My first ever blog post here was inspired when a family member passed along this article. It's a fine article with great graphics, but it's also worth noting how many of these pandemics changed history, and what that might mean for us now.
These days the impact of smallpox on Native Americans is pretty widely understood, and because of proximity we're aware of some of the social and political impacts of cholera and Spanish Flu, not to mention AIDS. But we're less aware that most historians believe that the Black Death was instrumental in the expansion of political and economic enfranchisement and rise of democracy. Food was wealth and food required land and all land was held by the nobility; that's what made one nobility. In England the nobility who were left alive suddenly found that they had too few workers to produce the wealth that they relied on. It took only a short while for this to effectively break the system of serfdom, by which workers had been legally tied to the land. Wages rose dramatically, and though laws were passed fixing those wages below post-plague rates, the world was suddenly made aware that if your crop was rotting in the field and your serfs had slipped away in the night for a better prospect elsewhere... the law didn't mean much to the land owner or the worker.
Today, it's notable how quickly supply-side economics dropped off the political map and everybody became a Keynesian when the shit hit the fan and we absolutely really needed real results. I haven't heard anyone talking about how tax cuts for the wealthy could keep this economy afloat. The governments of the world are individually and collectively making a historic first attempt to put their economies into the equivalent of a medically induced coma - a pause while the worst passes so we can heal after. We're seeing graphic illustration of the downside of using unrelenting competitive pressure to squeeze every efficiency out of every sector: there's no slack left when things pull tight, no fat to live off when times get really lean. No one cared when it was just the serfs who starved, but once the nobility start seeing that they might not be able to bring in their own crop things start getting done quick!
We're rapidly enacting measures to ensure that people don't lose their housing and medical coverage during this crisis. The US is even issuing what amounts to a Guaranteed Basic Income payment. Companies are suddenly offering paid leave or extra "hero pay" to the workers whose wages and benefits they've spent billions of dollars suppressing for the last several decades. It will be very interesting to see how hard it is to pull these supports away. Now that it's been done, how many people will wonder why they can't just, y'know - KEEP making $16/hr instead of $14 (or $8). Or why their health care or electricity could be guaranteed in June, but not in October.
For decades, many have wondered what it would take to reverse the relentless escalation of economic imbalance. Let's hope this is it, because if it's not, it'll take something worse. To avoid that possibility, even as things seem grim we should remember the true purpose of that tool mostly associated these days with the iconic image of death.
As my dad used to say, "Best to make hay while the sun shines." The sun will shine again. Let's not waste it.
