During the past year, I've written a couple of articles about COVID:
- The Anxiety Antidote: Scary Times Success Manual
- Killing Time: COVID-19 and Media Consumption
- Trends To Watch Due To The Pandemic
Perhaps this will be the last one (if things go well on the vaccine front)?
In any case, I found a couple of interesting graphs worth sharing. The first shows the economic costs of COVID-19 in the U.S.
The toll of COVID-19 on mental health, productivity, and GDP is tough to quantify. Yet, even at a glance, it's clear that the impact of the quarantine and isolation are significant enough to warrant serious consideration independently from the medical implications of the virus.
The numbers from the above chart aren't perfect, but they are from a Harvard study, so I'll assume they are at least somewhat credible (unlike a lot of what you read on the Internet these days).
To put it in perspective, that $16.2T estimate of the total economic cost of COVID-19 in the U.S. is $10 trillion more than the estimated aggregated costs of the post-9/11 wars.
The second chart I want to share looks at how COVID-19 has impacted global wages.
You can click the chart to view other countries interactively.
There are many things to consider as you look at this chart.
- First, rising wages aren't necessarily a sign of a recovering economy - though wages have actually increased in most countries.
- Next, in countries where wages have dropped, many have wage subsidies that have heavily compensated for the wage loss. As a practical matter, this tends to happen only in high-income countries.
- Third, average wages can increase with unemployment due to the compositional changes of the labor market - both due to lower-income jobs being the first to be cut and also due to fewer people working in general. Brazil is a great example of this.
Looking at the US, unemployment is going down while average wages are increasing. That seems terrific (perhaps even surprising). The vital question is ... how much of that is due to economic stimulus and how much is real recovery? To some degree, necessity is the mother of invention and the US adapted quickly.
What do you think? Are we out of the woods? Guess time will tell.
Onwards.
