On March 24, Dan Patrick, the 69-year-old Lieutenant
Governor of Texas told Tucker Carlson of Fox News, “You know, Tucker, no one
reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a
chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America
loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick continued, “And if that’s
the exchange, I’m all in… That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like
that,” he added. “I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this
country like me.”
Patrick and others claim that allowing people to go back to
their physical place of work and opening restaurants, bars and retail shops
would enable the economy to ‘return to normal’. However, at the time of
Patrick’s interview, the pandemic in the U.S. was still not at its peak
anywhere in the country. Those who made this argument around that time and in
early April, principally on the right of politics, must have known that
relaxing social distancing prematurely and without necessary safeguards such as
extensive testing, effective contact tracing and isolation would result in more
cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. Potentially, a lot more deaths.
However, if social distancing measures were to be relaxed immediately
and the US “opened up”, would people really be likely to dine in restaurants, gather
in bars or indulge in retail shopping? Perhaps at first, yes, but as media
reports of illness increased and more and more people had first-hand experience
of knowing someone who had become seriously ill or died from COVID-19, would people
be inclined to stay home and avoid high-risk places? Very probably.
Evidence from Japan shows that the government has been slow
to encourage social distancing, did not conduct widespread testing and has not
closed workplaces, shops or restaurants. Instead, it opted for a policy of
“cluster response”. However, writing in Science
magazine, Denis Normile explains that as COVID-19 case numbers in Japan began
to skyrocket in mid-April, “Most movie theaters, museums, and department stores
have shut their doors. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government reports that morning
rush hour ridership on city subway lines last week was down 60% from precrisis
levels. Many restaurants and bars have closed or are open for takeout only.”
Even with the economy remaining ‘open’, on April 20, The Japan Times reported: “Taro Saito, Executive Research Fellow at
the NLI Research Institute, said even at more than ¥100 trillion ($1 trillion),
the government’s economic support package is insufficient. Saito said it was
likely unemployment rate would rise to 3.9 percent from 2.4 percent in
February, with the fallout from the pandemic not yet factored into the official
data. He also estimates the number of unemployed will hit 2.72 million in the
fourth quarter, up from 1.56 million at the same time last year.”
Therefore, were any economy to be ‘opened up’ prematurely
with insufficient safeguards and pandemic numbers increased as a result, unemployment
figures would likely still be staggering. This would certainly appear to be so
for the United States. According to the Pew Research Center citing the US
Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 157 million Americans were in the
workforce in 2019 with 71% of non-farm employees working in the services
sector; 16.7 million Americans were employed in leisure and hospitality. A
further 12.9 million Americans worked in manufacturing, which would also be affected
detrimentally with falling retail sales. In the past month or so, around 26
million Americans have lost their job. These job losses might have been delayed
if there were no lockdown but would probably not have been avoided, and the
delay would have been at the cost of thousands more dead.
So, one way or the other, the economy was going to take a
hit. Why then would politicians, corporate figures and media commentators on
the popular right want to send many more citizens to their death for dubious, unsustainable
economic benefit? What is going on? Were these entreaties nothing more than
short-sighted, ill-considered grasps in panic for a return to normality? Are
they just manifest stupidity?
Or is the agenda for premature, ill-prepared opening of the
economy more callous and deeply rooted in ideology than mere concern over economic
numbers of the day?
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Without doubt, had US states followed the advice of Governor
Dan Patrick one month ago, there would now be a good many less grandparents out there like him. Patrick argued, “As the
president said, the mortality rate is so low. Do we have to shut down the
entire country for this? I think we can get back to work.” At the time he spoke,
Johns Hopkins University had reported 417,582 confirmed COVID-19 cases globally
and 18,612 deaths. On May 03, following weeks of strict social distancing with
about one-third of the world population in lockdown, the number of reported cases globally approached 3.4
million and there had been almost 245,000 reported coronavirus deaths, over 64,000
of which were in the United States. At one point, the number of deaths in New
York alone increased by more than 600 each day, falling below 500 deaths on April
20 for the first time in over two weeks. The BBC has reported that on 24 April
alone the United States had over 3,000 COVID-19 deaths. Disturbingly, the
actual number of cases and deaths in the US and elsewhere are believed to be
even higher because of limited capacity for testing and difficulties in
counting the dead.
