07-04-2021, 05:34 PM
When the pandemic seems to be over we are going to have copious evidence in the form of statistics in who the victims were by various demographics (age, ethnicity, occupation, education, rural-suburban-urban divide, and even religion and politics. We have yet to see much of an ethnic breakdown on who died, but should it be unreflective of the US as a whole, then that could reshape political life. Polarized as American politics have been for the last twenty years, demography is destiny until something breaks the pattern.
The economic consequences show in shortages and gluts. I'm sure that we all remember when we could not get sanitizer liquid. Now there is a glut. The supermarkets that I frequent have much less variety in selection.
If there is any good result it is that the neoliberal norm in labor-management relations seems to have broken. "Overworked and underpaid" was the blatant norm for about forty years; that seems to have abated. Such may have suppressed inflation, but at a grievous cost to anyone who did real work for less-than-real pay.
Labor shortages could be severe. Some occupations, such as employees of the New York subway system, were ravaged early and hard. I see more efforts to create contact-free transactions.
I would not be extremely surprised to find a special census to account for the human deaths from COVID-19. The toll is on par with a shooting war that went badly, at least by American standards. 620,000 lives is roughly twenty years of deaths related to motor vehicles. We spend huge amounts of public capital to make streets and highways safer with obvious justification.
The economic consequences show in shortages and gluts. I'm sure that we all remember when we could not get sanitizer liquid. Now there is a glut. The supermarkets that I frequent have much less variety in selection.
If there is any good result it is that the neoliberal norm in labor-management relations seems to have broken. "Overworked and underpaid" was the blatant norm for about forty years; that seems to have abated. Such may have suppressed inflation, but at a grievous cost to anyone who did real work for less-than-real pay.
Labor shortages could be severe. Some occupations, such as employees of the New York subway system, were ravaged early and hard. I see more efforts to create contact-free transactions.
I would not be extremely surprised to find a special census to account for the human deaths from COVID-19. The toll is on par with a shooting war that went badly, at least by American standards. 620,000 lives is roughly twenty years of deaths related to motor vehicles. We spend huge amounts of public capital to make streets and highways safer with obvious justification.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.