The Profit Paradox

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

[For an endnote on Henry Ford’s contribution to American consumer culture, click here.]

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

As Calvin Coolidge once said, “The business of America is business.” Today, more than ever, business requires business corporations, fictitious “legal persons” created out of whole cloth by the law.

We have “public corporations” listed on stock exchanges. We have private corporations owned by shadowy figures, often unknown to the public. We have numerous “little” corporations, called LLCs (“limited liability companies”), which anyone can create, online, for fees as low as $150. Many restaurants and small businesses take this form. Together all these corporations share one key legal feature: limited liability. Under most circumstances, neither their owners nor their managers are personally liable for their errors and omissions, i.e., for bad things they do by mistake or stupidity.

But all corporations also share a much more important feature, which is key to understanding America and its present discontents. According to the law and to the gospel of every business school in America, the primary, if not the only, purpose of corporations is to produce profit for their owners. That is their raison d’etre.

So it’s no exaggeration to say that profit is America’s purpose. Many of us profess to believe in God, or in Jesus. But what we devote our lives to, day after day, hour after hour, in the work of our lives, is profit. We no more think about that fact than we examine the air we breathe. But it’s nonetheless true.

This fact has real consequences. This essay examines some of those consequences and explores the possibilities for organizing our lives and our society a bit differently.

The most salient and most recent consequence of our apotheosis of profit concerns the Trump corporate tax cuts of 2017.

In his signature piece of legislation (until the just-completed coronavirus bailout), Trump and Congress cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the cut will save business corporations 1.35 trillion dollars over ten years. The savings were and are to be financed by government debt.

Now our corporations didn’t ask for this tax cut, and most didn’t need it. It was an unexpected windfall: a nice boost to the “bottom line” without any cost savings, increased efficiency, or indeed any effort at all, except maybe a bit of belated lobbying.

So what did most corporations do? In obedience to the dogma of profit, they passed the tax cuts on to their shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, which raise stock prices. The result was the “Trump Bump,” a nice, steady rise in stock-market prices, which the coronavirus crash just wiped out.

Who gained? Well, it’s common knowledge that only about half of Americans own stock. You don’t have to be a genius to guess which half. So the end result of the Trump corporate tax cut was to enrich (temporarily) the richest half of us, while requiring the poorest half of us, and their children and grandchildren, to help pay back the debt used to finance the cuts.

It was, in effect, a “reverse Robin Hood” event, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. And now that the coronavirus crash has wiped out some $20 trillion of stock-market “value,” the whole thing is just a bad dream, even for the rich. Sic transit gloria mundi. The transient benefit that the artificial “Trump Bump” manufactured has evaporated, except for certain members of Congress who sold their shares on inside information, while the debt that workers, their families and the rest of us must repay remains.

Yet the Trump tax cut is just the bare beginning of the fuzzy thinking and social pathology that results from our worshipping profit. There’s a corollary that’s worse, much worse.

The general formula for profit in manufacturing looks like this:

π = P - L - M - O,

Here π is the profit, P the price, L the labor cost, M the cost of materials and components, and O the “overhead” cost, including things like executive salaries, electricity, insurance, lawyers, accountants, and mortgages on premises, i.e., real-property costs. Each variable is per unit of production, i.e., car, washing machine, ventilator, etc.

The profit π is a dependent variable, while the chief independent variable is P, the item’s price. Subject only to competition—which we’ll get to in a moment—the corporation has complete discretion in setting the prices of things it produces. But for competition it therefore, in theory, has complete discretion over how much profit it makes.

The variable L, the labor cost, is where all the bodies are buried, literally. To the corporate producer, it’s just another cost. But to the workers, it’s income, livelihood and sustenance.

For big corporations—and for society as a whole—it’s something even more important. The bigger the labor “cost” L, i.e., the higher the wages to workers, the more stuff they can buy.

Henry Ford was the first to get this point. Over a decade before the Great Depression and the rise of organized labor in America, Ford more than doubled the wages of his auto workers, to the then-unheard of level of $5 per day. He did so spontaneously and unilaterally, of his own free will as company owner, in January 1914.

Inflated to 2020 prices, Ford’s $5 per day wage would be about $131. For a five-day week, fifty weeks a year (with two weeks off for vacation), that amounts to $131 x 250 = $32,750 per year, or over $16 dollars per hour. Meanwhile, we’re still trying to get most workers up to the level of $15 per hour. And bear in mind that Ford’s unprecedented wage hike came at a time when the income tax, passed to finance World War I, was only 1% on annual incomes of up to $20,000 (the equivalent to $262,000 today).

Ford’s bold move had a ripple effect. Rival industrialists grumbled, but they increased their wages to keep pace. The result was our modern consumer society with its large middle class of workers able to buy the things they made at work. At $5 a day, a worker could accumulate enough to buy a $600 brand new Ford in about four months. Of course, his family had to eat, too, but the wages were enough to cover living expenses and a new car at least every few years.

So Henry Ford helped create our modern consumer society by paying his workers enough to let them afford the cars they made. The rising tide of his more-than-doubled wages raised all boats and made us the richest and happiest society in human history.

Enter global competition. Sometime in the last two generations, globalized free trade brought a new factor into play: international competition. With that development, management attention shifted from the profit π, the dependent variable, to the price per unit P, the supposedly “independent” variable. If a corporation couldn’t compete on price, a competitor could undersell it, and it would be out of business. Its profit would go to zero.

So low prices replaced profit as the goal of business. “Win” the price game and you could dominate your industry with low prices, drive rivals out of business, and maybe (after doing so) become a monopolist and raise prices again without the inconvenience of competition. Lose the price game and you would have no business at all. The new corollary of profit above all became low prices above all.

To see how this works, just make the price P the “dependent” variable by shifting the costs to the other side of the equation, thus:

P = π + L + M + O

You can lower the profit that you and your shareholders are willing to accept, but not below zero. There are laws against selling below cost, and anyway it’s not a long-term strategy. The other costs, M and O are largely determined by forces outside your control, i.e., other corporations and powerful executives. So the only cost that you can really control is L, the labor cost.

Thus goes the terrible logic of the corollary. If you want any profit at all, you have to offer the lowest price for your goods, which means incurring the lowest cost. Since other costs are tough to control, stiffing workers is the path of least resistance. That, in a nutshell, is why our managers sold our factories and technology to China and Mexico and sold our workers down the river.

It was all a mad dash for low prices. It dried up our factories and midwest factory towns. It hollowed out our manufacturing and our ability to do something real, besides shuffle paper, spreadsheets and (badly working) Web pages. It left us with no capacity to produce ventilators, masks and other PPE in a pandemic. And of course it put Donald Trump in the White House.

What we forgot, in this mad dash for ever-lower prices, is that “labor” is not a just another dry cost factor, a mere cipher. It’s our people. Squeeze them, and keep squeezing, and eventually you’ll have a revolution.

But on the way, you’ll get exactly the opposite of the consumer society that Henry Ford fostered. You’ll get a society with cheap prices at Wal Mart and on Amazon, which the wealthy can easily afford, while what used to be the great middle class struggles to afford them because those prices don’t support a living wage for them. You’ll get a society with workers who can’t afford to sustain a robust economy because they have inadequate income or no jobs at all.

That’s precisely where we are today. For verification, just watch the must-see documentary film American Factory. It reveals workers from a closed GM plant, once earning $29-plus per hour ($58,000-plus per year), now earning $14 per hour ($28,000 per year) working in a Chinese-owned auto-glass factory.

So that’s the paradox of profit. You have to have some, or eventually you go out of business. But our national fetish for maximizing profit and absolutely minimizing costs has decimated our middle class and depleted our society of consumers who can buy things. It has therefore maimed our economy, which depends on consumer spending for 70% of economic activity.

The rich can’t support an economy all by themselves. They mostly hoard, save, and invest. They don’t spend nearly as much, as a proportion of their income or wealth, as average people.

So no corporation can succeed fabulously by building mansions, private jets, yachts, or Tesla Model S’s. The corporations that have made it big in our day, as in the past, did so by making things that the masses buy and use. When Henry Ford raised his workers’ wages, he converted the automobile from a luxury good to a mass-market product. The rest is history.

Could our dismal recent history have been different? Of course it could. It still can.

