Markets v. Lives | Boston Review
►http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/gregg-gonsalves-amy-kapczynski-markets-v-lives
par Gregg Gonsalves, Amy Kapczynski
The first stage of the U.S. coronavirus response was denial, issued straight from the top. The second was an extraordinary wave of social solidarity as we realized that in the absence of leadership from above, we had to act ourselves. Communities, neighbors, and state and local governments swiftly began to try to flatten the curve, though we may need to go still further to avoid cataclysms in our hospitals. What will the third stage be? Today, it looks like a riptide of contrarian skepticism—a powerful current running against the wave of social distancing that could accelerate the pandemic and the social dislocation that it will cause.
The reasoning goes like this. We can’t afford to keep these draconian social distancing measures in place much longer because we’re destroying the economy. Then come some graphs: lines of sharp cliffs to show us that the stock market is in freefall, unemployment is skyrocketing, and we’re headed for a new Great Depression—an economic cataclysm. The cure, we’re told, might be worse than the disease. An outbreak of armchair epidemiology and economics is aiding and abetting the problem, amplified by a news media eager for a hot take.
How precisely do they propose that we protect the vulnerable in nursing homes and prisons? Are they forgetting that so many of those who are most at risk—people over seventy years old and many who are chronically ill—need daily care? Who will provide it—or will we lock up the care providers too? In the most cynical instance, is “isolate the vulnerable” merely a politically convenient euphemism for “let them die”? The fact is, there is no simple way to protect the vulnerable beyond the blunt tool of drastic social distancing before we are able to scale up testing and tracing and to solve the shortages that are putting our health care workers at grave risk.
The darkest of these dreamscapes imagine that we must choose between saving the vulnerable and “saving the economy.” Already the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has urged that seniors like himself be asked to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the market. This is the level of the debate we are now having.
Pause for a moment to consider the absurdity of it all. All around us, we are seeing Americans sacrifice for one another to an almost unthinkable degree, all to slow the spread of a deadly disease—one that the best analysis that we have at the moment suggests could cause up to 2.7 million deaths in the United States alone if we abandon our efforts to contain it. Our typical indicators of the economy instead register our actions as a kind of collective suicide. Models of the economy, it turns out, do not incorporate the idea of staying home as productive of anything at all—not least avoidance of the negative externality of mass death. As longstanding critiques have insisted, figures such as GDP, which measure economic activity via the paid economy, also ignore the vast quantities of unpaid social reproductive labor without which society cannot survive. So the joke goes: when a man marries his housekeeper, GDP goes down. (Her work goes from paid to unpaid.)
But conventional wisdom is mistaking the current moment for something akin to the 2007–2008 financial crisis—a rupture that needs a “stimulus,” when in fact we want people to stay home rather than go out and spend. We’re not turbo-charging; we want to put the economy on pause as we dial down all but essential activities of our daily lives. This is a crisis, no doubt, but of a very different kind.
The interventions that we should be laser-focused on are those that meet people’s basic needs for social reproduction directly—to protect housing, to ensure that people can sustain themselves and their families through this shock, and to provide extra care for all of the workers essential to the response. The $2 trillion dollar package that passed the Senate yesterday instead tilts toward the old ways of thinking—with upwards of $850 billion directed at supporting businesses large and small, but with only $130 billion for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments. Trickle down, indeed.
In that cold calculus of efficiency or wealth maximization, those at highest risk of serious complications from COVID-19, for example the elderly and the infirm, seem expendable. But in human terms, this means a sacrifice of our parents and grandparents, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. This is worse than the specter of “death panels” that conservatives cynically fabricated to protect Americans from too much health care. It is a death drive, and the driver is capitalism. What else to call Lieutenant Governor Patrick’s cultish call for ritual group suicide among the elderly?
Fourth, we must do all we can to facilitate the development of safe, effective, and affordable drugs and vaccines. Here too, the path forward is through the public. As in all pandemics, the public will lead in funding the response, and should—though has not yet—demand that in exchange, companies that benefit from the response agree to a reasonable price for any cures. We must also require that companies make public the clinical trial data that sustains their claims—today, much of that data is hidden behind claims of corporate secrecy. We need public information about R&D costs too, to negotiate fair prices for things that work. As importantly, we must not succumb to the fantasy that a cure lies just around the corner.
While federal action is critical, there is much that still can and must be done at the state and local level. Closer to home, we need our leaders to protect those who cannot social distance because they are in our prisons and jails or living on the street or in homeless shelters. This is where social solidarity is most needed and most in short supply. It’s clear that with the close quarters in correctional facilities, the unsanitary conditions, and the frequent group encounters in washrooms or for meals, that the campaign against coronavirus is a losing game.