Nevertheless, just over one week earlier on Wednesday April
15, people in the US states of Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia
and Michigan defied social distancing recommendations and stay-at-home orders
to protest against “infringements on their freedoms”. The ABC reported that, “Some
carried signs claiming the coronavirus is a hoax, while others held signs with
slogans like, ‘All workers are essential’ and ‘Freedom not fear’.” Since then,
anti-quarantine and anti-lockdown protests have occurred in other US states. On
April 29, Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian
newspaper reported, “What is interesting is who is orchestrating the protests.
So, actually, behind the scenes they are being organised in some cases by
people with links to the Trump administration or existing right-wing groups,
and really now they’re the ones who are promoting the protests… Donald Trump
has offered tacit support for the protests, ‘These are people expressing their
views… They seem to be very responsible people to me’… A majority of Americans
support the lockdowns and in fact are concerned that the lockdowns might be
lifted too soon… Another thing is that because people are at the protests… milling
about – they’re not social distancing – some epidemiologists are now warning
that we could see a spike in cases in some of these states in about 3 or 4
weeks’ time.” These protesters have not been arguing that some people should be
sacrificed for the economy; they just do not believe that the risk to health is
real or that it is important enough to warrant disrupting economic activity. Such
behaviour in the context of available data on COVID-19 death rates in the
United States and elsewhere validates one of my favourite gems of Biblical
wisdom: stultorum infinitus est numerus,
(‘the number of fools is infinite’, Vulgate, Ecclesiasticus 1:15); however,
others apparently agree with them.
Two days after the initial protests, on Friday April 17, The New York Times summarised Republican
sentiment in Congress, “Republicans… are urging an end to the freeze. ’It should
have happened yesterday,’ Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, chairman of the
hard-line House Freedom Caucus, told Politico. Representative Trey
Hollingsworth of Indiana acknowledged the chance of ‘loss of life’ from an
early end to social distancing but asserted, nonetheless, that it was better
than the alternative. ‘It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and
big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils,’ he said to a
local radio station. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was even more blunt
during an interview on Fox News on Wednesday. ‘We gotta reopen, and
when we do, the coronavirus is going to spread faster, and we got to be ready
for it.’”
Of course, right-wing Republican lawmakers in the US are not
alone in arguing that the economy must be given priority over combatting the
coronavirus pandemic. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said, “Life must go
on, employments should be kept, people’s income should be preserved, so all
Brazilians should go back to normal.” Ignoring evidence from around the world,
he mistakenly argues that COVID-19 kills only the elderly and those with
underlying conditions, and that if he were infected – aged 65 – he would only
feel “a little flu”. He has opposed the social-distancing recommendations of
the Brazilian Ministry of Health and on April 16 sacked the Minister of Health,
Luiz Henrique Mandetta. Officially, Brazil has admitted to only around 6,750
deaths from COVID-19 in a population of over 200 million; however, as noted by
Professor Dupeyron at the University of Regina and reported in the National Post, “Brazil likely has 12
times more cases of the new coronavirus than are being officially reported by
the government.” On April 23, The Times UK ran an article claiming
that people are being buried in mass graves in the Brazilian city of Manaus.
This follows earlier reports of mass graves also in Sao Paulo.
Sweden eschewed a comprehensive lockdown that would involve
restrictions and fines – with attendant economic impacts – in favour of strong
messaging around social distancing. The Swedish head epidemiologist, Anders
Tegnell, argues, "It is important to have a policy that can be sustained
over a longer period, meaning staying home if you are sick, which is our
message." The policy has allowed bars, restaurants and shops to remain
open. However, a comparison of COVID-19 cases and deaths with Sweden’s near
neighbours Norway (population 5.37 million) and Denmark (population 5.79
million) both of which implemented comprehensive lockdowns reveals a human cost
to that decision. On April 21, Sweden (population 10.2 million) suffered its
deadliest day with 185 COVID-19 deaths, nearly as many in a single day as Norway
had recorded up until then in total. To date, Sweden has reported more than 2,669
deaths; whereas Norway has had 211 deaths, and Denmark 475 deaths. Reuters
notes that Sweden has an export-dependent economy that nevertheless has still
been affected negatively by the pandemic. On March 31, Reuters quoted Sweden’s
Finance Minister as saying that the nation’s economy is expected to shrink by
4% this year, “We see growth falling and unemployment rising in a way we have
not seen since the financial crisis”. Annika Winsth, Chief Economist at
regional bank Nordea, called Sweden’s decision to remain open “brave”.