Imagine, for example, that our president actually knew something and could think and analyze problems. Suppose that, instead of imposing blunderbuss “whole-value” tariffs on products and basic commodities like steel and aluminum, he imposed rifle-shot tariffs designed to neutralize the labor-cost differences between our workers and those in nations like China and Mexico for specific products that we actually make, or that we intend to start or re-start making. Suppose he said, in effect, “you can import all of these specific products that you want freely; but you’ll have to pay a tariff equal to the labor-cost differential between your country and ours. You can pay us in tariffs, or you can pay your own workers more.”

What do you think would happen? Either our workers would have a wage cushion by virtue of the tariffs, or Chinese and Mexican workers would experience rapid wage parity, producing Henry-Ford-like consumer societies in China and Mexico. Think everybody might be better off?

But we didn’t do that and we probably won’t. Why? The best I can figure, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Every business-school grad knows about the basic “demand curve,” which slopes downward to the right. It says that, as prices rise, the quantity sold falls. So if prices go up, sales fall, and the economy falters. Right?

Not really. That’s only when all other things remain equal. The standard demand curve doesn’t account for increasing consumer wealth as a result of better-paid workers. It also doesn’t account for the fact that labor costs are only a fraction of the prices of most goods. So if, for example, labor accounts for 25% of the price, you can double workers’ salaries and only increase the price of what they make by one-quarter. With doubled salaries, if they catch on like Henry Ford’s, how much more can workers as consumers buy?

No, the whole focus on profit, lowest price, and the so-called “efficiency” low prices represent is a product of limited minds unable to see the big picture. It’s a result of mechanistic, crippled thinking that sees people (aka workers) as merely cogs in a big machine. It is, as Farhad Manjoo described it in explaining why the world’s richest nation doesn’t have enough tests, masks, and ventilators in the middle of a pandemic, one of our “capitalist pathologies.”

It’s not as if there were no premonitions. During the eighties, Japanese car manufacturers penetrated our consumer society by focusing on market share, not profit. Maybe they even lost some money. But beginning with the tinny Datsun, they out produced us in high-quality, fuel-efficient small cars. So today Toyota is the world’s dominant car maker.

Our own Jeff Bezos and his Amazon.com spent decades disappointing Wall Street with no or small profits as he drove relentlessly for customer satisfaction and scale of operations. Today Amazon accounts for about half of all online sales and serves as a lifeline for stay-at-home customers locked down in the pandemic. Imagine, for a moment, if Bezos bumped his corporation’s 700,000 employees from a minimum of $15 to $20 per hour. The resulting boost from $30,000 to $40,000 per year would add some $7 billion to the global economy annually, and in the hands of folk who spend almost every penny they make. Call it the “Amazon stimulus.”

And then there’s Steve Jobs and Apple, which revived from a near-death corporate experience to become, for a time, the most highly valued corporation in human history—a feat lately repeated by Amazon. Jobs’ and Apple’s secret? Ease of use, intuitive interfaces, and making complex computer technology accessible to the average American, just as Henry Ford made his cars accessible to the average auto worker.

There’s a lesson in these stories of immense corporate success. Profit is not all. Low prices are not all. Having a society in which consumers are happy and workers can afford to be consumers is the secret to success, both for individual business corporations and for our society as a whole.

Maybe the pandemic, in giving us all time to think, will let us all come to the right conclusions. Maybe the “bailouts” of ordinary people that Covid-19 forced on us will show the way. Maybe we’ll kick the spreadsheet-makers out of the temple and reconstruct a society with postwar American levels of economic equality. If we do, a vibrant economy will follow, as day the night.

Endnote: More on Henry Ford

As Henry Ford’s historic vision increasingly clashes with the cramped shorted-sightedness of modern American industrialists, a veritable cottage industry has arisen to debunk it. I refuted a lame 2012 effort by an accountant (naturally) in Forbes Magazine here. The accountant argued that Ford didn’t intend to let his workers buy his cars: he merely wanted to curtail employee turnover as workers rebelled against the tedium and monotony of assembly-line work.

There is ample history from the era, including one of the most important corporate-law cases ever, to debunk that view. But even if it were right, it wouldn’t matter. Nothing in industrial history turns on Ford’s motives. What matters is the effect of his wage hike. No one denies (or can credibly do so) that Ford’s hike spurred copycats among other industrialists, who may have wanted to retain their employees, too. That led to a general rise in manufacturing wages and our modern consumer society.

The motives of a man long dead are not the issue. What matters is the effects his causes produced. From the perspective of a century later, we can see that Ford’s act changed America by the simple expedient of letting the masses afford what they make.

From the perspective of another century of economic learning, we can understand how essential that expedient is in an economy that depends on consumer spending for 70% of economic activity. After the last century’s horrors, we can also hope that increasing social justice while insuring a robust economy might help us avoid repeating that century’s wars and cataclysms, including the Russian Revolution, while helping us fight the current pandemic.

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Back to Work? Not so Fast!

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

For discussion of the fact, and its consequences, that viruses are not alive, click here. For the principal post, click here.

Improvised PPE

The economic pundit Farhad Manjoo has described the cascade of interlocking blunders and stupidities that made the richest country in the world unable to fight a pandemic for want of 75-cent masks. He aptly terms these fiascos “capitalist pathologies”—the relentless search for lowest cost and higher profit, no matter what the item is, or how vital it might be in a pandemic like the present one. It will be weeks, maybe months, before we Americans undo the stupidity of letting China make 80% of the world’s masks and Malaysia most of our medical gloves. In the meantime, maybe we can do what Americans are supposed to do best: improvise in times of need. Here are some ideas how similar products created for distinct purposes might be recruited to serve our first-line medical defenders as personal protective equipment (PPE) in this pandemic war: 1. Non-“Medical” Gloves. There are gloves and there are gloves. They come in latex, vinyl and nitrile. I use a lot in my work around the garden and house, to protect myself from harsh chemicals, paint, stain, glue and occasionally possible pathogens in disposing of dead mice (hantavirus) or bats (rabies). The ones I buy seem indistinguishable from the medical ones but are about $2 cheaper per box of 100 pairs. Their makers mark them conspicuously with the words “NOT STERILE,” and they’re probably excluded from hospitals’ procurement lists for that reason. But put them on, do the normal hand-washing routine and/or swab them with disinfectants, and voilà! You have a sterile pair of gloves. Probably no one produces these hobbyists’ gloves in anywhere near the same volume as medical gloves, but they could at least provide a supplementary supply while we ramp up production. All that’s needed is a little flexibility in procurement. 2. Face shields. Many, if not most, machinists and shop workers wear face shields to protect themselves from flying bits of material and broken tools in their shops. I have one in my home workshop. By and large, machinists’ face shields are bigger, heavier and more robust than those worn by health-care workers. But they are strong enough to be repeatedly washed and sterilized, perhaps even autoclaved. With machine shops all across American locked down due to the pandemic, why not collect both new and used machinists’ face shields and put them on health-care providers? These face shields are mostly open, not closed like some of the medical-workers shields. But together with masks and gowns with hoods, they could provide substantial protection against the projectile force of coughs and sneezes from patients in close proximity. The same probably holds true for diving masks and goggles, perhaps even with snorkels whose open ends are stuffed with cotton or gauze for protected breathing. 3. Impermeable gowns from thunderstorm “parkas.” Hikers and outdoor folk are familiar with plastic “parkas” that you can buy for a couple of bucks in stores like REI. They come in small plastic pouches that can fit in pockets, but they fold out into a complete knee-length waterproof parka with hoodie. The idea is to provide quick, cheap emergency protection from getting saturated by a thunderstorm. With a face shield and mask, or with goggles and a cotton-or-gauze-stuffed snorkel, this cheap and simple device could provide significant protection for front-line medical workers facing seriously sick patients. Their only obvious drawback is that most of their sleeves are short, so these plastic parkas would have to be supplemented with normal hospital gowns having full-length sleeves. * * * The word “scandal” is far too weak a word to describe the cascade of criminal negligence in our government that left our health-care heroes so vulnerable to a pandemic that everyone knew was coming someday. But now is not the time for blame and recrimination. It’s the time to pull out all the stops to protect the people who protect us. If I had a loved one on the front lines of this pandemic, I know I would be buying, begging, borrowing, stealing and improvising whatever PPE I could, making whatever mods and improvements I could, and putting it in his or her hands before work every day. And if I were a hospital administrator watching improvised PPE in action, I would wink and smile and be glad that health-care providers were protecting our most precious resource: themselves.

The principal post follows:

Is our president’s mouth an instrument of mass destruction? It certainly seems so.

