The 2020 posts …..so far

The blog marked its 1,500^th post at the beginning of the month – over eleven years. That’s almost 3 posts a week. To celebrate I’ve uploaded the posts for 2020 (86 so far) into a little E-book of some 200 pages which you can find here

I realise this may be a bit daunting for you – so here is the first instalment of a little series I’m offering to entice you into the riches….. I use that word only half-mockingly since the key feature this blog offers is the depth of the hyperlinks it offers into articles and books on important subjects…. It takes the form of one of the tables which have become one of the blog’s distinguishing features – with

-      the first column being the title of a post - to access, just click

-      the second column, trying to identify the event which was the catalyst to the post

-      the final column ,the basic message I would like to think the post should leave with the reader  

The E-book itself starts with an explanation first of the benefits blogging offers; then of why I, in particular, continue to find it a useful self-discipline for almost every morning; and finally why, for the past year, the blog operates with this particular title….. 

The Posts so Far in 2020…..

Title	What sparked it off	The “takeaway” or basic message
To whom it may concern - the 2019 posts	Pride in my posts of the previous year	Tables have become an important self-discipline
Poetry? Maybe	An Adrian Mitchell poem	“Most people ignore most poetry - Because - Most poetry ignores most people”
The Beast destroying the World	Discovering that posts about capitalism were the 2019 posts‘ second favourite topic	Most interesting narratives are from Collier, Hirschmann, Mander, Varoufakis
The Beast – part II	And that few economists could properly explain the global financial crash	My “Dispatches to the Next Generation” identifies more than 200 key books and then whittles that down to 50 or so key texts
Is public administration really all that sexy?	exploring why my fixation about this issue is actually increasing	Events in 2020 have demonstrated how much we have neglected the importance of “the state” in the past 30 years
57 Varieties of Capitalism	The matrix that resulted from an  “ideological triangulation” of a dozen academic disciplines	We need to be more aware of the ideological lens authors are using (often without their own appreciation)
Postmodernism – what is it and does it have a future?	The further thoughts that led me into	It’s been in the air most of us still alive have breathed; we don’t really think about it – nor care…..
My Best Reads of 2019	A useful January exercise	We like to feel, flick and smell the pages of real books
The perils of leaving economics to experts	A great little book called “The Econocracy” with this warning as a sub-title	Economics is a religion – and needs more pluralism and sceptics
The end of a doomed relationship	The leaving of the EU on Jan 31st – Brexit being this blog’s most frequent topic during 2019	To my horror I find that a “Daily Telegraph” article has read my thoughts
Why the British Masochists did what they did	A Dutch friend’s farewell letter	I didn’t do justice to the LEXIT arguments
Does the EU still warrant the support of progressives?	An episode of “The Crown” takes me back to the 1960s and suspicions about a British PM being a Moscow mole	The continuing post-mortem on the British suicide mission
Neutralising Democracy	A superb satire on the british system	Anthony Jay put it all so well in 1989
In Case You Missed it	Frustration with Dropbox	See the E-books listed in the top-right corner of the blog
Links I liked	many significant hyperlinks never see the light of day	I share my morning routines

 

Whatever Happened to “Peak Oil”?

It was almost 50 years ago we first heard the notion of there being “Limits to Growth” and the idea of oil supply – the basic source of modern civilisation – reaching a peak was developed by a geophysicist a decade earlier.

It was, however, Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse – the soviet experience and American prospects and J Michael Greer’s The Long Descent – a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age” (both 2008) which first made me aware of the dramatic changes we would need to make in our life styles - if these predictions proved true. These, of course, were the days when the reality of global warming had not really struck home – although there had been no shortage of warning voices in earlier years eg Bill McKibben whose “The End of Nature” was published in 1989.                 

