This pandemic is a good time to reflect on many things. It's a time to celebrate essential workers and contemplate how someone could be non essential.

That most of the non essential people seem to be in service industries must tell us something about a service economy. I think we can start to see that a service economy is a bit of an exaggeration along the lines of post industrial. It's something of an illusion for example that Google is not based on an industrial core. Based on the amount of energy the internet consumes it is hard to see it as anything but a heavy industry. It's also hard to see it as an information industry because most of the traffic is related to entertainment. Only a tiny fraction of internet traffic could legitimately be called information. You could argue that entertainment is an essential service in the same way some cities have declared liquor stores have been declared essential but that muddies the waters. As it turns out there are only a few very basic service that are essential for a civilization. They haven't changed in ten thousand years. Those services are water, agriculture, transportation, housing, and management. Those things such as music and art that we associate with civilization are a byproduct of an excess of necessities.

Part of the management of a complex society is money. Money is an entirely abstract reality. It's a way of keeping track of things. Who owes whom what. Unfortunately for economists value is as abstract as money. Take gold for example, it's intrinsic value is limited to it's utility in applications such as electronics. It's excess value comes from being shiny and rare. Gold's value it turns out is as abstract as that of money.

It also turns out that the value of labor is also abstract. If everyone decided that football was emotionally unappealing the NFL and it's players would starve financially. The point I'm trying to make is that to a large extent value is based on the satisfaction of our instincts. Since instincts out much more complex than any machine they can be reduced to a mathematical formula. You might say it follows the law of complex chaotic systems.

That brings me to the hubris of "follow the science" . Our science is for all intents and purposes the reduction of the complex to "simple" mathematical models. For solutions to dealing with things such as pandemics we need a new kind of science as Stephen Wolfram pointed out years ago and to which the general response was what an arrogant fool.

I have no pretentions of being the person that will bring us "a new kind of science" . That is work for a multitude of geniuses and a bit of bottom up luck. Of course we can't just stop everything until the problem is solved. The folly of the left is in thinking they can engineer that which they do not and cannot understand. The folly of the right is the invisible hand. That somehow systems will not go off the rails if not centrally managed.

The question becomes how do we manage a "service economy" that is driven by instincts we do not understand. The irrationality of our economic system is evident in that one day everything is fine and the next day you have a great depression, nothing tangible changed only the psychology. You can argue that the virus is different, that it is a tangible reality but that is a small part of the problem. If you argue that it could have been managed then why has every socialist experiment failed.

We have tried to manage the intangible through moral codes but history is littered with examples of how that has gone terribly wrong. We now have prophets who suggest we can address "injustice" by universal basic income or other redistribution schemes. Where they have been tried they have had such severe unintended consequences that they have been largely abandoned. Still we are going to have to address the issue of non essential people sooner or later as AI is posed to not only replace factory workers but low level professionals.

The first step is to create an economy that doesn't implode when all the essentials are in place. It's not a question of making it rational because we are all fundamentally irrational and instinctual.

Some speculation may follow