In the last few weeks, he has discouraged crash programs to make more tests, masks, ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE) by saying or implying that we already have plenty available. Just in the last fews days, he caused a run on the malaria drug chloroquine by suggesting that it might cure Covid-19. Not only did that run deprive people of the drug who really need it for malaria; it also inducing at least one true believer to kill himself with it. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that chloroquine works for Covid-19.

The president’s recent suggestion that nonessential workers begin to go back to work in two or three weeks could have a much wider and more devastating effect. There is absolutely no evidence that their doing so would help people or lower the sickness and death rate, and no expert in the field is recommending that course of action.

On the contrary, going back to nonessential work in numbers would have all the terrible effects that competent epidemiologists have been valiantly trying to avoid in “flattening the curve.” It would explode the ranks of sick people, including those seriously ill. It would rapidly exhaust our dwindling supplies of tests, masks, PPE, hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. In so doing, it would put our health-care providers at risk, get more of them sick, and reduce our capacity to deal with the spike in cases it would cause, not to mention any second wave or possible follow-on pandemic.

In other words, the president’s “back to work” suggestion is precisely the wrong advice. It would countermand the social distancing and lockdowns now in place, replacing them with nothing but hope and a prayer. Most of all, it would elevate profit over people, putting at risk the people (aka “workers”) who produce the profit, not to mention those who are trying valiantly to keep them healthy.

It’s possible—although not likely—that we could be ready to start putting nonessential workers back to work in a few months. But a lot of things would have to fall into place before that would be a good idea. We would have to develop a new kind of test, different from the one being used now to tell whether people are infected. We would have to develop antibody tests. Here’s the theory.

That vast majority of people who catch Covid-19 will recover. Once they have recovered fully, chances are good that they will be: (1) immune to further sickness from the same virus and (2) no longer carriers. Once properly identified, recovered nonessential workers could go back to work without endangering themselves or others, as least insofar as concerns Covid-19.

The problem is, we don’t yet know precisely how this theory works in practice for Covid-19. We don’t know how strong is the immunity in recovered patients, or whether it varies with the patient and the severity of the sickness overcome. We don’t know how long it lasts. And we don’t know at what point they are no longer carriers of the virus. There is some evidence that recovering patients can be infectious for longer than the now-presumed quarantine period, i.e., fourteen days.

Enter the antibody test. When a person’s immune system overcomes an infectious disease, it does so in part by producing antibodies to the infectious agent. The antibodies circulate in the patient’s blood. Generally speaking, the more antibodies there are, i.e., the higher their chemical concentration in the blood, the better the immune response. So the first step in being able to tell whether recovered patients are (1) immune and (2) no longer carriers involves being able to measure the levels of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 (the Covid-19 virus) in their blood.

Blood tests for this purpose are separate and distinct from the nasal-swab tests that detect active viruses in a patient’s airways. Antibody tests cannot be used to detect initial infection because it takes time for patients to develop and multiply antibodies. For example, flu vaccinations require from 14 to 20 days to produce enough of an antibody response in those vaccinated to confer a reliable level of immunity. But once patients have developed their own antibodies after recovering from infection, they can be as if vaccinated, i.e., both immune and “clean.”

Unfortunately, I have not seen any public report that we have such antibody tests, or that anyone is now working on them. The virus is too new. Anyway, at this initial stage of the pandemic, the focus must be on identifying people who have been infected but who have not had a chance to develop antibodies. Hence the active-virus nose swabs. But work on antibody tests should begin forthwith, and Congress should appropriate money for their research and development now.

That work will have to answer a lot of questions. What kinds of antibodies do recovered patients produce, and how much immunity do they confer? (There may be several kinds of antibodies, which target various portions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ biochemistry.) Can you tell whether a person is immune and not a carrier from the type and levels of antibodies in his or her blood? How long does the immunity last, and is it correlated with blood antibody levels?

Only when we’ve answered those questions, and only if the answers are promising, can we know how to identify people who’ve recovered, are immune, and are no longer carriers. Then we can send them back to non-essential work, confident that we are not endangering them, their families, health-care workers, or others.

Not only that. Once recovered patients had been “cleared” by antibody testing, they could be trained to replace health-care workers who had fallen ill, at least those not requiring extensive education. Having natural immunity, the recovered patients wouldn’t even require PPE; they could just take very thorough showers at the end of each work day to avoid infecting their families and others.

With a little clever science and chemical engineering—and a little luck—antibody tests can be made simple and cheap. Because antibodies populate blood at relatively high levels, tests for them are not nearly as complex and expensive as the tests for active viruses in the nose, which rely on sequencing whole or partial RNA strands. Some antibody tests can be as simple as an over-the-counter kit that lets a patient prick his finger, put some blood on a reagent stick, and watch for a change in color.

But a whole lot of research and study has to precede the happy day when such tests are available, over the counter, by the millions in drug stores nationwide. So shouldn’t we get started now?

Viruses are Not Alive

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes Covid-19, our current pandemic. As I talk with friends and family and read news articles about it, I find a repeated misconception. Neither SARS-CoV-2 nor any other virus is alive. That simple fact makes the viruses both more and less fearsome than bacteria, amoebae, and other protozoa, which are alive, and which also can cause disease.

(Sometimes you will hear lay people or even doctors speak of “live viruses” or “killed virus vaccines.” But that terminology is a holdover from the past, when truly live microorganisms were the principal focus of infectious medicine. Human language develops by analogy and becomes more precise only with time.)

High-school biology teaches the seven signs of “life.” Three of them are respiration (breathing), alimentation (feeding) and locomotion (moving). Viruses don’t do any of these things. Unlike bacteria, they have no “organelles,” or microscopic organs, capable of processing oxygen or food, and no appendages or other organs capable of moving.

Viruses are simple biochemical structures that must physically contact a target cell, more or less by accident, in order to infect it. Their receptors (the red structures in the ubiquitous electron micrographs of SARS-CoV-2) must contact a cell surface with the requisite biochemical structure. When they do, the receptors force their way into the cell and insert the viral DNA or RNA messengers, which then force the cell’s own DNA or RNA to reproduce more of the virus. (With SARS-CoV-2, the inserted stuff is RNA.)

The whole process is a delicate chemical takeover, which can be stopped at any of its three stages. But the virus doesn’t “eat” the cell in any recognizable way. It commandeers the cell’s own reproductive machinery by a simple biochemical process and causes the cell to make thousands of copies of the virus itself.

In this way, viruses are like minute “zombies.” They’re not alive and not dead. Yet they can make us sick and even kill us. But unlike Hollywood zombies, viruses are real. They are even more more fearsome because we can’t even see them without expensive scientific equipment.

You can think of a coronavirus as a tiny landmine, with its protruding red receptors as its “triggers.” What the receptors trigger is not an explosion, but a delicate and precise biochemical forced entry into the cell and a takeover of its reproductive machinery.

For us humans who suffer from viral diseases, these facts have both good news and bad news. The good news is that viruses don’t move on their own. They can’t crawl up your arm or even your nose. They don’t have any means of doing so.

In fact, SARS-CoV-2 has a tough time getting up your nose to where it can do damage. It must avoid somehow getting stuck in your mucus and expelled by a cough, sneeze or even heavy breathing. It must evade your tiny cilia (minute hairs) that are constantly in motion, expelling foreign particles from your airways. Then it must contact a fresh, vulnerable cell capsule and begin to do its dirty work.

That’s why masks are helpful, both to protect you and others (from your coughs and sneezes). That’s why netipots and saline-solution squeeze bottles might help avoid infection, by washing away the viruses before they can get a foothold. That’s why smoking lowers your protection; it slows or stops the cilia that are otherwise constantly expelling foreign matter from your airways. That’s why coughing and sneezing can (at the very early stages) help you avoid infection while, at the same time, increasing the risk to others around you. That’s why our bodies evolved the ability to cough and sneeze in the first place.

The downside of these facts is that viruses are hard to “kill.” They have no heart, stomach or vital organs to target. They don’t need food or air. To “kill” them—i.e., render them non-infectious—you have to cap or remove their receptors, burst their capsules and take the virus appart, or somehow destroy or disable their patiently waiting interior reproductive machinery. That’s what medicines and the antibodies that vaccines trigger try to do.

So when scientists tell you that SARS-CoV-2 can remain active and dangerous on hard surfaces such as plastic and metal for up to nine days, you should pay attention. They don’t “live” there. They just exist. As long as they maintain their original form and can be detached from the surface, they remain infectious if you should, for example, pick them up on a finger and insert that finger in your nose. So it’s best to wash possibly infected surfaces with soap and water, which can also disrupt the viral capsules, or to destroy their receptors and maybe disrupt their capsules with things like household disinfectants and ultraviolet light, including strong, direct sunlight.

