The Possible Long-Term Economic Benefits of a Deadly Epidemic

Stocks are crashing, productivity is falling, people are stopping their consumption of goods and transportation, and the economy is generally going to go to shit. This is a pretty big deal. But there are some very interesting things to look out for on the horizon, positive things, that may come of the coronavirus epidemic. Add them up and it could mean a trillion dollars worth of indirect economic stimulus over the following decade. Read on to find out how.

I apologize in advance for the brutal rationalist nature of this article, and don’t mean to make light of anyone’s death, or unemployment, or financial strain, but these are interesting things worth monitoring.

End of the Office

One huge response to this outbreak, that many companies are jumping on, is telecommuting. Telecommuting is an obvious increase in efficiency, but has been resisted by Baby Boomer upper management types for years because it doesn’t fit their mental model of how to do business. They like to manage by walking up and down the cube farm and making sure everyone looks busy, and don’t understand how they could manage that way if their company was most or all telecommuters. According to The Atlantic, approximately 34 million people telecommuted in 2011, but that half of all jobs could telecommute if their…