Author: George Papaioannou

After almost three months of social lockdown, we thought we would soon be free to breathe again.  And then a white knee pressed hard on a black neck and when the black chest could no longer breathe, Americans, black and white, realized they could not breathe either.  That’s how it was that American society came one more time face to face with its ugly legacy of racism and all other forms of social divisions between Us and Them.

I have just finished reading Robert Sapolsky’s authoritative volume Behave with a whole chapter dedicated to how humans navigate their intuitive tendency to see the world through an Us versus Them perspective.  I knew then I would have to write a post about this topic.  Little I knew that I would have to do this under such gut-wrenching and tumultuous circumstances.

Nature seeds our brains with instincts and biases that steer us toward kinship, altruism, cooperativeness and fairness.  Alas, though, the same nature, aided by cultural inculcation, also renders us more willing to exercise these virtuous behaviors toward in-group than out-group fellow humans.  Be exposed to something positive about a member of what is Them to us and our brain, as if in shock, pauses to process this association, as if it is an anomaly.  This happens because we have come to associate positive attributes, like generosity, trustworthiness and cooperativeness with our Us members.  We recognize more merit and greater morality in Us than in Them.  And we are more empathetic for our Us members than Them.

In contrast to the warm feelings we reserve for Us, we see those in Them as threatening, angry and untrustworthy.  We perceive them as menacing and disgusting.  We look at those we perceive as Them not as distinct individuals but as a monolithic mass fully vested with undifferentiated stereotypical attributes.  Arbitrary differences between Us and Them are registered as essential differences in values and beliefs.  Thus, a person who fancies hoodies becomes a potential threat if encountered by a white person in the dark of the night.

Feeling superior in human attributes versus Them-s is part of the problem.  It gets a lot uglier when we in Us choose to put a greater distance from Them-s not by improving ourselves but rather by putting down and hurting those in Them.  In that pursuit, building greater solidarity within the Us group is not done for self-improvement but in order to better fight the Them group.

This is the grim reality of the Us versus Them conflict that Sapolsky draws from numerous psychological, neurological and neuroimaging studies.   But we are not necessarily doomed to live in perpetual friction.  There are manageable ways to bridge the gap and bring Us and Them together.  It turns out that no one belongs to one Us or Them only.  We actually belong to multiple Us and Them.  We have shared commonalities.  When they find one such commonality, Us and Them come together, even if fleetingly.  A famous case is the Christmas Truce between British and German soldiers during the First World War.  They realized they were all from Christian nations accustomed to celebrating the same holiday.  That overrode their being parts of different enemy camps.

Other ways to ameliorate the chasm between Us and Them is to strive to look at the world from the other side’s perspective, to gain a better understanding of one another, and to judge people as individuals and not as members of a stereotyped body of people.  It also helps if we tamp down the sense of superiority and our craving for hierarchical dominance over the other group.  Bringing Us and Them together has a better chance of success if done in equal terms and under shared goals.  All these hopeful possibilities can be accomplished with closer contact and acquaintance with the other side.

So, how well is America doing in practicing individual and societal rehabilitation in order to erase the lines of division.  Lines whose number appears to have grown.  We are told that intellectual elites are out of step with the average person; urban Americans are culturally distant from rural Americans; and Democrats and Republicans are far apart on small and large issues.  Even wearing a mask has become a political statement.  But nowhere else America is more divided than when it comes to race and poor versus rich.  In many cases, race and poverty intersect and interact to produce common inequitable outcomes in educational attainment, social mobility, health soundness, level of wealth, and environmentally clean habitats.

The usual approach to reducing these inequities is to appeal for remedial policies.  But, as we see, progress is slow.  There is a reason why this is so.  The leading forces that could champion such policies are not experiencing the every-day problems of the underprivileged Americans.  The reason for this is that America lives in a sort of social segregation and distancing that makes difficult for the Us-es to understand the Them-s.  In other words, we are not giving ourselves the chances to successfully practice what Robert Sapolsky recommends if we have a chance to bring Us-es and Them-s closer together.

