“Pigs at the Trough”

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.

Back in the mid-seventies, I had a law professor named Arthur Miller (no, not the playwright who married Marilyn Monroe; a different guy). He taught a dry subject, civil procedure, but he did it with skill and gusto. He had a knack for using just the right words and phrases.

Every once in a while, Professor Miller would speak of “pigs at the trough.” He didn’t use the phrase often. But when he did, it evoked general laughter.

The laughter reflected sudden, shocked recognition of conduct that had no possible explanation but extreme greed and selfishness. Nearly all of the 150-some students in the class shared it, seeing right through the conduct under discussion.

That was a more innocent time. It was years before Ronald Reagan, under the banner of “It’s your money,” delegitimized virtually every expenditure of tax revenues for a public purpose, including low-cost higher education. It was years before Reagan described the very government he was supposed to be running as “not the solution . . . [but] the problem.” It was over a decade before that “principle”, if you can call it that, became Republicans’ distinctive bit of dogma.

The intervening years have transformed our society, and not for the better. Few law students would laugh easily at Professor Miller’s phrase today because it describes too many of us. The laughter would be guilty, self-conscious and constrained. But before we get to that depressing reality, let’s analyze just how breathtaking the intervening transformation has been.

I started writing about incompetence in America over fifteen years ago, comparing our collective reaction to 9/11 with our response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor almost 60 years before. Not only did we start two totally gratuitous and unnecessary wars—which became military stalemates, and which are still ongoing after having become the two longest wars in our history—to do what President Obama later did with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. We also prosecuted those needless wars with spectacular incompetence, under the so-called “leadership” of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

A few years later, we let a whole city drown, in Hurricane Katrina, despite decades of experts’ increasingly strident and futile warnings. Our media, obsessed with profits, began taking entertainment and gossip for news. A basketball coach (yes, really!) became CEO of WorldCom, a meteorically rising telecommunications firm that crashed in flames due to fraud, and Rick Wagoner, a finance guy, drove our chief car company, GM, so far into the ground that our “problem” government had to bail it out to the tune of $11.2 billion after the Crash of 2008.

Then there was the Crash 2008 itself. It was yet another example of breathtaking incompetence, on the part of both the bankers who caused it and the federal agencies that failed to do their jobs and regulate them.

Even just after the Crash, it was self-evident that the United States that had beat the Great Depression and helped beat back the Nazis’ and Imperial Japanese aggression was no longer the same competent “can do” nation that had invented the Marshall Plan, the UN, the GATT, the WTO, Moon landings and the Internet. Today our video media have forsaken news for entertainment and profit almost entirely. They now broadcast live the president’s hours-long daily rants, whose only “news” is gaffes, spectacular mistakes and retractions. (Has anyone thought to compare our supreme leader’s hours-long rants to those of Fidel Castro at the height of his power?)

Our response to today’s pandemic is just part of the trend. Our vaunted CDC and FDA refused to authorize external active-virus testing, forcing our state and local health authorities to beg for tests from China and Europe even months later. Then, for antibody testing, the CDC and FDA opened the floodgates to some ninety sources, without any verification whatsoever. Many of them supplied inaccurate or even fraudulent tests. We also neglected to replenish our “strategic” stockpile of masks after the last pandemic and left it partially filled with equipment that had long expired. What kind of competent leaders do this?

It’s tempting to blame it all on Trump, who seems to combine all the vices of Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Commodus in one person. But the trend long predated him. He’s more a symptom than the cause—perhaps the death rattle of our society’s once-vaunted competence.

So what happened? Did we have a society-wide, decades-long attack of stupid?

Not exactly. Our system of higher education is still the envy of our species, although China and Europe are hot on our heels. In the interim we invented (or co-invented) personal computers, CAT scans, MRI imaging, the Internet, smart phones, gene sequencing, gene splicing and gene editing (CRISPR/Cas9). We still know how to develop incredibly useful stuff and give it to the world, even (like the Internet) for free.

To get a handle on what ails us, a good place to start is a recent New Yorker piece on the pandemic and our globalized financial system. It’s one of the most maddening and depressing stories I’ve read in years. It begins with the tale of a young Australian who made billions playing Wall Street’s financial casinos. He’s now riding out the pandemic on a huge private ranch back in his native Australia, threatening (we hope in jest!) to kill the few other people in his remote valley if need be to survive.

It would be hard to imagine a better illustration of the deep pathology of, and cynicism among, our current global oligarchy and its many “nouveau riche” than this one man and his history.

No doubt he’s a smart, clever “quant.” In my day, he might have been my fellow student in a postgraduate class in physics. Like most of us in that class, he might have dreamed of using science to make the world safe for democracy, to provide limitless carbon-free energy, or to better diagnose illness with those selfsame CAT scanners and MRI machines. Now he’s an uber-selfish recluse who made a quick killing in our financial casinos and has no higher goal than to save himself and (if possible) even increase his easy-gotten gains.

Lest you think this man is unique, the rest of the fulsome article identifies several others and describes their similar financial shenanigans. Then, to confirm the depths of our national pathology, pick up a recent New York Times, business section. Read how the big restaurant chains, which are now gobbling up the pandemic bailouts meant for small businesses, spent the decade since the Crash paying their shareholders off with stock buybacks, instead of preparing for a rainy day. Read how the finance guys (they are nearly all guys) are now using the pandemic as an excuse to recover billions in unequal tax breaks that had been restricted for good reason after the Crash. Then hear or read how Mitch McConnell, the single legislator most responsible for broadening and deepening the trough and inviting more pigs in, “shed his first wife and announced to friends . . . a plan, . . . to find a rich wife.”

Just in case you haven’t yet gotten the point, pick up a report on the appalling scarcity of testing for Covid-19, after over two months, which contains this gem:

“It has proved hard to increase production of reagents [for testing] partly because of federal regulations intended to ensure safety and partly because manufacturers, who usually produce them in small batches, have been reluctant to invest in new capacity without assurance that the surge in demand will be sustained.”

In other words, we don’t have enough raw materials to do the testing that is vital both to “bending the curve“ of sickness, misery and death and to opening up our depression-bound economy because the pigs at the trough haven’t been guaranteed enough slops. Has anyone ever heard of the Defense Production Act, which would, if we had a normal president, let him commandeer the needed production facilities and get them rolling on three shifts a day?

An ancient Greek playwright inventing fiction to illustrate how a universal failure of “virtue” can lead to society-wide collapse would have had trouble even imagining all this. But it’s our inescapable fate. It’s our modern reality.

We still have no lack of brains and ingenuity. We’ve just built a society in which most of our best and our brightest dream of becoming successful pigs at the trough via the shortest route possible. Most of the time, that route involves utterly nonproductive financial speculation, in Wall Street’s ever-open casinos. Both the legal rules we set and our social structure encourage this breathtaking misallocation of “human capital.”

The irony is that most of our Founders were also wealthy men of their time. Many had lives of leisure made possible by their slaves. But, at the same time, they were self-conscious social engineers. They used their careful study of history and law (there wasn’t much real science back then), which their slavery-enhanced leisure made possible, to design a supposedly corruption-proof society, with a balance of powers and checks and balances.

Today their project appears to have failed. The most obvious reason is the compromise they made with an agrarian, aristocratic, slave-holding South, which now gives us minoritarian government with McConnell mostly in charge. The less obvious reason is that we, as a people, have lost sight of the lofty goals our Founders set, while many of the smartest and even the hardest-working of us just seek their own places at the trough.

Don’t look for a national epiphany in the pandemic. The New Yorker article will quickly disabuse you of that, as will the many companies (some ninety in all!) now selling jury-rigged and even consciously fraudulent antibody tests. As for our “elite,” most have retreated to their summer or other second homes, while the 0.1% repair to their yachts or huge, inaccessible ranches, leaving the rest of us to face the pandemic with a broken and nearly broke government.

It will take far more than a 2% death rate to shoo the pigs away from the trough. We will have to convert our oligarchs, many of whom are smart, hard-working and capable, into belated social benefactors like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. At very least, we will have to create a critical mass of oligarchs with goals beyond the trough in mind. Some models might include the late Steve Jobs, with his dream of easy-to-use computer devices for Everyman, Jeff Bezos, with his relentless focus on a better customer experience, or Elon Musk, with his obsession with carbon-neutral cars and trucks and his dream of a partial, permanent exodus from our warming planet before we completely destroy it.

The problem is not the capacity of our collective brains or our educational system, which is declining only slowly, under the relentless pressure of economic inequality. It’s a systemic moral failure—the transformation of a culture of highly evolved empathetic apes into a nation of pigs at the trough.

