Musings from Mark

Toward a More Equal America, Part 6

In Part 4, I alluded to the fact that “there is emotional work to do here as well,” in the context of creating a more equitable economy. In the final three parts of this series, I want to dig deeper into what that emotional work entails, and at the same time examine why the emotional work that we are doing doesn’t seem to be addressing our overarching neoliberal economic inequality in a meaningful way.

That means that it’s time to take a hard look at social justice – the ideology that seeks to overcome identity-based oppression and that has become firmly entrenched on the leftward end of the American political spectrum. Admittedly this puts me in an awkward position; as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man, social justice etiquette would dictate that I ought to shut up and listen, and most certainly not criticize the overall framework in any way.

So, I offer a critique of mainstream social justice not in my own words, but in the words of three others. Cedric Johnson, a Black man, is an associate professor of political science and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Adolph Reed, also a Black man, is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Kai Cheng Thom, a transgender woman of Asian descent, is an author, speaker, and cultural worker based in Quebec.

Reed expresses the problem succinctly:

(A)lthough it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female… etc.”

…

(T)he focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.

https://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence

Johnson expands on this line of reasoning, critiquing the prioritization of emotional antiracist work over concrete policy changes that would necessarily challenge both economic and racial privilege.

Whiteness studies has produced a form of anti-racist politics focused on public therapy rather than public policy, a politics that actually detracts from building social bonds and solidarity in the context of actual organizing campaigns, everyday life, and purposive political action.

…

The interpretive problems and faulty political assumptions of whiteness studies have become entrenched through the emergence of a therapeutic industry dedicated to rehabilitating interpersonal racism and addressing white privilege through acts of contrition, and have grown more dangerous as they have been amplified and degraded via social media. There is not much evidence that the expansion of this mode of anti-racist trainings over the last few decades has produced a different politics, a willingness to take risk, to sacrifice one’s privileged position to make substantive changes in society, or even altered day-to-day behavior.

…

If anything, whiteness deprogramming provides a ready means of egress, a way to demonstrate sympathy without making more difficult, sustained political commitments that might entail contesting institutionalized power. Neither does it require shedding or sharing the actual trappings of middle class privilege, i.e. better salaries, savings and assets, high performing schools, the capacity to travel, social networks, etc., which are codified in popular speech as white privilege, even though these same goods may be shared by other middle class and wealthy ethnics. Whiteness training encourages sharing one’s origin story, failings and sense of torment, but beyond charitable giving, it does not necessitate sharing resources at the level of redistributive public policy, i.e. through expansion of the universal social wage, commuter taxes, consolidation of urban-suburban school districts, revenue sharing across metropolitan divides, federally-managed public works projects etc.

There is also a millenarian and liberal individualist dimension to the kind of anti-racist politics embodied in whiteness studies, notions of white privilege and the like. We are told individuals must correct their flaws before they can participate with others, a view that runs counter to what should be conventional wisdom about human behavior and social movement dynamics. The assumption that the therapeutic work needs to happen first is simply wrong, and there are plenty of examples throughout history and in our own times where we can find imperfect people working to realize and advance their common concerns.

The work of building solidarity lies elsewhere, not in therapy aimed at self-actualization, but in lived social relations and sustained political work that transforms participants’ social consciousness and collective sense of historical possibility. Those everyday social relations and the context of political work are always defined by the presence of differences, whether those are differences of background, perspective, maturity, knowledge, insight, power, capacity, and passions, and none of these are calibrated strictly in concert with racial, ethnic, gender or other corporeal identities.

…

We should be able to talk about situated-class experiences, i.e., ascriptive gender and racial hierarchies, sectoral and regional variations in working lives, unique occupational subcultures, idiosyncratic worker concerns and daily issues, without losing sight of the fundamental capitalist class relation of exploitation, and the dependency on wage labor endured by the vast majority of the U.S. population. Moreover, when we discuss what are often treated as discrete identity-based issues, i.e. matters of hyperpolicing, health disparities, urban unemployment, environmental racism, the gender gap in wages, affordable housing crises and gentrification, we should be clear that those problems originate from the tremendous power capital wields over all of our lives, and contesting that power is essential to addressing those specific concerns and creating a more just state of affairs.

Excerpts from https://nonsite.org/article/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need

One effect of this is that we collect data on racial, ethnic, gender, and other identity-based discrepancies across a wide array of areas of concern: wages, hiring, college admissions, proportion of various workforces, deaths in police custody, deaths from various causes, and just about every aspect of society where data are collected. By pre-defining these identities to be the variables of interest, we can fail to properly determine causality when many other variables may be involved.

For example, we know that Black women experience pregnancy-related mortality at a rate three times that of white women. We can hypothesize that it is due to the stress of experiencing racism and underlying health conditions exacerbated by racism, but without further information as to the cause it is difficult to know where to focus activism. If it is due to direct experiences of racism, then antiracism training may be the answer, but if it is due to – say – poverty and lack of health insurance, then it would be better to focus on lifting these women – and all impoverished women – out of poverty and providing universal health care.

We can determine, in this example, that women in “poor” counties (>15% poverty) are twice as likely to experience pregnancy-related mortality than women in “rich” counties (<5% poverty), but all counties have a wide range of income levels and we don’t actually collect income data on an individual basis to assess whether poverty might be a more explanatory factor than race.

In the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Johnson penned a critique that I highly recommend reading: The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption. In it, he notes that large corporations that were facing intense scrutiny and condemnation for their labor practices during the Covid-19 pandemic received a public relations windfall from their support of the Black Lives Matter protests. I quote some excerpts below.

Nearly all of the Democrat leadership who “took a knee” against racist policing, have openly opposed Medicare for All, free higher education, and the expansion of other public goods, but their technical reforms to reduce excessive force incidents and prosecute police for misconduct are the perfect way of displaying commitment to racial justice, while perpetuating the very pro-market logics and class relations that stress policing and mass incarceration were invented to protect.

…

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

During the so-called Black Out Tuesday social media event, corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon widely condemned the killing of George Floyd and other policing excesses. Gestural anti-racism was already evident at Amazon, which flew the red, black and green black liberation flag over its Seattle headquarters this past February. The world’s wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos even took the time to respond personally to customer upset that Amazon expressed sympathy with the George Floyd protestors. “‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t matter,” the Amazon CEO wrote, “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. It’s not something I worry about. Black parents can’t say the same.” Bezos also pledged $10 million in support of “social justice organizations”…..

The leadership of Warner, Sony Music and Walmart each committed $100 million to similar organizations. The protests have provided a public relations windfall for Bezos and his ilk. Only weeks before George Floyd’s killing, Amazon, Instacart, GrubHub and other delivery-based firms, which became crucial for commodity circulation during the national shelter-in-place, faced mounting pressure from labor activists over their inadequate protections, low wages, lack of health benefits and other working conditions. Corporate anti-racism is the perfect egress from these labor conflicts. Black lives matter to the front office, as long as they don’t demand a living wage, personal protective equipment and quality health care.

Excerpts from https://nonsite.org/editorial/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption

From the perspective of transgender equality, Kai Cheng Thom writes, in Trans Visibility Does Not Equal Trans Liberation:

Our revolutionary fire burns bright as always, but I am afraid that it is being misdirected, co-opted. Neoliberalism, the deadly, advanced stage of the capitalist system in which we live, is stealing trans liberation.

Instead of being able to gain access to resources, we are given representation in mainstream media – a perk that helps us enjoy television and movies while continuing to suffer homelessness and joblessness. Instead of being granted freedom, we are being sold a product: an illusion of “equality” that is ultimately empty.

To achieve trans liberation, we must turn our gaze to ending neoliberalism.

…

Neoliberalism erodes human-rights movements in an insidious way. It co-opts the thinking and operations of human-rights activism by creating fear and scarcity, so that our political goals are forced to focus not on envisioning a better future for all but on personal survival. Hoarding resources, assimilation into the status quo, and no-holds-barred individualism are second nature to neoliberal thinking.

…

In my practice as a social worker, I see more and more wealthy, usually white, middle-class youth and children coming out as trans. It’s beautiful. They are brave and resilient; and sometimes, their families actually support them in transitioning and advocating for their access to school, healthcare, university.

Yet I see just as many trans youth, mostly of color, who are estranged from their families, living in shelters, blocked from accessing the resources they need for day-to-day living, let alone medical transition and higher education.

Trans visibility is brighter than ever, trans rights awareness is at an all-time high. Yet the class divide between trans people grows and grows.

…

The myth of exceptionalism has always been a cornerstone of neoliberal philosophy – this is the idea that since a few people can “make it” under capitalism, then everyone else can do the same. It is a myth that conflates the success of an individual with the prosperity of their entire class, and it is used to hide the barriers of systemic discrimination and violence.

https://www.them.us/story/trans-visibility-does-not-equal-trans-liberation

If we view the American Casino (Part 2) as a rigged card game played with predetermined good hands and bad hands, then the strategy of neoliberal social justice is equivalent to handing out aces to people with marginalized identities. For those whose hands are already good, the ace can make a difference. For those whose hands offer no chance of winning, adding an ace usually doesn’t help. The deeply unethical rules of the game remain unquestioned.

Thom closes with an impassioned plea for a society in which trans people don’t just have representation among the elite, but freedom to thrive:

I am not the first trans person to make these arguments, and I will be far from the last. As a diasporic trans woman of color, I come from a history of brilliant thinkers and fierce activism.

As a generation of young trans people like myself with access to education and a public platform emerges, we will each have to ask ourselves the question: What battles will we choose to fight, and for whom? Will those of us with the greatest chance of succeeding as a part of the neoliberal status quo fight for our piece of the pie alone, or will we try to overturn the table of capitalism and white supremacy, as our revolutionary foreparents did before us?

I know that I don’t want to live in a world where trans people can access medical transition care only if they have the insurance to pay for it. I want everyone to get the healthcare they need.

I don’t want to live in a world where middle class trans people can use public washrooms, but homeless trans people are barred from public spaces. I want to live in a world where everyone has a home.

I don’t want to live in a world where trans people can join the military or the police and join in the violent oppression of people of color around the world. I want to live in a world without wars or police brutality.

I don’t want to live in a world where trans people are put in prisons that match their gender identity. I want to live in a world without prisons.

I don’t want to live in a world where a handful of trans celebrities make millions of dollars while the rest of us struggle to survive. I want to live in a world where we all have what we need to thrive.

I don’t want to live in a world where some trans people are considered normal and others are considered freaks. I want to live in a world where all of our freakish, ugly, gorgeous magnificence is celebrated for its honesty, glory, and possibility.

My dear trans kindred – weird sisters, brothers grim and gay, siblings-in-arms: What kind of world do you want to live in?

https://www.them.us/story/trans-visibility-does-not-equal-trans-liberation

Toward a More Equal America, Part 5

In Part 3, I made the case that an economy – a system of exchange – allowed to evolve without guidelines will naturally create inequality over time. While that is true and needs to be kept in mind as we work to develop an economy of, for, and by the people, it also glosses over an important detail of history: the global economic system of the last 40 or so years has been particularly problematic in terms of increasing inequality and attempting to eliminate any and all regulations enacted in the past to maintain a baseline standard of living.

