Ethics and the Coronavirus
Ethics and the Coronavirus
When I was just 4 years old, in 1953, my sister and I lined up at the public library to get our polio vaccine in little sugar cubes. One of the girls in our first grade had crutches from her bout with polio, but otherwise we were spared from widespread epidemics, other than measles and chicken pox, neither of which was terribly disabling. There were no homeless people or panhandlers on the streets, though my mother seemed fond of quoting Matthew’s gospel that “the poor will always be with us.” But watching the world’s reaction to the coronavirus, it’s looking like fewer of the poor will be with us, especially as an even more serious pandemic seems likely in the not too distant future.
Poor nations are likely to have greater losses from the coronavirus, and in both China and the U.S., the poor are at a distinct disadvantage. In China, where the outbreak began, the nation’s poor have less access to supplies, and have neither the money or the connections to leave the country. As the cost of food, medicines and supplies increase because of the outbreak, only the well-to-do in China can maintain their lifestyles; those living hand to mouth, the vast majority of China’s 1.3 billion population, are being left behind.
Low-wage workers in China are often on the front lines in containing the virus; delivery drivers or small shop workers don’t have the option of staying home, because they lack savings or social support. Workers who are informally employed get no social security protection, and those living in crowded conditions under quarantine are more likely to be exposed to the virus. If you are well-connected in China –– with the right guanxi, that is –– you can get permission to travel.
In the United States, business executives are foregoing first class tickets on commercial airlines in favor of private planes. The well-to-do have begun traveling to more remote locations. Concierge doctors are seeing a rise in wealthy clients consulting on best practices to avoid the virus. And masks? Only the best: instead of spending four bucks on a bottle of hand sanitizer, you can get a European luxury brand “rinse free hand wash” with floral notes of pear and bergamot for $35, but only if you know the right people.
The very-well-to-do can buy round the clock access to doctors, member-only hospital amenities (to avoid more public emergency rooms); family memberships run about $8,000 a year, and for one concierge provider, Sollis, membership inquiries are spiking. Existing members have the means to stock up on antiviral medications such as Tamiflu and Xofluza, respiratory medications like Albuterol inhalers and Sudafed, and antibiotics like Levaquin and Azithromycin.
In parts of Silicon Valley, some of the tech-elite began preparing for hard times by revamping abandoned missile silos, converting them into luxury bunkers. The New York Times notes that “coronavirus is precisely the doomsday scenario they’ve been preparing for.” (The other “doomsday scenario” is, of course, runaway global warming and some of Silicon Valley’s elite have brought huge tracts of pristine land in faraway places or created fabulous underground bunkers to ride out disaster times.)
Currently, one former partner at a venture capital firm has been stocking up on canned food, water, hand sanitizer and toilet paper in anticipation of an outbreak. A high-end air purifier he’s considering –– Molekule Air ––costs $799.
It’s not just the poor in China or the U.S. that are less likely to be with us; entire nations have borne the brunt of rare disease outbreaks, most of them with the lowest per capita incomes. For climate change, those nations least able to afford adaptation –– those nations that are the least responsible for global warming –– will suffer the most.
The so-called “China Dream” and the “American Dream –– both of which espouse enhanced economic and social opportunity –– can now be seen as empty promises, since only the privileged can better their chances of survival. The dream of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and the “War on Poverty” became lost in the rise of neo-classical economics and the revival of “every person for themselves” in the Reagan era. The myth reborn then, which still persists, is that we must all –– both as individuals and business firms –– pursue our own self-interest aggressively and relentlessly to create the greatest GDP and thus, the greatest good. (Although it’s by now abundantly clear that increasing GDP does not increase social well-being.)
The myth that self-interest maximizing creates good is akin to Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” slogan, and corrupted the notion that we are all in this together. Remember “e pluribus unum” –– out of many, one? Forget it: the rise of “Chicago Man” (homo economicus, or the rational self-maximizing person or firm) went hand in hand with the denigration of government services that began in the Reagan Administration. The scariest words in the English language were, according to Reagan, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
Grover Norquist, the tax cutting champion of that age, was said to have aimed to make government so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub. Deregulatory fervor brought us the Savings and Loan Crisis and eventually, the Financial Crisis of 2008. The myth of the self-regulating market has resulted in a free for all in which money and position have been steadily leveraged, decade after decade, into crony capitalism, with its lenience on big financial firms (bailouts but no quid pro quo) and tax breaks for corporations and the well-to-do. All this as the poor are left to fend for themselves.
It’s all perfectly legal, of course. But even as tax cuts and willful neglect of public goods like bridges and tunnels become dangerous, the regulatory infrastructure has suffered, as well. One reason the government is so ill-prepared to deal with the coronavirus is that budgets for the CDC and other fast-response teams have been cut year by year, especially in the Trump Administration.
As George Packer wrote recently in The Atlantic, The White House has “treated the coronavirus epidemic as more of a political problem for the president than a public-health one. Experts have been muzzled, the White House has consolidated control of the messaging campaign, and Trump himself has made numerous false statements about the progress of the disease. As for the administration’s response, budget and personnel cuts in key health offices have left the country unprepared for the likely scale of what’s to come.”
But the seeds of this disastrous response go back forty years. Under Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama, too many average working-class Americans did not benefit from globalization. Now that many of the harmful effects of globalization are being felt here at home, the main beneficiaries can be expected to protect themselves first, as they are predictably doing right now. The self-serving bias from those that have has been very strong in this land.
Instead of “out of many, one,” we now have “I’m number one, and I don’t know you.” Omnis homo sibi. It’s as though we’re telling large numbers of our own citizens that if they don’t have the money to up their odds against the coronavirus, it’s their own fault.
But we see now the direct effects of our general insistence on “rugged individualism” and the myth that the best path forward as a society is to maximize our own economic interests. The unwelcome truth exposed by this pandemic is that our ethics are being tested, and are getting a D minus at best. Frank Snowden, author of Black Plague: Epidemics in Society told NPR recently that epidemics hold a mirror to civilization. In human history, events like these bring out the need to blame “the other” (China, in this case), the need to keep out “dark strangers” who bring disease, and the impulse to ignore knowledge from experts, science, and the lessons of history. Donald Trump has captured all of these, and typifies a mindless and unethical response of denial, blame, and distancing.
As Snowden puts it, we should be acting in an international, coordinated way, based on truth and science, and learning the lessons of history. It is not just a technical question, but rather, a question of ethics and moral courage: are we prepared to take up that challenge? We are not. Our social capital, as Robert Putnam has pointed out, is in short supply.
The vast majority of U.S. citizens, and our Nation as a functioning whole, cannot just “go it alone” against the winds of global pandemics or any other global challenge. But for those rich enough to find safe harbors, the poor will not always be with them.
March 7, 2020