In Pakistan, the pressure for relaxation of social
distancing has come from religious leaders. On Wednesday April 22, with the
holy month of Ramadan imminent, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) District President,
Mufti Kifayatullah, said, “we would never allow this government to keep people
away from mosques in such an alarming situation where one should seek Allah’s
mercy and forgiveness to come out of this deadly pandemic.”
Let’s be clear, no reasonable person would take issue with
the proposition that group worship be allowed and economic activity be done to
the maximum extent possible consistent with minimising pandemic-related illness
and deaths. Indeed, in some places, the perilous state of the economy cannot
easily accommodate a lockdown at all. For example, on Friday April 17 in Malawi,
Africa, an organisation called the Human Rights Defenders Coalition obtained an
initial seven-day court injunction to prevent lockdowns on the grounds that the
people of Malawi work hand-to-mouth on a daily basis and that a lockdown would
cause tremendous hardship and hunger, even starvation. That court injunction
has since been extended indefinitely over questions relating to constitutional
law. But recent calls – primarily from the right – to “open the economy” immediately
have not been couched with caveats requiring the best possible health outcomes.
A callously sinister although patently dubious argument is
that an increased loss of life is just the price that must be paid for keeping
the economy strong. On March 23, the U.S. National Economic Council Chairman,
Larry Kudlow, declared that “we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs.”
Vanity Fair interpreted these remarks
to mean “we’re going to have to let some people die so the stock market can
live”.
In Australia, writing in Quadrant
on April 15, Roger Kimball, quoting a former New York Times writer
argued, “right now the best current projection is for 61,000
US deaths. That was the 2017 flu season. Why have we shut the country? I am
glad to see that President Trump is at last convening a commission charged with
restarting the economy. That should be the signal to retire the task force on
the coronavirus and get the country back to work.”
Great for the economy! What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, the COVID-19 death projections cited by Kimball were
wildly optimistic – noting nearly 65,000 US COVID-19 deaths at May 03, rising
at roughly 2,000 per day – and made in the context of comprehensive lockdowns
across the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
did indeed conclude that 61,000 people in the US died from influenza in the
2017-18 season, but that was on an estimation that 45 million people were sick
with the flu that season. Dr Norman Swan of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation explains that, "COVID-19 has two or three times the
transmission rate [compared with the flu] … and the case fatality rate for
COVID-19 is around 30 times higher than the flu." Therefore, if the US did
“retire the coronavirus task force and get the country back to work”, there is
a high probability that the contagion numbers would equal those of the flu and
that more than a million people would die. At present, COVID-19 in the United
States does not appear to be on that trajectory but that is because much of the
country continues to be in lockdown and enforcing social distancing. What
happens if these measures are relaxed prematurely or without necessary
test-based monitoring, effective contact tracing and outbreak response?
Japan has tried to fight both the virus and keep the economy
running at the same time. There have been many critics of Japan’s low level of
testing and some suggest that this was done deliberately in early March to
present an optimistic picture that might avoid having to postpone the 2020 Olympics.
In mid-March, the UK Daily Mail
observed that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remained adamant that Japan “will overcome
the spread of the infection and host the Olympics without problem, as planned”;
one Tokyo 2020 executive board member “hastily backtracked and apologised after
suggesting a delay”.
On Tuesday March 24 the Tokyo Olympics were indeed postponed
until 2021; however, only one day before that announcement Time magazine reports, “the country was celebrating its annual
cherry blossom festival, the time of year when Tokyo residents pack into parks
to picnic under the fluttering blooms. The government issued mild warnings and
advised people to practice ‘social distancing’ but many parks were nearly as
crowded as ever.”
