During the pandemic we have repeated the mantra, "We're all in this together." But the pandemic will leave some people better off -- and millions of people worse off than they were. That's certainly the case in Britain. Rafael Behr writes:
The language of collective endurance has helped sustain public spirits, but it also elides major sacrifice with acts that, in the wider scheme of human experience, register more as inconvenience: wearing a mask; foregoing meals out.
It might seem callous to talk now about anyone having had a “good pandemic”, but it is dishonest to pretend that the nation will walk out of the darkness together, with one story to tell. The disease has ravaged some and spared others. It gets deadlier with age, but appears also to have discriminated along racial lines for reasons that are not yet fully understood. Partly, that is likely to be a function also of class inequality. Covid thrives on deprivation: crowded accommodation; poor diet; precarious jobs that make it harder for people to self-isolate or take time off work for convalescence.
A release of pent-up consumption by the lucky group will generate flattering growth statistics, although that economic bounce will leave millions behind. Boris Johnson’s MPs will resist efforts to force the winners to subsidise the losers on any adequate scale. The Conservative cult of self-reliance usually provides intellectual anaesthesia against the discomfort of living in a very unequal society. There is less duty to care about unemployment once it is cast as a self-inflicted penalty for idleness. It gets harder to argue along the same lines when a pandemic is the cause of people’s suffering, but then the myth of collective sacrifice and the rhetoric of “hard choices” can be applied to salve wealthy consciences. We are all in it together. Some are just in deeper than others.
And that is the point. Some of us are in much deeper than others.
Image: quotefancy.com
10 comments:
"And while the growing ranks of homeless begged for change in areas like Downtown Manhattan, Lamborghinis sat parked outside crowded restaurants."
The above is an excerpt from a NYT photo essay, Owen, that complements the British piece, this one about the disparities that emerged in NYC during the pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/09/business/economy/covid-nyc-economy.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Thanks for the link, Lorne. The pandemic is a global phenomenon. And, all over the globe, the rich are getting richer.
The Black Death greatly transformed European societies. Covid-19, while mortality rates are infinitesimal contrasted with the 50 per cent death rates centuries earlier, may have some lasting effects.
I've read a few analyses suggesting that the pandemic may lead to a wave of automation even greater than we've experienced in recent recessions. Many corporations, rocked on their heels by an economic disruption, use their down time to restructure, often finding ways of paring down their costly payrolls.
Human labour is becoming increasingly obsolete. Some analyses compare the workforce to the farm horse in the age of internal combustion. For centuries the horse was indispensable to agriculture. Quite abruptly it was displaced and in a few years it was gone. A significant portion of our own work force could be headed in the same direction.
Economist James Galbraith painted this scenario of an automated economy:
"A part of the cash flow that previously supported these people - the managers and the checkout clerks, the secretaries and the TV repairmen, the booksellers and the reporters and the photo-lab technicians - now flows instead to a minute number of people at the top of the digital food chain. This was a dominant source of rising inequality in the late 1990s, when fully half the rise in income inequality measured across counties in the United States could be accounted for by rising incomes on Wall Street, in the three counties of Silicon Valley, and in Seattle. It continued to be a large part of the continuing high inequality in the decade that followed, although the locus of most rapidly rising incomes shifted, first to the military-heavy counties around Washington, DC, and then to the most flagrant centers of real estate speculation in the months before the collapse.
"The rest of the cash flow that technology eliminates finds no immediate outlet. Businesses that had previously met a larger payroll now meet a smaller one. their cost saving, like all saving, implies lost employment, diminished incomes, and the waste of displaced human talent. This affects all those directly displaced and also those who previously worked to provide goods and services to those now unemployed. In effect, the "saving" disappears. There is no paid activity to replace the activity lost. The plain result of the new technology is unemployment."
Yuval Noah Harari expands on this in "Homo Deus" in which he adds doctors to the list of doomed occupations. Why train thousands of MDs every year when, for a substantial one-time investment, you can computerize all medical knowledge and flood the world with automated physician care? Your robotic doctor would instantly access your entire medical data, including that of siblings and parents, and give you a far more reliable diagnosis than a human MD, limited to five or ten billable minutes per appointment, can ever provide. It would virtually eliminate misdiagnosis, prescription errors (a surprisingly high percentage even today) and other shortcomings. Meanwhile it would save governments an enormous expenditure. Harari recommends we stop trying to goad our kids into medical school.
There's no way to tell what might unfold but there's a good chance it will be unprecedented in human experience. For that reason alone we need a major political reformation and require our political parties to place more emphasis on the nation's needs and a lot less on their partisan fortunes.
The pandemic is truly an earth-changing event, Mound. Unfortunately, most of our political class haven't a clue about just how transformative it is and will continue to be.
All in this together? rubbish, we seldom have been and are oblivious the the circumstances that once did draw us together for the common good.
We are brain dead to historical situations that once led us co operate.
Human labour is becoming increasingly obsolete. Some analyses compare the workforce to the farm horse in the age of internal combustion.
Yet the masses yearn for the technology that brought us to this point.
For example using a web search to find less expensive goods to purchase leads to the closing of local stores that provide labour which provides income which provides tax revenue !
But we still degenerate to the cheapest , not the less expensive!
Cutting your own throat is something the average consumer does not understand , or is it wilful ignorance?
TB
The average consumer believes he's cutting someone else's throat, TB.
The average consumer is oblivious to his or her actions.
Does this take to task social media or our education system
Both promote rights; neither promote responsibility.
TB
I haven't seen any "all in this together" anywhere.
Instead, I see administrative workers in the public service whining about how tough it is to work from home while they enjoy a life of flex time with no interruption in their anticipated income.
The healthcare business has turned into a revenue grab through unsolicited and unwarranted teleconsultations with nurse practitioners whose primary function seems to be to insulate the doctors that employ them from involvement in the process.
In the hospitals the providers are enjoying a break from the interference of annoying relatives who used to try to protect their loved ones from directions by the angels of death to elevate the case to a higher level of neglect.
Sure, we're in it together. If you don't agree that we are, we'll put you somewhere else.
Some of us will come out of this in very good shape, John. Lots of us won't.
One should never underestimate the power of ignorance, TB.
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