The name – not often used – for the economic framework currently in place worldwide is “neoliberalism.” Rather than attempt to explain it myself, I encourage all of my readers to read this excellent essay on neoliberalism by George Monbiot. I will offer a few important excerpts here.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

In effect, neoliberalism takes the ideal of a “free market” to its logical extreme, specifying that any and all impediments to a pure interplay of supply and demand dictating prices and wages – including laws, progressive taxes, and trade unions – should be abolished. The resulting distribution of goods and income is then defined to be free, fair, and not open to question.

The idea of neoliberal economics was born in 1938, but did not really gain traction until the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of the 1980s. Monbiot writes:

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

Following economic crises in the 1970’s that exposed the limitations of Keynes’ prescriptions, neoliberalism was waiting in the wings and rapidly rose to prominence. Wealth inequality has increased steadily ever since.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.
 
Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

Neoliberal economics has tried very hard to pass itself off as a law of nature, even to the point of eliminating use of the word “neoliberal” so as to simply become “the way things are.”

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

Monbiot discusses the ways in which neoliberalism has infected democratic politics, infiltrating both parties and dramatically limiting the political influence of anyone who does not have vast sums of money to spend.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

He closes with a plea for developing a new economic system to replace neoliberalism, given that its failures have been clearly apparent since the crisis of 2008.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

I will use the word “neoliberal” or “neoliberalism” to refer to our current economic system for the remainder of this series. “Capitalism” is frequently used as a synonym, but capitalism describes any economic system in which private business is the primary organizing principle – including the more equitable Keynesian economics of the 1940s-70s and much more social-welfare-oriented systems in place across northern Europe.

The main alternative to capitalism is socialism – in which the government owns and controls the means of production – and socialism has a poor track record of creating bloated, inefficient, and violently oppressive governments. My personal feeling is that an economy of, for, and by the people, designed to confront the needs and crises of the 21st century, could still fit loosely within the definition of capitalism.

Part IV: Changing the Rules of the Game

These are some basic ideas as to what sorts of change would create an economy of, for, and by the people. My intention is not that this serve as a prescription but rather as the beginning of a conversation, as more people begin to wake up to the inequity of our current system and demand justice.

A movement, not a revolution

There is much within our economy that is equitable at present, and the economy still performs its original function of providing compensation for our contributions to society, thereby allowing us to purchase the contributions of others. The concept that a willing seller and a willing buyer will settle on a fair price for a good or service in a free market works in most cases, provided that demand is discretionary. And this free market system ensures that we collectively produce what we collectively wish to buy, and it offers plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurship and creativity.

We don’t need to adopt socialism, communism, or any other alternative to a free market economy that has been tried – and has usually failed – around the world over the past century. We just need to impose a few simple rules – the equivalent of legislative checks and balances – to limit human greed and exploitation, to ensure that my right to swing my metaphorical economic fist ends at the tip of your metaphorical economic nose.

Furthermore, we don’t need to steal anyone’s wealth. This is a controversial idea, I realize, given that the range of net worth in today’s America spans a factor of 100 million, but I feel that this can only be a peaceful transition if we respect that the rules of the game remain valid until they are changed, and that people will not be penalized for having played and won at the old game. If all of these changes are implemented, economic hardship in the working class will ease immediately, and the overall distribution of wealth will equalize over a couple of generations.

An equitable economy can still have personal wealth. I think most of us would agree that J.K. Rowling deserves to be a millionaire, for example, and if people are willing to spend millions attending professional basketball games, then the players deserve to have millions. Personal wealth alone is not an indicator of inequity; it is the aspects of the system that extract wealth, and allow wealth to beget more wealth, that must change.

We cannot win a battle for equity with violence. Those who are angry enough to lead a violent revolution are destined to become the new oppressors. History is full of revolutions of this sort. Instead we must be steadfast and insistent in our commitment to basic human dignity, following in the footsteps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, building a movement that demands change but not retribution.

Taxes are not the answer

The standard method to address wealth inequality in the United States has been to leave the economy alone but to impose progressively higher taxes on the upper classes. This is akin to treating the symptoms of a disease rather than the cause, and it has the added effect of being divisive because we are arbitrarily deciding exactly how much of whose wealth is being claimed. Most people would rather earn a million dollars than earn two million and pay half in taxes. Taxes could be a part of the program in the nearer term, but ultimately I would like to see a flat % tax on a fair distribution of income.

What follows is a basic system of reforms to remove exploitation from the economy, which need not be implemented all at once, and with the most urgent changes listed first.

1. No profit from basic human rights

As we established in Part III: People will pay almost any price within their means to meet their basic needs, if there is no other option.

Within our current economic system we already have services that are deemed “public utilities.” Most of us pay a monthly fee to have safe drinking water piped to our homes and sewage piped away, and every year our cities send out a financial summary showing how those funds were spent. Water and sewer services are essential, so if our cities decided to triple the price we would still pay it if we could, but instead we have reached a collective agreement to cover the costs and pay the city workers a fair wage.

We should immediately begin to replicate that model for two basic human rights whose costs have ballooned in recent decades: housing and health care. Landlords, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies should be subject to the same oversight, transparency, and cost reporting requirements as city waterworks, with restrictions on excessive compensation and strict penalties for profiteering.

I am in favor of universal health care, but only if we first act to reduce costs and increase oversight by declaring essential care to be a public utility. If we do not do this, we will simply transfer the exploitation from patients and insurance companies to the government payroll, and the inequity will continue to depress take-home income and weigh down the economy.

2. Living wage for all essential work (and respect for all essential work!)

Addressing #1 first will make this easier to accomplish, which is why I listed it second, but this should be the top priority of any economic reform. And by a living wage I don’t mean enough to stay housed and buy food, but enough to:

• Provide all basic needs for oneself and one child
• Make payments on a modest house
• Save enough to cover emergencies
• Save enough to cover eventual retirement without relying on investment returns beyond inflation, and
• Have enough left over to pursue hobbies and take occasional vacations.

Going back to our wealth chart, a living wage is one that will, with responsible spending and money management, land someone firmly in the “security” range by the time they are ready to retire.

I am not suggesting that all work should pay equally, and indeed I believe neurosurgeons still ought to be amply rewarded and promotions still ought to be offered based on performance and seniority. Rather, I am suggesting that the floor needs to be raised by a lot.

We depend equally on all of the hours of human labor that support our society and provide our collective needs: the apple pickers and the attorneys, the janitors and the teachers, the fast food workers and the cashiers, the contractors and the managers, the accountants and the doctors, the meat packers and the truck drivers. To suggest that people in any of these roles do not deserve comfort and security in life is to say we do not value your contribution to society.

Too often in present society that lack of financial respect translates to a lack of actual respect. We look down on cashiers and bus drivers, or fail to interact with them as human beings, as if to judge and say you could have done something better with your life, but you didn’t. That would be a little more OK if they were playing video games in their parents’ basement, but instead they are working their butts off, providing a service without which the rest of us could not survive. This disdain is a projection of our internalized elitism. We tell ourselves stories about how we deserve what we have and those who earn little deserve to earn little, and in so doing we diminish them in our own eyes and in our interactions.

There is emotional work to be done here as well, but if we can raise the minimum wage to a level that supports human life, we will raise the self-respect and self-worth of all of our essential workers, and in so doing begin to grant them the respect that they deserve in our own eyes as well.

3. Decommodify, relocalize, and restore relationship to transactions.

As we established in Part III: When transactions become abstracted or commodified, with no connection between producer and consumer, competition rewards exploitation.

A commodity is any good or service whose only distinguishing feature is price. When something becomes a commodity, the result is a race to the bottom, leading to exploitation of humans and the environment and externalization of costs. The more we can restore connections and relationships between producers and consumers, the more we will be able to ethically choose what we buy. There is no one solution here, but reforms might include:

• tariffs and trade barriers to disincentivize offshoring and exploitation of lower-cost foreign labor, and to allow domestic producers paying fair wages to compete.
• certifications (e.g. fair trade) that ensure an equitable distribution of wealth along the supply chain.
• producer stories and personal notes added to products, to rehumanize producers in the eyes of consumers.
• efforts to build resilient local food webs, local artisan marketplaces, local currency initiatives, and other incentives to relocalize and remove intermediaries from transactions.
• Awareness campaigns to shed light on unethical practices and inspire change.

4. Money should not make money

As we established in Part III:

Investment income requires no work or contribution to society, and so provides the earner with the ability to purchase more of others’ time and effort while contributing none of their own.

Any investment that provides a return greater than inflation without requiring work or reasonably compensating for risk of loss is structurally elitist. Such returns are effectively pay for no work, and yet this pay can be redeemed to purchase the work of others. These investments may be directly exploitative (e.g. loans and mortgages repaid with interest) or indirectly exploitative (e.g. government securities repaid with taxes, or shareholder profits taken from corporate revenue), but they always entail a transfer of wealth from people who have fewer financial resources to people who have more.

This is a tougher nut to crack, because many people’s retirement plans are contingent on money continuing to make money. That is to say, changing this rule of the game now presents a moral dilemma in that many people would have behaved differently – perhaps set more money aside – had they known the rules would change.

At the same time, it may not be possible to provide everyone with a living wage so long as investment income continues to siphon wealth out of the system, providing the ability to purchase goods and services without requiring any contribution to society in return.

Not all investments are inherently unethical. The lower-risk, lower-return options like government bonds and mortgage-backed securities are actually more problematic than higher-risk, higher-return investments. The idea of buying and selling stock was originally created to allow people with money to invest in the risky process of starting and expanding businesses. Some businesses succeed and investors see a great return, while others fail and investors lose their money. On the whole this functions as a high-stakes betting game that also helps entrepreneurs to realize their dreams, and it doesn’t extract money from society at large.

The ethical problems arise primarily from investments whose returns depend on interest, which is money paid by those who have less to those who have more, in return for temporary access to additional funds. The entire system whereby everyone is encouraged to accrue debt and pay interest is extractive and serves to create a wealth curve that looks like the one below, which is exactly what we are trying to get away from.

This problem may ultimately be solved for us, in that investment returns are predicated on economic growth, and economic growth is following a long-term trajectory toward zero as population stabilizes and we reach our planet’s resource carrying capacity.

In the near term, I would propose a phased-in approach, whereby interest rates are lowered in a tiered fashion and ultimately pinned to the rate of inflation, with rate increases allowed only to compensate for risk. At the same time, minimum returns on retirement savings up to a certain amount would be insured for those currently retired or retiring in the next 20 years or so.

There is much to figure out in this area, but the ultimate conclusion remains the same: in an ethical economy, money should not, as a rule, make money.

5. Wealth should not be inherited

This is controversial as well, but necessary if we are to level the playing field. If we can agree that a person should not have privilege in life by virtue of being born white, then we should also be able to agree that a person should not have privilege by virtue of being born wealthy.

At the same time it is a perfectly reasonable desire for parents to want to share their success with their children. Some compromise is necessary, perhaps a maximum of $500,000 or so that can be transferred from one generation to the next, in cash or in assets, before or upon death. Anything above this amount can be donated to charities of choice, or else will be claimed for public purpose, perhaps to provide a basic income to those who are unable to work, or to insure returns on retirement accounts for those who are no longer receiving investment income.

