Journal of the Plague Year

© 2012 Kassy. Licensed under CC-BY.

While the economic consequences of the coronavirus look grim, I did a little surfing online, and it is not clear the last worst plague, the Spanish Flu, or other epidemics since, did much lasting damage. It is hard to separate its effects from those of the First World War; but had they been that dramatic, surely it would not have been so hard.

Apparently, the clearest effect is that, like the Black Death, it caused labour shortages and drove up the price of labour. Which is not a bad thing for the poor, if not perhaps the economy as a whole. And it prompted an extension of the social safety net. If the economic fundamentals are sound, there is no reason why such a virus should be more than a temporary hit, so that everything can come back once it’s over.

The question is, are the fundamentals sound?

It seems to me that the experience is going to cause some long-term changes—a systematic effort to “decouple” from China and bring supply chains for critical supplies home to North America and Europe. Quite possibly a strong boost for technological changes that were making sense anyway: online education, working from home, a general exodus from the big cities, robotics, online conferencing. Maybe a boost for the concept of a Guaranteed Minimum Income.

I’d worry about the housing and mortgage market; I’d worry about the viability of the universities.

An article in Quillette makes the same argument I was making: that the virus is stress-testing different societies, and Europe and Iran (and perhaps North America—we’ll see) are revealing themselves to be decadent in comparison to East Asia, Eastern Europe, Israel, and Jordan.

“In an interview published yesterday, the director of a hospital in Madrid was unusually forthcoming. Still traumatized by the images of the emergency care unit where he works, Santiago Moreno confessed that ‘we have sinned from too much confidence.’”

That maybe sums it up.

“A week ago, the Spanish government actively encouraged all Spaniards to go to the streets and join dozens of very large marches for gender equality. When asked about the infection hazard, one minister publicly laughed.”

One town in France, she reports, in response to early signs of infection, organized a Smurf convention to lighten spirits.

“At the time of the Madrid marches and the Smurf convention, I was returning from a long journey in Asia and could not help noticing the contrast. In India, or Singapore, or Vietnam, people were dramatically changing their behaviour to adapt to the coronavirus. They were going out less, avoiding large groups, taking turns on the elevator and, of course, wearing masks everywhere, even if perhaps they looked less elegant in them.”

And she concludes: “it carries a dark foreboding for the future of a continent which seems to be poorly prepared for a world beyond normal times.”

We may hear less in future of the immense agonies and injustices supposedly borne by this or that special interest group. Just as an immune system, lacking enough to fight, will sometimes turn on its host, if we lack enough real problems, we start inventing them.