The loss of potential and love during pandemic
If we’re friends, you know that I’m straightforward and don’t like beating around the bush. And right now, I would rather all of us know what we’re up against than find out the hard way and not be ready for it. This will be tough to read, so read when you’ve got the capacity for it.
I have been noticing a lot that people aren’t quite grasping long term implications right now. How could we? We’re just trying to find and hold onto our center for dear life right now. I want to write about a few things with the hopes that you’ll be able to internalize it and take care of yourself and your family accordingly. I don’t know how much of an arbiter of truth I am, and none of this is new because the Spanish Flu happened/history has been plagued with pandemics + countries like New Zealand have given us a global best practice (Puerto Rico is doing well too sans the carrying travelers/visitors) + economists and other countries have taught us how to prevent or deal with social collapse... but I want to share what I’ve been reading, seeing, and thinking. I will leave out the political stuff since I already wrote about that extensively, albeit informally. I’ll include links this time around.
Living through social collapse is difficult. I have been struggling a lot recently coming to grips with a new reality in America for the unforeseeable future. For the first few months of all of this, there was a hope that there would be an end. I lost that vision a couple weeks ago.
Let’s start with COVID-related quotes and things as a baseline:
From Dr. Fauci on number of cases a couple weeks ago:
“I can’t make an accurate prediction but it’s going to be very disturbing. We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around, and so I am very concerned.” (CNBC link).
Now, while our publicly reported positive case numbers are not yet over 100,000, Youyang Gu’s model based on deaths (Link), which has been the most accurate, is now estimating 275,000 infections per day. (I’ll get back to this one).
“That means that 1 in every 90 Americans (1.1%) is currently infected (including asymptomatic individuals). This may still be an underestimate.” (Tweet link).
Youyang also gave a very good thought exercise that would help put things in context (assuming people continue to go out without wearing masks). He says:
“Here’s a light-hearted trivia question that highlights the concept of exponential growth:
A lily pad growing in a pond doubles in size every day. After 30 days, it covers the entire pond. On what day does it cover half the pond? Day 2, day 15, or day 29?”
The answer is day 29 (Tweet link), and hopefully that gives you perspective of how the cases and deaths in this country are growing out of control in the U.S., and what that means for us in the coming days, weeks, and months. If it took four months to reach 130,000+ deaths, the next 130,000+ will take two months, then one month, etc. unless we act and do the right thing.
Quote from Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell, on the American economy:
“A full recovery is unlikely until people are confident that it is safe to re-engage in a broad range of activities. A second wave could force people to withdraw and undermine public confidence, which is what we need to get back to lots of kinds of economic activity that involve crowds.” (NY Times link).
Referring back to Youyang Gu’s tweet, one can ascertain that the reason for the undercounts are mostly for a couple of reasons (neither are good). The first being that an overwhelmed healthcare system with limited resources doesn’t have the capacity to test, trace, and quarantine THAT many people. The other reason is more nefarious in that states are lying about their data so they can re-open businesses and keep the economy going. On the latter, you wouldn’t know it from the undercounts, but according to Arturo Galletti’s model (Link), the highest risk county in the country right now is Davidson County in Tennessee, or the greater Nashville area (Tweet link). As a combination of the reasons, the U.S. will be playing whack-a-mole as one major outbreak happens from New York to Arizona to Florida, etc., with healthcare resources being overwhelmed and depleted, and eventually being forced to make extremely difficult decisions.
Now, what Chairman Powell explains in simple terms is the economic principle “propensity to consume.” This is the idea of how much one person will spend rather than save. What happens when the federal government doesn’t invest in people in the middle of a pandemic and instead only gives people unemployment and a one-time $1200 check (which, unemployment + PPP is expected to run out at the end of July barring a miracle from the Senate)? People don’t spend. What are you personally spending your money on? Basic needs and not much else, right? You don’t know when you might be one of the 50+ million unemployed, so you need to save. There is an anecdote from Economist Umair Haque I’ll share, which he wrote on May 1st (Link).
“What Coronavirus is going to have created is what economists sometimes call a ‘substitution effect.’ It’s going to replace good jobs at small and medium sized businesses with exploitative ones, at mega corporations. The number of such jobs offered is going to be smaller too. As a result, people will have to compete harder for even that work.
That’s going to have ruinous effects. Without stable and rising incomes, people’s ‘propensity to consume’ will fall. Translation: they won’t be able to spend enough money to bring an economy of gentle Main Street businesses back to life, because they won’t have it. Saving? Forget about it. Many of these dismal shifts in behaviour — ordering everything from Amazon and Instacart — are likely to be permanent.
What will we see, in the end? An economy with permanently lower levels of all the following key indicators. Employment — especially good, lasting employment. Income. Savings. Home ownership. Upwards mobility. People not trapped by unpayable levels of debt. Investment, and as a result, education, longevity, health. Social bonds. Trust. Happiness. And ultimately, meaning. When I’m bitterly competing with you for even that exploitative crap gig — what meaning can my life really have? I’ll never be that novelist, artist, scientist, explorer I wanted to be. Here I am, stuck in the jaws of a life going nowhere. That, my friends, is what a depression really is: human potential going up in smoke. That’s what the Coronavirus Depression looks like.”