The rise and fall of civilisations had, of course, been a popular theme at both the beginning and the middle of the 20^th Century in the writings of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee but, by the 1960s, we had become so enthralled with the notion of technical progress that such writing was seen as “old wives’ tales”. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987) may have been a warning shot but, coming a mere 2 years before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, served only to boost the celebrationism of the time.  And Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) was too narrowly conceived – with this critical review lambasting it,

Jared Diamond tried to jolt us back to our senses with his “Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed” (2005) - but it took the global financial crash of 2008 to make us begin to question our direction with any seriousness.

Right-wing historian Niall Fergusson’s 2010 article in “Foreign Affairs” reflects that new mood of sober realism.

And it was that same global financial crash that brought oil prices down and made investment in renewable energy once again a “yessable” proposition – as Greer anticipates in “The Long Descent”. Covid19 is having the same effect…  

I read Orlov’s book some years ago and followed Greer’s blog until it ended a couple of years ago. But I have just been able to download “The Long Descent” from Zlibrary (https://1lib.eu/) and found this recent post by Michael Greer a useful summary of his position -

Since some of my current readers weren’t yet reading me when I last discussed these issues – in “The Long Descent” (2008), I’ll start with some general points and go from there.

One of the great mental blind spots of our society is the notion that there are only two possible futures: on the one hand, business as usual stretching endlessly into the future, with a side order of technological progress dished up at intervals; on the other, sudden apocalyptic mass death, with or without a small band of plucky survivors sitting around a campfire as the final credits roll. An astonishing number of people these days literally won’t let themselves think about any other possible future, and will either change the subject or get furiously angry at you if you should be so bold as to suggest one.

 

The evasion and the anger come from the same source, which is that those imaginary futures are the ways most of us distract ourselves from the future we’re actually getting: a future of decline.

·         We all know this. If you’re old enough to be out of elementary school, you’ve already seen ongoing declines in standards of living, public health, public order, the quality of education, the condition of our infrastructure, and much more.

·         Those trends define our future. They also defined the future of every past civilization, because that’s how civilizations end, and it’s how ours will end, 100 to 300 years from now.

·         Again, at some level, all of us know this, but it’s taboo to discuss the matter or even think about it, which is why so many people bury their heads in shopworn fantasies of perpetual progress or overnight cataclysm.

 

One other thing. Technology will not save us from the Long Descent, because technology is the main factor driving the Long Descent. The more technology you have, the more energy and resources of every kind you need to build, maintain, repair, replace, and dispose of it, and the mismatch between endlessly rising resource costs and the hard limits of a finite planet is one of the main factors bringing about the declines I’ve just described. Nor does technology allow one energy resource to be replaced with another, except in small and irrelevant ways.

 

The world now burns more coal than it did at the peak of the Coal Age, for example, and more wood than it did when firewood was the main source of heating fuel worldwide. As renewable power sources got added to the mix, furthermore, the amount of fossil fuels being burnt didn’t go down -- it went up. (That’s caused by a widely recognized law of energy economics, by the way; look up Jevons’ Paradox sometime.) If progress is the problem, more progress is not the solution -- but here again, that’s utterly unthinkable these days. Faith in progress is the most popular idolatry of our time, and a vast number of people who claim to belong to other religions or to no religion at all are devout worshipers at the shrine of the golden calf named Progress.

 

So where are we headed?  That hasn’t changed one iota since the last time I discussed these issues. “The Limits to Growth”, the most thoughtful (and thus inevitably the most savagely denounced) of the Seventies-era books that explored the landscape ahead of us, traced the arc of our future in a convenient graph. Between 1972 and the present, its predictions have proven much more accurate than those of the book’s critics -- another reason why it’s been assailed in such shrill language for all these years. Here’s the graph: (sorry it doesn't show in this text - please consult Greer's post)

 

I’d encourage my readers to pay attention to two things about the graph. The first, which should be obvious at a glance but has been ignored astonishingly often, is that it doesn’t show any kind of sudden apocalyptic event. What it shows is a long and relatively smooth transition from a world of abundant resources and sustained economic growth to a world of scarce resources and sustained economic contraction. Population doesn’t fall off a cliff, it rises, crests, and declines. Pollution doesn’t up and kill everybody; it rises, helps drive declines in food and population, and then declines in turn as industrial output falls off.

