Pandemic Choices

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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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