Religion once provided some moral guidance, despite its incessant intolerance and brutal wars of conquest. But now it no longer helps. People are leaving organized religion in droves. The exodus is not without reason: much of religion now teaches intolerance, dogmatism, and war, or excuses pedophilia, rather than effectively propagating the empathy, selflessness and cooperation that are our species’ chief evolutionary advantages, and that once were foundations of every religion.

David Brooks seeks redemption in small, self-governing communities. That’s an easy but inadequate fix. We evolved in clans of about thirty or fewer individuals. So generosity in and cooperation with like-sized neighborhoods come easy to us. As a result, we have many heartwarming stories of empathy and helping hands at the local level. The trick is maintaining that same useful moral tone in today’s huge nation-states of hundreds of millions of individuals, let alone an increasingly interdependent globe with seven billion inhabitants. That’s what we may have to do not just to defeat this pandemic, but to address the far more dangerous threats of global warming and nuclear proliferation.

Stalin once said that a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are but a statistic. Many revile him for that statement, taking it as a presumed moral or political teaching. But what if it’s just a statement of fact? What if it accurately captures the inability of most of us to expand empathy and cooperation to the gigantic scale on which our global society now operates?

There are exceptions, of course. Lincoln, FDR, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela managed to make empathetic leaps from community to nation and beyond. Enlightened oligarchs like John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros did so, too, but only after eating their fill at the trough.

For the vast majority of us, extrapolating empathy and real cooperation to a national or global scale may be a conceptual bridge too far. What we require, and what we self-evidently lack, is an individual sense of obligation and responsibility to our species as a whole.

The traditional means for recognizing and actualizing our global obligation and responsibility has been government. Weak as they have been at times, our obligation and responsibility will not return to life, at least in the United States, until we reject decisively the “government is the problem” nonsense that the GOP has been hawking for forty years.

If we just used the Defense Production Act in this emergency as the Congress that passed it intended, we would be at most a month or two away from resolving the critical shortage of both active-virus and antibody tests. We can’t come close to meeting that schedule now because we’re still waiting for the pigs to figure out whether and how cooperation in testing can put their snouts in the trough.

History does not augur well for the epiphany we need. In all of recorded human history, there has been only one other society with the economic dynamism and inventiveness of the United States, but which was also founded on the notion of free and independent citizens who are somehow endowed with real social and economic power. Ancient Rome at its height was the only other enduring society to use the word “citizen,” rather than “subject,” and to make the world around it respect that choice and all it implies.

When Rome fell, the result was a millennium of dogmatic religious authority amidst a mad and bloody free-for-all to build the next phalanx of empires. Until political correctness prevailed among historians, we used to call this period the “Dark Ages.” But whatever you call it, just about a millennium actually passed before the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment brought new ideas into play, including the rudiments of modern democracy, science and the scientific method.

Science is probably here to stay. It’s too useful in fighting wars and pandemics, in curing disease, and inventing useful gadgets for any emperor with more intelligence than Trump’s (a very low bar) to forsake. China’s Xi, for example, is jumping into science with both feet, in part because it’s so useful in surveilling, propagandizing and controlling his people.

But the very notion of a delicate balance between individual autonomy and societal cohesion has been a rarity in human history. To see how rare it is today, just recite the names of the increasingly authoritarian and intolerant leaders around the world: Abe, Bolsonaro, El-Sisi, Erdoğan, Kim (if still alive), Modi, Orban, Putin, bin Salman, Trump, and Xi.

Sparks of the Enlightenment remain in Europe, in England, France and (most of all) in Angela Merkel’s Germany. They flicker even in Ireland, Italy, Spain and Greece. There are dying sparks in Latin America. But the guttering flame here in the United States depends for life both on whether we will have an election in November and, if so, its outcome. If either fails, the trough for the pigs will grow much larger. It could become our global society’s dominant feature for as far as the eye can see.

Endnote: A Happier Ending? Buried in the back of this week’s New York Times Sunday Review is a must-read economic piece by economist Gene B. Sperling. It just might augur a happier future. Beginning with Dr. King’s core insight, Sperling describes our crying need for every worker to receive a living wage, health care, child care, leave for parenting, family care and bereavement, and working conditions conducive to good health. He also notes the nearly unanimous “no, never!” response of today’s Republican pols.

That party-wide negation is, of course, part of our national pigs-at-the-trough phenomenon. It rests on the assumption that giving workers at the bottom decent pay and benefits would somehow deprive the rest of us of our “due.” But is that really so?

Sperling reflects on a $20-per-hour wage ($40,000 per year) as a reasonable minimum for worker health and satisfaction. As I recently noted [search for “Bezos”], increasing Amazon warehouse workers’ pay from $15 to $20 per hour would raise the cost of an average Amazon box only 40 cents, if each worker packed an average of at least 100 boxes in a eight-hour day. (That would be 4.8 minutes per box, a steady but not impossible pace.) Does anyone seriously think that 40 cents more per package would kill Amazon’s business, or crush the satisfaction of its millions of customers, including me?

For far too long, the pigs at the trough have convinced us—without proof or evidence—that treating all of our workers decently would hurt the rest of us, leading to job losses or radically higher prices. Sperling debunks the job loss bit, writing (with his own linked sources), as follows:

“Conservatives, and some traditional economic analyses, claim that a living wage would lead to job loss, but that has been repeatedly contradicted by empirical evidence—including a recent analysis of 138 state minimum-wage increases.”

But maybe citations to expert studies are not enough for the doubters. Maybe economists need to calculate the average percentage of prices that low-pay labor accounts for in industries like restaurants, hotels, and hospitals. Suppose it’s 15%. Then raising wages by 50%, for example, from $15 per hour to $22.50, would raise prices, on average, by only 7.5%. That would hardly cause an economic apocalypse.

In the final analysis, the struggle to treat all workers fairly and humanely is not really about economic proof. It’s a matter of mindset. The pigs-at-the-trough mindset says: “It cannot be, ’cause it might hurt me!” The traditional American mindset says, “Let’s try it and see what happens; if it works, it would make a whole lot of mostly desperate fellow Americans much better off. Who knows? It might even save us from revolution, civil war, or dissolution!” The contrast between these two mindsets is why I have a really hard time thinking of modern Republicans as “conservatives.”

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The Expendables

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.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. . . . The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. . . . And he has lifted them up.” — Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail, September 10, 2016.

Which is worse, “deplorable” or “expendable”? Many believe that Hillary’s “deplorables” rant helped Trump, a perennially bankrupt loser in business, win the White House. But what if your words and actions imply that peoples’ very health and lives are expendable? Isn’t that even worse?

We’re about to find out.

Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s “back to normal” order covers, as a first priority, salons, gyms, bowling alleys, barber shops, tattoo parlors and certain other businesses. They can reopen tomorrow, Friday, April 24. Theaters and dine-in restaurants get to reopen only next Monday.

So what’s special about salons, gyms, bowling alleys, barber shops, and tattoo parlors? Why call them out at all? Far more people, on average, go to dine-in restaurants and theaters than any of these. What’s the point of treating these odd businesses specially and putting them first?

Lots of people use gyms. Many upscale customers even have memberships. But with a little discipline and imagination, you can exercise at home, or outdoors, maintaining social distancing. What kind of people, other than their owners, are so eager to get back to exercising in gyms, where social distancing is much harder, and where you have to disinfect every machine before you use it just to avoid the common cold and the seasonal flu, let alone Covid-19?

Maybe Kemp thinks that avid gym patrons, like people who go to bowling alleys and tattoo parlors, are “his” people—the kind of non-college-educated whites who drive pickup trucks with the Stars and Bars or gun racks in the windows. Maybe he thinks they, or at least the white ones, are libertarians, Republicans and Trump supporters.

Then there are the African-Americans. It’s well known that their hair salons and barber shops are venerable community gathering places, especially in the South. Probably few African-Americans are Kemp fanciers. But it never hurts to throw a “hail Mary” pass, or try to confuse the rubes. If just a few change their minds it might sway the next election.

So isn’t the political point self-evident? Apparently Kemp thinks that those who patronize these “special” businesses are “his” people, or Donald Trump’s, or that they can be tricked. He wants their support and their votes, so he’s putting them first in line to open up the Georgia economy too soon and to risk catching the bug.