The Us-es of privileged America retreat in high-cost suburbs or behind gated communities.  They send their children to expensive private schools or public schools full of the children of Us-es.  And then they use various means to secure admission to top colleges.  Less affluent Americans separate their children from public schools by sending them to charter or parochial schools.  There are rich school districts and poor school districts with unequal educational resources and outcomes.  In their formative years, America’s schoolchildren learn that they live in split worlds.  Even worse, there are willing public officials and professionals that contribute to our segregation.  Politicians legislate strict zoning laws to keep lower income Americans out of precious suburbs or exclusive urban neighborhoods.  Realty firms use dirty tricks to keep minorities out of residential areas inhabited by white and rich people.

The Us-es and Them-s may work in the same places, may cheer the same teams in stadiums, and sometimes may pray in the same places of worship.  But we still are like ships passing by in the darkness of the night knowing and feeling so little about each other.  When we live separate lives with little personal interaction let’s not be surprised that prejudices grow and stereotypes make us blind to individual attributes and worthiness.

If America has a hope to become a less divided and more cohesive society, we must create the political and social institutions to bring the Us-es and Them-s together.  And each one of us has to build bridges that will take us to the other side.  The black stand-up comedian Wanda Sykes put it succinctly when in one of her shows she asked her white audience: “In this twenty-first century, tell me whether you have a black friend?  Yup.  That’s the reality test.  If we replace black by any other Them category, have we tried to get close to any one of Them?

* Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky (professor of biology and neurology, Stanford University, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant).

** Should we capitalize the initial letter of the words black and white when referring to people?  I referred to the Columbia Journalism Review, according to which both upper- and lower-case initial letters are used by different users.  I went for the lower case.

For about seventy years after World War II, America promoted and pursued a global order that was based on political liberalism and free trade.  Despite its flaws, costly military interventions and the support of illiberal regimes, this policy succeeded in establishing a globalized economy that gained even greater momentum after the entrance of the countries of the former Soviet Block and especially China into the world of capitalism.

The US commitment to internationalization was made at a time America was effectively an unchallenged economic and military power.  It was also fueled by a supreme confidence in the capacity of America to maintain its competitive advantages as a capitalist country.  Furthermore, there was a consensus across the political spectrum that America was willing to absorb economic costs in order to pursue global strategies that were deemed to be in the national interest.  Such costs were those related to securing the defense of Europe and Japan while these countries grew their economies and became serious competitors of America.  One could say, therefore, this strategy was a win-win proposition.

The same strategic thinking was behind America’s decision to accept China as an economic partner and give her a seat at the World Trade Organization.  The hope was that as China opened up its markets and economy and integrated itself into the global market system political liberalization would follow.

Now, we are discovering that while the strategy seemed to be sound, at least from an American standpoint, it was poorly executed and assumed too much.  The catalysts that helped America come to this realization have been two cataclysmic events: the Great Recession of 2008 and the Pandemic of 2020.

The 2008 crisis focused the minds of middle- and lower-income Americans on the fragility of their finances, the insecurity of their jobs, and how much was lost to foreign competition and offshoring.  It had a lot to do with the growth of the populist fervor that eventually brought Donald Trump to the White House.  For its part, the Pandemic showed that at a time of a severe health crisis, America’s procurement of critical medicines and health equipment depended on supply chains it no longer controlled.

So, what went wrong with the international economic order America had pursued until recently?  I believe the single most critical mistake was to ignore the inevitable loss and denigration of domestic jobs and the need to adopt policies to soften the blow.  Just as in the American domestic market the pursuit of unfettered capitalism ignored the costs of creative destruction (i.e., creating new jobs that destroy old jobs), the same way American global capitalism ignored the destruction of American jobs through offshoring and foreign competition.  Similar complaints have funneled public unrest in other Western countries.

The cost of globalization to America could have been less under any of the following conditions.  One would have been the presence of a robust labor union system that could have put checks on economic policies that threatened the livelihoods of working-class Americans.  The second condition would have been an enlightened corporate policy that would practice a more equitable sharing of the economic gains of globalization.  And the third condition would have been a public policy that would have aimed at the reengineering of the skill sets and education of the labor force to fortify it against the inevitable dislocations caused by globalization.