Now that viruses have established themselves in our biosphere, they will probably be with us as long as our species survives. They have co-evolved with us and with our fellow creatures. The only way they increase their numbers and geographical scope is by infecting us and other similar organisms.

But viral evolution has some interesting and hopeful twists. Like all evolution, it proceeds by mutation and the natural selection that follows mutation.

Suppose that a virus mutated to cause violent convulsions in its victims and kill them in as little as five minutes. It wouldn’t spread very far, would it? Even primitive human societies would have shunned, burned, and buried the victims’ bodies as riven by “evil spirits.” Today, all remains would be quickly cremated or carefully sequestered as medical waste. Unable to move and “chase” its victims, the virus would probably find no further hosts after its first dozen or so victims had been disposed of.

The most “successful” viruses, from an evolutionary point of view, are those that spread far and wide by making their hosts sick but not killing them. As long as hosts are well enough to stay out of bed and out of the hospital, and to spread the viruses by sneezing or coughing on others, the virus can expand its human and geographical reach. High mortality is therefore a negative adaptation for viruses; that’s why non-lethal viruses such as the “common cold” have some 250 variant strains.

So we can expect our war with viruses to continue for a long, long time. With each new mutation, our bodies must adapt by getting sick and getting well, thereby “training” our immune systems to fight the new threat. Medical science must develop new medicines to cap or remove the new viral receptors, destroy the capsule or defeat the internal reproductive machinery. We must develop new vaccines to train our immune systems to fight the new virus before we feel sick.

Some day, we may have cheap and simple masks, or even nose inserts, that can filter out viruses at the nanoparticle level. Some day we may automate the tedious processes of developing medicines and vaccines and testing them for safety and effectiveness. Some day, we may find a universal or near-universal antibody for most or all or our respiratory viruses.

But in the meantime, our exploding global population, densely packed cities, and even more densely packed modes of transportation (including elevators), provide fertile ground for even the wimpiest viruses to infect us and spread among us by means of our own social movement, and then to mutate and spread some more.

That’s why isolation, keeping our distance, wearing masks, not touching our faces, washing our hands, washing our faces, cleaning possibly infected surfaces, irrigating our noses and sinuses, quitting smoking, and changing our social behavior during epidemics will be with us as far forward as anyone can see.

Asian cultures, which have long dealt with greater human density, are ahead of us Westerners in this regard. It has been customary in Asia for people not feeling well to protect others by wearing masks when in public, at least since the mid-eighties when I first visited Japan.

As viruses proliferate and take advantage of greater human density and more frequent travel, the rest of the world is going to have to catch up with Asia in simple precautions and mechanical means of control, as well as in making social changes in times of epidemics. The days of supposed isolation of man from man are gone even in the “Wild West,” when a cowboy in Montana might have gotten off a plane from Paris or Beijing only a day or two ago.

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Pandemic Choices

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Unbeknownst to almost everyone, we’ve already made a crucial choice. When I write “we,” I mean our entire species—all of us.

That includes fun-loving, libertarian France and Italy. It includes theocratic Iran and authoritarian China and Russia. It certainly includes the United States, which is in the process of upending its economy to slow the virus. It includes South Korea, which probably has had the most efficient and effective pandemic response of any nation to date.

We’ve all made precisely the same choice. We’ve made it naturally and instinctively, without thinking, consulting or debating. We never really considered the alternative. We’ve all decided to fight the Covid-19 pandemic with everything we’ve got.

What’s the alternative? In concept, it’s pretty simple. This pandemic kills relatively few. It’s nothing like the Black Plague, which killed off one-third to one-half of Europe and parts of Eurasia. With proper testing and care for the sick, the death rate from Covid-19 is about 1%. Even where care is poor and testing is lax, the death rate likely rises to no more than 3% to 4%. Estimates of the mere complication rate are about 7%.

So we could, if we decided to do so, just let the pandemic rip. In two or three months, every human being on the planet would have caught it. The overwhelming majority would have recovered. At most 7% would have suffered and died. The remaining 93%-plus—maybe up to 99%—of survivors could get on with their lives.

This choice has some clear advantages. The whole thing would have been over in three months. The world’s health-care system and its providers would not have been stressed or put at risk. The global economy could have gotten back to “normal” in not much more than a single accounting quarter. Assuming that those who recovered would have some immunity, maybe even full immunity, the human “herd” would have “beaten” this pandemic and be readier for the next one.

So why didn’t we make that choice? Why didn’t we even consider it? Cynics might say we didn’t do so because this pandemic preferentially targets the aged, who by and large are the leaders, politicians, and oligarchs of any society. We didn’t consider this choice because our rich and powerful are risk-averse and would have been on the front lines, dying—a choice they never accept without a struggle.

But I think it’s really simpler than that, much simpler. We didn’t even consider “letting it rip” because we are all human. Taking care of each other (or at least our own) is what we do. Life is precious to all of us, and we do what we can to preserve it and help each other do so. Every single nation, no matter how far from the so-called “mainstream,” works that way. We’ve evolved that way, both biologically and socially, and that’s who we are as a species.

Now that we’ve made that choice, there are others to be made. They are equally profound and portentous. In the long run, they may be more consequential.

In three months or so, our much-vaunted global economy will have ground to a standstill at our own command. Global air traffic is down 60%, maybe closer to 80%. Domestic ground and air traffic exists only for essentials: food, water, medical supplies, electricity and the products needed to use them and keep them coming. Cruise-ship traffic has all but halted, worldwide.

So the pandemic gives us an opportunity to assess, vividly and in real time, just how much excess and “fluff” there was in our globalized economy, and just how superfluous it is to human survival and happiness. In developed countries, at least, we are contemplating having nearly the entire workforce stay home with family and work by telecommunication, while the very few needed to grow our food and keep it coming, and to keep the lights on, work at lower volume and with social distancing.

What does this tell us about ourselves and our future? Several things.

First of all, it tells us much about our profligate use of fossil fuels. We don’t rush all over the world in planes and ships, and all over our continents in cars, buses, planes, and trucks every day, because we must. We do it because we can and we want to. We are heedless of our own and our planet’s future.

In just two months, we’ve cut global fossil-fuel usage probably by at least half. There is absolutely no reason why we couldn’t continue and even deepen those cuts as we emerge from the pandemic. There would have to be economic adjustments, of course. But there’s no question that we could do it. We just did, worldwide, and in a mere two months.

Second, our bankers say that $21 trillion in “value” has evaporated globally. But is that so? Have the stock-market crashes worldwide made us anything less than we were the day, the month, or the quarter before? Is anyone starving? Has anyone but the very few cut down by the pandemic reaper died? Some of us who were vastly more equal than others are less so now, some a lot less. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

One thing the pandemic has shown is how irrelevant and illusory our entire financial superstructure has become. Only a man of the intelligence and humanity of our president could confuse our stock market with the value of life and society in America. Even our quantitative economists are beginning to understand there’s more to life than GDP. And as for real investment in real business, no less an authority than Warren Buffet gave up on derivatives and their derivatives long ago.

The sum of $21 trillion is something like half the entire mortgage debt in the US at the time of the Crash of 2008. It would take a general nuclear war to destroy that much real value, i.e., the underlying houses. So isn’t there something strange about a financial system that can “destroy” it in a couple of weeks, based entirely on fear and speculation, and make the 50% of ordinary people who own stocks take much of the loss? Has much of our global financial system become a species-wide case of pathological gambling?

Perhaps the pandemic-caused global stock-market crashes will help us ask a series of fundamental questions. Should we “employ” a huge class of people in what is essentially gambling on unknown and unknowable risks? Should we make them among the richest and most powerful among us? Should we be putting our children’s college educations and our workers’ retirement on their roulette wheels? Have we all gone crazy for what is essentially a sophisticated form of gambling, rather than seeking more certainty and stability for our children’s lives and education and our own retirement?

A third big opportunity involves intellectual property. As the pandemic struck, we were just in the throes of an enormous global disruption due to the loss of good jobs to low-wage countries. Could we stop all the energy-wasting transshipment? Why should forks and chairs used in Chicago and Charlotte be made in Guangzhou, and iPhones used in New York be made in China from chips and other components made in California? Wouldn’t it make more sense, reduce energy waste, insure local employment, spread skill and expertise, and insure supply in times of stress (like this pandemic) by having most things made near where they’re used? How did we end up with half the world’s supply of medical masks being made in China?