What other reason could there be? In no way does any of these businesses qualify as “essential” to a modern economy or to anyone’s supply chain. Something like this is just what you’d expect of a guy who won the governorship of Georgia after claims of unprecedented voter suppression and a conflict of interest as Georgia’s Secretary of State.

Most experts say opening so soon is unwise. It just risks a renewed flare-up of cases and deaths. And who would be its first victims? They would be the people who patronize and own Kemp’s prioritized businesses. To the extent that they smoke, are old, or have serious health conditions, they would be the first at risk to sicken seriously and to die.

The experts say such a second wave of infections will take several weeks to crest. Maybe Kemp doubts that this cohort of people would make the logical connection. Maybe he thinks they lack the intelligence and self-protective instincts to connect the dots. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he thinks they’re expendable.

But Covid-19 sickness, which can be permanently debilitating, is hard to “spin.” So is death. Survivors and loved ones left behind have the rest of their lives to contemplate cause and effect: their getting their recreation and jobs back, their raucous libertarian protests, and their political support for the right wing, in exchange for becoming cannon fodder in the political war to reopen Georgia’s economy.

It would be quite another thing if Kemp’s order came up with lot of money, equipment and people for a full-court press on testing, contract tracing and quarantining. But that’s not the case. Kemp has no medical degree or expertise in epidemiology. He’s simply decided, in his political wisdom, that he can win politically among certain demographics by opening Georgia up for business now, regardless of consequences. If that makes the target groups “expendable,” so be it.

So stay home and stay safe, folks! No one in this country is really “expendable” except for pols who think their voters are. Come November, they’ll see just how expendable they are. (Unfortunately, Kemp is not up for re-election this fall, but others of his ilk are.)

Endnote: As if on cue, the Washington Post reports that the Covid-19 pandemic is now invading “Red” states, putting Trump’s and Kemp’s supporters right in the virus’ crosshairs. We’re about to find out whether the propaganda of the President, Fox and Sinclair will be enough to negate the evidence of their own and their loved ones’ sickness and death. This is how the heavy veil of lies may finally be torn asunder.

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Fixing Modern Economics

[NOTE TO READERS: In order to maximize its exposure, the principal post below appears on both this blog and on Daily Kos. Some earlier posts of mine also have appeared exclusively or jointly on Daily Kos. In order to facilitate access to them, I’ve added links in the lists of my posts, linked in normal boldface type below. The symbol [DK] in the post-title list denotes a Daily Kos post and, if separately linked, leads to the Daily Kos version.]

For the principal post, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts back to Thanksgiving 2018, 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.

Two Rays of Pandemic Hope

In two respects, I may have been wrong—too pessimistic—in my analysis of the five strategic stages of our war with Covid-19. News reported on PBS within the last week or so, but not yet (to my knowledge) picked up by the print media, suggests two new ways in which to fight the war more effectively. 1. A belated all-out push for active-virus testing. My own analysis suggested that the United States already has missed the boat on this sort of testing with its late, slow and incompetent start, so that massive active-virus testing is no longer of general strategic value. But two very smart and well-qualified experts, Paul Romer and Rajiv Shah, believe the contrary. They propose that, for an investment of $100 billion per year (a fraction of what we’ve already spent on stimulus), we could jump-start active-virus testing and use it as a safe and effective means to open parts of our society, and maybe eventually all of it, back up for business. They suggest doing this even before we try doing something similar with antibody testing in search for acquired immunity (what I call “Stage Three” in our war). So far, our federal management of testing in general has revealed all the earmarks of extreme incompetence at the highest level. In active-virus (infection) testing, the FDA and CDC were classic “control freaks,” refusing to authorize anyone else to develop tests until it was too late to contain severe initial outbreaks all over our nation. With respect to antibody-testing—a second-line defense—the regulatory agencies adopted exactly the opposite approach. They allowed some 90 different companies, many in China, to sell tests in the US without any verification of their accuracy, and many of them simply didn’t work. This oscillation from one ineffective extreme to the other is a classic symptom of leadership that doesn’t know what it’s doing. But with better leadership, perhaps from the private or philanthropic sector, the Romer-Shah plan might still work. 2. Spurring “innate” immunity. The second ray of hope is the use of a common vaccine, already in wide use, to spur a type of temporary immunity, called “innate” immunity, that can be provoked before infected patients can develop antibodies (which typically takes two to several weeks). Science initially discovered in Russia suggests that a common oral polio vaccine can trigger this sort of immunity against influenza—another coronavirus. No less an authority than Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV, the AIDS virus, thinks this same approach might work with Covid-19. The approach would be simple and cheap to test. “Innate” immunity is thought to be temporary, lasting an unknown time, perhaps a month or so, while patients’ bodies develop antibodies and longer-lasting acquired immunity. Beyond that, not much is known about innate immunity, including whether it can be repeated in the same patient. So it’s not a panacea, even if it works against SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 virus. But it could have three possible uses. It could help: (1) immunize people temporarily for such high-risk activities as (a) moving to another city or state, (b) temporary high-risk front-line work for medical personnel, or (c) other time-limited, high-risk work such as disinfecting a physical complex, cleaning out a heavily infected nursing home, slum or apartment complex, etc.; (2) immunize people temporarily while a vaccine under test let them build up longer-lasting antibodies; or (3) perhaps even serve to ameliorate the disease after accidental or deliberate exposure, for example, in “challenge” testing of a candidate for a vaccine. It remains to be seen whether our Keystone Kops society, in which neglect, wishful thinking, indecision, useless ideology and general incompetence have become ways of life, can effectively exploit these rays of hope. But at least we have them. Both appear worth trying. Thanks to Christiane Amanpour on PBS for bringing them to light.

1. We live in “the best of all possible worlds”
2.“Unrestrained free trade makes everybody better off”
3. “Free trade is good because it exploits everyone’s comparative advantage”
4. “Maximizing profit is the purpose of business, and it makes everything more efficient.”
5.“Low prices make for happy consumers”
Conclusion

The secret of “life, the universe and everything” is “42.” — Output of “Deep Thought,” humanity’s greatest supercomputer, after 7.5 million years of calculation, in Doug Adams’ masterpiece of science-fiction humor, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We humans have aggrandized ourselves with the title “homo sapiens, Latin for “wise man.” Yet what we really seek most is shiny objects, not wisdom.

Our language is necessarily a pile of abstractions, for our grapefruit-sized brains are infinitely smaller than our own planet, let alone our Universe. So we have no choice but to abstract if we hope to comprehend. But we have littered our species’ short history with vicious wars, economic catastrophes, and other gigantic blunders, all flowing from our propensity to take shiny abstractions as bits of absolute truth.

Religion, of course, is rife with this phenomenon. But modern economics, the “dismal science,” is no exception.

The best known recent example is the notion that free markets always correct their own errors and excesses. That shiny abstraction, in the mind of then Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, prevented him—or anyone else in a position of authority—from stopping the avalanche of liars’ loans for mortgages, financial derivatives based on them, and the resulting pile of defaults, for at least a year before the Crash of 2008.

The result was the worst financial and economic collapse since the Great Depression. Although Greenspan had forsaken anything resembling science for this particular shiny abstraction, he was an honest man. In testimony before Congress, he admitted his error and its disastrous effect. Unfortunately, his recanting came too late to do much good for the millions who suffered, or for our economy.

The irony is that economics purports to be a science. As every diligent junior-high-school student knows, science is the slow, rigorous, step-by-step, process of testing hypotheses against observation or experiment.

But not all “hypotheses” are capable of being tested. Some are too broad and general to admit of verification or refutation by scientific means. Those that include the concepts “always” or “most of the time” are of that untestable nature. They can’t ever be part of “science” because testing them rigorously, under all the myriad conditions to which they could apply, might take more than our species’ entire recorded history.

Recent economic history contains many more of these shiny abstractions. Some have had disastrous unintended consequences. The most recent consequences include: the collapse of globalization and globalized supply chains under the stress of Covid-19, the conversion of many democracies into authoritarian polities, and degeneration of modern economies into societies less egalitarian and more oppressive, in their own ways, than Genghis Khan’s or Ivan the Terrible’s.

This essay explores just a few of those shiny abstractions, and their effects when taken too seriously. Let’s analyze.

1. We live in “the best of all possible worlds.” This shiny gem was a belief held by the French aristocracy in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. We know it well today because Voltaire lampooned it in his hilarious satire, Candide ou l’Optimisme.

That book came out in 1759. The French Revolution began just forty years later. Today we know that revolution as one the most cruel and bloody in human history, surpassed, if at all, only by the Russian Revolution a century and a quarter later.