If none of these conditions came to pass it is, I believe, because of corporate interests and money and their political allies.  Growing aggregate wealth, the bulk of which went to a tiny fraction of Americans, became a more acceptable criterion of economic growth than its fair distribution.  All the while, raising taxes to fund public policies to mitigate the costs of job losses became an anathema.  In sum, the execution of the American global order eventually morphed from a win-win proposition to a win (for the few) – lose (for the many) reality.

The second flaw in the execution of the American global order, especially after the ascendancy of China, was the assumption that international economic partners can be trusted.  Trust is of essence in any trade arrangement.  I specialize in the production of good A and you in the production of good B.  Whenever, I need good B, I know I can procure it from you and vice-versa.  The Pandemic of 2020 exposed the risks of the trust assumption.  Western nations, including the US, felt vulnerable as they came to rely on foreign, mostly Chinese, firms to secure what they needed to fight the pandemic.  Trust had already become an issue, as for example, in the case of 5G technology and its applications to sensitive telecommunication systems.  The central question is whether nations can trust the international division of production if they are concerned that some countries may act nationalistically to maximize their leverage.

Against these negative realities, the current American approach is exemplified in President Trump’s rhetoric for an “America First” and the lack of willingness to seriously engage in multilateral talks in order to right the course of the economic global order.

But because America is willing to live with less internationalization, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world will follow us.  China, in particular, is pursuing a methodical multiprong strategy to secure a leading role in the global economic ecosystem.  The “Made in China 2025” aims at placing China at the top of technology and research by 2025.  The “Belt and Road Initiative” is establishing a nexus of countries across the globe where China has an economic presence and which can be used to secure supply lines for the growing Chinese economy.  It is doubtful that the leading economies in Europe, Russia, India and Brazil will resist the temptation of doing business within this new emerging model.

Therefore, after seventy years of a global order led by America, we are now at a point this order is withering as America turns inward and has to compete with a new order modeled by China.  American indifference to constructive global engagement has the risk of ending up with a new global order to which America will feel like an outsider.

The title is more intriguing than it is informative.  So let me explain.  I don’t mean we can be immune to death.  What I mean is we have the capacity to become immune to the idea of death, and by that I don’t mean the idea that we all eventually die.  I rather mean that we learn to live with the idea that something will kill us.  Therefore, at some point and until we discover a vaccine or treatment, we will find it acceptable to live with deaths from coronavirus.  Some of the reasons for that eventual acceptance are grounded in historical experience, others in cynicism, and others in cold calculations.  And the most powerful reason yet is our own nature.

In my last post, I dealt with moral judgment when a decision must be made between means and ends when human lives are involved.  In this pandemic, the decision to lift restrictions is primarily in the hands of public officials.  Nevertheless, the ultimate resolution of this matter will be determined by individual choices.  Although currently people are still mostly hesitant to break out of the restrictions, we should not be surprised to see that as the spreading subsides and the economic and social consequences become more painful to bear more people will opt to take risks in order to restore their livelihoods and social lives.  And we have the record to show that for better or worse we have accepted to live dangerously and to accept deadly conditions.

Over the last two hundred years we have developed technologies that introduced new risks of death.  Electricity, industrial machinery, chemicals, fossil fuels, cars, airplanes, and the ultimate risk, nuclear plant accidents and nuclear weapons.  We have lost many lives to these discoveries; but we have also gained solutions to diseases, starvation, and other maladies.  I suppose we have found the cost-benefit trade-off to be to our advantage.  And what about the multitudes of people who insist to live in tornado alleys, hurricane-stricken areas, and lands exposed to annual monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, and earthquakes.  The deaths come predictably every year and yet people stay put.  It’s difficult to understand the reasons.  It may be loyalty to one’s homeland or lack of means to change habitat or just dogged defiance.

Then there are deaths we have accepted because of a cynical indifference to those paying the price.  In the early years, we remained idle as gay, and not only, people died of AIDS.  Today, we do nothing or much less than it is warranted to eliminate the scourge of opioids, gun-caused suicides and the mass murders of schoolchildren, churchgoers and even concert attendants.  Governments also refuse to impose or they ease regulations concerning water and air quality or work safety rules although these actions have predictable risks for diseases and fatalities.