With more attention paid to intellectual property rights, including design rights, future products could all be made wherever they are used, or at least much nearer to users. Designers and inventors all over the world could receive their just due in royalties for their pleasing and ergonomic designs and their inventions and copyrights. But the production and jobs could accompany consumption, worldwide: local people could make things, from paid-for designs developed anywhere in the world, for local people.

Finally, what about the United States’ shameful and persistent problem of homelessness? Shopping malls were already dying nationwide, well before the pandemic. They are dinosaurs, miscreants of profligate burning of cheap gasoline in a geographically dispersed era before “urban planning” was even a meme.

Now the pandemic has given shopping malls the coup de grace. Why not convert them into modern shelters for the homeless and low-income families and resolve one of our most shameful national disgraces? Why not do the same with all the useless cruise ships that are now tied up like so many derelict warships after World War II?

Since the discovery of cheap oil in Pennsylvania over a century ago, we have made for ourselves a world enormously different from the one in which our ancestors evolved and thrived. It's noisier, busier, more raucous and infinitely more polluted and dangerous than anything that came before.

We know we are rapidly destroying the climate in which we and our fellow species evolved. We know the destruction is accelerating, even faster than the most “alarmist” of our cowed scientists predicted. But we—our entire species—just couldn’t help ourselves. We got hooked on perpetual motion, on taking a weekend in Europe or Asia to shop, or driving from Dallas to Chicago to see the family on a day’s notice.

Now the pandemic has cut all that short. We are seeing just how inessential to our civilization—our survival and our humanity—are all this fossil-fueled perpetual motion, all this energy profligacy, all this feverish financial speculation, and all this neglect of our planet and the least among us, including our fellow species.

As the days turn to weeks, and the weeks into months, three things will happen. First, our city skies will clear. The vast majority of our global population, which lives in cities, will begin to experience spring as our forebears knew it, without smog, but with the alluring smells of flowers and nature.

Second, our lives will simplify and improve. We did not evolve to travel hundreds or thousands of miles a day and deal with a whole new set of people with each dawn. We will learn to cherish our families and friends and those close to us, whether in real space or online. We will learn again the pleasure of having evolved in small clans of thirty or fewer and what it means to live as we evolved, knowing those close to us intimately, not just through sound bites and video clips.

Third and most crucial, as we emerge from the pandemic we will find it easier, and far more natural, to build a new world with renewable energy, a less grotesque financial system, and human scale. Without much change or effort, as the pandemic loses its grip we can go “cold turkey.” We can stop the profligate burning of fossil fuels that have made our current world so noisy, so hectic, so inhumane, so polluted and so increasingly like our medieval visions of Hell.

The Internet requires so much less energy than our perpetual motion and our absurd transhipment of flowers from Africa to England. (Ever heard of greenhouses?) With it, we can stay in touch globally. We can continue to evolve our science, technology, medicine, learning and art, all together as a species. Maybe we could even work on deeper mutual understanding and harmony among us.

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Mobilizing to Fight the Pandemic

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

There’s an old saying about the military. It goes something like this: politicians and glad-handers rise during peacetime; doers rise to the top only in war, and then only out of necessity.

Our civilian sector, including many of the non-military parts of government, could tell a similar story. For at least the last forty years, three recognizable types of “leaders” have dominated it.

In politics and large parts of the private sector, it’s the advocates: politicians, lawyers, PR folk and advertisers. Their primary job is to dupe the rubes. They begin with a fixed position, handed them by their party or their bosses. Then they justify and propagate it cleverly against all opposition. For them it’s all an abstract verbal game. The simpler the story, and the more mindless and simplistic the abstractions, the better to dupe the rubes.

The second class is the “bean counters” and spreadsheet makers, aka MBAs. All they really know is how to choose the more immediately profitable among a small number of options presented (often, but not always) by people who actually know what they are doing. That’s why we had to bail out GM after the Crash of 2008. That’s why we had a second “total death” crash of the 737 Max, when any competent pre-war industrial leader would have grounded the plane the first time, found the flaw, and fixed it. Boing is still trying to do that.

The third class is the traders, including brokers, financiers, market manipulators, and international dealers in goods and services. In the last several decades this class has metastasized explosively in both numbers and obscene wealth.

For these folks, everything is a commodity, to be “monetized,” bought and sold. This class includes people like Mark Zuckerberg, who learned to monetize, buy and sell billions of people’s private information.

Our media gush over their Internet financial gimmicks as “marvelous innovation.” Meanwhile, real discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, quantum computing, nanotechnology and even medicine increasingly migrate East to China and Japan. Or they migrate back to Europe, whence many of the last century’s great discoveries in science came to us, after the Nazis drove their makers out.

Not one of these three long-dominant American “professions” will be of any use in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is not intelligent. You can’t dupe it and you can’t “spin” it, although of course our president has tried and failed to do that to us, the people.

There’s no profit in the Covid-19 pandemic, nor in abating it. It’s a cost center, not a profit center. The goal of fighting it is not profit, but reducing death and suffering and insuring human survival. It’s probably going to be the biggest cost center in our species’ history, at least until global warming really starts to bite.

Finally, there’s nothing about the pandemic that can be usefully monetized, except in the crudest and most skullduggerous way—as did that Tennessee yahoo trying to corner the market in hand sanitizers and toilet paper in his little part of the world. In the past, we had a word for people who try to “monetize” suffering and death or the risk of them: criminals.

World War II was our last serious challenge as a nation. The Cold War was a bit of mutual Russian-American insanity that sort of ended by itself. No one really “won” it. As for the Crash of 2008, it was a totally gratuitous crisis caused by members of our own financial class, resolved by bailing them out. No wonder the New York Times opined in a must-read editorial that our nation has faced nothing as daunting as the Covid-19 pandemic since World War II.

Now that we must face it, we need people of imagination, experience and daring. We need people who can seize opportunities and avoid risks on the spur of the moment, and who can organize teams and whole industries to do so. You can’t do that by spinning lies and half-truths, working a spreadsheet, or trading monetized commodities like a barterer in a souk. You have to have the brains and skill of people like FDR, Harry Hopkins, Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur and Marshall, and (from the modern era) Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, David Packard, and Jonas Salk. (The fact that many readers will have to look up some of these names shows just how far we’ve degenerated from a nation of doers and achievers into a gigantic fan club for celebrities, including our president.)

None of the three great classes of self-indulgent lightweights who’ve risen to the top of our society since Reagan can help us. We need people who can figure out how to turn production lines for vacuum cleaners, air conditioners and refrigerators into factories for ventilators in a couple of weeks. We need leaders who can organize their massive manufacture and distribution without excess or hoarding. We need doctors and biotech researchers who can find and validate quicker and cheaper tests for infection incipient and infection overcome—and eventually vaccines and cures. We need industrialists who can organize and quickly ramp up massive production and distribution of all of these things. (For an example of a modern medical industrialist whose new ideas might help fight the pandemic, click here.)

We need construction czars who can make whole new hospitals rise from the ground in ten days, as in China. And when the whirlwind pandemic finally has passed, we will need industrialists and planners who can put our shattered economy back together, perhaps nearer to the heart’s desire. Presumably what rises from the ashes will be not only more equitable, fair and just to workers and families, but also less reliant on profligate use of planet-killing fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, many of our people who could help us do all this are no longer working here at home. They’re in China, Mexico, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where leaders of our three “professions” sent them to make piles of money and send it home.

And that’s precisely the problem. Since Athens fought Sparta, our species has understood a painful truth. Live the Good Life, too far prolonged, and you become weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. After 75 years of the Good Life—nearly four continuous generations!—we have to get strong, diligent, selfless and smart overnight.

We have to find, promote and follow people who actually know that they are doing, not spreadsheets or some simplistic ideological mantra. Of course we have to dump our Buffoon-in-Chief. But if we wait until November, we are toast. Right now, we must kick him upstairs, letting him Tweet and grab credit at will, while finding and putting experienced, competent people in charge of our society, or at least our response to the pandemic. We have to listen to them and turn on a dime, just as we did when we realized, too late, that we don’t have nearly enough tests.

We also have to stop beating our flabby breasts, crowing about past glory, and bashing other societies, like China, for not being like us. Yes, China got off to a slow start, but so did we. If we can face this virus as well as China is doing now, let alone South Korea, we might have something to crow about, maybe a year down the road.