Every day that people continue to go out or not follow the guidance of things that work (stay at home, wear a mask, stay six feet away, etc.), this pushes the length of this depression by an equal or greater time and puts all of our social systems at risk of collapsing. If we had shut down hard and provided economic support to incentivize people to stay home, we would have successfully overcome this by now, with periodic outbreaks and episodic waves. A more tempered depression with occasional 4-6 week shutdowns that other countries will face. Instead, America is stuck with mass death and economic depression until there is a vaccine, at a minimum.
Now, the basic construct of society is that it’s not possible for me to be me without you. I need a farmer to be great so that I can have food delivered to the Piggly Wiggly next to my house in the suburbs of Birmingham, and so that I can spend my time trying to become what it is that I want to be. This is the same for you. Because of the farmer, we can dream big, work towards big ideas, and collectively solve society’s problems and provide each other better, higher quality lives. And ideally give back to the farmer so he can be rewarded for what he’s allowed us all to become.
But with a pandemic running rampant, here’s the cycle we are now stuck in:
- We can’t even go out without worrying about dying 3-4 weeks later.
- If we can’t go out, businesses don’t get money.
- If businesses lose money, they will close.
- If businesses close, people will lose jobs.
- If people lose jobs, they can’t pay their bills.
- If people can’t pay their bills, businesses don’t get money.
- Rinse and repeat.
There are a few consequences here:
If businesses don’t get money, no one will take a chance and open a new business. The risk of entrepreneurship is too high when you’re trying to just keep a roof over your head and put food on the table. The loans given out will be with much higher risk/interest because the loaner doesn’t want to lose either. When people aren’t starting businesses, the local economy doesn’t grow. Therefore, local + state + federal suffers. When local + state + federal suffers and people lose jobs and aren’t spending, social systems collapse. When social systems collapse, the amount of effort it will take to bring those back will be exponentially more difficult. Who has time and money to spend on a social system and help each other when they’re most concerned with self-preservation?
For example, when we don’t contribute to social systems, how will we improve on public education? Those employees will get reduced incomes, be furloughed or laid off as the system itself loses money because people aren’t spending or donating.
We are already seeing the negative impacts of the pandemic on education via online learning. I’ll provide two quotes below, but essentially you have parents who are forced by employers to work with their kids not around (which is a disaster of an idea coupled with childcare centers closing), so parents can’t be there with their child to make sure they are doing their schoolwork during the day (a role a teacher would traditionally play) because the parent is focused on trying to keep their job so the family can have a roof over their head and food on the table.
From Annika Olson of U.S. News & World Report:
“A tracking system developed by researchers at Harvard and Brown University studied how children progressed before and after schools closed in March on Zearn, an online math program. As of early June, total student progress in the program's online math curriculum had decreased by nearly 71% compared to January of this year.” Olson adds, “When kids fall this far behind in school, consequences are big. A former Tennessee state education commissioner recently explained that online learning and a lack of structured curricula could set back an entire generation of children.” (Link).
I was talking to a kindergarten teacher this week who told me that the superintendent of her school system (it’s in Alabama, but I won’t say which system) is suggesting that the curriculum right now will be focused on helping the children understand how to handle the uncertainty and anxiety of the pandemic. That teachers and children won’t have to worry about and be evaluated on the results of testing scores.
So, if our children are not learning right now, our future is stifled. For parents and adults, they can’t aspire to live to their fullest potential, or give their children the best chance at the brightest future possible. They are just trying to keep it together right now. So, who at all has any potential right now other than the super wealthy? And what incentive do they have to give us anything other than the bare minimum when the competition has declared bankruptcy or liquidated their assets?
When jobs are lost and people are stuck in the same roles (if they're lucky) because businesses just can’t afford to give anyone a raise or promotion right now, we also lose our vision as to what is possible for us to aspire to. When people aren’t consuming or spending money and businesses close, and people are focused on survival, how likely is it for someone to take a chance and become something like the next great author, artist, scientist, or president? When that happens, what dreams will our children have? They will be limited by the reality of their lives.
Lastly, one of the most natural things for us is to love. Whether a significant other, or a new friend we connect with. In the midst of a pandemic, who we have in our lives is who we have and are comfortable with. Fortunately with technology, we’re able to stay connected through our phones and social media. Still, a rift in trust exists now where we almost need to vet someone to make sure they’re being smart by quarantining or wearing a mask before we decide if it’s safe to spend time with them. This creates a gaping, traumatic hole in our social lives, and as a result our happiness, wellbeing, and self-esteem.
For example, I have been playing music with my friends Matt and James for the last year or so. They live a few blocks away from me. On a Friday night or Saturday afternoon, they’d bring their guitar or bass over, and we’d play along to songs we’d been listening to recently or wanted to learn/play with each other. We’d play, sing, chat and laugh in my garage for hours and hours. Now, we wonder if it’s worth the risk of being in an indoor area together for an extended period of time. James is a dentist who went back to work when it was possible for him to, and I’m living with my parents who are both over 60 and at-risk. We haven’t played together in a couple of months. You realize just how much of a luxury it is to play music with other people.
And so, if we don’t have potential, lose our capacity to love, and lose our ability to develop or create social bonds, what do we have to look forward to? That is the consequence we’re facing in America and are going to have to learn to cope with.
Of course, the answer to recovery is to be together in isolation so we can suffer now, and recover together later and rebuild our social systems. Yet, every day we put this off is another day or three that it will take for us to build back the society we know and love.