And then we have cold calculations that pit self-interest against public safety.  President Trump was unwilling to acknowledge the potential severity of the coronavirus threat for fear that it would spook the stock market.  President Bolsonaro of Brazil was similarly dismissive of the pandemic until it was too late.  Now both men are blamed for infections and deaths that could have been avoided.  Cold calculations can also be attributed to businesses that are eager to reopen without adequate protective and safety practices in place.  They may perceive infections and deaths to be part of the cost of doing business.  Others, politicians included, point out in a very matter-of-fact manner how, after all, the pandemic is primarily dangerous to older people and, hence, that should not stop us from opening up for everybody else.

(A special case, I believe, is the display of a mix of moral dissonance and hypocrisy found in the eagerness of mostly conservative states to relax restrictions despite warnings of a flare up of infections and additional deaths.  Aren’t these the states that have strict anti-abortions views and rules for the purpose of protecting unborn children?  What about protecting the lives of real, already born, people?)

For one or another reason, therefore, we have learned to live with technologies, natural phenomena, policies, and ways of doing business that have the capacity to kill us.  In spite of all the existential anxiety we feel for our ultimate end we do not seem to shrink from putting our lives at risk.   And then there is one risk we cannot resist to take because it comes straight out of our nature as social animals.  Our social ecosystem cannot survive if we stay in isolation from one another.  This is the most important natural environment to humans.  And it has the irresistible power of pulling us into its orbit.  Living in isolation with loved ones, or even with very close friends, it’s not enough.  We like to work with others, have fun with others, celebrate with others, grieve with others.  And to afford these social interactions we are willing to risk our welbeing.

So this is the human record and background within which the current debates as to how fast and how far we should remove the lockdown restrictions are taking place.  A cool mind and passionate heart would like to slow things down but, I am afraid, their power of suasion would wane over time.  What I fear, however, even more is the opportunistic voices which, taking advantage of our record of risk taking and acceptance of death as well as our prosocial instincts, will become the sirens to coax and lure people back to “normal” life, thus, legitimizing Covid-19 deaths as one more of those cases we have come to take for granted.

And there are political implications in this tug of war.  Conservative commentators and, of course, our equivocating President already clamor for relaxing the lockdown rules.  Interesting, how all of sudden, their “bleeding hearts” lament the plight of the working-class people who can neither work from home nor can they rely on savings to stay home.  But the political position of liberals is equally fraught with conveying the wrong message, that is, a message of over-caution and timidity.  Humans are accustomed to taking control of their lives and their environment.  To that end, they are willing to take risks and pay the ultimate price.

It will take a lot of collective wisdom to find the right and humane balance between courage and rashness and between compassion and selfishness as we try to restore our lives.

With the new cases of corona virus declining in many countries, authorities are grappling with the question of how far they should go in relaxing their lockdown requirements.  In answering this question, the unpleasant quandary is this: “Do we relax the restrictions and face deaths that could be otherwise avoided or do we keep the restrictions and suffer additional economic damage?”  Actually, the quandary can be refined to this question: “What amount of economic loss can a society accept in order to save an X number of human lives?”

There are at least two writings on this topic that I am aware of.  One was an article in the New York Times of May 12.  The other appeared a day earlier on the online news outlet Wired. *  In the Wired essay we learn that the research to put a value on human life started in the consulting firm RAND in the early 1950s and then it became a topic of academic research all the way to our days.  Initially, the US Defense Department had an interest to find how much it should spend on airplane equipment that could save pilot lives but would potentially doom the airplane.  Later President Carter, and in short order Congress, mandated that new regulations should estimate the cost of saving lives.

Thomas Schelling (a 2005 Nobel Prize winner in economics) introduced the metric of Value of Statistical Life (VSL) by asking “How much money people are willing to accept to risk their own life.”  A working estimate of VSL stands at between $9m and $11m in today’s dollars.  Armed with this estimate, a president, prime minister or state governor can multiply the additional number of deaths expected from some opening up program by the VSL and compare the product to the expected incremental gain in GDP.  If the economic gain doesn’t match the value of lost lives then you recalculate.  All this sounds cynical and even inhumane, but it reflects the calculus behind public pronouncements of the kind “The people cannot keep seeing their livelihoods disappear.”