To readers today, the shiny abstraction that Voltaire satirized seems an obviously self-serving lie of the top dogs, justifying their oppression of the vast mass of French people. I include it in this list of modern shiny objects only because most modern ones, albeit more complicated and specific, tend toward the same end. They all justify and rationalize the economic elite’s top-doggery. Let’s analyze a few, beginning with the most general and moving on to the more specific.

2. “Unrestrained free trade makes everybody better off.” No, it doesn’t. Nothing demonstrates the falsity of this particular shiny object better than the rise of China and the fall of the United States and Western Europe, collectively “the West.”

Economists, including the eponymous magazine, tout trade’s role in elevating nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty, mostly in China. But there was also a cost, which free-trade boosters tend to elide. The cost included the transfer of technology, know-how, millions of jobs, and tens of thousands of factories from the West to China. It included plummeting Western wages, massive losses of manufacturing jobs, closed factories, dried-up factory towns, dashed standards of living, foreclosed homes, broken marriages and families, an epidemic of “deaths of despair,” and the dismal and unprecedented statistic of falling average longevity rates in the United States for three years in a row.

The indirect political costs included aggrieved workers’ election of Donald Trump, the worst president in our history, Brexit in Europe, and the inability of most of the West to supply itself with enough active-virus tests, masks and ventilators to resist the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s no coincidence that China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—all beneficiaries of the decades-long transfer of manufacturing to Asia—had more and better manufactured tests and defenses against Covid-19, available earlier, than France, Italy, Spain or the United States.

The notion that unrestrained free trade makes everyone better off is not too far from the “best of all possible worlds” philosophy that preceded the French Revolution. Its mere generality is self-evidently far too great to bear any relationship to science. But whom did belief in it benefit, at least in the West? The owners and oligarchs, of course: the people who owned the factories and got rich (and became our 0.1%) by moving their factories, technology and their workers’ jobs to China. They also profited through ownership in those now-Chinese factories as they sold cheap products back into the United States and worldwide.

3. “Free trade is good because it exploits everyone’s comparative advantage.” (The “law” of comparative advantage.) At first glance, this shiny object seems plausible. The idea is that some people do things better than others, and it’s good to have everyone make and trade things that they make best. Don’t the Germans and Japanese, with their excellent engineering, make better cars? Don’t clean air, unpolluted pastures and wide open spaces in Argentina and New Zealand make for tastier beef or lamb?

But recent history has debunked this “law” thoroughly. China proved there’s really no such thing as “comparative advantage,” at least besides consistently good weather for farming (as in California’s Central Valley, which produces one-quarter of US food) or the fortuitous presence of mineral deposits, oil or gas below a particular nation’s soil (as in Russia, Saudi Arabia and offshore Venezuela).

Before the massive transfer of the West’s technology and factories to China, that nation had no “comparative advantage” at all. All it had was large numbers of uneducated peasants willing to work for low wages and under appalling conditions that workers in the West would not accept. In exploiting that “advantage,” China first began making tennis shoes, clothing and lawn furniture. As it trained and educated its vast peasant workforce, China moved up. Later came hand tools, then machine tools, then cars and heavy equipment, and now robots, quantum computers and Covid-19 tests.

What China’s rapid rise proved is that—apart from weather and mineral wealth—there’s no such thing as an intrinsic or durable comparative advantage. If you’re smart enough to inveigle bosses in a manufacturing mecca to sell you their technology, know-how and factories, you can build your own comparative advantage and beat them at their own game.

That’s precisely what China’s leaders and capitalists have done to Western capitalists over the last forty years. In the process, they’ve proven beyond doubt that any people anywhere, with proper training and education, can learn to make high-quality products. This was something that Japan had proved earlier, but on a smaller scale.

Ironically, the whole notion of so-called “comparative advantage” originated in the West’s exploitation of something quite different: its own first-mover advantage. Over two centuries, beginning in England and moving to the European Continent, Western manufacturers maintained policies of “mercantilism” and high tariffs against imported manufactures. All this was a deliberate attempt to keep manufacturing (and jobs) to themselves and to enrich themselves by selling what they made to their subjugated foreign colonies in exchange for indigenous raw materials.

Viewed from an historical perspective, China’s inveigling Western capitalists to sell out their nations’ own manufacturing and jobs for thirty pieces of silver looks like a world-historic payback, a vast form of economic revenge. But neither China’s twentieth-century “revenge” nor the West’s two-century reign of mercantilism and tariffs before it had anything real to do with “comparative advantage.”

Analyzed cold-bloodedly, the shiny abstraction of “comparative advantage” never really had much practical effect at all, at least any effect that was unambiguously positive. In the beginning, it was a transparent Western fig leaf for mercantilism, colonialism and economic exploitation. In modern times it became a pretext for unfettered globalized trade, which made Western oligarchs obscenely rich at the cost of permitting China’s terrible revenge on the West and its workers.

4. “Maximizing profit is the purpose of business, and it makes everything more efficient.” This gross generalization depends on what you mean by “efficient.” Maximizing profit does tend to reduce unnecessary waste of resources. It focuses the mind on parsimonious use of valuable materials, land, labor, energy, “overhead” and other inputs. But because labor is a major cost of any business, maximizing profit also means stiffing workers, i.e., paying them as little as their subsistence and tolerance for suffering will allow.

The trouble is, there are a lot more workers than there are bosses. There always have been and probably always will be, at least until we invent and multiply truly intelligent androids to do our work. So to the extent maximizing profits requires minimizing wages and benefits—which it usually does—it also requires sacrificing the welfare of the many to secure the riches of the few. This is the iron law of profit-maximizing capitalism.

Does that sound like a proper goal of a society that purports to be democratic and egalitarian? The Business Roundtable belatedly recognized this point, acknowledging the interests of other “stakeholders,” besides those of shareholders in dividends and higher stock prices. Among those stakeholders are suppliers, customers, communities and (last but not least) employees.

So far, so good. But the Business Roundtable’s “change of heart” was largely a public-relations ploy. Whether, when and how it produces a change in behavior and actual business plans will determine whether and when angry workers stop revolting and picking flawed champions like Donald Trump. If nothing else, the French Revolution teaches us that squeezing workers too hard can have unintended consequences, including the lopped-off heads of those who conceived and promulgated the shiny abstractions.

5. “Low prices make for happy consumers.” This one is not just misleading. It’s flat wrong. To the extent lower prices derive from lower wages, which they very often do, they portend a “race to the bottom.” Workers, in the guise of consumers, do get low prices at Wal Mart. But they have to shop there, and only there, because the low wages they receive to keep prices low don’t let them buy anything better or elsewhere.

As explained more fully in another post, Henry Ford understood and proved the exact opposite. Higher wages, even if they might produce higher prices, let workers buy the stuff they make and created a vibrant consumer society. You would think that especially today, when consumer spending supports 70% of economic activity, economists would understand this. (The rich don’t spend nearly as much of their earnings as working people; instead, they save, invest and hoard.)

If low prices come from moving factories abroad and closing those at home, the same reasoning applies. You cannot forge a thriving consumer society by throwing millions out of work, even if they eventually get jobs at much lower wages.

Again, understanding the fallacy of this shiny abstraction requires only thinking a little more deeply. It may be more “efficient,” in the abstract, to be able to buy the same thing for a lower price. But if doing so means depriving the people who make that thing of a decent living, or throwing them out of work entirely, is that really “efficient”? Not if you think more broadly and have any sense of humanity, empathy or a well-functioning society.

I call this canard the “Wal Mart” fallacy. The apotheosis of low prices leads to a restive society in which the vast majority of people (excluding the rich) can’t afford to buy much anywhere else. A society with no brick-and-mortar stores left standing but Wal Marts, it seems to me, would hardly be a culturally rich, broadly satisfying, or desirable one.

Conclusion. Let’s never forget that our capitalists moved nearly 60,000 US factories to China of their own free will. And that’s only from 2001 to 2015!. No one held a gun to their head and said, “Move your factories to China, or else!” They did it to exploit the Chinese “comparative advantage” of low wages and miserable (read “cheap”) working conditions. They did it for the shiny objects of “low prices” and “high profit.”

And they made out like bandits. In fact, the massive shift of factories and technology was a “win-win!” The Chinese lifted hundreds of millions of out extreme poverty. Our capitalists still own, or part-own, the once-American factories in China. So they got, and still get, a big piece of the action: a share of the profit on every sale of stuff, not only to the 1.3 billion Chinese, but (because of the globally low prices) to the United States and Europe, and all over the world.

