Lessons We Learned as a Species from the Pandemic
The pandemic has cost the world tremendously in terms of sheer dollars and short-term GDP deficit. In the U.S. alone a record 3.3 million unemployment applications were filed in March. The NWU economist Martin Eichenbaum and colleagues estimate that a yearlong shutdown may cost the country $4.2 trillion, but without such drastic measures we could be looking at an immediate 7% loss, followed by half a million deaths, resulting in a loss of roughly $6.1 trillion. The U.N. is more optimistic estimating a total global cost at around $1 trillion.
Germany’s public health agency is among those that think the epidemic could drag on for more than a year. “Smart containment” aimed at scaling personal participation in the economy based on own’s own health could improve these concerns a lot. A detailed accounting of the cost versus benefit of strict containment response upon the economy indicates that there is a balance to be struck. Too little action or too much action could each prove catastrophic. A multitude of economic analysists vie for dominance in this conversation and effectively advise our governors on how to limit costs in both life and dollar.
Perhaps there are even some long-term economic benefits of the unfolding pandemic. For instance, being forced inside unleashed a live test of the telecommuting principle of employment and so far, the world is passing with flying colors. The Brookings Institute seems to think that this will save employers money in the long run. Long, traffic-jammed commutes are the most despised part of the job for many. They’re also quite dirty, costly and dangerous on account of all that combustion. This brings up an even more salient idea: what about the non-economic benefits of COVID-19?
Is short-term GDP really the best metric for the health and functionality of a country, people, or civilization?
The foundation of western economies is the contractual common law of nature: reciprocity. Thinkers as far back as Aristotle have identified this core value as the basis for all legislation and notions of justice. Presently, the legal system works to discover instances by which reciprocity is violated between actors, both human (individual) and non-human (corporate/nation/group). The obvious problem with this model is that it does not adequately address externalization of damage.
Drag-net fishing of the oceans may be a sensible choice for a corporation or individual concerned with meeting the demands of clients. In that sense it is contractually reciprocal. Unfortunately, this transaction puts the damage on the future of the entire species as a whole. Similarly, the recent pandemic has exposed a very corrupting externality that affects billions of day-job laborers from drivers to office workers: removal of the person from the home.
What is the cost of being removed from your home from dawn till dusk? Economically, it may not even be as productive as remote work, but beyond the direct costs to industry, what damage is externalized to our health, our happiness, and our future existence by such strictly reciprocal jurisprudence? Legal containment of externalized damage is inherently limited to apparent physical destruction. On the other hand, the spiritual havoc wrought by separation from one’s kin by day is incalculable, literally. There is, by definition, no way to materially account for this sort of loss in an economy of ledger. Neither can any fine hope to remedy the burden of separation from the home.
The pandemic has served to remind us of how much we value these non-economic, virtual goods such as time at home with our families. In the words of a good friend, Mr. Jay Smith, a systems manager quarantined from his IT position at Ohio State University, “Home really feels like home now. [Before the pandemic] it just felt like some place we were temporarily renting.” The economic notion of negative compensating differential doesn’t seem to contain the extent of value that has been added to Mr. Smith’s life by the permission to work from home.
Presently, law is essentially limited to contracts, which are materially binding. The problem is that certain externalities, while they may physically affect our health and prosperity down the road, are not inherently catalogable in such metrics. Certain immediately benign contractual decisions merely displace harm onto temporally or spatially removed members of the species. It may be for these reasons that legislation cannot remedy such infractions until injury is long wrought and cause is provided scientifically in retrospect.
In the meantime, we can learn these lessons disaster by disaster. Perhaps this pandemic will affect a transformation toward remote employment by degrees and effectively alleviate a formerly inapparent spiritual externality of contractual labor. Moreover, COVID-19 may prove to be but a small drop in the bucket of the inestimable number of tragedies that must befall us in order to step-by-step legislate a rightly harmonious, healthy, and just co-existence with one another and our ecosystem.