In the NYT article, we read that estimates of VSL differ across countries and even within countries, as for example in the US.  Republican administrations apply lower VSL estimates whereas Democratic administrations apply higher estimates.  This way, Republicans can limit the scope and severity of new regulations while Democrats aim for the opposite.   The World Health Organization also has its way of deciding how much to spend on new health projects. The WHO estimates its VSL as GDP per capita multiplied by 3.  If this product exceeds the cost of a health initiative that adds one year of quality life, the health project is approved.

Of course, this economic approach has its critics.  A monetary estimate of VSL ignores the cost of enduring disruptions in everyday living and the cost of grieving.  Uncertainty in mortality rates also makes the total cost of human lives unreliable.

OK.  So much about the economic methods and the tendency economists have to use their “dismal science” to solve all kinds of problems. What do we know about human behavior in similar situations?

Kin selection from the theory of evolution explains that a mother would sacrifice her life to save her child and thus give her genes a chance to survive in future generations.  So, let’s conduct a crude thought experiment.  Let’s assume that relaxing lockdown restrictions would potentially kill only old people who are passed the procreation age.  Would we accept opening up the economy to avoid an economic meltdown?  We see that it’s not only economics that can pose cruel dilemmas.  Actually, human behavior can lead to different decisions, depending whether your moral focus is on the means or the ends.

We have insights on this conundrum from the famous trolley experiments of Joshua Green of Harvard and his colleagues.  A trolley has lost its breaks and will kill five people if it keeps moving on its tracks.  You can pull a lever to send the trolley down different tracks but this will kill one person who is crossing those tracks.  Will you pull the lever?  In repeated experiments 60 to 70% of people said “Yes”, they would pull the lever.  Then, they were asked whether they would push a person onto the tracks to halt the trolley and save five people.  Now, only 30% said “Yes”.  Green concluded that when you divert the trolley you have no intention to kill the passer-by.  The passer-by just happens to be there; death is a side effect of the attempt to save five others.  But pushing someone to his death is an act of intention.  Therefore, intentionality makes the difference.

Furthermore, these experiments found that 30% of the respondents always acted as deontologists, consistently refusing to pull the lever or push the person while 30% acted as utilitarians, consistently willing to pull the lever or push the person.  The deontologists found the means (killing one to save five) morally abhorrent; whereas the utilitarians found the end (saving five at the expense of one) morally acceptable.  Such patterns of human behavior help us understand the present split between those eager to relax the restrictions in order to boost the economy and those unwilling to sacrifice more lives to that end.

But there are complications.  Green argues that looking at the immediate ends (or consequences) to justify the means may fail us if we ignore the long-term consequences.  In the case of the pandemic, for example, upon further reasoning, we may come to the conclusion that the means (relaxing restrictions) may not work to produce the desirable ends (economic gains).  In this case, we risk sacrificing our moral principles for much less moral vindication than what we expect to find in the sought-after ends.

The other more insidious complication is the usual infringement of Us versus Them into our moral judgments.  What if those who will be most exposed to potential infection are members of Them (for example, poor, immigrants and minority workers or residents of the Them states)?  Or the vulnerable people may be those in distant locations toward whom we feel less kinship.  Based on what we know about human behavior, we may be more inclined to pull the lever or push the person in those instances.

This is, I believe, our present predicament.  Do we sacrifice additional human lives to avoid further devastation of livelihoods and the economy or do we look more carefully at the longer-run consequences lest we discover material and moral consequences that do not justify the immediate ends?  How we proceed will depend on whether the deontologists or the utilitarians gain the upper hand.

* I want to thank a friend who brought the Wired essay to my attention.

It is too bad that we often find about the exploits and contributions of fellow men and women after their death.  And we usually do this when we read their obituaries.  But many go unread, unless they refer to a celebrity or otherwise famous person.  Mel Baggs’s obituary in the New York Times last week could very well have been one of these unread obituaries.  Her name rang no bells for me.  But, as I fleetingly scanned the title, I caught the last five words: “. . . the Essence of Being Human.”  So, I read the full title: “Mel Baggs, 39; Explored Autism and the Essence of Being Human.”  Now I had to read the whole story.