 

The second thing about the graph I’d like readers to notice is subtler, and you may need to read the book to grasp it: the limits to growth are economic limits, not technical ones. What happens, in brief, is that the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits, until finally they overwhelm growth itself and force the global economy to its knees. What this means, in turn, is that proposed solutions have to be economically viable, not just technically feasible. 

As you can see, Greer writes very well. And he’s not just good on theory but on practice. Chapter 4 of his book has 4 bits of advice –

- reduce your energy use (by half id possible – restrict use of the car;praxtice coping with blackout)

- DIY health

- community networking

- choose a viable profession (market gardening; clothes repair) 

A Peak Oil resource

- Prosper – how to prepare for the future and a world worth inheriting; Chris Martensen and Adam Taggart (2017). The vast majority of books on peak oil (let alone global warming) are written by leftists. This is a rare, exuberant and remarkably easy read; aimed at those who want to be ahead of the curve; takes the question of collapse for granted; and looks at how we should be preparing for it – using the concepts of time and 6 forms of capital (social, intellectual, material etc). 

“The first step toward achieving long-term sustainable prosperity is, of course, to adopt a better narrative - a narrative of living within our means, of resource stewardship, and of finding happiness in a life of purpose, not of possessions. If the old narrative was extractive and isolating, the new narrative needs to be regenerative and relational”. 

A presentation by Chris Martenson about his Crash Course here

 Some of Greer’s writings can still be found in the Counter Currents website eg  https://www.countercurrents.org/greer290511A.htm; and   https://www.countercurrents.org/greer241111.htm. Just type J Michael Greer in the search engine

-       The Five Stages of Collapse – survivor’s toolkit; Dmitry Orlov (2013) I’ve just been able to download this more recent book by Orlov. The guy has a great sense of humour.

-       https://www.resilience.org/ One of the movement’s main mags

The continuing Saga of Brexit

In just over 2 months, the fate of the UK will be finally sealed – the country will leave the European Union not just on paper but with full legal consequences, the transitional arrangements of this year expiring on 31 January 2021. I follow only 3 blogs on these issues – Boffy’s Blog; Brexit Blog and EU Referendum. First Boffy                        

The reality is that Britain needs the EU far more than the EU needs Britain - and all the cards are in the hands of the EU, when it comes to these negotiations. The end result will be that, at the end of the process, Britain will have less sovereignty than it did as a member of the EU, and has been greatly depreciated in its power and influence in the world, just as Boris's inevitable capitulation again leaves him looking weak and powerless, and quite frankly a bit of a blow-hard, much as is Britain itself. 

The reality is that if Britain wants a trade deal with the EU, and it does, because the EU accounts for the vast majority of Britain's trade, and will do forever more, simply on the basis of its proximity, Britain will have to comply with EU rules and regulations, because the EU is seven times bigger than Britain, and is, therefore, able to dictate the terms.

If Britain wanted a trade deal with the US or China, the same would apply, because neither the US nor China will allow goods into their economies that do not comply with their rules and regulations, otherwise they would be putting their own producers at a competitive disadvantage.

 

Similarly, the US and China would insist that Britain accept into its market US or Chinese goods that comply only with their standards, not with any that the UK wants to impose, otherwise there would be no advantage for those large economies in striking any such deal. They may not bother in relation to any goods that are not important to them, but for every type of production that is significant to their economy they will insist on their rules, regulations and standards being the ones that have to be complied with. That is the subordinate position that Brexit has put Britain in. It no longer has any leverage to determine those rules, regulations and standards, and no say in their determination, as it did as a member of the EU. 