The upper half of Americans—the ones who own stocks and bonds—also made out like bandits. The only losers were the American workers who didn’t own shares and lost good jobs by the millions. Then, when those workers got angry, rebelled against “politics as usual,” and elected Donald Trump, all of us Americans lost big time. We got the worst president in our history and a grossly corrupt, neglectful and incompetent government. Now, as a result of that catastrophe, every American is suffering unnecessarily in the Covid-19 pandemic, from a GOP-maimed, scatterbrained and responsibility-ducking federal government and a consequent inability to make, procure, or secure medical tests and personal protective equipment.

Does all this mean we should abandon capitalism? Should we go for socialism? No and no! “Capitalism” and “socialism,” too, are mere shiny abstractions. They’re abstractions of an even higher order. They’re so abstract and vague that intelligent people can and do argue for days about what they actually mean.

There have always been, and perhaps there always will be, people who put shiny abstractions on banners and flags and ask others to die, literally or figuratively, to move those flags and banners forward. That’s the nature of our species and the propensity of our limited brains, as we seek to understand a universe infinitely bigger, influenced by relentless propaganda put out by Fox, Sinclair and the Russians.

To make real progress, we have to get away from all that. We have to start talking in specifics and doing what science commands: making testable hypotheses involving specifics, and then actually testing them with observation or experiment.

I suggest two. First of all, let’s go with Joe Biden’s latest take on health care. Let’s lower Medicare’s age of eligibility from 65 to 60, and let’s provide a public option, not force Medicare on all.

Previously, I’ve hypothesized that a true public option will produce Medicare for all naturally and organically, in just a few years. Sooner or later, people seeking health insurance will realize how much fairer, simpler, more comprehensive, more cost-effective, and more portable the public option will be than anything that today’s grossly dysfunctional private health-insurance system can provide.

With the Covid-19 pandemic raging, that transition will come much sooner than even I expected. As of April 16, there were already some 22 million unemployed, most or all of whom had already lost their employer-based health insurance along with their jobs. If we offered them a low-cost, basic Medicare-type health plan, most or all of them would take their supplemental “Covid-19 bailout” income and stampede toward it. The trick would not be encouraging them to make the transition; it would be—as in “Obamacare’s” original rollout—constructing a website robust enough to handle the stampede.

All these things are concrete hypotheses we can test. All we have to do is elect Joe Biden president and flip the Senate, and we can test these hypotheses by experiment, aka actual practice, as good scientists should.

Second, let’s drop all this shiny, abstract mumbo-jumbo about “efficiency,” the unprovable universal benefits of unrestrained trade, and the allegedly universally salubrious consequences of ever-lower prices and ever-higher profits. Let’s go straight for the concrete things that make workers (the vast majority of us) happy and secure: living wages. Let’s adopt Bernie Sanders’ universal minimum wage of $15 per hour and see what happens.

I predict the economy will not collapse but will even grow. That was in fact the experience in Seattle.

Now that’s a testable hypothesis! Maybe hotel rooms and restaurant meals will cost a little more. But there’ll be a lot more people able to afford them. Maybe the workers in upscale restaurants will be able, on special occasions, to eat there themselves, just as Henry Ford’s workers, after his unilateral doubling of wages, could afford to buy the cars they made. Maybe hotel workers could, once a year, have a romantic hotel weekend getaway with their spouses, even in the places where they work.

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful sign of an egalitarian society and a vibrant economy? How could you even assess the rise in workers’ dignity, well-being and morale? Would these intangible but very real benefits show up in the shiny abstraction of GDP?

The private sector could go even further, and it probably should. With a stroke of his pen, Jeff Bezos could raise his warehouse workers’ wages from $15 to $20 per hour. For a working year of 40 hours in each of 50 weeks, with two for vacation, that’s $40,000 per year—a good middle-class wage. If a warehouse worker packed only 100 boxes in an eight-hour workday, her extra $40 of pay per day would add 40 cents to the delivered price of the average Amazon box. Think that would slow Amazon’s rise or impair its business? I hypothesize not, and that’s a testable hypothesis. (I know for certain the extra 40 cents per package wouldn’t affect my buying almost everything I buy from Amazon, especially during the pandemic.)

Maybe Bezos could become the twenty-first-century analog of Henry Ford. Maybe other industrialists would follow. Maybe we’d again have a robust consumer economy, without workers having to work two or three jobs just to raise a family. Maybe the American Dream would revive. All these points, except the last, which is too vague, are easily testable hypotheses.

Maybe we would have to impose some tariffs to relieve competition from low-wage factories in less fortunate countries. But these wouldn’t be generalized tariffs, like those Trump slapped on steel, cars and aluminum. They would go into effect only to protect specific American factories or other business projects, and then only to the extent of neutralizing the foreign-local wage differential. Build or plan a new American factory, and a specific, calibrated tariff could go into effect to give it a price umbrella. The economic effect of that plan would be easy to test.

Whatever the results of these straightforward experiments, one thing is certain. We will not make social or economic progress if we keep our eyes fixed on shiny abstractions like “efficiency,” “comparative advantage,” GDP, profit and prices. In recent history, these shiny abstractions have served as little more than oligarchs’ sleight of hand in a shell game that American workers and our nation as a whole have lost catastrophically.

If we focus on simple, concrete things that help the majority of our people live well, we might really make America great again. Doing that would require abandoning our shiny abstractions and providing practical things that really matter, like access to health care, sick days off, child care, and living wages for the vast majority of us who work for a living. Who knows? The “hangman’s noose” of the pandemic may yet compel us to do just that, as Britain and the “socialist” nations of Northern Europe already have done.

Footnote: You can’t even begin to have an intelligent discussion if you conflate today’s winner-take-all oligarch-driven “capitalism” with the highly regulated “capitalism” of FDR, once but no longer constrained by robust collective bargaining. The same applies if you equate the democratic socialism of Denmark—considered by many to be today’s happiest nation—with the mess that is Maduro’s Venezuela, or (an even farther stretch) with the failed and abandoned collectivized economies of the old Soviet Union, or of old “Red” China before Deng Xiaoping. Yet pols and pundits confuse us and themselves by using the very same abstractions to conflate and equate these vastly different things every day.

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Bernie Said it First!

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.

He’s Baaack!

Having waited politely (and strategically) until after Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden, President Obama is back in the fray. His trademark empathy, slight understatement, and absolutely precise analysis make such a contrast with the random blathering of our incumbent Caligula as to give us all much-needed hope. Take a bit less than twelve minutes and transport yourself to a kinder, better, and infinitely more competent universe, by clicking here.

Preliminary Lore on Covid-19 Immunity and Antibody Testing

At last there is an authoritative preliminary news report on ongoing research on acquired-immunity responses and antibody testing for Covid-19. The picture is still uncertain and evolving. But research on related viruses, including those that cause SARS, MERS and the common cold, suggests that immunity in recovered patients may last about a year and have a spectrum of strength: a majority may be complete, a minority may be weak, and a small minority may be nonexistent. (We need further research to tell whether we can distinguish among these levels of acquired immunity with blood-testing for antibodies, which promises to be quicker, simpler and cheaper than swab-testing for active viruses.) The report speculates that acquired immunity might be fairly widespread if, as some epidemiologists suspect, actual recoveries from the virus are ten to a hundred times as numerous as confirmed recoveries, due to the paucity and late rollout of active-virus testing in the United States. While uncertain and still needing confirmation in actual tests with recovered Covid-19 patients, these preliminary results are encouraging. They suggest that we might soon start putting recovered patients to work in numbers, at low risk, after antibody-testing them for immunity and freedom from active virus. Thus would begin the next and first “offensive” stage in our war against the virus, which I call “Stage Three.” As more and more immune patients were “cleared” in this way, we might begin, perhaps in months to a year, to produce “herd” immunity in the general population. This approach—and not an uninformed “back to work” decree from on high—is the only right way to ramp up the economy with acceptable risk to people who don’t work at home and other “virgins” never exposed to the virus.

The principal post follows:

“Nothing’s ever been said until a Harvard man says it.”—Comment of a colleague at an American Law Institute meeting, after a pompous Harvard-trained lawyer repeated, with slightly more precise wording and better grammar, what two previous speakers had said.

It was with great pleasure and satisfaction that I read the New York Time’s grand editorial Thursday, explaining just how extreme, corrosive and unsustainable America’s economic inequality and malign neglect of workers have become. It’s best to view the project online, where appalling but true facts come tumbling across the screen like world-destroying meteors.