If not, then once the dust all settles, China’s ascendance and the acceleration of our decline will be virtually assured. No society can count on dominance, let alone transcendance, for any particular length of time. If we don’t find and heed good leadership in response to this first big challenge in 75 years, our global dominance will become history shortly after the crisis ends, and our nation will be immeasurably weaker.

What kind of foreign leader will pay any attention to a man who disbanded our government’s principal pandemic leadership team, and then, once the pandemic hit our shores, belittled it, failed to work hard to insure adequate testing, made four basic errors of fact in his first address on the subject, praised himself repeatedly, and gave himself a “10” for performance? Mitigating the most obvious aspects of economic devastation is not hard. All it requires is violating Republican orthodoxy and handing out money to people who are not oligarchs. Stopping the pandemic, making sure that it’s stopped, preparing for the next one, and restructuring our economy in the wake of its devastation to be more just, fairer and more resilient to both medical and climate shocks will require much, much more.

Try to imagine what this nation will be like after four more years of this raucous parade of self-congratulating incompetents. Then act, work and vote accordingly. Please.

Thought for the Day. Except for Mitt Romney, every single Republican senator voted to keep our Incompetent-in-Chief in office. As you watch your loved ones suffer and/or die for lack of tests, ventilators, hospital beds, ICU beds, healthy care providers and/or effective mobilization, please remember them.

Endnote: China’s push to assure its ascendance in mobilizing globally against Covid-19 is already happening. Having apparently contained its own part of the pandemic, and having expanded its production of masks twelve fold since the outbreak began (from half of the whole world’s supply at the outset!) China has begun exporting masks, ventilators and expertise to hard-stricken foreign countries like Italy and Iraq. If you want a premonition of the future, just watch China run.

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Post-Covid Antibody Testing: Getting Back on Our Feet

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Here’s an interesting table of Covid-19 statistics (as of 9 am PDT March 17) to contemplate:

Country	Smoking Rate	Cases	Deaths	Death Rate
South Korea	23.3%	8,236	75	0.9%
United States	21.8%	1,714	41	2.4%

Which country is right about the death rate? Anthony Fauci is probably one of a half-dozen or so of the smartest people on this subject. He keeps saying that the death rate for Covid-19 is about ten time that for influenza, which is 0.1%. So he apparently thinks South Korea is right about the death rate.

What accounts for the difference? Testing. We all know South Korea has been doing a superb job of getting its people tested, with multiple drive-in testing centers around its big cities. We also know that we Americans have bungled the job.

So unless you think that South Koreans’ collective genetics makes them Covid-19 superheroes, there are approximately 1,714 x 2.4/0.9 - 1,714 = 2,857 people in the US who had or have unconfirmed cases of Covid-19.

Why is that important? If these statistics are right, at least 87.6% of them, or 2,502 people, either got or are getting well.

If we knew who they are—and once we were sure they are no longer infectious—they would be our first cohort of post-pandemic survivors. They could be the first ones to emerge blinking from the fallout shelter into the dawn of a new life.

Having natural immunity from having survived the disease, they could go anywhere and do anything without fear. In particular, they could volunteer (or be paid) to man testing sites, take care of the sick and buttress a health-care system under siege. They could go back to work or school. They could go back to restaurants, bars, shops, theaters, gyms, fly on planes, go on cruises, and begin jump-starting our wounded economy.

But how do we find these “survivors”? We need another test than the one that works for immediate infection, before the infected person has a chance to develop antibodies and therefore immunity. We need a test showing whoever’s been infected and is now immune, so that they can go back to normal life without fear, and without threatening anyone else.

There are some subtleties. The two tests—for infection and immunity—may overlap technically and practically; that’s a question for the microbiologists (I’m not one). One test may be more complex and/or expensive than the other. And there may some remanent period during which a recovering or recovered person can still spread the infection.

If the two tests are identical, the obvious priority is testing people getting sick, not those who got or are getting well. But even then, all people tested should remain identified, so that they can be “cleared” once well and deemed non-contagious. (We may have to modify our absurdly draconian medical-privacy laws here.)

Anyway, the longest remanence period for contagiousness of which I’ve ever read is 37 days. From now, that would end before the end of April. That’s many months before any expert estimate of the vaccine-development time.

Wouldn’t it be nice, as we contemplate a grisly conveyor belt moving sick people into hospitals and ICUs with ventilators, that there also be a conveyor belt moving people back to normal life? All that requires is an antibody test for those who’ve had the disease, have apparently recovered, and are now immune.

Producing and giving these tests would have to be a largely non-profit venture, probably government sponsored. The real push in microbiology is and must be to develop a vaccine. Once the vaccine arrived, it would render these antibody tests obsolete: get vaccinated, wait the requisite period (probably about two weeks), and you would have “presumed” immunity.

But an antibody test might still have some residual value: (1) in individual testing if the vaccine were not fully effective; (2) during the ramp-up to produce enough vaccine for everybody; and (3) if the antibody test cost less than the vaccine to produce.

The salient thing about this virus is that the overwhelming majority of people who get it are going to recover. So shouldn’t we start working on a good, cheap, simple antibody test to identify those who have recovered right now?

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The Great Culling

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

[For brief comment on the Biden-Sanders debate Sunday night, click here.]

We Baby Boomers—our generation born between 1946 and 1964—are probably the most self-indulgent and entitled generation of Americans ever. We could be the most self-indulgent and entitled generation in human history.

And why not? Our parents, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” had risen from farm, field and city to help fight and win the most terrible war in human history. Unlike most other combatants, they had returned to a homeland almost completely untouched. They went to work, creating the most prosperous consumer society ever. By the end of the sixties, almost every suburban family had a house, one or more cars, and annual vacations. The post-war American middle class was the largest, richest, happiest middle class in human history, by a country mile.

While all this prosperity was happening, science and education flourished. There was universal respect for science. By inventing nuclear weapons, physics had helped win the Big War and create a Pax Atomica among major powers, now in its 75th year. Medical science eradicated smallpox and most childhood diseases with vaccines; it even eliminated the more fearsome scourge of polio, while or before most Boomers were in their childhood’s vulnerable years.

So we Boomers have enjoyed lives at levels of prosperity and safety—from both major-power wars and disease—unprecedented in human history. We were the darlings of the Generation that had fought and risked everything to make our Good Life possible.

But there’s one big problem with the Good Life. It doesn’t last forever. Inevitably it makes its beneficiaries weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. Then the Good Life gets harder and comes to an end. That’s the message of Athens and Sparta, and that’s why we need constant immigration from countries riddled with hardship to keep up our game.

That process of moral and social degradation is of course happening now. Take higher education, for example. I got an A.B., M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California but emerged with no debt and money in the bank. My payments to the University for my undergraduate education were a mere $100 per semester “incidental fee.” Scholarships and fellowships paid for my books and living expenses. In contrast, today’s kids graduate from mediocre colleges with up to $100,000 in debt. The average is around $30,000, for undergraduate education alone.

The trend started with Reagan. While governor of California, he squeezed state financing for the once-nearly-free University. His apparent motives were lowering taxes and squelching what he saw as a nest of opposition to his right-wing ideology. The trend that he started in California then went national. We stopped funding our own kids’ higher education through taxes.

What kind of people burden their kids, as a whole class, with such economic millstones just as they are beginning their careers? In one generation, under a grade-B former actor’s influence, we went from a far-seeing society to a selfish and stupid one.

Believing it our right and duty to force our culture on the other 95% of humanity, we have fought three totally unnecessary wars in minor powers: Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. To fight these senseless wars after Vietnam, we have created a potentially militant class of soldier-serfs to replace citizens soldiers, just as ancient Rome exploited the Visigoths, who eventually sacked it. We developed transparently inadequate theories, like the Domino Theory in Vietnam, and “if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here,” in order to justify these needless, endless wars and the sacrifice they required of a small class among us. (Most of the “elite” and their children managed to dodge the draft in Vietnam. After our transition to an “all-volunteer army,” the task of “defense” fell to people with few other options.)

As for science, what can I say? Ignorant anti-vaxxers, using their right to say anything, however ill-informed and misguided, are busy destroying the herd immunity that medical science and organized public health took decades to build. Measle—measles!—has again become a major threat to children in our cities. We have a president who doesn’t believe in climate science and managed to make four basic errors of fact in an eleven-minute speech about Covid-19.

It’s impossible to imagine our Greatest Generation accepting a leader anything like Trump. A gifted con-man, he knows nothing, respects nothing (but himself) and has the moral sense of a coyote. When you compare him to this nation’s pre-Baby-Boom leaders—FDR, Eisenhower, Marshall, Truman—the comparison makes you want to retch.