 

Tory politicians keep banging on about it being unfair that the EU will not give them a Canada style free trade deal. Welcome to the real world where what happens has nothing to do with “fairness” or morality, but is instead determined by power relations, and those with more power get to set the terms. The Tories, of course, have always been used to sitting in the bosses' seat which has power in relation to workers, and where they have been able to negotiate on that basis. Now they are in the position of a group of weak workers, badly organised and facing a powerful employer. 

Moreover, the EU was never going to give the UK a deal like Canada, because Britain is on the EU's border; in Ireland physically on its border. Also the deal with Canada increases trade and reduces costs between them, but any EU-UK trade deal will result in less trade, and greater costs than already exists.

 

The EU does not have to worry that capital is going to relocate to Canada to avoid EU regulations, but it does in relation to Britain. That is why the EU is insistent on the points about state aid, and on regulation. Britain's perfidy in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement, and the UK Internal Markets Bill, as well as its proposals to introduce Free Ports where all sorts of fly by night and shady businesses are allowed to set up shop, and flout rules, gives the EU more than ample reason to distrust UK intentions in that regard. It’s not that the EU fears the UK's plans for “state aid” as such. Why would it, its Britain that has been the champion of the small state, and red in tooth and claw free market competition, and devil take the hindmost. Britain has not even used current state aid provisions, inside the EU, to provide short term assistance to struggling industries. No, what the EU knows is that the Tories would use any such leeway simply to provide assistance to chosen businesses to compete unfairly with it. 

 

And fisheries provides an interesting lesson. The contribution of fishing to the UK economy is minimal. If the fishing industry disappeared tomorrow the economy would not notice it. From an economic standpoint, allowing defence of fishing to get in the way of a trade deal makes no sense. Britain would benefit far more from a deal where fishing disappeared, but where it had better access to EU markets, than denying itself such access simply to protect fishing. For one thing, if Britain tries to exclude EU fishing fleets, and does not get a trade deal, it will find great difficulty selling the fish it catches, when they have large tariffs imposed on them, because the majority of that fish is sold in Europe not Britain. 

So, why are the Tories making a big thing about fishing? The reason is that the Tories hung their Brexit hat on questions like fishing. Fishing for them became totemic of the drive for national sovereignty. The right to exclude others from your waters was a symbol of the implementation of that sovereignty…..the Tories have made a big thing about fishing, because having made it totemic of their claims about national sovereignty, they picked up political support, and parliamentary seats in those coastal areas where fishing is seen as important. In other words, the Tories are failing to strike a deal, by insisting on their position on fishing, not out of any national interest, but purely out of their own narrow party political interest. They know that when they capitulate on fishing, a lot of the rhetoric around national sovereignty goes down the pan, and with it all of the nationalistic argument for Brexit itself, but they also know that they lose face in all those coastal areas where they picked up votes and MP's. 

Chris Grey’s weekly Brexit Blog is, for me, the bible on these issues – and his latest weekly post duly landed yesterday with a thud in my letterbox

It is clear that the EU will not walk out of the talks and that whilst they continue, fisheries, state aid and the governance of any agreement remain the familiar, widely-reported, stumbling blocks. Of these, the third, governance, has grown in salience because the Internal Market Bill (IMB) has so badly damaged the EU’s trust in the UK (£). But the truth is that this lack of trust has been growing over years, as I catalogued in a post last May, accelerating with Johnson’s cavalier repudiation of much of the Political Declaration.