The top 1% of us Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom 80%. The hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin paid $238 million for a New York apartment, while 10.9 million American families spend more than half their incomes on rent, and a half million Americans are homeless on any given night. More than 90% of Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents by age 30; only half born in 1980 were. In 1980, an American with income in the top fifth could expect to live 13 more years than one with income in the bottom fifth; today that advantage in longevity has more than doubled. (Not coincidentally, 1980 was the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.)

This extreme inequality has resulted in a “reverse-Robin-Hood” effect—a vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The editorial describes it as follows:

"If individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, the extreme increase in inequality means every worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a worker in the top 10 percent.”

In other words, if the fruits of increased worker productivity since 1970 had been widely and fairly shared, every worker in the bottom 90% of income distribution today would be earning $12,000 more per year on average. Many, of course, would be earning even more. Over the last decade, that’s an average loss of nearly $120,000, which actually went toward enriching the oligarchs. So much for the US as a socially mobile and egalitarian society.

The NYT “exposé” also mentioned, in brief passing, the 2014 study by two American academics proving that the United States already had become an oligarchy, in which economic elites’ “needs” produce legislation far more often than workers’. (For a brief BBC summary of the study, click here.)

Bravo! The NYT’s editorial summary was cogent, well-written, impressively illustrated and compelling. It promises to be part of an ongoing journalistic project, a “Times Opinion series exploring how the nation can emerge from this crisis stronger, fairer and more free.” I and the rest of America await future installments with bated breath.

And yet, and yet . . . Haven’t we heard all this before, and from a serious candidate for president, twice?

Hadn’t Senator Bernie Sanders been making the very same points, long before they bubbled to the surface of “mainstream” American consciousness enough to make headlines in the New York Times? Sanders himself made headlines (and lots of enemies) talking about our “rigged economy” and extreme inequality on the campaign trail in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020.

But Sanders didn’t limit himself to sounding the alarm about an economy whose fairness, equity and social mobility have already faded into myth. He also offered solutions.

He proposed replacing our byzantine, hideously inefficient and grotesquely dysfunctional private health-insurance system with the kind of streamlined single payer that every other developed nation has. He pushed to relieve our higher-education graduates of the mountain of debt that began only after Ronald Reagan “downsized” the University of California and its theretofore nearly free undergraduate education to slake his political ambitions. Like Henry Ford, Sanders wanted to empower workers and boost our economy with a living wage, at least $15 per hour. And he sought to create millions of new, non-outsourceable jobs rebuilding our dilapidated national infrastructure and converting us to clean energy with a Green New Deal.

Just a few years ago, these proposals of Sanders seemed progressive fantasies. But now, after his near-win of the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020, everyone takes them seriously. Many states already have instituted $15-per-hour minimum wages, as have a few leading businesses like Amazon. Voters are no longer talking about how disruptive a rational, functional, single-payer health-insurance system would be. They are asking how much it will cost.

As a curmudgeonly but brilliant independent Senator from Vermont, Sanders has been making these points for decades. Yet he has been vilified as a “socialist” and allegedly unable to work with others—a point his actual colleagues belie. He’s been marginalized, ridiculed, mocked and minimized by the “mainstream,” including the New York Times.

Reporters have characterized him not just as “left wing,” but as “far left,” as if name-calling were analysis. The New York Times’ own reporters have been far from innocent in this regard. By dint of such cheap name-calling, respectable reporters from solid “mainstream” media have made it impossible for the workers who most need Sanders’ insight—let alone those never weaned from Fox—to hear and heed his message.

For years and years, the national reception to Bernie’s accurate and compelling analysis was what you would expect from a clique or gang on a high-school playground. They ignored the substance of his message and attacked him ad hominem. They averred that no “democratic socialist” could ever win high office, or rightly diagnose our national ills. They neglected to mention, let alone explain, the vast chasm between “democratic socialism” and a socialist economy without free enterprise; they never even admitted the divergence from galaxies far, far away, in which abide Communism and radical tyrannies like North Korea’s.

In doing all this, the NYT and (to a lesser extent) the post-Bezos WaPo followed the “lead” of such paragons of estimable journalism as Fox and Rush, albeit more subtly and with less overt mockery. Only now, after three years of catastrophic, hard-right drifting, inexpert near-anarchy, a sycophantic takeover of Congress the likes of which the US have never seen, and a pandemic that threatens a new Great Depression, has the NYT suddenly “gotten religion.”

Perhaps we should all rejoice and shout “hallelujah!” just as Jesus welcomes a repentant sinner, even one at death’s door. But don’t we also have a more urgent obligation to recognize the single, lonely man who spent a lifetime in the political wilderness in relentless pursuit of unpopular, inconvenient and unacknowledged truths? Shouldn’t we celebrate the man who eventually brought marginalized workers, indebted students, honest laborers who can’t see a doctor, and the undocumented to the attention of our “mainstream”?

I will go to my grave believing that, if Bernie had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, he, not Trump, would be in the White House today. Had Hillary Clinton just named him as her Veep, she would be in the White House today. In either case, we would not be suffering the surreal misrule of a man whom a former conservative called, quite accurately, “the worst president ever.”

After a full century of horrors, we humans stand on the precipice of a grand choice. We can try to emulate ants, bees and termites and model our societies on mechanistic hives. We can squeeze our workers for every ounce of energy and diligence, like the last century’s “efficiency experts,” with their endless rows of identical lathes or sewing machines. We can push Amazon’s warehouse workers to pack those boxes ever faster and faster, competing for space in narrow aisles with heavily laden robots, and sometimes getting crushed. We can focus obsessively on “efficiency” and “productivity” and make things we need in places like Foxconn in China, with globally low salaries and dismal working conditions punctuated by barely-contained mini-epidemics of suicide. We can watch helplessly while so-called “deaths of despair” reduce our national average longevity into banana-republic territory.

We can overdo abstractions, just like megalo-mechanistic Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who, knowing nothing about Russia, its language or history, invented a crash program of privatization “shock therapy” and got our government to foist it on Russia during Russia’s brief window of trust, thereby creating Russia’s current oligarchy as yet another reason, besides the Cold War, for a durable international grudge. We can measure “success“ by such impersonal abstractions as GDP, low prices, and profit. We can forget (or ignore) that the flip side of low prices and high profit is low wages, one of whose many consequences is tens of millions of workers suffering poverty, perpetual insecurity, and (today) the inability to resist the pandemic now maiming our economy.

Or we can try another approach. We can recognize ourselves as human beings—intelligent, naked apes, not ants, bees or termites. We can see our empathy and ability to cooperate as our two greatest evolutionary adaptations, greater even than our large brains and opposable thumbs. We can see what Henry Ford saw a century ago—that high wages produce a vibrant consumer economy, while low ones produce a restive society of serfs. (It really is that simple.) We can understand, at last, that satisfactory societies with minimal conflict require keeping everyone happy, well fed, and secure, from the oligarch in his mansion, to the worker in the factory, mine, farm or warehouse, down to the undocumented serf in our fields and slaughterhouses, which Jesus described as “the least of these.”

Yes, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee. Yes, he will challenge Trump in a coming political Armageddon. Yes, the result of that epic political battle will fix the fate our our nation and the world, for a long time to come. (Imagine world with leaders like Bolsonaro, Duterte, El-Sisi, Erdoğan, MBS, Orban, Putin, Trump, and Xi in power, in every significant nation, as far as the eye can see! Would we have to wait for another millennium of Dark Ages to see our next Renaissance?)

But make no mistake about it. If we are to face facts—if we are to change our profligate, oppressive, oligarchic, bossist and racist ways and recover our soul as a nation—Bernie Sanders is our guru.

There is nothing we can do, as a people, to repay him for his boundless energy, persistence and perseverance in showing us the terrible errors of our ways. Unlike Jesus, he hasn’t yet died for our sins; but he did have a heart attack striving mightily to enlighten us.

The least we can do, if Biden wins and the dark clouds of political Armageddon slowly part, is to replace every statue of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the genocidal racist Andrew Jackson with one of Bernie Sanders. Then, as long as Bernie lives, we can honor and laud the man who devoted his life to reminding us of our common humanity and how far we have strayed from actualizing it.

Endnote: The State of our “Mainstream” Media

It’s a sad fact, but true. We Americans have only two independent national “print” media of real clout: the Washington Post and the New York Times. What used to be a third, the Wall Street Journal, is fatally corrupted by Murdoch’s 2007 takeover, after over a century of independent family ownership. It’s now best described as “Fox Lite,” a rag whose news and analysis—not to mention basic journalism—are perpetually harnessed to a not-so-subtle right-wing political agenda. (After thirty years of subscribing, I gave Murdoch a few years and then canceled, for reasons described here).

