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I didn't find El-Erian's interview responses particularly insightful. They have already been provided by many MSM articles. Despite his predictions, we can already see the pushback from some companies, most notably the Wall Street banks. E.g. "If you can eat out at a restaurant, you can work in the office." Take your pick: Zitron's observation of useless middle managers desperate to regain control and micromanage employees within the office, or the fear of business owners losing control of their employees' costs and hence profits, even staying in business. History partly rhyming with the Black Death, just with a much smaller mortality and morbidity rate, changing the relative power of the wealthy and the workers.

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Re: Ezra Klein : Interviews Betsey Stevenson

The more I read about this issue, the more I keep thinking this is analogous to the Spartans' fear of a helot revolt. Essential workers are poorly paid, abused by their bosses, who whine if they cannot get enough workers cheaply enough. While they cannot go to war on these workers to keep them in line, they can try to make their lives even more miserable (although in a pandemic exposure to a potentially fatal disease the outcome is still death). 2500 years of civilization later and little changes...

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As someone whose 20s overlapped with the Carter and first Reagan Administrations, what stands out in memory is how rapidly and completely the mass-media economics and public policy commentariat embraced Friedmanism. There must have been pushback — Paul Samuelson’s Newsweek column? — but not much. Things turned quickly in the Seventies: less than a decade separated Nixon’s “We are all Keynesians now” from the Volcker Recession.

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