In the face of rising COVID-19 case numbers in Japan, on April
08 a month-long ‘state of emergency’ was finally declared for seven regions, and
one week later this was extended to cover the whole nation until May 06. The
state of emergency allows regional governments to urge people to stay at home
but has no punitive or legal force compelling them to do so. On May 03, the
number of cases reported for Japan had declined from an average of around 500
per day over a 10 day period in mid-April to under 300 per day with the total number
of cases at 14,571 and 474 deaths. On April 16, the BBC reported, “One poll
shows 75% of people think the prime minister took too long to declare a state
of emergency in Tokyo. After a recent spike in cases in the capital Tokyo,
experts warned that the city’s emergency medical facilities could collapse
under the pressure.”
Nevertheless, as Kimball notes, “nobody says that COVID-19
is not real and can’t tax hospitals or kill people” – except perhaps the
MAGA-cap-adorned protesters thrusting signs stating that it is a hoax –
“especially if they are over 75 or have co-morbidities”. Lt. Governor Dan
Patrick argues, ““My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living,
let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of
ourselves.” Charles Mudede of The
Stranger in Seattle, poignantly reflects, “If we have learned anything
about the politics of gun control, it is this: the GOP can stomach a whole lot
of death.”
Utilitarian Logic
When the U.S. National Economic Council Chairman, Larry
Kudlow, acknowledged that there would be a need for “trade-offs” he was talking
about the sacrifice of some lives for improvement of the economy. The rationale
of this thinking is that on balance
the greatest good for the greatest number of people would be achieved by
allowing some, mostly seniors, to die. The casual acceptance of this idea was
starkly on display with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s egregious
observation that restrictions on social contact should not be put in place
because, “we all have to die someday… “. On March 27, he argued that the
economy must remain open saying, “I’m sorry, some people will die. They will
die—that’s life.”
This way of thinking reflects certain ideas first
articulated by the classical utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
describes this philosophy: “utilitarianism is generally held to be the view
that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good… that
is, (actions that) bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest
number’.” Bentham’s ideas were shocking to people in the late 18th
Century and have been controversial ever since because they suggest that the
moral standing of any decision is to be judged only on assessment of its
consequences, “It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that
is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of
their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong. This cut against the view that there
are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their
effects… Some may be wrong because they violate liberty, or autonomy. Again,
Bentham would view liberty and autonomy as good — but good instrumentally, not
intrinsically.”
Edgar Allen Poe illustrates the utilitarian moral dilemma in
his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). In this story, the protagonist and his
fellow ship-wreck survivors have been adrift with insufficient food and water
for an extended period and matters have become critical. The narrator recounts
a disturbing turning point that reveals the dilemma of choosing between a
morally repugnant act at the expense of a minority and an important benefit for
the majority, “Parker turned suddenly towards me with an expression of
countenance which made me shudder… before he opened his lips my heart told me
what he would say. He proposed, in a few words, that one of us should die to
preserve the existence of the others.” Sadly for the character Richard Parker,
he draws the short straw and is promptly killed and eaten by his crewmates.
As an aside, amazingly,
in 1884 – 46 years after publication of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel – four hapless
surviving crew of the wrecked yacht Mignonette faced the same terrible
ordeal in real life as Poe’s fictional characters. They felt themselves confronted
with the choice of cannibalism or starvation. In a macabre twist of
coincidence, the young crew member they eventually chose to slaughter and eat shared
the exact same name as Poe’s sacrificed fictional character, Richard Parker.
It is indeed this very fear of taking human judgement away
from decisions on whether acts are inherently vicious or evil that underpins
concern over handing aspects of social policy to computer algorithms. With
regard to recent calls for premature relaxing of coronavirus social distancing
in the name of the economy, perhaps predictably, those most opposed to such
consequence-based utilitarian logic are senior citizens over the age of 65 who would
be the most likely to be sacrificed for the greater good.
Republican Senator John Kennedy said, "When we end the
shutdown, the virus is going to spread faster… That's just a fact. And the
American people understand that." Recent opinion polls show that
Kennedy is correct, the American people do understand that, especially older
Americans. The approval rating of President Trump has fallen dramatically in
recent weeks with seniors over the age of 65 years. On April 30, The Boston Globe reported, “Trump’s
approval among people over 65 dropped 19 points between March and the end of
April, according to Morning Consult polling. In another poll this week, from
YouGov, his approval among older voters dropped to 46 percent, down five points
from the week before.”