As the WaPo’s masthead now declares, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” To appreciate that truth, all you have to do is consider how Fox has become human history’s most effective propaganda organ, and how assiduously and relentlessly it’s now pushing Donald J. Trump as the first emperor of a new “Amerika.” The recent electoral fiasco in Wisconsin is just a foretaste of what’s in store if Fox, Trump and the modern excuse for the GOP have their way.

It’s vital to understand that nothing about capitalism or “free enterprise” saved our Fourth Estate, or the independence of our “print” media—the only portion of our vast media empire that provides sober analysis and reflection. On the contrary. It was robust, laissez faire, winner-take-all capitalism that allowed Murdoch and right-wing apostles like Rush and Sinclair Radio to dominate the airwaves with a toxic mix of entertainment, mockery of education and experts, and right-wing ideology. They won by making propaganda sell.

What saved our Fourth Estate was two fortunate and unexpected accidents. First, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Then the New York Times, after a near-death experience, belatedly managed to convert its journalistic high repute and already-national print distribution into a viable online business model. Nothing in our economic system substantially assisted, let alone foreordained, these two fortunate events. From a political/social/economic perspective, they were unplanned, world-historic bits of dumb luck.

Whatever you may think about how Jeff Bezos treats Amazon’s workers on his way to assimilating the known retail Universe, his purchase has left the WaPo with complete editorial and journalistic freedom, comparable to what it had enjoyed under the legendary Graham family. (Katharine Graham, as editor-in-chief, had risked the WaPo’s economic survival in order to publicize the Watergate Scandal, eventually driving Richard Nixon from the White House.) Bezos has recycled all operating profits back into building the WaPo as a world-class paragon of news and analysis. For that purpose he seems ready to dip again into his fortune as the world’s richest man, if necessary. As for the New York Times, you can gauge how close it came to untimely journalistic death by noting that, before publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger died, he almost killed his baby by making an advertising executive CEO, with full control over editorial policy.

So we Americans escaped the fate of the old Soviet Union by the skin of our teeth. As Americans my age (74) recall well, “news” in the Soviet Union depended on two self-conscious Communist propaganda organs: “The News” (“Izvestia”) and “The Truth” (“Pravda”). Soviet citizens explained these rags’ effectiveness in informing the Soviet public with the slogan “There’s no truth in The News and no news in The Truth.”

Today, with Fox dominating TV and Sinclair dominating local radio, we Americans may yet achieve a similar apex of Orwellian ideological spoon-feeding. Only the WaPo and the NYT stand in our way. (The British weekly The Economist provides some international perspective. But, by and large, it serves only the elite in the United States. Anyway, its consistent editorial outlook is not far from that of the oligarch-suborned Wall Street Journal, as I explain here.)

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The Big Picture: Stages in our Pandemic “War”

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.

Stage One—Testing, Tracing Contacts, and Isolating the Infected: the Lost Battle
Stage Two—Locking Down and “Flattening the Curve”: now in process
Stage Three—Finding the recovered who are immune non-carriers and putting them to work
Stage Four—A medicine: the “Wild Card”
Stage Five—a Safe and Effective Vaccine
Conclusion

There are two things that no leader in wartime ought to do. The first is to try to fight the last war, using an obsolete strategy. The second is to refight a lost battle.

The French made the first error in World War II. They created the “Maginot Line,” a series of fixed fortifications, which the Germans with their Panzer (tank) divisions easily circumvented. As a result, most of France fell and remained Nazi-controlled territory for most of the war.

The Brits avoided the second error after their horrendous early defeat on the European continent. Instead of fighting to the last man, they beat a strategic retreat from Dunkirk and saved the bulk of their fighting force. Then they devoted their energy and ingenuity to the so-called “Battle of Britain”—the air war over France, Germany, England and the English Channel. Their pyrrhic victory in that battle probably saved Western civilization from Nazi brutality.

We have not yet made France’s error in the war against Covid-19 because the scientists have been in charge. While they have noticed important similarities among the Covid-19 virus and the viruses that cause SARS, MERS, influenza, and even the common cold, they have been just as attentive to important differences. As good scientists, they care about detail and have assumed nothing. From the very beginning, they have been fighting this war, not the last one.

Unfortunately, our species has not been nearly as wise and prescient as the Brits after Dunkirk in letting a lost battle go. Only South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore appear to have won the battle of testing, tracing contacts and isolating the infected. The rest of the world, including the United States, has self-evidently lost that battle already, by weeks if not months.

So if we want to win this pandemic war as a species, in places not so wise and/or lucky, we’re going to have to consider the likely ebb and flow of the entire war, in all its various stages. We’re going to have to plan in advance and respond flexibly to reverses and unforeseeable events. To that end, we should consider the five stages through which this war will very likely pass:

Stage One—Testing, Tracing Contacts, and Isolating: the Lost Battle. Outside of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, this battle already has been lost. Once you have known cases in the tens or hundreds of thousands, you have to admit that unknown cases must bulk at least the same order of magnitude, and perhaps an order of magnitude larger. Then there is no hope of even testing everyone likely infected, let alone tracing all their contacts retroactively over a period of several weeks or months, especially when your testing “infrastructure” has badly lagged. If nothing else, the United States’ complete lack of discipline and consistency in simply testing arrivals from China during the height of its epidemic demonstrates the utter futility of relying on this approach now.

This doesn’t mean that testing, tracing contacts and isolating the infected no longer has relevance as a tactic. It can work in special instances like the infamous funeral in Albany, Georgia, or in isolated, local hot spots.

But it’s not going to save already established citywide hot spots like New York or New Orleans from a full-blown explosion of cases. For nations and regions that have already missed the boat, testing, tracing contacts and isolating the infected is no longer a viable strategy. The only thing that can minimize the suffering and death in these places is adroitly moving on to the next stage.

Stage Two—Locking Down and “Flattening the Curve”: now in process. The purpose of and prognosis for this stage is now well known. The idea is to slow the exponential growth of new infections so as not to overwhelm hospitals and health-care providers, and to stay locked down until the exponential rise of new infections goes flat and even begins to decline. It’s the only viable strategy yet devised for cities, states, regions and nations that have already missed the boat of Stage One.

This is entirely a defensive stage. All it can do is slow the pandemic’s explosive growth unless or until we have a vaccine. Its logic requires (apart from overlap with Stage Three) that we maintain the lockdown indefinitely, lest “virgin” people mix with infected and recovering ones and so restart the cycle of exponential growth of new infections all over again. (No doubt this dismal error will recur, perhaps repeatedly, in places where leaders and their people fail to understand the terrible logic of this stage.)

Stage Three—Finding the recovered who are immune non-carriers and putting them to work. Outside of lucky and prepared places like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, this stage is the first part of the “war” that we can properly characterize as offensive, rather than merely defensive. If we can identify people who’ve had the disease and have recovered, and who are both immune and no longer carriers, we will have an ever-growing army of invincible pandemic fighters. They, and only they, can begin to get back to “normal.”

Not only can they go anywhere and do anything, without risk to themselves or others, as if the pandemic had never occurred. In particular, they can: (1) supplement and protect the first-line defenders, i.e., doctors, nurses and hospitals; (2) test suspected new cases without risk; (3) bring food and other necessities to the isolated but fearful uninfected; (4) perform essential work like keeping food growing and flowing, transporting the sick, maintaining critical supply chains, and keeping the lights and power on; and (5) jump-start and expand the customer bases of closed and barely operating small businesses, such as restaurants, bars and even entertainment centers. In essence, these recovered, identified and “cleared” people can begin, slowly but steadily, to revive the general economy.

The key to all this, as I explained three weeks ago, is blood tests for antibodies, as distinguished from nasal-swab tests for active virus. There is now evidence that patients recovering from Covid-19 develop two kinds of antibodies: a temporary one from about six to 20 days after infection, and later a more permanent kind.

We still have lots of good science to do to determine how much of which kind of antibodies in the blood confers immunity and rules out further contagion. But prior experience with other viral illnesses, including vaccines, suggests that such tests are possible.

Once we’ve done the right science well, we can test not only people who’ve previously tested positive for viral load, but also the higher number of suspected but never confirmed infections. As and if people’s antibody tests “clear” them, they can go to work and back to normal life, as if vaccinated, even long before an effective vaccine arrives. It goes without saying that this testing should be entirely gratis to the subjects, financed by government as a public necessity.