Lack of trust is now central
The IMB was just the last straw, and - even if the relevant clauses get abandoned, as they still may - its attempt at hardball tactics has badly misfired. For, especially given the new Covid-19 situation, Johnson might want to play the same trick as he did in January and sign up to some kind of deal which he could then try to backtrack on later. If so, the IMB has made that a great deal harder. He has played his tricks so many times that there is no longer any goodwill. Trust and goodwill can sound like airy-fairy concepts in the cold-eyed world of trade negotiations and international relations but they are indispensable, especially in such a complex and unprecedented negotiation as this one.
…..At the same time, there are increasing concerns about the government’s commitment to the rule of law, not just because of the IMB but also the recent attacks from the Home Office on the legal profession, attacks repeated by Johnson in his party conference speech. The backdrop of the illegal prorogation of parliament and the grab of executive power in relation to both Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through the extensive use of Statutory Instruments, contributes to these concerns. As David Allen Green, the Financial Times’ Law and Policy commentator, discusses, there is now a question as to whether Britain is moving towards “government by decree”.

Also rumbling away in the background is the long-standing hostility of many parts of the Tory Party – strongly overlapping with those that are the most pro-Brexit – to the Human Rights Act and, even, to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Indeed it is worth recalling that before the Referendum, Theresa May, whilst campaigning to remain in the EU, proposed that Britain leave the ECHR. Perhaps of more relevance at the present time is Dominic Cummings’ assertion that after Brexit “we’ll be coming for the ECHR”.

No doubt this would find considerable support amongst many leave voters. Throughout the Referendum campaign in conversations and on social media when leavers were asked to give examples of EU laws they disliked these were almost invariably judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (usually garbled versions of these, but that is another matter). Although this is only based on my own experience, I’m pretty sure it was the case more generally. It perhaps doesn’t need to be said here, but the ECHR and its Court are not EU institutions, and Brexit does not affect Britain’s participation in them.

A problematic neighbour
Having been repeatedly stung by British perfidy – especially over the Withdrawal Agreement/ Political Declaration - there is a strong incentive to nail down the governance terms of any agreement, and if that is not possible to accept that there will be no deal this year. As Clement Beaune, the French European Affairs Minister said this week, “it’s a matter of how the UK is a partner of trust in the years to come”.

Britain unprepared
If such strategic considerations inform the EU’s approach to these final phases of the negotiations, in the UK it is short-term factors which mainly predominate. I’ve been writing since at least October 2018 about the lack of preparedness of businesses (and other organizations) for Brexit, and in several recent posts about how government information for businesses has come too late and been lacking in key operational detail. Throughout that time there has been a drumbeat of implicit criticism from the government of businesses for being unprepared (and – paradoxically – a veritable orchestra attacking business bodies for their warnings of how much will change).
In recent days, these criticisms have mounted. First, the Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, issued a panicky sounding “urgent message” to businesses to get ready for the end of transition. The next day Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew accused them of “burying their heads in the sand”, attracting widespread condemnation (£). I’m conscious that I keep repeating that I am repeating myself but as I wrote a few weeks ago these criticisms of business are outrageous given the years of dishonest promises of continued ‘frictionless trade’, the lateness of government planning for the effects of Brexit, and the dismissal of the warnings about both.

Even now, although it is true that some of what is to come will occur with or without a deal, businesses that will face tariffs if there isn’t a deal are left in limbo since, in at least some cases, this is not something they can prepare for as it will simply sound their death knell regardless of any actions they take in advance. Nor are tariffs the only issue. It has long been explained to Brexiters that a ‘Canada-style’ Free Trade Agreement – actually, any Free Trade Agreement – will do relatively little for services trade and, certainly, will offer far less integration than single market membership. But for years they either ignored it, or pretended that a ‘Super-Canada’ deal would be done that would magically avoid this problem. 

The reason why trade agreements do little for services is because, even more than for goods trade, liberalisation requires removing non-tariff barriers. This in turn entails some loss of national regulatory control or, in Brexiter terms, sovereignty. An example of the kind of issue at stake is the mutual recognition of professional qualifications in, for example, law and accountancy, and in fact, despite its recent rhetoric of asking for no more than what Canada has, the UK has been seeking such recognition in the negotiations with the EU.
This seems to have been unsuccessful (though that cannot yet be said definitively) and if so that is unsurprising as it is a version of ‘cakeism’ – that is, wanting to have a benefit of single market membership without being a member. The consequence, as a House of Lords sub-committee reported this week (£), will be very considerable potential damage to the UK’s £225 billion professional services industry. As with sectors like pharmaceuticals, auto, aerospace, chemicals and also some that get less attention (e.g. music, computer gaming, fintech) the UK is ripping up some of its biggest economic success stories – areas where, to use the government’s favourite phrase, Britain is ‘world-beating’ – in the name of the Brexit theology of sovereignty.