Can we make this happen?

Two weeks ago I had no idea I would be writing this series. Then as the world began to rise up against inequity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the words began to come to me. What was going to be one essay became two, then three, then four as outlines and graphs filled bits of scratch paper. I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else until it was completed.

Perhaps this is not the time for a wider distribution. I do not wish to distract from the cause of racial justice that is at the forefront right now, and is finally beginning to achieve what it has been fighting for for decades and centuries. I stand with that cause 100%.

At the same time, I feel strongly that we – by which I mean economically privileged white people in the United States – cannot in any way consider ourselves champions of equality if we stand behind social/racial justice while ignoring economic justice. Not only are the two causes intersectional – in that marginalized groups are disproportionately impoverished – but we cannot truly mean what we say about confronting privilege if we only confront that privilege which requires the least sacrifice.

Writing this has changed me, in ways that I did not entirely expect. I cannot poke holes in my own moral arguments, and so I find that I will be making different choices moving forward. I will find it much harder to charge market rates for rent, for one thing, and I will be more aware of the products that I buy and who I choose to support with my purchases. I will be more particular about how I am willing to earn income. I do not know if this is destined to be read, or to make a difference in the world, but it came to me, came through me in a way, and I had no choice but to bring it to fruition. If you read it, please share your thoughts, and share it with others if you wish. We have a difficult road ahead of us, paved as it is with climate change, resource shortages, energy shortages, overpopulation, and global pandemics. We can fragment based on fear and survival, and so confront the future unprepared and in disarray, or we can unite based on our shared humanity and so rise to the occasion. To unite we must confront and eliminate our old inequities.

All of them.

Let us begin.

Part III: Rehumanizing the Economy

Language matters.

The way that we formulate words both belies and influences the way that we think.

Economists have tricked us.

They have convinced us that their statements are value-neutral, that they are just reporting facts about the world.

They. Are. Wrong.

The economy, from community bartering up through Wal-mart and Wall Street, is entirely a creation of human beings. Everything that happens within the economy occurs as a result of human decisions. Human decisions may be self-centered or altruistic, helpful or harmful, and are subject to moral assessment. Therefore every economic “truth” is subject to moral assessment. Every aspect of the system was crafted or molded by human minds. Nothing “just is.” It is high time that we take a closer look at the rules of this game we all play by virtue of being alive in this time and place, and whose stakes are quite literally life and death.

We tend to think of economics as boring. But the economy is not just Wall Street or the Dow Jones Index. It is not just employment numbers or any other statistic released by the government. The economy is everything we own, everything we have ever purchased or eaten or shared with our friends or made with our hands. It determines whether we have a place to live, enough to eat, freedom to follow our dreams, care for our bodies if we are sick. It determines our net worth, and by extension – in many ways – our self-worth.

For all that the economy defines our experience, we spend relatively little energy thinking about it, how it came to be, how it really works, when it is fair and unfair and what determines that difference. So let’s take a quick journey through the evolution of our economic system, with our eyes open for pitfalls and avenues for exploitation.

The money economy began thousands of years ago, long after humans began trading among themselves. One person went fishing perhaps, then traded the fish for flour, firewood, and clothing. But what if the woodcutter didn’t want any fish? Such was the reason for currency. The fisher could sell fish for coins and then buy goods with the coins, and in so doing obtain what she needed. But how many coins was the fish worth? Or the wood? That was for each buyer and seller to negotiate, and so was born a fundamental tenet of economics that remains printed in textbooks to this day: the fair price for a good or service is the value agreed upon by a willing seller and a willing buyer in a free market.

Unfortunately this supposed “law” is only true if the buyer and seller have similar levels of power, which is to say that they can both walk away from an unfair offer. This is very easy to illustrate, but typically omitted from textbooks. Let’s say our fisher gets sick, and the doctor in the village has a lifesaving medicine. If they’re friends they will agree on a price that is commensurate with the knowledge and effort required to produce the medicine. If the doctor is an enemy, he might demand the fisher’s house in return. Then the fisher might call up some friends and go knock some sense into the doctor, or steal the medicine. But let’s say the doctor is also a skilled swordsman. With no recourse, the fisher offers up her house to the doctor in return for the medicine. We have a willing seller, a willing buyer, and a free market, but does this mean that a house is a fair price for some lifesaving medicine? Of course not! It just means that the doctor has both greed and power.

Ethical red flag #1: People will pay almost any price within their means to meet their basic needs, if there is no other option.

Now let’s say another fisher moves to town who has big nets that catch indiscriminately and workers who he treats like slaves, and he starts selling fish for half the price. But the townsfolk love their fisherwoman, and know she does honest work, and so they continue to buy her fish. But then a merchant moves in and sets up a store where the townsfolk can buy all of their food and supplies in one place. The townsfolk, finding it convenient, go to the store and stop buying directly from the fishers and farmers. The merchant, wanting to earn as much money as possible, buys her fish from the new fisherman, and so our fisherwoman is forced to either sell at a loss or find a way to compete. In the language of economics, fish has just become a commodity – that is, a product disconnected from its maker or any other distinguishing features. Economics textbooks will say that competition in a commodity market leads to increases in efficiency, with the implicit assumption that efficiency is always a good thing. Unfortunately, efficiency more often than not means exploitation – of people, of the environment, or both.

Ethical red flag #2: When transactions become abstracted or commodified, with no connection between producer and consumer, competition rewards exploitation.

Now let’s say our fisherwoman is determined to stay in business, but she knows that in order to compete with the new man in town she will need nets, employees, and more boats. So she visits the merchant, who by now has money to spare, and asks for a loan. The merchant agrees provided that, in five years time, she pays back the money plus 20% “interest”. The fisher, not having any other good options, accepts the terms and expands her business. She is now able to compete but ends up selling her house to pay the interest on the loan. Meanwhile the merchant turns a tidy profit without doing any work. Economics textbooks devote many chapters to the ways in which money can be invested to earn returns. The question of whether money ought to earn money is never asked.

Ethical red flag #3: Investment income requires no work or contribution to society, and so provides the earner with the ability to purchase more of others’ time and effort while contributing none of their own.

It’s easy to see from our fisherfolk example that, once extended beyond a small community bound by social ties, a system of currency designed to facilitate exchange will naturally evolve to reward exploitation and generate wealth inequality. It’s equally clear that a few simple rules could prevent this from occurring, and we’ll get to that in Part IV. For now, I want to focus on the near-complete absence of an ethical dimension in the realm of economics.

Allowed to evolve without guidance or intent, political systems will tend toward autocracy and monarchy. Leaders initially supported by the will of the people will naturally act in their own self-interest to perpetuate their power such that the people will come to serve their leaders, rather than leaders serving the people. A fifteenth century political science textbook would have described this process as natural and inevitable, and devoted many chapters to the roles of peasantry and nobility. If it included any ethics, it would have been along the lines of “what makes a good king?” with no question as to whether kings ought to exist in the first place.

Then, in the mid-1700s, something changed. A group of intellectuals who found themselves an ocean apart from their king decided to try a new approach. Rather than asking how the system worked, they asked themselves how it ought to work. How might a system of governance be intentionally created to be resistant to the forces of human nature that lead to tyranny, in order to serve the people in perpetuity. In an explicit rejection of the old system, the Declaration of Independence, they wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This was radical at the time, and the structure of government they devised, with three distinct branches and checks and balances to prevent any branch from attempting to consolidate power, has survived for 244 years and has been copied and improved upon by democracies around the world.

There is some cruel irony in the fact that several of the men who penned these words owned human slaves, but at the same time it is laudable that their founding documents described not a system of government specifically of, for, and by rich white men, but a government of, for, and by “the people”, which allowed the definition of “the people” to be expanded over time to include non-landowners, freed slaves, and women without needing to change the basic structure of government.

It should also be noted that because the Founding Fathers were wealthy and privileged, near the top of the economic ladder, it is not at all surprising that they made no attempt to create an economy of, for, and by the people. The economy as it existed worked just fine for them, so long as they didn’t have to pay taxes to the King of England. The result has been that, at several times throughout US history and increasingly in the present moment, economic inequality has become a threat to the institution of democracy. If votes can be purchased through the media, or if monetary influence can circumvent the will of the voters, or if people are sufficiently disenfranchised that they will vote for an angry strongman with no talent for leadership, then democracy is in crisis.

The science of economics was developed by the winners – those who earned money from investment rather than hard work – and so it ultimately served two ends:

1. To educate those with wealth, and their children, as to the best ways to maintain and increase their wealth, and
2. To explicitly define the system as it is to be free, fair, and not open to ethical analysis.

The ethics in our economics textbooks remains at the level of “what makes a good king.” We can talk about people who benefit from breaking the rules (insider trading, pyramid schemes, “predatory lending”) or about applying our values to our economic decisions within the existing framework (e.g. “socially responsible investing”), but the system itself remains inviolate.

That.

Needs.

To.

Change.

We can start by recognizing human agency in statements about the economy.

What they say	What it really means
Labor is cheaper in (some country).	The government and elite of (some country) have conspired with other nations and multinational corporations to devalue the labor of their lower classes.
The cost of healthcare has doubled since the 1980s.	After adjusting for inflation, healthcare providers are charging twice as much for the same services as they did 35 years ago.
The cost of public college has tripled since 1990.	After adjusting for inflation, public colleges are charging three times more for the same services as they did 30 years ago.
The average American now spends 37% of their income on housing costs.	Landlords and real estate investors are earning record profits from a basic human right, with little to no investment of time or effort on their part.
Jobs in the manufacturing sector have decreased.	Companies have moved their manufacturing operations to countries with cheaper labor and fewer environmental regulations.
The weather in Phoenix is hot and sunny.	The weather in Phoenix is hot and sunny.

Language matters.

We see the statements in the left column as headlines in newspapers and trade publications, and we are encouraged to plan accordingly. Save more for college and healthcare, find a job with health benefits, find a roommate to save on housing costs. Such is the extent of our power, we are told, to react and adapt. But the reality is in the right column. Economics is not like the weather, that just is the way it is and so we must adapt. Whenever an economic change causes pain, someone did something harmful to someone else, for their own economic gain. We could adapt and move on, we could censure them – in the hope that they will be good kings – or we could change the system so that those actions are no longer possible.

The framework of social justice has introduced most of us to the terms structural racism and implicit bias. Structural racism is any racial discrimination that is “baked in” to the rules or norms of society, such that we can be “good people” in terms of playing by the rules but still be discriminating. Implicit bias (in a race context) is any action that causes racial harm without intending to do so – typically due to structural racism.

It is high time that we applied these concepts to our economy. To do so, we must remember that the only ethical function of the economy is to provide a means of exchange: payment for our contribution to society so that we might purchase the contributions of others. A basic doctrine of ethical economics can be summed up neatly as:

• Equal pay for equal work (within and between countries)
• Adequate pay for all essential work
• No work, no pay (except to keep up with inflation, and for people unable to work), and
• Fair prices for basic needs (food, shelter, medicine, etc.)