These “cleared” people would not necessarily return to their old jobs. With their confirmed immunity and freedom from contagion, they could do other work of much greater social benefit. Especially in the early phases of Stage 3, they will be a precious resource whose immunity and labor must not be wasted or misused.

Their most important early use would be giving beleaguered medical first responders some relief. There is growing evidence that “viral load,” in addition to a patient’s personal immune-system characteristics, fixes the severity of the Covid-19 illness, as well as its mortality. As this evidence becomes confirmed, it will make no sense to stress our non-immune doctors and nurses with impossible 60-hour weeks in which they regularly encounter very sick patients coughing, sneezing and breathing all over them.

Chronic stress and fatigue only impair people’s normal immune function. To subject our doctors and nurses to them and to great viral loads simultaneously is to treat our elite shock troops as cannon fodder. It would make much more sense to give them a respite of a day or two after encountering a formidable viral load, both to increase their own chances of survival and to assess whether they are falling ill and therefore an increased danger to patients.

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee has explained the theory in a brilliantly written must-read New Yorker article. He speculated whether we might measure viral load with something like the radiation dosimeters that workers in nuclear power plants wear. That seems unlikely: just measuring the virus’ presence in individuals is already hard enough, as well as slow and expensive. But with current hospital computer systems, it would be easy enough to keep careful records, for each caregiver, of things like being sneezed and coughed on by a very sick patient, or installing a ventilator in one (which requires very close contact). Then caregivers’ workloads and respite periods could be arranged accordingly.

Two points about Stage Three bear emphasizing. First, the lockdown for “virgin” people (those neither infected nor recovered) must continue as long as Stage Three lasts, or at least long enough to reliably establish “herd” immunity among the general population. So the lockdown should last at least months, not weeks. It might even last until a reliable vaccine is generally available.

Second, although Stage Three begins the transition period back to normal life, it will not release everyone from lockdown at the same time. It will only release those who have caught Covid-19, have recovered, are no longer carriers, are immune, and have been so tested and therefore “cleared.” So Stage Three will mark the beginning of the end, but nowhere near the final end chronologically.

Stage Four—A medicine: the “Wild Card.” No one can now predict when or whether a medicine for Covid-19 will ever exist or, if so, what it will do. As compared to vaccine development, research on medicines is random, haphazard and wholly unpredictable. It depends, in large measure, on rare and extraordinary scientific insight, serendipity, and plain dumb luck.

In contrast, the process of developing a vaccine is well known and straightforward, at least in theory. It has worked for many viral diseases, from smallpox and polio to (until recently) measles and mumps. What takes so long is maximizing a vaccine’s protection and confirming both its safety and effectiveness in lengthy, large-scale human trials.

At present, the most promising approach to a medicine is the use or synthesis of antibodies that real patients have developed in recovering from the disease. Scientists in China have had some preliminary success with this approach, and it seems promising enough to merit serious, expedited research.

But there are hurdles in using antibodies from real patients’ bodies in other patients. They include unforeseen immune reactions and obvious problems in scaling up. (Individual patients’ bodies do not make robust medicine factories.) There are also obvious problems in synthesizing “purer” versions of the same antibodies at scale and with sufficient purity to avoid unintended reactions.

Nevertheless, this approach has had limited success with other diseases. So far, it seems the most systematic approach and the one most likely to achieve limited success in the short term.

But neither this approach, nor any other now known, seems to offer anything like a “cure.” A pill or injection that will cure every case of Covid-19—let alone an advanced case with pneumonia, lung damage and organ failure—is highly unlikely. The best we can reasonably hope for is a medicine that: (1) reduces the incidence of infection among exposed people, or for a limited class of them (such as those who do not react negatively to a specific antibody); (2) relieves symptoms if given soon enough after infection; (3) makes serious complications less likely if administered early enough; or (4) in limited, highly specific cases can bring patients back, albeit greatly impaired, from the brink of death.

There is absolutely no way of knowing, in advance and without extensive clinical experience and double-blind human trials, whether any particular natural or synthesized antibody or medicine will have any one of more of these effects. That’s why the very notion of a “medicine” must remain a “wild card” in planning the war against Covid-19. No one can predict when one will be found or what it can do. All we can do is exploit one, if discovered, to the best of our ability. As a result, the discovery and development of a medicine are far too uncertain to serve as reliable strategic factors; they can serve only as tactics.

Stage Five—a Safe and Effective Vaccine. As these brief descriptions of the earlier stages suggest, the pandemic will not be “over,” in any real sense, until we have developed a safe and effective vaccine. Even then, it may take many months to ramp up production of the vaccine worldwide and bring all the uninfected “virgins” out from hiding and vaccinate them.

No less an authority than Dr. Anthony Fauci has guesstimated the time required just for vaccine development and testing as a year to eighteen months. If you don’t consider the job done until the vaccine has reached all the far flung corners of the Earth and relegated Covid-19 to the same rarity as polio or smallpox, winning the “war” may take even longer than that.

During all that time, recovered patients “cleared” in Stage 3 will steadily continue to increase in number. After all, the vast majority—well over 90%—of infected patients will recover. Most, if not all, of them eventually will be “cleared” by antibody tests to return to normal life. But all this will take time—months and months, not weeks.

As Stage Three progresses, Covid-19 “virgins” in the high-risk categories will have a terrible choice to make. To protect themselves, they will have to stay in lockdown and continue to practice social distancing for all this time. Or they will have to bite the bullet and risk being among the last to die in a nearly-extinguished pandemic. Isn’t that just as depressing as being the last soldier to die in a waning war?

The dilemma that these uninfected “virgins” pose, both to themselves and to the larger society, will require vast moral and economic changes in the larger society as it recovers economically and gets back to normal life. Handling them will say much about how our society evolves, if at all, from its present cruel and short-sighted reliance on social Darwinism to one based on compassion, caring and concern for all.

Conclusion. Our pandemic “war” will not be won until we have a safe and effective vaccine and have used it to give our entire species effective herd immunity. While prediction is hard at this early stage, the most conservative estimate of a time frame for that “victory” is two years. During all that time, there will be innocent, high-risk “virgin” people whose lives, health and safety will depend on at least partial lockdown and social distancing. No doubt there will be places and leaders that “jump the gun” and sacrifice these innocents to the harsh god of a quicker economic revival.

How this tension between compassion and “get on with it” fever plays out will vary widely from place to place, just as the reluctance to lock down in the first place has condemned some rather remote places to becoming minor hotspots. In making this crucial choice, places and leaders will reveal, for some time to come, who and what they really are.

The most crucial choice of all will be how we handle “cleared” Covid-19 survivors in Stage Three. We can take a “laissez faire” approach and let them decide, under the aegis of “personal freedom,” what they do, when and where they do it, and whether they make any contribution to the common “war” effort at all. Or we can organize and put them to work fighting the pandemic. We can, for example, let smart people with medical and scientific expertise return to managing venture capital and speculating in the stock markets; or we can put them to work designing better ways to organize our fight against the pandemic.

The “laissez faire” approach is not the one we took in World War II. Then we drafted all able-bodied men and accepted all female volunteers and put them to work in the war effort. With intelligence tests and careful biographies, we evaluated every draftee and volunteer individually and put him or her to the highest and best use in fighting the enemy. Anyone at all familiar with the war effort knows that, from rationing gasoline, food and automobile tires to running the Manhattan Project in strict secrecy and putting women to work as “Rosie the Riveter”, our entire nation was involved in a carefully planned, beautifully organized, top-down crash project to win the war.

We will need something like that in Stage Three if we are to fight this pandemic effectively. It will, or course, go against the grain of libertarianism that has so saturated our national culture and ideology. But it will shorten the war, save tens of thousands of lives, and perhaps give our people coherence and a common goal. Who knows? It might even show them what’s been missing from our hedonistic, libertarian, selfish, “anything goes” culture for the past generation or two.

Our draftees’ and volunteers’ effort in World War II was unlimited in time. No one knew, in advance, when the war would end or even if we would win it. For many, their fight lasted the entire four-year duration of our nation’s part in the war.

In contrast, this commitment will be unlikely to exceed two years. The path toward vaccines against viral diseases is long and winding but well known and well traveled.

Whether those of us who survive and recover from Covid-19 can devote that much time to assuring a quick and efficient national recovery will tell us and the world a lot about about ourselves as a nation. Most of all, it will reveal whether we can ever recover our lost national greatness, and whether we can truly compete with China for leadership of our species.

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