Slanted but Essential

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Shutdown, historian Adam Tooze’s new book—which carries the somewhat premature subtitle How Covid Shook the World’s Economy—is billed by its publishers as “a deft synthesis of global finance, politics and business . . . a tour-de-force account of the year that changed everything.” Whether the coronavirus will, when all’s done, have “changed everything” remains to be seen, but Shutdown is well worth reading as an intriguing, thought-provoking study of a period made unique not by a disease—our species has weathered many—but by how we dealt with it.

“Never before,” writes Tooze, “had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down.” He could have taken a more rigorously questioning look at the rights and wrongs of that decision, one of several missteps in the book that range from his cursory examination of the different course adopted by Sweden to his failure to consider whether prolonged shutdowns would have been justifiable had vaccines not been developed so quickly. The vaccine breakthrough casts the draconian measures taken by authorities in a more favorable light than they may deserve. For how much longer would we have had to shelter at home? Years?

But then Shutdown’s author makes no secret of his preference for strong state action…

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A Useful Pandemic: Davos Launches New ‘Reset,’ this Time on the Back of COVID

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COVID-19 is a bad disease that has been used to breathe new life into bad ideas. And so it comes as no surprise that the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) is deploying the pandemic as an argument for what it labels, with characteristic modesty, “The Great Reset” initiative:

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Even if we pass over the presumption of the reset’s name, this is a small classic of the prose of soft authoritarianism. There is an “urgent need” that must be met. There is to be cooperation and management, the world is to be “improved,” and all of this is to be put in place by “global stakeholders,” — a conveniently vague phrase, with more than a suggestion of democracy bypassed about it.

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Lockdown Lunacies

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COVID-19 is again advancing in Europe, “despite” (I will get to those scare quotes later) earlier lockdowns.

CNBC (from Monday):

European countries are likely to impose more restrictions on public life in the coming days as the number of daily coronavirus infections rises rapidly, analysts said.

France reported 10,569 new cases Sunday (down from more than 13,000 new cases reported the day before), Reuters reported, while the U.K. reported almost 4,000 new cases on Sunday. Italy saw close to 1,000 new infections and Germany reported 1,345 new cases Sunday, and a further 922 cases Monday. Spain has yet to post its weekend case tallies, but reported almost 4,700 new cases Friday.

On Monday, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said rising coronavirus infection numbers in countries like France, Austria and the Netherlands were “worrying” and that Germany would sooner or later import cases from there, Reuters reported. He added that countries like Spain had infection dynamics “that are likely out of control.”

“Despite” because the initial lockdowns were never going to suppress the virus, not in the longer term.

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A Benefit Worth (Largely) Preserving

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From CNBC:

Republicans are considering extending the enhanced unemployment insurance benefit at a dramatically reduced level of $400 per month, or $100 a week, through the rest of the year, sources told CNBC.

Congress passed a $600 per week, or $2,400 a month, boost to jobless benefits in March to deal with a wave of unemployment unseen in decades as states shut down their economies to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The policy expires at the end of July as the U.S. unemployment rate stands above 11%, despite two strong months of job growth.

The GOP, which has not made a final decision on how it will craft unemployment insurance in a bill set to be released this week, previously discussed extending the benefit at an additional $200 per week instead of $600. Democrats want to make the $600 per week sum available at least until next year.

There are good arguments to be made for reducing the enhanced benefit from its current level, but a reduction to $100 (or even $200) seems to me like too great a cut too soon.

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On the Bleach

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Long periods of social isolation can lead to insanity. When I turned to Twitter one day last week and found that the trending items under “politics” included #Lysol, #DisinfectantInjection and the surely superfluous #DontDrinkBleach, I began to think that hallucinations were setting in. A link led me to this headline:

“Lysol and Dettol manufacturer tells customers not to inject disinfectants as possible treatment for COVID-19.”

What?

Then I saw this:

#DisinfectantDonnie

Ah.

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Facing New Crises, Macron Repackages Old, Bad Ideas

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At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

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Corona Conspiracies

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Say what you will about Carl Jung, myth-spinning Swiss sage, madman, and psychiatrist, but he wasn’t always (completely) wrong. Writing in the middle of the last century, he noted how:

The Middle Ages, antiquity, and prehistory have not died out, as the “enlightened” suppose, but live on merrily in large sections of the population. Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst and are unknown only to those whose rationalistic education has alienated them from their roots.

Sadly, that argument falls apart in the second half of the second sentence, perhaps even more than when those words were first published. In an era of apocalyptic environmentalism, revived Marxism, and goop, mythology and magic are finding dismayingly large audiences among those given the benefit of, at least nominally, a rationalist education.

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Cuomo’s Moment?

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The fact that I am writing this from home, in a New York City that has been more or less shut down, with the National Guard checked into neighboring hotels and, just a few blocks away, Gotham’s principal conference center hosting an emergency hospital, is a reminder that to dismiss almost anything these days as an impossibility is unwise. And so, yes, it is possible that Andrew Cuomo could be chosen as the Democratic nominee at whatever sort of convention the party is able to hold in Milwaukee in August. But it is also extremely unlikely.

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Setting a Precedent

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Whether Britain’s COVID-19 lockdown will be worth what it will cost — a bill involving far more than just money — was and is, for now, unknowable. That it would be used as an excuse by empowered authoritarians to go even further than highly intrusive regulations allowed them to go was, by contrast, all too predictable. When the state is given a mile, its rank and file will generally add a few inches all of their own. Between them, police and local bureaucrats have already distinguished themselves with stunts such as pulling over cars to check if their drivers are on “appropriate” journeys, dyeing a beautiful lake black to discourage visitors, and deeming Easter eggs “non-essential” purchases.

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Health versus Wealth Is a False Choice

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Deciding how and, critically, when, to put America back to work again after the COVID-19 shutdowns has, all too often, been framed as a debate between green eyeshade and stethoscope. Or, to put it another way, risking lives to put a few points on the Dow. Today’s appalling unemployment data are a reminder that describing the choice in that way is to play politics with a pandemic, and to avoid confronting the daunting dilemmas that will be involved in finding the right time to sound some sort of All Clear.

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