Of course there are reasons for Trump’s demagogic success. But they all relate to selfishness. When you have a society built entirely on self-interest and profit, which Reagan gave us with the slogan “It’s your money!", the smarter ones always make selfishness work better for them. The weaker, less informed and less resilient ones end up on the bottom of the heap.

That’s been the way things have worked for nearly all of human history. Our Founders thought they had engineered a society resistant to that basic fact of life. So far, they’ve been wrong. The next election will tell us whether we have any chance of restoring to basic functionality the Republic they thought they gave us.

So far, a class of business people who made profit our moral and national goal have become our oligarchs. They amassed immense wealth by selling our jobs, factories and technology abroad, to nations like China and Mexico, leaving our middle class behind, high and dry.

It’s not as if no one warned us. In 1992, Ross Perot, a corporate leader and budding oligarch himself, described the “sucking sound” to be made by the flood of jobs to Mexico that NAFTA would cause. (Bernie Sanders, among a very small number of senators, voted against NAFTA.) Perot’s third-party bid for the presidency ended the political career of George Herbert Walker Bush, got clueless “triangulator” Bill Clinton into office and put our national decline in high gear.

The most astounding thing is that once our middle classes were smart and practical people. They built, maintained and repaired the machines that made us an industrial powerhouse. They could see through con-men, charlatans and snake-oil salesmen a mile away.

Now they cheer a man who makes minor changes in NAFTA—the very same treaty that started their whole class’ precipitous decline—and declares a false new era. They applaud his doing nothing about our failing infrastructure, whose repair could give skilled workers millions of good, well-paid and non-outsourceable jobs, and instead enacting a $1.5 trillion tax cut that mostly benefits the rich and the oligarchs. They applaud him imposing tariffs on imports that make their lives worse. They allow him to distract them with hate for minorities and immigrants who helped build this country, too, many of whom are in worse shape than they are. They let their representatives excuse using the power of the presidency to extort a foreign power for personal benefit, without even a fair trial.

This is not just a cohort of Americans that fails to see their own economic interest. It fails to see through the most flagrant con-man in American history, maybe since Caesar. It’s nothing like the millions of mid-Western farmers who chuckled at the snake-oil salesman and sent him on his way. It’s a cohort of Americans pampered beyond any class in human history that, on suddenly losing their pampering, became incapable of reacting with more than blind rage.

Covid-19 doesn’t recognize rage. It’s not even intelligent. It invades the respiratory system of anyone in reach, and it has a preference for the aged. It will be the scythe that cuts down the most pampered generation in human history, whose pampering has made them, as a class, extraordinarily self-indulgent and short-sighted.

Of course I’m ambivalent about the virus. I’m in the prime age cohort, too, and I don’t want to catch it, let alone die from it. But when I look at its steady advance from the perspective of intellectual distance, I can see a silver lining in its very dark cloud. By eliminating so many who have spent their lives so pampered that they can’t even see where their own true self-interest lies, let alone others’, it could leave us with a more resilient and cohesive society.

The era of selfishness as a guiding political principle has destroyed our fathers’ and grandfathers’ America. It began nearly forty years ago, in 1981, with Ronald Reagan declaring “It’s your money!,” thereby presumptively delegitimizing tax expenditures for any public purpose. It continued through his deliberate destruction of state funding for higher education in California, which spread nationwide. It perhaps reached its zenith when Rick Santelli, an obscure commodities trader, shouted from his trading floor: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.” That single scream of selfishness killed a housing rescue plan that could have saved many of us from unnecessary foreclosure after the Crash of 2008.

Maybe the pandemic can kill this mindless selfishness as the basis of government policy. Maybe it can restore the operations of government for the “general Welfare,” as our Constitution’s preamble prescribes. If so, it could be a blessing in disguise.

The Biden-Sanders Debate of March 15

The big takeaway from the debate was Biden’s commitment—repeated for emphasis and clarity—to pick a woman for his running mate. Here’s why it should be Elizabeth Warren:

Let’s face it. Democrats have mostly made their choice. They want a “moderate” to go up against Trump this fall. They want Joe Biden.

Joe, with all his decades of experience, will be in charge. He’d be calling the shots. Wouldn’t that be enough for the “moderates”?

But lots of Dems still want someone more progressive, like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Biden can secure their votes now by promising to pick her specifically as VP. If he does, he will win over most of the folks who might otherwise stay home on November 3 for lack of enthusiasm. (I hate to say it, but the “moderates” would have no place else to go, unless they prefer a right-wing dictator.)

Nothing Joe do could now would unite the party better: progressives and moderates, males and females.

Sure, he could pull a progressive bait-and-switch, and choose another moderate like Klobuchar or Harris. But that’s just what disappointed progressives have expected from the “Establishment” all along. Think that’ll bring them out to the polls this fall?

Warren is not just a brilliant financial strategist, who understands precisely how our bankers cheat consumers and brought our economy down. She’s also a great “attack dog.” Remember how she leveled Bloomberg? She could do even better with our Patron Saint of Sexual Harassment.

There’s no going back. Joe Biden is practically the Dems’ candidate right now. We are all counting on him, as is the nation and the world. He could show us how the Democratic candidate treats the smartest and most strategic woman ever to run for President, and grooms her for the Big Job. Wasn’t that what someone with supernatural political skill once did for him?

The rest of the debate can be summarized in just a few impressions:

How good it was to see two good, honest men, debating real issues, not lies and impressions, and obviously caring deeply about our country and our people. After watching the mess that Trump has made of his “look at me!” response to the pandemic, the Biden-Sanders debate was balm for the soul.

The two candidates devoted moments to praise and even genuine affection between them. Often they accepted each other’s ideas explicitly. We had gotten so inured to “leadership” in the form of “if I didn’t say it or do it, it doesn’t matter.” After three years of that, this, too, was balm for the soul. Seeing two good men with obvious love for our country and its people recognizing each other’s talents and accomplishments brought tears to my eyes.

Of course each promised to support and campaign for the other if he wins. The promises seemed genuine. The loser in the primaries must fulfill his promise enthusiastically in order to beat Trump’s lies and the Fox propaganda machine.

As for substance, the two men tried to make much of the differences between them. Sanders touted his Medicare for All and all-encompassing Green New Deal, which includes banning further fracking. Biden seemed to sign onto the fracking ban, but possibly not in all respects (maybe only on federal lands).

But the pandemic and its aftermath, which they discussed earlier in the debate, will likely occupy most of the next president’s early time. Things will change, and the urgency of the moment will shift priorities.

Yet the interchange between the two—mostly calm, civil, honest and substantive—made it possible to foresee the vile, incompetent blowhard in the White House being buried in a landslide this November. Biden’s pledge of a female running mate makes that all the more possible. How many women in our land can possibly respect or admire the abysmal excuse for a man and a leader in the White House now, or remotely imagine him as a spouse or a boss?

I remain convinced that Trump won in 2016 because many “swing” voters in key states simply didn’t like Hillary. They took a chance on Trump because they didn’t know him and believed some of his propaganda. But now, after three years, they know enough about him to retch each time they see his face on TV. (I know I do.)

So I think the coming general election will be in large part a character election—a point on which I’ll elaborate soon. With thousands of clips of Trump’s vile character available for attack ads, no one paying attention will be able to ignore it. We have to thank Jim Clyburn of South Carolina for reminding us all what a good man and an empathetic leader with lots of executive experience look like. Thanks, Jim.

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Covid-19: the Scythe is Coming

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

So far, the pandemic’s advance here at home has been slow. There are reasons why. It started in China and had to get here somehow. The virus came in people who travel back and forth internationally. Those people come and go mostly by air, with some on cruise ships.

Nearly all of those travelers are people with means. Many—especially those on cruise ships—are retired. They have ready access to medical care: they have Medicare and/or good private health insurance. Most of those who still work have managerial or “information economy” jobs that let them work from home. Those who are retired don’t have to work at all. So the expectations are reasonable that those likely infected will self-monitor, get tested, seek medical care when needed, stay at home when sick or known to have been exposed, self-quarantine when advisable, and strictly obey quarantine rules and medical advice.

In other words, Covid-19 came to our shores through the so-called “upper classes.” What happens when it hits the “lower classes”? We’re about to find out.

American health care’s dirty little secret is that it leaves a lot of people out. Some 37 million have no health insurance. Another fifty million or so have inadequate health insurance. And some 11 million undocumented workers have no ready health care at all. If state law gives them some access to doctors in theory, Trump’s new law threatens to deport them if they seek any kind of public assistance.