Few of us would disagree with these ideals, and yet our economic reality violates all four on a daily basis.

It is implicit bias to pay foreign workers less than domestic workers for the same jobs, simply because structural inequalities have set the going rate lower. To do so is to say: your time is worth less to me, because of who and where you are.

It is implicit bias to pay anyone less than the cost of living for full time work doing anything, unless they have agreed to volunteer. To do so is to say: you do not deserve to have your basic needs met.

Any investment that provides a return greater than inflation without requiring work or reasonably compensating for risk of loss is structurally elitist. Such returns are effectively pay for no work, and yet this pay can be redeemed to purchase the work of others. These investments may be directly exploitative (e.g. loans and mortgages repaid with interest) or indirectly exploitative (e.g. government securities repaid with taxes, or shareholder profits taken from corporate revenue), but they always entail a transfer of wealth from people who have fewer financial resources to people who have more.

Any housing or medicine that is offered at a price higher than the cost incurred plus the value of the labor invested constitutes implicit bias. The “market rate” is irrelevant, because demand for essential needs is inflexible and so buyers will pay any price up to and including bankruptcy. To profit by offering these services is to say: by virtue of having privilege (as a property owner or care provider), I am entitled to accumulate wealth at your expense.

What then shall we do about it?

If we believe, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, that “All (Humans) Are Created Equal,” then we have a clear obligation to give everyone a fair shot at “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” That is to say, once we recognize the inequity of our economic system, we cannot ethically ignore it any more than we can ignore human slavery, genocide, or the structural racism that led to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. Here’s what we can do in this time:

1. Assess our own personal lives from the framework of ethical economics. How do we earn our money? How many hours of others’ labor is invested in the goods and services that we purchase, and how does this compare to the number of hours that we spend working? This is probably impossible to answer, but it is helpful in thinking about equity. How is the system exploiting us? Loans? Mortgage interest? Rent? Low wages? How are we benefiting from the exploitation of others? We don’t need to be too hard on ourselves; we are participants in the system, but we are not responsible for it.
2. Commit to changing the system. Realize that putting that change into effect means that any of our income that currently derives from unethical exchanges will disappear, and accept that. If we can begin to eliminate unethical exchanges from our lives in a way that benefits others, do so.
3. Network. Tell this story, to challenge the narrative that the economy as we know it is fair and beyond question and impossible to change. Those who have been beaten down by the economy will not believe that change is possible. But it is. The economy is nothing more than the sum total of human exchanges. It is us. If the ~70% of Americans in the red zone of exploitation (from Part I) could rise up together, we could easily change the system.
4. Make people uncomfortable. But don’t judge them or call them out. Lead by example, and calmly point out the ways in which the system is unethical. Induce cognitive dissonance. Most people believe they are good and have earned their wealth by honestly playing by the rules. They are not wrong, and implicit bias is not a crime. If we tell them they are bad, they will react defensively and close themselves off to our message. If we tell them they are good, but it is hard to watch good people inadvertently hurting others, and would they consider following our lead in making or advocating for changes… they may still cling to their story, but a seed of doubt will be planted.
5. Stop romanticizing the American Casino. A few people from the wheat fields of Kansas and the streets of Chicago will end up as movie stars and investment bankers. That makes for some good stories, but the chance that anyone can strike it rich does not excuse the reality that tens of millions of people work 40+ hours a week doing essential work for their entire lives only to remain locked in poverty.
6. Join the conversation and help to envision an ethical economy. As more people escape from the old story, we can build a movement and move forward together. I’ll lay out a possible platform for change in Part IV: Changing the Rules of the Game, but that’s just one possible framework, and perhaps there are other changes that would be more important.

Part II: The American Dream Casino

To understand how economic inequality is created and exacerbated over time, it is helpful to examine society along a different set of axes:

On the horizontal axis we have level of wealth. I’m less concerned with numbers of dollars or pounds of gold here than I am with the ability to provide basic needs, cover emergencies and eventual retirement, or make discretionary purchases. I have divided this into five categories:

• Survival: Some basic needs go unmet due to insufficient resources.
• Subsistence: Basic needs are met but with no cushion to cover emergencies.
• Comfort: Sufficient cushion to cover emergencies, and some retirement savings, but assets may not be sufficient to cover retirement years or a major emergency.
• Security: Sufficient assets to cover retirement or most foreseeable emergencies, but some decisions are still constrained by available wealth.
• Abundance: Money is typically not a concern in making life decisions; all options are on the table.

On the vertical axis we have average wealth trajectory. This is defined as the average change in level of wealth over time across all people in society who share the same position on the horizontal axis. In the green (“accumulation”) zone wealth is increasing, while in the red (“exploitation”) zone wealth is stable or decreasing, and workers are not being paid a fair wage for their labor.

Finally, the thickness of the line is roughly proportional to the number of people in that position.

Let’s start by examining a feudal society, which looks something like this:

Peasants, the majority of the population, are locked into poverty by heavy taxation and a lack of land ownership, while the upper classes accumulate the extracted wealth to reach – in the case of nobility – a high level of opulence. This is also a caste system, in that peasants have essentially zero opportunity to rise into the merchant or nobility classes, and the higher classes have no risk of falling into the peasantry.

In contrast, the generalized American chart looks like this:

With no rigid castes, people have a nonzero chance of following a rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags trajectory – which makes for good stories – but on the whole the poorest folks remain stuck in poverty and the richest folks get richer. Moreover, the shape of this curve guarantees that wealth inequality will increase over time. Playing the game of life in America is less like a dream and more like a trip to the casino. Winning big is a possibility for anyone, but the deck is stacked; those who play with hundreds usually take home thousands while those who play with quarters are often left with dimes.

To understand our current moment, it is helpful to examine this chart at different moments in history. Early America looked something like this:

White people mainly stayed out of the red zone – their fortunes increased – thanks to the institution of slavery which exploited the labor of a vast number of people while paying the returns to the upper echelons.

In the decades following World War II – from 1945 through about 1990 – the curve looked more like this:

The letters are the four quadrants of American society from last week:

Now, as we will discuss in Part III, economic eras don’t just happen of their own accord. A period of prosperity is not like a period of good weather. A period of prosperity for some is inevitably a period of exploitation for others, and so it is not a coincidence that this was also a period when the United States established itself as a global superpower and brokered deals with governments and elite around the world that led to exploitation on a massive scale. So while a majority of Americans were accumulating wealth, “developing” nations around the world looked like this:

The incredibly damaging and unethical process through which entire nations were converted from largely self-sufficient economies to pools of cheap labor for the global elite is worthy of its own series of posts, but for the purposes of this series it is sufficient to know that it transferred immense wealth to the upper classes of American society, created unsustainable economic growth, and put downward pressure on wages for any industry that could be exported.

Eventually the global dominance of the United States began to wane as other countries got in on the exploitation game and exploited countries began to rise up and demand fairer terms of trade. At the same time, those at the top continued to demand rates of return in excess of what available wealth could reasonably supply without increasing exploitation. That brings us to today, when the situation in America looks like this:

Compared to forty years ago, the most significant changes are:

• The white working class has fallen into the red zone, due to offshoring of jobs and downward pressure on wages.
• The red zone now encompasses a majority of American citizens.
• The middle class – in the “comfort” zone on the chart – has decreased in relative size.
• Quadrant C – the “professional-managerial class,” has grown in size, wealth, and influence.
• Quadrant D – the wealthiest, now extends off the chart in terms of wealth and wealth trajectory.

Once again, we see an oppressed majority and an elite minority, and we can also separate racial/social oppression (differences in outlook and opportunity unrelated to level of wealth) from purely economic oppression (differences in outlook and opportunity solely dependent on level of wealth).

This chart only captures racial oppression that results in loss of economic opportunity – like housing and hiring discrimination – but not the insults hurled in stores, deaths and beatings by police, and whispered comments and sidelong glances that make racial and cultural minorities into second-class citizens in American society. So we must focus on finally rooting out racism in this time of uprising and solidarity.

At the same time, we need to recognize that at this moment in history, members of the white working class are also second-class citizens. And since the vast majority of people of color are in the working classes, that means that even if we succeed in stomping out racism entirely, in the absence of economic reform these people will still be second-class citizens. Racial and economic reforms are not in competition; they are intersectional and equally essential if we are to attain the equality that we seek.

If we are going to change this curve, it’s worth asking ourselves what it ought to look like. The standard elitist/capitalist argument against economic equality is that enforced equality stifles ambition and fails to reward hard work and entrepreneurship. That is to say, they reject a socialist society that looks like this:

But that is a straw man argument, since no complex society has ever looked like this and very few if any people are proposing such an arrangement. We can continue to reward hard work and ambition while ensuring that basic needs are met for everyone, and we can accept some degree of wealth differential if we can un-stack the deck, ensure that all people have a fair shot, and prevent wealth discrepancies from propagating across generations. In short, we could shoot for a society that looks like this:

To get there, we will need to change the rules of the game. That’s coming in Part IV, but before we get there we need to examine how it is that economic policies and decisions have so far avoided ethical scrutiny. We need to apply the framework of social justice – including implicit bias and structural inequality – to the realm of economics. That will be the focus of Part III: Rehumanizing the Economy.

Part I: The Elephant in the Room

We are certainly living in interesting times. It feels to me that we are entering a period of instability, during which change is possible – perhaps inevitable – and during which the outcome is ultimately uncertain and small acts have the potential to alter the course of history. I feel called to write and share my perspectives in this moment; I have no reason to believe they will have a profound effect but I encourage anyone reading to engage, sit with your own thoughts, add to the conversation, and share if it resonates with you.

We have been living in a tense stability for the past two decades, our nation increasingly angry and polarized, leading up to the election of an angry and polarizing president. So far in 2020 we have seen three shocks to that stability: the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic turmoil arising from the lockdowns and shutdowns in response to the pandemic, and the current public outcry surrounding the deadly combination of racial prejudice and police violence that has resulted in far too many deaths of innocent Black people in the United States in recent years.

The COVID-19 lockdown proved that we are capable of shutting down our economic juggernaut in response to a collective demand, in the face of a disease that will from a historical perspective appear be a relatively modest threat. Prior to 2020 I would not have expected this to happen. Instead I would have expected that the wheels would be kept turning at all costs, with deaths minimized or carefully ignored in the media to avoid impacting “consumer confidence” and the almighty dollar. But that didn’t happen, and instead we were given a glimpse into the the invisible behind-the-scenes reality of meat-packing plants and Amazon warehouses, where thousands of human beings labor long hours in poor conditions for little pay, in roles that are absolutely essential for all of us to eat and to acquire the supplies that we need.

The recession that in all likelihood is just beginning has disproportionately impacted the lower rungs of the American economic ladder, increasing the number of people living on the edge of bankruptcy or homelessness. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter protests have demonstrated that we are capable of having empathy, of standing up for social justice, of putting ourselves in the place of George Floyd and Philando Castile and so many others and standing up together to demand change.

Taken together, these three shocks have given me hope that we may finally be ready to confront the elephant in the room, the story that is carefully avoided by the media but that is in many ways responsible for the accelerating breakdown of civil society, the fundamental and immoral inequality that is – like racism – as old as society and civilization itself. I am speaking, of course, about our structurally unjust economic system that creates haves and have-nots: that privileges some while oppressing others.

