We are living through one of history’s longest and most excruciating versions of “We told you so.” When in March 2020, the world’s government decided to “shut down” the world’s economies, throttle any and all social activity, and deny kids schooling plus cancel worship services and holidays, there was no end to the warnings of the terrible collateral damage, even if most of them were censored.
Every bit of the warnings proved true. You see it in every story in the news. It’s behind every headline. It’s in countless family tragedies. It’s in the loss of trust. It’s in the upheaval in industry and demographics. The fingerprints of lockdowns are deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives, in ways obvious and not so much.
Actually, the results have been even worse than critics predicted, simply because the chaos lasted for such a long time. There are seemingly endless iterations of this theme. Learning losses, infrastructure breakages, rampant criminality, vast debt, inflation, lost work ethic, a growing commercial real estate bust, real income losses, political extremism, labor shortages, substance addiction, and more much besides, all trace to the fateful decision.
The headlines on seemingly unrelated matters go back to the same, in circuitous ways. A good example is the news of the electric vehicle bust. The confusion, disorientation, malinvestment, overproduction, and retrenchment—along with the crazed ambition to forcibly convert a country and world away from oil and gas toward wind and solar—all trace to those fateful days.
According to The Wall Street Journal: “As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles (EV). In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.”
Reading the story, it’s clear that the reporter is downplaying the sheer scale of the boom-bust.
That’s not to say that Tesla itself is going bust, only that it has a defined market segment. The technology of EVs simply cannot and will not become the major way that Americans drive. It might have seemed otherwise for a moment in time, but that was because of factors that traced exactly to pent-up demand caused by lockdowns and huge errors in supply management because of bad signaling.