This trend has seemingly been noticed by Donald Trump who changed
his emphasis late April in commenting on the plans of Governor Brian Kemp to
open the Georgia State economy: “‘It's just too soon,’ Trump said Wednesday at
the daily White House news briefing on coronavirus when asked about Kemp's
timetable. ‘The spas and the beauty parlors and the barber shops ... I love
them but they can wait a little bit longer, just a little bit, not much, because
safety has to predominate.’ Trump said that he told Kemp ‘very simply that I
disagree with his decision, but he has to do what he thinks is right.’”
So what is the ‘Greater Good’?
All of which leaves the casual observer in somewhat of a
fog. If appeals to weaken the fight against COVID-19 by prematurely relaxing
restrictions on social distancing deliver questionable sustainable economic benefit
and at the same time are harmful to public approval of those making such
appeals, what is the greater good that is being pursued at the expense of
people’s lives?
Writing in The New
York Times, Jamelle Bouie offers an
answer to this question. The thrust of his argument is that, “Congress has had
to contemplate policies that would be criticized as unacceptably radical under
any other circumstances. At $2.2 trillion, the initial relief package was a
bill that was more than twice the size of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act passed in 2009… including universal basic income for
the duration of the crisis, a COBRA expansion that would cover 100
percent of health care costs for laid-off and furloughed workers and a proposal
to cover payrolls for nearly every business in America.” He
continues, “But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of
social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under
crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these
conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment
is low… the ideological danger is that it undermines the ideological project
that captured the state with President Ronald Reagan and is on the path to
victory under Donald Trump.”
Bouie concludes, “In
which case, it makes all the sense in the world for Trump, the Republican Party
and the conservative movement to push for the end of the lockdown, public
health be damned. After years of single-minded devotion, the conservative
movement is achingly close to dismantling the New Deal political order and
turning the clock back to when capital could act without limits or restraints.”
In her
ground-breaking book, The Shock Doctrine,
economist Naomi Klein furnishes examples from around the world, executed over
several decades, of how a right-wing, neo-conservative agenda of laissez faire
capitalism and small government has been pushed during times of disaster upon
societies that would in normal times have resisted such policies. She
identifies the economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago as the
primary architect of this idea, which she argues is “contemporary capitalism’s
core tactical nostrum”. In his book, Capitalism
and Freedom, Friedman writes, “only a crisis – actual or perceived –
produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic
function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”.
Klein argues that,
“For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been
perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off
pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from
the shock, then quickly making the ‘reforms’ permanent”.
Of course, the ‘existing
policies’ that Friedman found so odious in the 1960s – when he originally published
his doctrine advocating disruptive change during times of crisis – generally entailed
a healthy, functioning public sector paid for by society through taxes.
However, those ‘existing policies’ no longer exist as they did; the role of the
state has been systematically diminished in many countries around the world
since then, and especially in the United States since the era of Ronald Reagan
who was a staunch supporter of Friedman’s ideas. Bouie argues, “But in trying
to destroy the administrative state — in trying to make government small enough
to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — conservatives
left the country vulnerable to a deadly disease that has undermined that
project and galvanized its opponents. And all of this is happening as one of
the most progressive generations in history begins to take its place in our
politics, its views informed by two decades of war and economic crisis.” In
other words, paraphrasing Friedman himself, there are new ideas “lying around”
and they are progressive rather than neo-conservative.
Essentially, what
Bouie is arguing is that progressive forces – perhaps conscious of the irony –
now have an opportunity to adopt Friedman’s tactic to roll back decades of
reduction in the size, role and effectiveness of the public sector and to
re-establish social welfare conditions that benefit the less wealthy. Klein
offers multiple examples to show that the laissez faire capitalist philosophy
of the Chicago School of Economics has permeated the political-economy of many
societies around the world. The current coronavirus pandemic is happening in
every country more or less at the same time, and as such in Bouie’s words is
creating “a
dynamic beyond partisanship that explains why much of the conservative
political ecosystem, from politicians and donors to activists and media
personalities, has joined the fight to end the lockdown.” Ultimately, we are
left to ponder whether people are being asked to die for the economy or for
neo-conservative ideology?