Those familiar with early American history will remember a pamphlet called Common Sense, published by Thomas Paine in early 1776. At the time, the idea of a government of, for, and by the people was radical, new, and untested, and while the colonists suffered under the English monarchy they knew of no other option. Paine’s mission was to persuade the people, in clear and straightforward language, that self-government was not only a viable option but the only ethical and reasonable option. It is my hope that this series of essays might serve a similar purpose: to suggest that it is time for an economy of, for, and by the people, and that indeed such an economy is the only moral option.

Before I begin, I want to emphasize that this is a moment for racial justice in America, and I in no way wish to detract from that. So please…center Black voices, join in the protests, and stand up against police violence, racial profiling, and all of the other injustices that collectively confront and continue to oppress minorities in this country. If this movement can be successful in forcing meaningful change against the established forces of the police and white supremacy, then we will emerge empowered to confront the much stronger forces of economic dominion. At the same time, I want to caution that racial justice alone is not enough. If the end result of the racial justice movement is only to elevate oppressed minorities to the level of the white working class, their lives will remain a daily struggle and their human dignity will still be far from assured.

I also want to add that movements for justice and equality should not be about defining Good People and Bad People. To make such judgments is divisive and enormously counterproductive. We are up against forces that control the narrative and the guns, and by declaring them evil we put them on the defensive, draw the lines of battle, and all but guarantee our own defeat. Instead we need to recognize that most people in positions of power and privilege view themselves as moral, ethical people who have achieved success by playing by the rules of the game. We need to relentlessly point out the ways in which those rules are unfair and tell the stories of those who have been personally affected. We need to take to the streets, united in our conviction. We need to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the privileged, as they recognize the ways in which their actions have contributed to the suffering of others. This cognitive dissonance will make them less motivated to fight against change, even if change will bring a reduction in wealth and status. Finally, we need to change the rules of the game, and invite the formerly privileged to play by the new rules without threat of retribution for past actions. Only in this way can a rift be healed and progress be made without simply oppressing the oppressors and repeating the old patterns anew.

With that, let us begin…

America in four quadrants

I find it useful to look at the United States along two axes, as follows:

I struggled as to which labels to give to the axes, as there are no words that fully capture the distinctions. As I use these terms, my definitions are:

• Cooperative: Focused more on the good of the whole and the well-being of others than on winning. People may be cooperative because they have been excluded from competition, because they value comfort over uncertainty, or for purely personal reasons. Cooperative people are more likely to agree with the statement “we’re all in this together.”
• Competitive: Focused more on survival/success/winning on individual, family, corporate, or national levels than on the well-being of all. People may be competitive because they feel like there are not enough resources to go around or because they feel like it is the only path to success in a competitive world. Competitive people are more likely to agree with “family first” or “America first” slogans and with statements like “only the strong survive.”
• Populist: Struggling economically, concerned about inadequate compensation for labor, and feeling that honest work is being unfairly exploited to benefit those who already have wealth and privilege.
• Elitist: Economically comfortable, with a feeling of having righteously earned that comfort, and with a tendency to rationalize the suffering of those lower on the economic ladder by employing alternative explanations (e.g. racism, prejudice) or by making usually-inaccurate assumptions (e.g. laziness, lack of ambition).

Populism and elitism track closely with economic status. Not surprisingly, those who are comfortable tend to rationalize that comfort to avoid cognitive dissonance, while those who are suffering tend to harbor resentment and a desire for change. The cooperative-competitive axis, on the other hand, seems to be embedded within human nature, and is exemplified by the differences between the peaceful bonobos and warlike chimpanzees, who are otherwise genetically identical and are our nearest evolutionary neighbors. We are all capable of adopting a more cooperative or more competitive mindset, and we will do so in response to our sense of security, social pressures, childhood experiences, and a host of other factors.

I’m going to be talking about these groups a lot, so I’ve taken the liberty of assigning them letters. I have also attempted to estimate each group’s proportion of the US population, +/-10% or so.

Within the current two-party system, the divide looks like this:

We can place presidents and candidates over the last 40 years into this framework:

As populist discontent has grown, it has become more difficult to win elections without a populist message. At the same time, given the amount of money required to win and the elite bias of the media, it has remained impossible for true populists to gain traction. As a result, our last two presidents have been elitists with populist messaging, from a cooperative (Obama) and competitive (Trump) perspective, and the losers have been elitists who failed to connect with the lower classes (McCain, Romney, Hillary Clinton). There is a lot of hand-wringing about Obama-Trump voters: those people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and for Trump in 2016. The media can’t understand, or doesn’t want us to understand, that it is possible for prioritize the populist-elitist distinction over the cooperative-competitive distinction. That would open up the possibility of a realignment of the quadrants in a way that would create a populist majority, which is something that the elite would like to avoid at all costs.

In the context of racial prejudice, the media tends to portray this narrative:

That is to say, it’s the hillbillies and rednecks who are the problem, the “deplorables”, the Proud Boys, the police, the attitudes of the ignorant and uneducated.

But if we dig a little deeper we can easily identify structural racism and implicit bias within the elite classes. Companies are less likely to hire Black applicants. Real estate agents are less likely to show good houses to Black families, and banks are less likely to offer them loans. Supposedly “liberal” and “accepting” whites are still alarmingly likely to call police on Black people simply going about their lives. And the list goes on. So in reality the picture looks more like this:

This isn’t the whole story, however, because race is not the only axis of oppression in American society. From an economic perspective, anyone outside the comfortable classes is feeling some pain. Between rising costs and stagnant wages, the purchasing power of the lower half of American society has been declining for the last 20 years or so, leaving retirement accounts empty, families forced to downsize, and only 41% of people with sufficient savings to cover a $1000 emergency – while at the same time the wealth of the comfortable classes continues to increase. So viewed from an economic lens, the picture looks more like this:

Elitism extends this divide beyond dollars and cents to the realm of social interactions. In order for the elite to feel justified in their wealth, they must also feel that they are deserving of it while the lower classes are not, or else that something other than economics is preventing the lower classes from rising. For quadrant D this is fairly straightforward: life is a struggle and they are the winners and therefore entitled to the spoils. For quadrant C this requires considerable mental gymnastics to maintain a cooperative mindset while supporting an economic system that generates oppression. These people tend to tell a story that quadrant A is oppressed by quadrant B (i.e. racism and white supremacy), and that if only that oppression could be resolved immigrants and people of color would be freed to rise into the comfortable classes. Meanwhile people in quadrant B are judged as bigoted racists and therefore deserving of their lower-class status.

It is of paramount importance to the comfortable classes that the struggling classes, which represent a solid majority, not be allowed or encouraged to find common cause. So it is that we have a fragile balance of halfhearted alliances and open enmities that maintains the balance of power and looks something like this:

It is worth examining these inter-group relationships in a bit more detail to understand this state of affairs.

Quadrant A, composed largely of people of color, is not given any great options. Quadrant C promises opportunities for advancement and protection against discrimination, but at the same time continues to charge the same unaffordable rent and to prop up the economic system that exploits their labor at unlivable wages. But an alliance with them is at this point preferable to the hatred flung their way by quadrant B.

Quadrant B, the white working class, includes a few dyed-in-the-wool bigots and racists, but is largely composed of good-hearted people who have a love of tradition, a nostalgia for the good old days when they earned reasonable wages, and a real but generally nonthreatening discomfort with people who are “different”. I know this because these were the people I grew up with, the people who I still call friends, the people who cared for my father when he was dying. Their antipathy toward A seems to me to be largely a result of actions by the elite quadrants C and D.

The framework of social justice is largely a product of universities, whose faculty and students are primarily in quadrant C. To avoid having to deal with the implications of their economic privilege, economic oppression is conveniently omitted from their framework. This angers the white working class, who are told that the suffering they are experiencing is either not real or their own fault, given that they do not have any “axes of oppression.”

Quadrant D, and especially Donald Trump, recognized the rejection of the white working class by quadrant C liberal elites and offered an alliance. The substance of this tenuous alliance is loosely based around shared competitive values (e.g. “America First”) and social conservatism, but any potential camaraderie between these groups is impeded by the fact that D was (and remains) most responsible for the immiseration of B, through – among other things – automation, offshoring of jobs, and destruction of unions. In order to forge this alliance, D had to offer B a convincing alternative scapegoat for their anger, and so was born the dangerous messaging that “illegal aliens are taking your jobs” and “black criminals on welfare are living high on the dole while you work hard for your money” and any number of other falsehoods.

Elite quadrants C and D disagree loudly on various issues – their voices are the ones we hear in the media – but they agree that preserving the economic status quo is a priority and also that growing populist dissent and discontent represents a threat to their power and wealth. Thus keeping a fire burning between A and B is very much in their shared interest.

The A-C and B-D alliances are beginning to weaken. For all that Donald Trump is a B-D bridge at the moment, he cannot ultimately improve the situation for B without making changes that will impact himself and his wealthy quadrant D cronies, and so the alliance seems doomed to failure. For all that the folks of C are doing their part to be allies to A during the current protests, when the discussion moves beyond racism and police brutality to affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage the support will quietly evaporate.

At the same time, immigrants, people of color, and working class whites are toiling together daily in construction sites and factories, food processing plants and hotels, and increasingly recognizing their shared humanity and their common cause in restoring respect, dignity, and adequate pay to their essential contribution to society. So it is that I expect, within the next years to decades, to see a realignment of political alliances in the United States which will open the door to the possibility of real economic reform.

To get a sense of what that reform might look like, we first need to understand how our economy exploits some to benefit others, and apply the framework of social justice to attach moral significance to economic decisions. We’ll continue with Part II: The American Dream Casino.

We’re all in open relationships now…

As we emerge from our two-month government-mandated lockdowns, we are, in some ways, entering into a changed world – a world in which a nasty and potentially deadly infection continues to walk among us.  Many of us lived through the introduction of HIV, a virus far worse than any of the lesser STIs, and now we must confront a PTI – “Proximity-Transmitted Infection” – and begin to navigate a new world of communication and consent.

We can wish that the government would enforce our personal preference on this matter – require everyone to stay home as much as possible and wear masks everywhere else, or force everyone to return to normal in spite of the new risk – but the reality is that COVID-19 etiquette is exiting the realm of public policy and entering the realm of personal choice, and so all of us must determine our own comfort levels and personal practices.  Most of us are unprepared for this, and it is revealing differences among partners, friends, and families that were previously unexplored or unimportant.  In building our lives together, we have sought compromise on monogamy, child-rearing, location, politics, and religion, and either reached agreement or ultimately parted ways.  But nowhere in those conversations was the question of comfort level with a contagion.  We didn’t ask each other: “If hugging a friend ever-so-slightly increases your chance of death and your chance of bringing death to your family, would you still do it?  Would you be OK if I did it?”  Those are the conversations of the now times, and perhaps we could learn from the well-developed language of sexual communication and consent.

