Working From Home 2: Re-Opening
We have spent the last forty-five or so days working remotely. Since we work for a web company, much of what we do requires a phone, a computer, and a dependable internet connection. As a company that puts a premium on relationship, our ability to maintain this does have an expiration albeit one with mild consequences. Our industry is ultimately people and where they live — so an economic strain on that market is far-reaching and no one is exempt from that.
Texas is going to start Phase I of our reopening plan. The variety of opinions about that are all of two.
We need to reopen — the economy cannot wait going into June, maybe even July!
We need to wait longer until medicine can save us — the economy can wait!
Valid points in their own contexts. Both share a common denominator though in whether or not they can work for either short or long terms, and that is the need for funding resource. Only one option of those two addresses that.
What boggles my mind is that it’s an either/or, in that if you support one you hate the other. People are intellectually lazy as though caring about the economy is exclusive from caring about people. I tend to lean a bit more holistic on this. Emotional and financial health contribute to overall health. Stress compromises the immune system. Stress should be mitigated — so that means I need to care for everything that makes life. It means I need to care about the person who needs work because they need money to make sure the family’s needs are met. As a Dad, these things concern me quite a bit. It means I need to care about those that are vulnerable, which means let the healthy people work as they have the best opportunity to handle this risk and let our at-risk people maintain their distance until it’s okay again. Locking down everybody was a great idea 45 days ago when we had no perspective of how this would affect us. We have that now for the most part, and we need to start swinging at this thing.
The United States economy is the economy on which the world essentially leans — because we buy and sell a lot of stuff. If you remember anything about Economics in college, the backbone of any economy from macro-to-micro is the ability to produce goods, and subsequently buy and sell those goods.
Yes, the economy can wait — it has — but it should not too long. The economy is not just physical goods and currency, it’s also speculation and trust, the latter of which we have lost. The moment people start to protect their investments by cashing out, is the moment that the big machine starts to lose momentum. That trust is difficult to gain in the amount of time it took to lose it. This lost trust, the inevitable shrinking of our economy with the sharp drop in employment means that people are due for a lot of stress. It is a quantified fact that recessions/depressions contribute to an increase in suicides (source) particularly during a global depression, which the American economy if it fails, could very likely cause. (Opinion from RealClearPolitics)
So I believe in re-opening in May and I think Texas’s commitment to increasing our testing concurrent with reopening to make sure we are getting more data is a great start. People are hitting that phase where the economic pinch is turning into more of a slug in the face. Humans are incredibly resilient, let’s act like it.