Mel Baggs was a non-verbal autistic person who expressed herself by blogging and in videos.  Her message was that “people who think and communicate in nontraditional ways are fully human, and that humanness is a spectrum, not something that can be reduced to a normal/abnormal dichotomy.”  Reading those words “humanness is a spectrum” set a whole range of thought processes in my head.

We are used to employing the term spectrum to refer to the range of symptoms identified with a syndrome or disability; hence, the autism spectrum.  Mell Baggs, though, used the word to capture the whole range of conditions, normal-abnormal, typical-atypical, rare-frequent, that we observe in human beings.  Mel Baggs wanted to remind us that all kinds of conditions that are found in humans are legitimate constituents of the human spectrum.  Her purpose was to help us understand the breadth of our humanness.  She wanted to bring more people from the forgotten or misunderstood fringes of our species into the visible part of the human spectrum, the part inhabited by the so-called “normal” people.

The idea that we are all on the human spectrum and thus deserve respect and compassion is unfortunately an idea that has been challenged, even discarded, through out human history with devastating and barbaric consequences.  We have used religion, race, gender and ethnicity to push people to the outer bounds of the human spectrum, even to throw them overboard altogether.

Take the case of slavery.  It has been justified in the past on the invidious ground that enslaved people deserved this fate because they are less human or not even human at all.  “An inferior man … and no fanaticism can raise him to the level of the Caucasian race.” That’s how a Southern senator opined about black Americans in the years after the Civil War.  And “inferior man” in this case meant inferior human.  And Caucasian race was, for all purposes, the whole human spectrum as far as that Senator was concerned.

Women too would not occupy any significant position on the human spectrum for thousands of years.  “A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife, … and the “right of a husband to his wife” and of “a father to his child” comprise the “three great fundamental natural rights of human society.”  That’s how a member of Congress saw women on the human spectrum.  We still have societies and states that view women no differently than that late nineteenth century Congressman.

Next, take the case of the Nazi final solution project against Jews, Roma, Slavs and people with disabilities.  To justify the barbarity of those holocausts the Nazi public propaganda machine would cast doubt on the full humanness of its victims.  Underman, sub-man, subhuman were the terms the Nazis used to describe the above people as well communists and anyone else Nazi paranoia deemed unworthy to meet its narrow band of the human spectrum.

In the early twentieth century, a mix of overzealous science and racist bias combined to justify the practice of Eugenics.  The goal was to weed out the “unfit” and populate the human spectrum with those endowed with desired traits.  Again, a case of purification and cleansing of the human spectrum that could be effected through selective breeding.  Related to eugenics is the modern-day push to use medicine and genetics to sculpt babies into the kind of humans favored by their parents.  Obviously, such parents believe that certain places on the human spectrum are up for sale.

And finally, the soft, but most present and pervasive, cases of redefining and downsizing the human spectrum are those that put a distance between those with mental, emotional and physical disabilities and the rest.  A distance that can be manifested in limited socialization, gratuitous ignorance about their existence, lesser human rights and care.  They perceive the world differently, they express themselves differently, they feel about things differently, they move their bodies differently, that’s how these people are different from the rest.  These conditions keep them from fully partaking in the world of those in the “normal” range of the human spectrum.  But more devastating to these individuals is to feel unwelcome and to sense the distance others keep from them.

The biggest irony in any of these selective redefinitions of the human spectrum is that they are the product of a diminished sense of the other’s predicament, or sense of empathy, or sense for sociality, which are the building blocks for becoming human in the first place.  In his acclaimed book “Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny,” Michael Tomasello shows how humans build on biologically endowed capacities to develop bonding, first with their parents and later with others, by understanding the other person’s feelings and intentions.  And how this initially limited bonding gradually grows to more extensive and sophisticated relationships based on joint commitments, empathy, fairness, cooperation and regard for social norms.  The culmination of this process is the attainment of a uniquely human sense, the sense of “We.”

Mell Baggs dedicated her life to convince us to extend our sense of “We” to all born human irrespective of one’s particular condition.

