New unemployment numbers are out today. After reading them, I told my wife, “If a soothsayer had shown up on New Year’s Eve and said that by summer, 40 million people would be unemployed in this country, we would have thought he was crazy.”
A global economic crash like 2008, sure, that we could understand — but even then, the job losses weren’t this bad, and they happened over 18 monhts. This thing, though? Forty million made jobless in 10 weeks? Seriously, if someone had told you that this was going to happen, and you believed them, what kind of plausible scenario would you have come up with to explain this catastrophe? I don’t know if most of us could have done it.
And yet, here we are.
An aside: it’s a tale that has been told many times: how World War I destroyed European civilization, and ushered in modernity in full force.
Read the whole thing.
On the flip-side, if Rod Dreher’s doomsday prognostication seems too wildly over the top, James Lileks tours the office building housing the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and writes, “Outside the building, the helpful [social distancing] stickers are already coming off, giving you that ‘oh, I remember those, there was a pandemic’ feeling we’ll all have in October, except probably not; there will be a second wave reported no matter the severity.”
In 2020, October will not lack for October surprises.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If you’d told me on New Year’s Eve that we’d be paying people handsomely to be unemployed, I would have found the numbers easier to believe.