privately and blah blah blah. So there's some of my thoughts, fwiw.