Bounties are a good way to solve this. Invent a new therapy? The government buys your patent for a sum proportional to the value created (not to the dollars invested) and releases it to the public domain.
The thing is that the restaurant has waiters. Those waiters don’t take a vacation because they can’t afford it so Boeing doesn’t sell planes. Boeing isn’t growing so they lay off engineers who now don’t upgrade their iPhones. And Apple will suffer, just awhile from now.
If you are an insurance company and you raise someone's rates 25% it's just business -- risk management in large pools. As a hiring decision, though, any percentage discount makes it clear that you're not seriously worried about the risk -- if you were, you just wouldn't hire the person. On the individual hiring decision the risk calculus doesn't work like that -- "they're a greater risk so they'll need to provide more of a profit compared to their salary."
This virus is only two months old. Companies with cash reserves don’t have to lay-off immediately... they can wait a few months and figure out how many they need to lay-off.
Not really. Their thesis disintegrated way before this. Their thesis was that that even in a market with weak network effects, customer acquisition costs are high enough that you can spend your way into such a dominant mindshare that you end up with monopolistic or oligopolistic returns. The thesis is basically trashed at this point. The upfront costs are too high and the mindshare dominance is too fragile.