Holding all the cards?
Also unsuccessful has been the “UK plea” for special allowances on electric car and battery exports (this would have meant an exemption for this sector from rules of origin which, in general, we already know will be applied). This, remember, is a sector identified by Boris Johnson in 2019 as being one in which the UK plans to emerge as a future world leader. And in the balance are arrangements for air travel at the end of the Transition Period if there is no deal. As things stand, it is not known what will be in place but, in the event of no deal, the Transport Secretary says “we expect the EU to bring forward contingency measures” so that flights can continue. Hardly reassuring for those wanting to plan travel for a time which is now less than eighty days away.
It’s worth noting the tone in both these stories. Whereas the Brexiters promised that Britain would ‘hold all the cards’ once it voted to leave the EU it is now a matter of ‘pleading’ with the EU for special treatment and being entirely dependent upon the EU to keep something as basic as air travel to the continent. That’s not the result of EU ‘bullying’ but the fact, as the air travel case illustrates literally, that if a country disconnects itself from an interconnected world then inevitably it becomes the supplicant when seeking to reconnect itself. Sovereignty doesn’t put planes in the air.

But there is small comfort in the spectacle of all the Brexiter claims being discredited. Between the ravages that Covid-19 is inflicting on businesses and those self-inflicted by Brexit it is becoming increasingly difficult to see what kind of economy Britain is going to be left with this time next year. And that self-inflicted wound isn’t just a result of Brexit, but of the way Brexit has been done and even just of the bone-headed refusal, in the midst of a pandemic, to extend the Transition Period, which would at least have cushioned or delayed much of the damage.

Time is running out but negotiations will never end
Having refused to do so when it was both possible and obviously going to be needed has now exposed the UK to a dire set of risks, for the end of year deadline is one that Johnson cannot now conveniently drop. It is ironic that David Frost is reportedly complaining that (£) the EU is “using the old playbook” of “running down the clock” when it was the UK that ensured that the clock stopped on 31 January. That of course was predicated on the theory that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’, a theory now being tested to destruction, with the most recent EU Council statement having a decidedly ‘take it or leave it’ tone.
This exposes the obvious difficulty with the government’s approach which is that it entails the UK being willing to ‘walk away’ without a deal. But apart from all the damage that would do, disproportionately to the UK, the story about contingency measures for air travel in the event of no deal shows the hollowness of the idea. For immediately after having done so Johnson would have to return to the table to agree these and other measures. So if later today, or any other time, he were to announce the end of future terms talks then almost the next day they would resume in a new form.

In several recent posts I’ve argued that it is pointless trying to predict whether or not there will be a deal, and I must confess to becoming increasingly irritated by the numerous pundits trying to do so. But, in addition to that, the wider implication of what I’ve written today is that if there is no deal – and, in a less dramatic way, even if there is a deal – that won’t be a ‘settled’ relationship, and so won’t be the end of ‘Brexit negotiations’. It will be the beginning of more negotiations.
So, depressing as it is to say it, the current ‘deal or no deal’ episode isn’t even the prelude to a resolution. For, given the irreducible fact that the EU is a major economic bloc sitting geographically right next door, there will be never-ending negotiations of one sort or another. Indeed it must be conceded that one, at least, of the Brexiters’ slogans has been proved true. Unsurprisingly so, since it was the truism that ‘we’re leaving the EU but we’re not leaving Europe’.

