Honest question. Not political, I just don’t understand.
Imagine there’s a town of 1k people and they all serve each other – hospital workers, food service, etc. Then all 1k people die. Now there is no shortage of nurses and restaurant staff because there’s no one using the hospital or restaurant.
Now I understand that isn’t exactly what happened when a million Americans died of Covid-19. And I suspect certain types of people died with higher frequency leaving particular industries with a shortage (ie those with public-facing essential workers.) But is it that hard to shift? Say all the grocery workers died and now there’s no one to buy furniture, and the furniture store goes out of business. Well, the furniture workers could go work at the grocery store.
Or is it more like, people who work in general died, and those who don’t work survived and still need services? Regardless of whether people can’t work (ie they’re disabiled) or won’t (ie their dad got them a non-working, high-paid “job” in management?)
Surely I’m missing something, I would just like to know what it is.
In: 3
You have a flawed assumption that all the goods and services that a town provides needs to go back into the town. If a company built a furniture factory in a town, they wouldn’t expect that furniture to only be sold inside the town. That furniture gets shipped and sold elsewhere in the nation or internationally.
What die-offs do is make labor more valuable because the labor supply is lower.
Let’s say 1 out of 10 people have died in that town, evenly spread among all industries. The furniture factory has high pay and needs more bodies so they offer jobs to people who previously were paid less. People working in lower paid jobs can now demand higher pay from their current jobs or else they’ll jump to higher paying jobs.
Companies who can’t pay higher because of low margins or poor management will end up short staffed. Nobody wants to work anymore **for shitty pay**.
Latest Answers