These are not “information workers” who can work by computer from home. They have to show up to get paid. They are not affluent; most live paycheck to paycheck. So if they feel sick or suspect they’ve been exposed, will they stay home and get tested, as advised?

Not likely. They will ignore public-health advice and stay in the shadows. They will not be able to afford the tests, or the masks, disinfectants and other precautions, let alone find them in our already depleted stores. They will delude themselves about their health. They will drag themselves to work as long as they are physically able. They will suppress their coughs and sneezes with over-the-counter medications and sheer will power. In order to keep their pay coming, they will bring Covid-19 right into the factories, construction sites, slaughterhouses, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and the homes of rich folk where they work. They will not do so out of malice or even thoughtlessness; they will do so just to survive.

To understand how this “second wave” of infections will work, and how fast it will spread, consider the nursing home in Seattle that is, so far, the US center of Covid-19 deaths. We don’t know yet how it got there, but we do know it killed a lot of old people in the home.

Now, what about the minimum-wage workers who tend the elderly there? Are they all in quarantine? What about their families and friends, their social acquaintances, and the people in their poorer neighborhoods with whom they socialize and go to church, synagogue or mosque? Have they all been traced and quarantined, if necessary? Unlikely.

I’ve never understood what’s “conservative” about a society that claims to be class-free but consciously maintains a lower class and an underclass. The lower class includes minimum-wage workers with no health insurance, no health care and no paid sick days. The underclass includes 11 million undocumented workers that the GOP’s business wing keeps in appalling conditions for fear of deportation, while the GOP’s political wing seeks to demonize and deport them to garner votes from our lower middle class.

Whatever you call this abomination of a system, there’s one sense in which it’s not and can never be “conservative.” It’s not going to save us from the virus. Instead, it’s going to bring it right into our communities, workplaces, places of rest and recreation. For those of us affluent enough to have nannies, cooks, gardeners, housekeepers, personal assistants, or trainers, it’s going to bring the virus right into our homes.

How long will it take? Probably no more than a month or three. Once the virus hits the lower class and underclass, there will be little to restrain it from spreading. Sick and exposed people will have little or no incentive to follow rules that might leave them destitute or homeless or get them deported.

How many people will get sick? Suppose it’s fifth of our population. That’s over sixty million people. If the death rate is just the 2.4% initially suspected (and not the larger 3.4% now under consideration), that means 1.57 million of us will die. That’s about as many as all our fighters killed in all the wars in our entire history, from our Revolutionary War to Afghanistan today.

Can we stop the second wave now? Maybe, but not likely. We’d have to pass emergency laws giving our lower class and our underclass free access to necessary health care and paid sick days off. Then we’d have to get the word out to most or all of them before the virus hit them in their various locations, so they wouldn’t just hide. If you think Congress, let alone our current executive branch, is capable of doing something so effective and necessary in only a month or two, you haven’t been paying attention.

So get ready for the scythe. Its second sweep is going to cut us down. Mercifully, it will spare young children and their parents, who seem much more resistant to the virus than us geezers.

It’ll take the progressive and the “conservative” alike. There may not be much poetic justice in that equality, but taking the aged first seems fair. It was all of us who, by sins of commission and omission, let this gross class discrimination in health care survive and grow like a cancer for decades. Unlike our health-care system, the virus doesn’t care what class you’re in; being human is enough for it.

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Why the Democratic Primaries Aren’t Over Yet

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Going for Biden

After some vacillation—compare this post with the one below—I’ve resolved to support and vote for Joe Biden, rather than Bernie Sanders. I published the reasons for that decision in Daily Kos, which has better circulation than this blog. With our democracy at stake, our national decline becoming a plunge, and a global pandemic looming, I think the safe choice is the best. God help us all if Joe can’t win.

I get it. It felt it, too. There was a gale-force wind from the national sigh of relief when the disputatious, hair-splitting, back-biting mini-mob of Dem candidates got winnowed down to a manageable two: one moderate and one unabashed progressive.

I, too, feel the tug of Joe Biden—a nice, safe, known quantity, with executive experience to match his advanced years. His mouth sometimes gets ahead of his brain. But he wears like an old, well-broken-in boot. After years of hard use, he fits well. After three years of Trump’s psychopathy, that’s not nothing.

But feelings are not reason. Emotions are not facts. The euphoria of this much-needed culling will pass. Then Democrats will be left with a central truth of our age: the GOP has relentlessly moved the goal posts rightward for two generations, since Reagan.

Selfishness has become our nation’s moral lodestar. Profit is its metric. Learning, science and expertise are all embattled. We can’t seem to mount a coherent, let alone a swift, response to a global pandemic that hasn’t really yet reached our shores. Whenever we have a problem to solve or a plan to make, we look to people motivated by greed. That has become our national reflex.

That’s not the America I was born into in 1945. It’s not the America that helped win World War II, that shaped the Pax Atomica that followed, and that forged the cohesive global society that is now dissolving without our leadership. It’s not the America of the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, the G7 and the G20 and, yes, NATO, formed to contain aggressive and simplistic foreign ideologies. It’s not the America that dumped Jim Crow, passed the civil rights and voting acts and set out to make Jefferson’s credo, “all Men are created equal,” not just a slogan, but a vital, living social reality.

We have lost so much, as a nation and as a people, that we now see a big victory in just getting back to “normal.” We yearn for the time before a venal narcissist and his ring-kissing sycophants occupied the White House, our Senate, and our Supreme Court.

But some of us—maybe many of us—want more. We want to exploit universal revulsion at these three years of egregious misrule to help us recover our national soul. We know in our hearts that the only way to “make America great again” is a vast moral and social reawakening.

To get back on track, we need to see and understand how far off track we have strayed. Describing the difference in outlook as a battle between “moderation” and “socialism” is like calling the French Revolution “undisciplined.” It’s a complete misunderstanding and mischaracterization of where we are as a nation. Our youth, who are not so wedded to name-calling from the past, understand full well. This is a make-or-break chance to recover our national soul, our moral core.

As for hard facts and evidence, we don’t really have them yet. Nothing in the primaries/caucuses so far is factually or rationally decisive.

We’ve had reliably blue states (California, Colorado and Vermont) go for Bernie Sanders. We’ve had some blue states go for Joe Biden, too (Maine, Massachusetts, and Minnesota). None of these states is likely to pick Trump in the general election, so their preferences now are immaterial.

We’ve also had some states most unlikely to dump Trump go for each candidate. Sanders won Utah, while Biden won Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas. But these states are unlikely to abandon Trump in the general election, so their status as fulcra of change is improbable.

What matters most of all is the states that have not yet spoken. The general election will turn on their decisions, including the seven states most up for grabs. Here’s a broader, more comprehensive spreadsheet of the states just possibly in that category, i.e., those whose red or blue margins were less than 9% in 2016:

Possible Swing States in 2020
State	Trump 2016 Margin	Electoral Votes
Ohio	8%	18
North Carolina	4%	15
Georgia	5%	16
Arizona	3%	11
Florida	2%	29
Pennsylvania	<1%	20
Michigan	<1%	16
Wisconsin	<1%	10
New Hampshire	-<1%	4
Minnesota	-1%	10
Nevada	-2%	6
Maine	-3%	4
Colorado	-5%	9
Virginia	-6%	13
New Mexico	-8%	5

These fifteen swing states have total of 186 electoral votes. Less than half have yet spoken. Four of them—Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia—went for Biden, with a total of 42 electoral votes. Three went for Sanders—Colorado, Nevada, and New Hampshire—with a total of 19 electoral votes.

So Biden now has a greater than two-to-one advantage in electoral votes of swing states. But it’s early days yet. Eight of these key states, with a total of 121 electoral votes, have yet to speak.

There are still two viable theories of the general election. One is that a “moderate” like Biden can win the votes of the few independent thinkers remaining in swing states and therefore best beat Trump. The other is that a true progressive like Sanders can attract more new voters and best win by expanding the Democratic base.

Up to now, nothing scientific or solid has ruled out either theory. It’s all just nervous speculation. We should wait, as patiently as we can, until further primaries (and their figures for new-voter turnout) tilt one way or the other.

Not coincidentally, the two candidates remaining are the ones with the most specifically political experience in the entire Democratic field. No Trump clones for the Dems: the two billionaires who ran mostly on their money have flamed out. So we should all wait for further results. A premature coronation didn’t work out so well last time, did it?

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