Covid19, governments, lies and science

Confession time – for years I have referred to ex-UK PM Tony Blair as T Bliar because of the role he played in leading us into the Iraq war on the basis of the lies he spread about Hussein’s possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

But Blair is an innocent compared to current British Prime Minister Boris Johnston – renowned throughout the world for the apparently temperamental inability his entire career has demonstrated of being unable to distinguish truth from reality.

This is nowhere more obvious than in the constant refrain Johnson has offered, throughout the Covid pandemic, of simply “following the science”. The 3Quarks Daily site offers today the best putdown of this defence 

Since Covid became an epidemic it is no longer a merely scientific problem. Dealing with it requires balancing conflicting values and the interests of multitudes of people and organisations. This is an essentially political challenge that scientists lack the conceptual apparatus or legitimacy to address.

Epidemiologists can inform the political process but not replace it. In particular, they can advise governments on the sources of risk and the projected levels of risk associated with different Covid policies.

However, as we have seen in the various approaches to lockdown and rollback around the world, how governments address Covid does not follow directly from their different epidemiological circumstances. Governments make two specific political choices well or badly:

-       how much Covid risk to tolerate and

-       how that risk ‘budget’ should be allocated between competing social needs and interest groups.

 

First governments must decide how much Covid matters to them, i.e. how far to prioritise controlling the epidemic relative to their other priorities, such as economic prosperity, other aspects of public health, and their own political survival.

The health of the general population will never be the only concern, and this is entirely reasonable and moral in a world of trade-offs (or we would all demand a speed limit of 10 mph on our roads). This does not mean that we cannot criticise the specific trade-offs a government chooses to make ‘on our behalf’, for example if it seems to value its own political survival far above the lives of citizens.

Closely connected to how much to care is the question of how rosy a view of the risks to take, i.e. whether to plan for the best or worst case scenarios posited by epidemiologists. Together this exercise generates what may be called a ‘risk budget’.

 

Second, governments must decide how to allocate their risk budget among a society’s competing needs and interests. Whatever precautions individuals follow, all physical interactions carry some risk of transmission and hence of raising R nought. Which interactions are worth that risk?

For example, should the airline industry, the hospitality sector, or schools get to resume something like normal services, and thereby resume serving those who depend on them (such as children and working parents), while imposing risks on those who work in them (such as teachers)?

Because there is a limited amount of normality to go around, who gets to enjoy its benefits or suffer its consequences is a matter of intense political competition. One would hope that the political system would prioritise those whose interests have the greatest moral claims and/or generate the greatest net beneficial impact. For example, in person schooling is of great direct and indirect value to children, and also frees up working parents to do all the things we would like them to do, like run ICUs. In contrast, in person university teaching is entirely dispensable except for a handful of vocational subjects like nursing.

 

However we all know that even in the best of times and the best democracies, risks are distributed rather more according to a political than a moral logic, i.e. those groups least able to resist end up holding the shortest straw. Hence the fact that noxious and dangerous facilities like highways, refineries, incinerators and so on are much more likely to be sited in poor and minority neighbourhoods. So it is not surprising that even democratic governments who can legitimately appeal to the public interest are vulnerable to political resentment from those who lose out from Covid risk rationing, especially as time passes and their costs mount.

 

Governments pass from being seen as saviours into callous and arbitrary gatekeepers controlling who gets access to the suddenly precious domain of business as usual. People lose their jobs and fear losing their homes; business owners lose their shirts; families lose the chance to say goodbye to dying relatives; and so on just because of the rules set by the government. Set us free! they cry. 

Covid can’t be worse than this! Ironically, this challenge is only possible because of the success that Covid risk rationing achieved in preventing far more infections and deaths. It thus invokes the paradox of expertise in which the absence of catastrophe counts as evidence that there was no real catastrophe to evade, rather than as evidence that it has successfully been evaded by following the experts’ advice (elsewhere).