Sorry, Donald, You Can't Grab an Economy by the Pussy - Umair Haque

What jobs will people have left? Ultimately, technofeudal ones -- delivering Instacart groceries for tips today, Amazon packages tomorrow, driving an Uber by night. People will turn to scattershot techno-labour to make ends meet. But of course this glorified Victorian style piecework barely pays enough to make ends meet.

...Bang! Now twin tragedies have been caused. On the one hand, because the economy's been commanded to reopen too soon, the virus has accelerated, which has spiked the death toll into the figures of historic tragedy -- maybe half a million are now projected to be needlessly dead. But because the virus has accelerated again, consumption and investment have cratered. That, in turn, has caused a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. The Coronavirus Depression has now been made very real. It lasts a decade or so -- at least it's scars do. And all for a very simple reason.

You can coerce some people to go back to work, but you can't force people to spend money or make investments. Here the strike of the confidence fairy is real. Permanent unemployment beckons to the withering middle class.

_{Schengen is toast!}