In an interview during the brief run of his unpopular sitcom The Norm Show, Norm MacDonald explained how even if nobody watches a network TV show, it still gets credited with a million or so viewers because so many people just leave their TVs on all day. Sometime in the last few years, I started thinking about that observation as a metaphor for the economy and how we experience it personally—or like a platoon of a million semi-trucks barreling down the highway, all of which would keep going for a while if their drivers took their feet off the gas. Last month, all the drivers did let up on the gas at the same time, and now the trucks are all coasting to a standstill at once, which is a weird thing to watch. But during ordinary pre-pandemic life, individual parts of the economy would seemingly coast on similar momentum, and we would barely notice. Or to return to the TV metaphor, we’d just leave the TV on in the living room, and shows we’d never even heard of would keep putting up numbers. But now, suddenly, we’re actually running out of shows, figuratively if not literally.
#123: Debaser
#123: Debaser
#123: Debaser
In an interview during the brief run of his unpopular sitcom The Norm Show, Norm MacDonald explained how even if nobody watches a network TV show, it still gets credited with a million or so viewers because so many people just leave their TVs on all day. Sometime in the last few years, I started thinking about that observation as a metaphor for the economy and how we experience it personally—or like a platoon of a million semi-trucks barreling down the highway, all of which would keep going for a while if their drivers took their feet off the gas. Last month, all the drivers did let up on the gas at the same time, and now the trucks are all coasting to a standstill at once, which is a weird thing to watch. But during ordinary pre-pandemic life, individual parts of the economy would seemingly coast on similar momentum, and we would barely notice. Or to return to the TV metaphor, we’d just leave the TV on in the living room, and shows we’d never even heard of would keep putting up numbers. But now, suddenly, we’re actually running out of shows, figuratively if not literally.