DOW Blog

The DOW Jones has seen its biggest drop ever in the last month. This is because there's a global pandemic that's preventing us from existing in close proximity to each other, an activity that's pretty central to the economy as we've built it. I don't really know what the DOW drop means. The DOW number, even at its lowest point following coronavirus, was higher than its peak before the 2007/2008 market crash. Then again, maybe population growth and raised costs of living mean that comparing the DOW number at two times doesn't serve as a relative measure of how well things are going at both. I don't think I have a strong enough grasp on how things work to take a guess at how the next sixth months will play out. As we live through one of the more notable disasters of modern history, there's people pointing to the fallout as evidence current systems don't work, while others say current systems are the only reason it isn't much worse. There's a lot of discourse from a lot of perspectives by a lot of people who seem much smarter than me, and a good number of them, at least as their opponents tell it, seem to have quite strong incentives to be deceptive. What I think is interesting is that political discourse, which tends to center around how to maximize happiness, or what system most benefits the most people, is in times of limited resources, forced to confront the reality that at times not everyone might get enough, and different political systems have built into them biases about who gets to have and who doesn't. Not to say that people haven't been pointing that out forever, but now its been dragged out into the public light.

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