Intimacy entails a level of risk – of pregnancy and STIs, and of emotional connections that may threaten existing relationships – and that risk can be mitigated – with condoms, birth control, and established boundaries.  In effect, by adding a new level of social risk, COVID-19 has simply expanded our sphere of intimacy.  Whereas before it was deemed essential to have consent before planting a kiss, and good practice to have consent before giving a hug, hugging has now become a mandatory-consent activity limited to one’s closest circles, and it is now good practice to have consent before coming within six feet or so without a mask on.  An uninvited and unmasked intrusion into that six-foot radius is the new equivalent of an unwelcome embrace – a sort of low-level assault that makes us feel less respected and less safe in the world.  We are learning a new lexicon of negotiation, of masks, bubbles, and pods.

When to wear a face condom

Masks are like condoms for the face.  I mean that not at all in a derogatory sense, but simply in that they serve an equivalent function:  to prevent infectious particles (and yes, in this context, sperm are “infectious particles”) from leaving one sphere of intimacy and entering another.  We all have the same parts on our faces, and our mouths and noses are equally infectious, so mask wearing is not gendered, but in most other ways the analogy holds.  We can recommend that everyone practice “safer socializing” and wear masks whenever in public, but we also need to acknowledge that, like their sexual counterparts, masks have certain drawbacks.  Breathing is a bit more difficult, for one, but on a personal level it creates a change in our self-expression and experience of the world.  Scents and voices are muffled, and we feel a bit protected and withdrawn.  A conversation with a close friend feels more intimate, more trusting, when conducted without masks.

We can argue about where and how often we all ought to wear masks, but I think it is more important at this point in time to define interpersonal etiquette than to enforce broader societal standards.  On this level, the guidelines can be based on consent and respect and would look something like this:

• If you need to approach within 6-10 feet of someone who is wearing a mask, wear a mask.
• If you are entering a place that provides essential services for vulnerable populations (e.g. grocery store, post office), wear a mask.
• If you enter an environment where a majority of people are wearing masks, it is courteous to put one on. 
• Outside of these situations, please refrain from casting judgment on people based on their choice to wear a mask or not.

Bubbles and Pods

Along with our newfound expansion of intimacy comes a necessary negotiation of personal choices within each household or group of friends.  Are we comfortable dining in restaurants?  Meeting those outside the group without masks?  Hugging people outside the group?  Do we trust others in our group to be truthful?  Just as those who are polyamorous or in open relationships must negotiate what intimacies are allowed and with whom, now we all must have those discussions.  If anyone in my “bubble” or “pod” is engaging in behaviors that I am not personally comfortable with, then they are effectively making an unwanted choice for me.  There are three possible solutions to this, all of them potentially fraught:  1) convince the other person to accept my preferred choices as their own, 2) accept the risk that comes with their choices as a “price of admission” for having them in my bubble, or 3) decide to live in separate bubbles. 

This can lead to divisions and difficult choices.  For those caring for a vulnerable elder at home, it can mean a physical separation, with one partner taking on the caregiver role and remaining socially distant from the other partner and children.  For others, it can lead to choosing between forming a bubble with elders to the exclusion of friends and coworkers, or forming a more-porous, less risk-averse bubble with friends and coworkers while remaining socially distant from elders.  The larger and more diverse the group, the less likely it is that all will be able to agree on acceptable risks, and the more likely that that some boundary of physical isolation will be necessary in the weeks and months ahead.

Where are we headed?

It is almost impossible to predict the trajectory of COVID-19 at this point, and the parallel trajectory of our personal comfort levels.  If the disease fades out in the months ahead, perhaps our spheres of intimacy will shrink back to their previous size, and these concerns will melt away.  If it reaches outbreak status again, perhaps we will return to lockdown for a time, and in our enforced isolation be spared from confronting our differences.  But more likely, it seems, the truth will be in the middle, and COVID-19 will be neither a relic of the past nor a breaking wave of mortality, but rather a persistent background risk – like car accidents or cancer – that we all must make peace with in our own ways, making our own choices and navigating this new landscape of expanded intimacy with compassion and open communication.

We’re going on two months since the pandemic upended our daily lives, and what began – for many – as a long unexpected-but-not-entirely-unwelcome staycation is transitioning to a new normal, a world in which we are back to our lives and our jobs but at a careful distance, a summer without festivals and fairs, sports teams playing in empty stadiums.  A year or more, perhaps, without singing in choirs or feeling comfortable hugging our friends, without visiting our elders in care facilities.  Within myself, I am feeling increasingly restless and reckless, pulled between a desire for freedom from fear and a sense of social obligation, to continue to slow the spread and “stay home, save lives” as our governor implores. 

I find myself meditating on a passage from The Living, by Annie Dillard.  The entire book, a work of historical fiction set in late 19^th-century northern Washington State, is a reflection on what it means to be alive, to feel alive, to choose life over fear in a world defined by mortality.  Within the context of frequent and unexpected death from accidents and disease, one of the main characters (Clare Fishburn) is under constant threat from an armed and mentally unstable man (Beal Obenchain) who wishes him dead.  This leads to a climactic confrontation and a choice, a moment of clarity, a joyful and courageous surrender, as the character turns his back on the threat, accepts the possibility of death, and walks on (pp. 385-386):

When Obenchain stood and stopped him—his face thickened under his hat—and told him he was not going to kill him, he was not going to die, Clare looked out over the trestle and down to the water, where gulls flew without bending their wings. Obenchain was offering him a view he had to reject. The tide on the bay was slack at the flood. There was a plank walkway on the trestle by the rails. Clare moved onto the walkway, nodding and serious; he held his breath as if he were diving.  The trestle quit the shore, and Clare stepped out over the bay and the strait in a socket of light.  Sky pooled under his shoulders and arched beneath his feet.  Time rolled back and bore him; he was porous as bones.

‘No,’ he said to Obenchain – but Obenchain was already far behind him on the bluff, his head swaying up like a blind man’s.  No, indeed.  The sky came carousing down around him.  He saw the sun drenching the green westward islands and battering a path down the water.  He saw the town before him to the south, where the trestle lighted down.  Then far on the Nooksack plain to the east, he saw a man walking.  The distant figure was turning pea rows under in perfect silence.  He was dressed in horse’s harness and he pulled the plow.  His feet trod his figure’s long blue shadow, and the plow cut its long blue shadow in the ground.  The man turned back as if to look along the furrow, to check its straightness.  Clare saw again, on the plain farther north, another man; this one walked behind a horse and turned the green ground under.  Then before him on the trestle over the water he saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking darkly as it always walks in every season: it was plowing the men under, and the horses, and the plows.

The earth was plowing the men under, and the horses under, and the plows.  No wonder you are cold, he said to the broken earth, he said to the lighted water: you kicked your people off.  No generation sees it happen, and the damp new fields grow up forgetting.  He would return home and see his cedar shingles off on the train.  Clare was burrowing in light upstream.  All the living were breasting into the crest of the present together.  All men and women and children spread in a long line, holding aloft a ribbon or banner; they ran up a field as wide as earth, opening time like a path in the grass, and he was borne along with them.  No, he said, peeling the light back, walking in the sky toward home; no.

I love that passage because it combines remarkably evocative imagery of enduring natural beauty with the transience of human life, and Clare explicitly accepts the world as it is, complete with the ever-present possibility and ultimate inevitability of death, and chooses to ride the cresting wave of the present.  And he does so without reference to a particular God or vision of the afterlife – which would limit relevance to those with similar beliefs – but simply a joyful commitment to this mysterious and miraculous experience of life that we all share. 

When I think ahead to a year without gatherings, without contra dances and potlucks, without concerts, a year of fearing closeness rather than embracing it, a year of religiously washing our hands, wearing masks, keeping our distance from our parents and grandparents, I think of a song that my father wrote, to the melody of Tom Paxton’s The Last Thing On My Mind:

In the morning the sun so gloriously greets the day
Brings the light, ends the night
And in the streets the people go the same old way
Without sight, without light
 
And how many days just pass us by
When we never really live and we never really die
And we never really laugh and we never really cry
And we never really know the reasons why
 
In the evening all the colors gather
In the sky, the western sky
Yet in the streets the people all would rather
Just get by, just get by
 
And how many days just pass us by
When we never really live and we never really die
And we never really laugh and we never really cry
And we never really know the reasons why

~Ed Stone, sometime around 1980

In this case we know the reason why, and we are accepting a lesser life in the hope that doing so will lead to lesser death.  But perhaps that is always the reason why.  Perhaps we don’t really live and really laugh because our fear stops us short, tells us stories that keep us small, keeps us confined to the past and future, the virtual and the distant, while neglecting the miracle of the here and now. 

The latest guidance says that we won’t be singing together again, dancing together, crowding into stadiums again, until we have effective treatment or a vaccine.  That wording concerns me, precisely because it is conditional and not at all time-bound.  We might have a vaccine next year, or we might have one that is 40% effective like for the flu, or we might not ever have an effective vaccine at all, like for HIV.  It’s not like waiting until Christmas.  It’s more like staying in an unpleasant living situation because your scary roommate tells you they are probably moving out sometime in the next few years, and it feels safer and easier to stay put. 

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has so far resulted in 85,000 deaths and trillions of dollars’ worth of missing paychecks. The question of reopening is usually portrayed as lives lost versus economic suffering, but that equation is missing so much of human experience that cannot be readily quantified. What is the value of dying in the company of family and friends, versus dying alone in a sterile institution?  What is the value of spending nights and weekends with parents and grandparents?  What is the value of cancelled dances and missed glances?  What is the value of making music together in a choir, of gathering in a park for a summer concert, or relaxing in the presence of joyful humans at the Oregon Country Fair or Folklife or a stadium crowd?  What is the cost of isolation – not just in terms of clinical depression and suicide but in quality of life?  How much time spent less than fully alive is worth how much actual death? 

I should note that I supported the lockdowns, imposed at a time when we were facing so many unknown unknowns, when it seemed like the alternative could be millions of deaths in a few weeks, or that we might discover a miracle treatment.  The lockdowns also provided a much needed reset of the rat-race economy, a chance to stop for a moment, to take time to think, to consider our approach to this new death-bringer in our midst rather than being dragged thoughtlessly forward to meet it.  But I also cautioned, in my first essay on COVID-19, that we might well be faced with a difficult choice if eradication proved impossible.  Two months have passed since then, and the time for that choice has now arrived.

It is time, I believe, to consider the possibility of surrender.  Not an unconditional surrender, with COVID-19 patients overwhelming our hospitals, but an acceptance that in order to return to our lives and our loves, we must accept a higher chance of death than would be strictly necessary.  A choice like Clare Fishburn, to say “I reject the idea that I will not die,” and to thereby choose to live.

In order to morally make such a choice, we must address two serious ethical dilemmas.  The first is that any choice that increases one’s chance of death is deeply personal, and should ideally never be coerced.  At the moment we have waiters and hairdressers who are afraid to return to work, yet who face the loss of unemployment payments when their industries reopen.  We have elders with conditions that render COVID-19 extremely life-threatening, who wish to be able to choose continued safety in isolation even as life resumes.  The second is that our society is built upon structural inequalities, which are showing up as disproportionate infection and death rates among African Americans, immigrant communities, and low-income families employed in essential trades.  This has become a political division, as a few on the right posit that death is OK so long as it happens to those people, while many on the left counter that the only reasonable approach is to continue the lockdown indefinitely and minimize death at all costs.

We will not be able to address these dilemmas completely, but we could certainly do better.  We should offer continued unemployment to anyone who is uncomfortable returning to work, along with the option of paid education for retraining in lower-risk careers.  We should ensure that we have delivery systems in place to provide low-contact essentials to those who choose self-isolation.  We should create a National Essential Service Corps, with voluntary enlistment and good pay and benefits similar to the military.  This force should be deployed to keep essential services open – including meatpacking and public transportation – while allowing at-risk and fearful workers in those areas to take extended paid vacations until local outbreaks subside.  Such a service would also expose a wide array of people to these “dirty” and underappreciated jobs, and likely generate a public outcry to improve pay and working conditions.

If we can protect the most vulnerable and address demographic inequality, then perhaps we can follow in the footsteps of Sweden, which never imposed a lockdown on their population.  They have been criticized for having a higher death rate than neighboring countries, but neither has it been catastrophic, and in fact it has remained lower than locked-down Spain and Italy.  Perhaps our control is not even as effective as we believe it to be.  Regardless, the novelty of COVID-19 has worn off, and we understand it far better than we did a few months ago.  Now we must simply choose, each for ourselves and together as a society:  will we constrain our lives indefinitely, in the hope that we can claim dominion over this virus, or will we follow in the footsteps of Clare Fishburn, accept the possibility of death, and set off courageously across the trestle toward home?

Where are we now?

It’s been two weeks since my last COVID-19 post, when I predicted that case counts and deaths would begin a noticeable decline as they have across most of Europe. Instead, we have seen a stubborn plateau. Testing continues to increase, so it is likely that actual new cases are declining slowly, but daily deaths continue to average around 2000 per day, which means that ~25% more people are dying in the United States than in normal times.

The picture is different state by state. New York City, where an estimated 20% of the population was infected, is following an Italian trend, with a steady decrease in death and infection now down at least 50% from last month’s peak. Some areas, including Minnesota and Washington DC, are still seeing an increase despite lockdown measures. Still others, including Oregon, Montana, and Hawaii, are seeing cases and deaths slowly decline despite never experiencing widespread infection.

Nationwide, smart thermometer users continue to report zero fevers, suggesting that the disease is now primarily confined to unrepresented populations: lower-class essential workers and care home residents being the most-affected demographics in this moment.

Despite continued high case counts, most US states are either beginning to relax restrictions or making plans to begin the process in the next few weeks. We can hope that increased testing and contact tracing will allow us to keep infection levels from rising, but there is also a growing consensus that we can’t keep parts of our society shuttered indefinitely, and that if we can’t ultimately contain this virus we may need to adapt to it, perhaps following a Swedish model.

Seeking perspective

Most of us have been thoroughly confused, and seriously frightened, by the graphs, stories, and comparisons presented in the media throughout this crisis. In particular, we have been inundated with inappropriate comparisons and selective individual accounts.

Most of these comparisons are based on the unquestioned assumption that the severity of a crisis is directly proportional to the body count. So it is that COVID-19 rapidly became worse than 9/11 (3,000 killed) and is now worse than the Vietnam War (58,000 killed). But it doesn’t actually work that way. We cannot reasonably compare accidents, mass murder, war, and disease. As an exercise, consider the relative national emotional impact of the Challenger space shuttle explosion (7 deaths), 9/11 (3000 deaths), the 2017-18 flu season (80,000 deaths), and the annual cancer death toll (600,000 deaths). Since 9/11, nearly 4,000 people have died of cancer for every person that died when the twin towers collapsed, but no one would dare to suggest that cancer is 4,000 times worse than the attack.

Of the roughly two million people that die every year in the United States, the majority die of some sort of disease: heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure/stroke, influenza, etc. This is the appropriate context in which to assess the impact of a pandemic. Of those two million people, many of them experience substantial pain and suffering, and many of those deaths were not strictly unavoidable, instead being caused or accelerated by poverty, addiction, loneliness, diet, environmental toxins, and a host of other factors. When we hear harrowing accounts of people suffering from COVID-19, we can forget that there are far greater numbers of untold harrowing accounts in our homes and hospitals: metastatic cancer, autoimmune disease, liver failure, lung disease, and the list goes on.

Furthermore, COVID-19 deaths match the age breakdown of typical deaths quite closely. It’s not exactly true that this illness specifically targets the elderly and spares the young, in the manner of heart disease or dementia. Rather, if we were to compare the ages of COVID-19 deaths to a random sample of obituary pages from past years, we would find that the age breakdown is almost identical: roughly half over age 80, most over age 60, and very few under age 40. The only difference would be the near complete absence of children and teens from the COVID-19 column. So unlike the 1918 flu pandemic, which seemed to target those in the 20-40 age range by stimulating a self-destructive immune response, COVID-19 is following the standard mortality tables with regard to age-based impact.

A 100-year bug

Most of us are familiar with the concept of a 100-year flood: a flood of a magnitude that recurs on average once per century. The same understanding can be applied to pandemics.

A 10-year bug would be roughly equivalent to the 2017-18 flu season in the US, causing around 80,000 deaths. It is possible, but increasingly unlikely, that we will confine COVID-19 to this level. Visually, this is what a 10-year bug looks like:

The last major pandemic to spread around the world was the “Spanish” flu in 1918-1920. That disease caused 600,000 deaths in the United States. The population of the US has increased slightly more than threefold since that time, so the equivalent number of deaths today would be two million – which also happens to be a good estimate of the number of expected deaths if COVID-19 were allowed to spread freely throughout the population, and it is also the number of people who die in the United States in a typical year. So, if left unmanaged, COVID-19 could become a 100-year bug with a death breakdown like this:

A 100-year bug would condense two years of death into a single year, and our collective chance of surviving another year would be the same as our chance of surviving another two years in normal times. It would be a time of great sorrow, and we would do well to avoid it if we can do so without completely destroying our lives in other ways, but it would hardly be “apocalyptic,” “catastrophic,” or any of the other frightening words flying around the media-sphere.

We can save those words for a 1000-year bug, which with any luck none of us alive today will live to experience. The last widespread example in history would be the Black Death, which killed 50% of the population of Europe from 1348-1350. Such a pandemic could easily happen again, if a virus with the death rate of Ebola were to achieve the contagiousness of COVID-19 (R=3) or measles (R=12). Such a pandemic would look like this, and the world that came after would be truly changed.

Yes, we can act! (but why?)

One of the great surprises of the last two months – for me – has been the degree to which COVID-19 has catalyzed previously-unthinkable changes in our society. Facing projections of catastrophic climate change we can’t even pass modest improvements in vehicle fuel economy or stop increasing the amount of carbon we emit each year, but give us a virus that could kill fewer than 1% of us and we will all stay home, save lives, and reduce our air travel by 95%.

If we can understand what exactly about this crisis enabled us to take action, perhaps we can improve our chances of making other much-needed course corrections in the years ahead. To me, the critical elements here are a threat to our notion of progress and a clear near-term danger.

The past 150 years have seen a dramatic reduction in deaths due to infectious disease, thanks to advances in antibiotics, vaccines, and medical technology in general. We have flu and an increasing number of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, but we no longer have smallpox, polio, measles, typhoid, or cholera in the US. This is by all accounts a positive trend, but it has had a psychological side-effect of moving death from infectious disease along the spectrum of societal acceptability. What would once have been viewed as an act of God or nature to be endured has now become a step backwards, a loss of control, to be avoided even at a very high cost. We have come to accept a rising incidence of cancer – better living through chemistry – and even vehicle accidents, but we are no longer so tolerant of pathogenic microbes in our midst.

As our quadrennial elections and investment decisions make clear, we are much more likely to think and act on short time scales. And when it comes to immediacy, it is hard to to beat a virus that could infect us tomorrow and land us in a grave within a month. This crisis makes clear that we are collectively able to change our habits, even sacrifice our economic engine, in response to a relatively modest short term threat. Unfortunately, many of the impending crises that humanity faces – climate change, resource shortages, topsoil loss, air pollution – are objectively worse than even unmitigated COVID-19 but not nearly as acute. One question to ask ourselves, post-pandemic, is how we might reframe longer-term crises in order to spur in-the-moment action.

Shining a light into dark corners

The meat industry

The US meat industry has been all over the news in the past two weeks, as COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly among packing plant workers, and the resulting closures have created a bottleneck forcing farmers to euthanize animals and threatening shortages and price spikes on grocery store shelves. This news coverage is, in turn, giving Americans a better sense of where their meat comes from, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Each year in United States, we consume eight billion chickens, 226 million turkeys, 123 million pigs, and 36 million cattle. Per person, that works out to an annual diet of 24 chickens, 2/3 of a turkey, 1/3 of a pig, and 1/10 of a cow. That actually doesn’t seem too excessive to me, although we could certainly lighten our footprint by consuming less meat. The problems arise from industrialization and commodification of the process, with minimal regard for the animals themselves or for the humans that work in the industry.

Thousands of years ago when humans domesticated animals for meat, milk, and eggs, we made a biological bargain. To the animals, we offered safety from predators, protection from the elements, plentiful food, and abundant opportunities for reproduction. In return we claimed their bodies, or their milk or eggs, for our nourishment. Up until the year 1800 or so it was a relational system, with farmers taking pride in tending their animals well, animals free to explore pastures and have their own experience of the world, and skilled butchers in each town and city transforming those animals into bacon, sausage, hamburger, and steaks for the table.

Then came industrialization and economies of scale, but some processes scale more easily than others. With an equipment upgrade, one miller can expand from grinding a ton of wheat each day to 100 tons a day. One farmer can expand from harvesting five acres of corn to harvesting 500 acres. But animals remain discrete, biological, imperfect, messy. Every chicken must be eviscerated by a human hand, head and feet removed, cut along and between the bones to separate breasts from thighs from wings. Short of advanced robotics, this is nearly impossible to mechanize. So in order to have cheap hot dogs, chicken breasts, and lunchmeat in the supermarket, we employ a vast number of workers – mostly underpaid and underappreciated recent immigrants laboring in cramped and unpleasant conditions – in meat packing plants around the country. And in those cramped, human, blood-spattered quarters, a virus like COVID-19 spreads like wildfire.

These plants have a voracious appetite for animals. The first plant to close, Smithfield in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is designed to kill 20,000 pigs a day. We may still have bucolic visions of farmyards full of a diverse array of animals – and those farms still exist – but that’s not where those 20,000 pigs come from. Those pigs come from barns holding 2500 hogs apiece in a mucky soup of their own waste and managed for the sole purpose of producing the traded commodity known as pork. The pigs therein have been bred to maximize growth rate and have seen no other sight than the muddy floor and an endless writhing sea of other pigs for their entire short lives. It is the same in the chicken barns, the turkey barns, and the cattle feedlots. In our desire to produce maximum product at minimum price we have neglected to hold up our end of the biological bargain. We seem to have forgotten that such a bargain ever existed, or that indeed we might owe these conscious, neurologically complex beings some ability to experience the world on their own terms, aside from their final destination as our nourishment. This may all seem normal now, but I suspect that some time in the future we will look back on the massive concentrated animal operations of today with the same disgust that we feel when we contemplate our history of human slavery.

There are parallel systems in place that have not forgotten the old ways. While others searched empty shelves for an Easter ham, we pulled one out of the freezer, the last cut remaining from a quarter hog. A friend of ours raises three pigs every year, free to roam in the summer sun, and in return for a quarter of a pig – enough to keep us in pork for half a year – we traded her 50 lbs of onions from our garden, honey from our bees, homebrewed mead, and some of our homegrown quinoa. Every year there are more small farms raising animals the old fashioned way, many of them started by frustrated consumers unwilling to buy factory meat.

This crisis is revealing the primary weakness of industrial, globalized systems: efficiency is the enemy of resiliency. To maximize efficiency we need size, consolidation, just-in-time delivery, and minimal surplus capacity. Disrupt one piece of a gargantuan supply chain, and the whole system falters. To maximize resiliency in the face of the inevitable crises ahead we need diversity, redundancy, and dissemination of production. We need to re-localize our meat production and our food systems in general, to remember our biological bargain, and to restore relationship and connection to a commodified world.

Nursing homes

(or the way that we value, and devalue, our elders)

Around half of COVID-19 deaths in the United States have been among residents of care facilities, primarily nursing homes. As with our meat industry, this has been shining a light of media attention on some uncomfortable truths about modern society.

Several weeks ago I read an article – which I can no longer find – which argued persuasively that there is no ethical way to assign a different value to human life based on age. That is to say, it is no less tragic if COVID-19 or anything else kills an 85-year-old vs. a 25-year-old. This set me to thinking, as I couldn’t bring myself to agree. While I would certainly rather die at 75 than 45, it matters far less to me whether I make it to 85 or 95. I expect that my quality of life will be diminishing in those later years, and I hope to feel that I have lived a “full life” by age 75 if not sooner.

Pondering this further, I came to realize that we are conflating two different values in our relationship with our elders. The first, which I will call Importance of Staying Alive, reflects our readiness for death – both in our own minds and in the minds of our loved ones – and the lengths to which we are willing to go to prolong life. The second, which I will call Value as a Human Being, includes respect, appreciation, and inclusion in family and community – all of the ways that we express our love and acknowledge the humanity in each other.

In older times, I imagine that these values changed over time something like this:

Survival was of paramount importance for children, for parents, and for the duration of a career. Beyond that, added years were an unexpected bonus, and quality of life declined as aging set in. While death was always a sad occasion, it was less tragic when it greeted a life well lived than when it claimed someone in their prime. At the same time, elders remained in the care of their families, and their value was maintained. They were seated at the table, included in discussions of the day and revelries of the evening, and consulted for their expertise for as long as their mental faculties survived.

Having spent a fair amount of time in nursing homes, it seems to me that we have, through some complex mental gymnastics, gotten these values reversed in a most unpleasant way. In order to more fully join the rat race economy, and with the supposed justification of gender equality, we have devalued the economy of the home – traditionally “womens’ work” – that included at-home care for our children and our elders. We have outsourced these roles to underpaid and undervalued workers, who are still primarily women. It seems to me that it might have been a better feminist goal to shoot for equality in the home economy – dividing both breadwinning and child/elder care among men and women – than to sell out both genders to the patriarchal capitalist agenda of maximum employment. But that’s not what happened.

In order to make peace with our choice to send our elders away to assisted living and care facilities, we told ourselves a comforting story. They will be safer there, we told ourselves. In the care of professionals, their needs will be met better than at home, and their lives will be longer. And so off they went, into loneliness, to shuffle down the halls in a daily routine and play bingo with strangers, while family might visit once a week if they were lucky. And once they were out of our lives, their value to us declined. They were, for all intents and purposes, just waiting to die, but since we had sacrificed connection for safety we were no longer willing to accept their deaths.

Every day I read stories of the tragic toll of COVID-19 in nursing homes. Yet to me it is not the death that is tragic. The average duration of a nursing home stay, prior to death, is just over two years. Death is to be expected, and there are many in such a state of physical decline that it seems almost a mercy. What is tragic to me is that these people are all dying alone, and that their families are barred from visiting. Formalizing these restrictions only emphasizes their everyday reality: that most of these people die alone in normal times, and family visits are the exception rather than the rule.

When my father died in 2016, he spent two months in a nursing home before passing. This was a choice on my part and his, given that his decline was relatively rapid, his prognosis was poor, and it would have been difficult to retrofit his home to provide for both his comfort and a caregiver. So he moved into the home, but we stayed with him. Every day, while he was awake, Jean or I, or sister Barbara, sat with him. As death neared he asked not to sleep alone, and so every night for the last month one of us slept in the recliner in his room. We ate meals with him, brought food from his garden, sang him his original songs, wheeled him around the block in the late summer sunshine. It seemed a beautiful time, and yet his room was unique. The other residents seemed sadly abandoned by comparison, barely alive and mostly forgotten.

Had his decline happened in this time, we would have been barred from visiting, and we would probably have chosen to care for him at home. I am hearing numerous stories of elders being sprung from care homes in this time, so that they can be with family instead. COVID-19 is killing the narrative that our elders are safer in an institution, and with that narrative dead we can no longer justify abandoning them. That can only be a good thing.

It is my hope that this pandemic will help us to recognize that the rat race isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that the home economy has real value. Skilled nursing facilities serve a purpose – especially memory care and some other specialties – but we have done our elders a great disservice by prioritizing their survival over their value to us, their inclusion in our daily lives, and our expression of love and appreciation for them on a daily basis. Perhaps we might choose to make routine institutionalization of our elders a thing of the past.

It’s been two weeks since my last writing on COVID-19. At that time, I predicted that based on looking at trends in Italy and other European countries, the number of new cases would stop rising in the next seven days. That happened, with the highest total recorded on April 4. I also predicted that cases would begin to drop after the peak, and so far that has not occurred. The number of daily new cases and daily deaths from COVID-19 in the United States has reached a plateau with no clear sign of a downward trend.

The original models that charted exponential growth and two million deaths were wrong, as we quickly realized once social distancing began to take effect. And the oft-cited IHME model, with it’s bell-shaped peak, is also proving to be incorrect.

What is going on?

The plateau seems to be driven by two factors. The first is that testing is increasing and flu season is ending, meaning that a greater proportion of people with flu-like symptoms now have COVID-19 and we are detecting a higher proportion of total cases. In places where other measurements like hospital admissions are in decline, it is likely that actual new cases are in decline as well. That would be good news.

However, we are not seeing fewer people dying yet, and we are now beyond the time window within which the effects of social distancing should be evident, so something else is going on. Nationwide, fevers – as reported by smart thermometers – have declined to historic lows of effectively zero

The surge in “atypical illness” – likely COVID-19 – that began in early March has rapidly receded, and fevers quickly dropped below the expected flu-season range and then gradually to zero in the course of less than a month. This is solid evidence that social distancing is effective.

But how can this be reconciled with the reality that there are presently at least 100,000 people sick and feverish with COVID-19 in the United States? The unfortunate answer, I believe, is that we have not reduced R regionally, but rather demographically. Administrators, IT professionals, professors, office workers – the people who live in smart homes and own smart thermometers – have been safely working from home. Their only risk of exposure is from a weekly trip to the store and passing mostly-healthy neighbors on walking paths, and so R for them has dropped to well below 1, maybe even 0.1 or 0.2.

On the other hand, grocery store cashiers, care home nurses, bus drivers, farmworkers, and food industry workers have continued to breathe the same air as hundreds of other humans each day. Their jobs can’t be done from home, and they are not optional. Even if these people could afford to miss work – which many of them can’t – our society would suffer a far greater loss of life if we stopped tending the sick, producing food, and maintaining basic services. So it is that we are seeing the worst outbreaks in places like the Smithfield pork facility and vastly disproportionate infection rates among black and latinx communities who are also disproportionately employed in essential but underpaid and underappreciated work. For these groups, R remains elevated, probably still above 1 in many cases. The plateau in case counts, in other words, may represent the balance between dramatically decreasing infection rates among privileged classes and stable to increasing infection rates among essential workers.

When can we reopen?

The trillion-dollar question these days has become a political football, and as with all political divisions the rhetoric on both sides has become warped from reality.

The choices ahead of us will not be easy. There is no win-win. It will be a compromise of lose-a-little-lose-a-little. On the one hand, relaxing restrictions will lead to increased illness and death. In most places it should not be difficult to achieve the objective of remaining within the capacity of the healthcare system, but within that there is still plenty of room for suffering and loss of life. On the other hand, maintaining restrictions will lead to loss of livelihood. The longer restaurants and shops remain shut, the fewer will be able to reopen. Loss of livelihood leads to depression, anxiety, addiction, food insecurity, and homelessness – all of which can lead to illness and death in their own way.

We absolutely need to increase our testing game, and provide adequate PPE to our healthcare workers. I am befuddled that we are still so far behind this far into the pandemic, and I hope that we can begin to catch up in the weeks ahead.

That aside, I do not believe it is premature to talk about reopening, or to consider what steps might alleviate economic pain without greatly increasing infection rates. After all, the restrictions were put in place in panic mode, in a state of emergency, without a clear understanding of which ones are really effective and which are less consequential.

We also need to improve our empathy and relax our desires to police each other. From the perspective of a work-from-home administrator, any social gatherings seem irresponsible. From the perspective of a bus driver, breathing community air all day long, being reprimanded for having a beer with friends after work seems draconian and out-of-touch.

I ask that we resist the temptation to speak and write in terms of unfair equivalencies. Stay-home orders are not the government attempting to control a herd of sheeple. Nor is it fair to portray the decision to reopen as grandma’s life versus Goldman Sachs executive bonuses. The reality is more like a modest increase in grandma’s chance of dying versus grandma being isolated from family for many months during which time she may die anyway. It is, for many furloughed workers nearing retirement, a choice between risking death now and retiring in a few years, versus losing employer-sponsored health coverage, racking up medical and other debts, and being forced to work for additional years if they can even get their jobs back.

Trump is the wrong leader for this time, because he always needs to fight for a side, and he keeps switching sides. Blame China! We’re doing great! We’re failing! But it’ll be over soon! Oh crap the models say we’re all gonna die! Stay home! But the economy is crashing, liberate! Liberate! In that way he is going through the same emotional cycles that the rest of us are, and while many folks find that relatable it is not effective leadership.

Effective leadership requires listening and compromise. We need to listen to all sides and all perspectives. We need to scale back restrictions slowly and intelligently, starting with steps that maximize job recovery with minimal added risk of infection. We need to protect our essential workers, by all wearing masks where social distancing isn’t possible. We need to ramp up testing, start testing for antibodies, and trace contacts, so that we can replace social distancing with less disruptive ways of reducing R.

I will make no strong predictions as to where we will be in another two weeks, although I would expect case counts to begin a noticeable decline and most less-affected regions to make tentative steps toward reopening. We shall see – as usual models are wrong, reality is messy, and the truth is in the middle.