The challenges and disruptions the coronavirus pandemic has thrown at people around the world has caused a lot of introspection and reevaluation of realities and priorities.  I have written about some of them in previous posts.  As the pandemic appears to be receding, at least in this wave, thinking must turn forward to the next phase, that is, what societies ought to do in the post-pandemic era.

The experience has certainly been different across countries.  Each country has discovered different vulnerabilities that call for different solutions.  Hopefully, what worked and what didn’t in different countries will help us draw lessons how to prepare for the next crisis.   The experience has been especially sobering and humbling for the United States.  The much vaunted “American Exceptionalism” did not prove enough to protect hundreds of thousands of Americans from being infected and tens of thousands from dying.  A dysfunctional co-ordination of administrative, scientific and medical resources led to a much-delayed response and left Americans vulnerable and confused.

Beyond the medical and government response to the pandemic, this country has to reckon with additional issues which, though present prior to the pandemic, have come into sharper relief since and must be addressed with a high degree of urgency.

Rethink fiscal policy.  The fiscal cost of this pandemic is already being counted in the trillions of dollars of new debt on top of the trillions added by the ill-designed tax law of 2017.   Does this enormous debt matter?  And who will pay?

There is a new economic school of thought that looks at deficits and debt as practically harmless, as long as a country can use its own currency to pay for them.  I am wary of this new thinking for several reasons.  First, debts must eventually be repaid.  The post-2017 tax reform period showed that fiscal stimuli do not always generate enough bang in economic growth to reduce public deficits and debt.  Neither productivity or population growth (the drivers of economic growth) is expected to rise fast enough to boost growth in GDP.

My second worry is that under the shadow of an enormous debt and its rising servicing cost, conservative voices will predictably call for review of our commitment to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and other public support programs in order to restore fiscal soundness.  Under the current tax law and income distribution policies, this would mean a terrible exacerbation of economic inequality.  The only socially fair solution is to call to task those who can afford to bear the cost and who, after all, have been the principal beneficiaries of the tax system, that is, the high income-earners.

How we will reorder our fiscal policies in terms of allocation priorities and funding sources will be, I believe, one of the defining choices of the post-pandemic era.  It remains to be seen how the money elites of this country will respond to this challenge.

Reestablish international American presence and cooperation.  Without enough medical supplies for its own needs, it goes without saying that America was in no position to take a leading role in the fight against the pandemic.  But we didn’t have to wait for the pandemic to realize our diminishing role and standing in global affairs.  By abandoning international agreements and dispensing with international organizations, we made it clear that we alone knew best how to manage our interests and challenges.  Why then do we accuse the World Health Organization and China for not giving us enough forewarning and advice?  Didn’t we declare we are self-reliant?

The great lesson we have learned is that country heft and effectiveness do not necessarily coincide when it comes to fighting a health crisis.  Relatively small countries, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Greece among others, proved to be surprisingly efficient in limiting the impact of the pandemic.  They relied on the experts and scientists and ignored political calculations.  South Korea and Taiwan applied some of the most innovative uses of technology to take control.  Furthermore, finding effective vaccines and drugs will be the culmination of extraordinary collaboration of scientists and private and public labs from around the world. All that means lessons and solutions can come from anywhere in the world, that cooperation can amplify their efficacy, and America’s role as problem solver and facilitator is in its national interest.

Rebuild and expand social capital.  America’s social capital has been dramatically depleted in recent years.  That’s why rebuilding America’s social capital is where a new president can make the most important contribution.  We have a natural propensity to develop a sense of Us and Them.  It is the Us vs Them that erodes the pillars of social capital, trust and cooperation.  In recent years, not only have the divisions hardened but the gaps have also widened.

There is no denying that there are legitimate reasons why groups of Americans have coalesced around various Us and look at others as Them.  The problem lies in our inability to have a good faith dialogue.  In the past, I have referred to the paradigm of the Elephant and the Rider.  The Elephant is the set of instincts and emotions that sets our conservative or liberal leanings, while the Rider is the reasoning faculties that can help us critically evaluate our choices.  Unfortunately, as the sense of Us vs Them intensifies, we use reason to validate our instincts and emotions (the confirmation bias) rather than check their coherence and correctness.

One way we learn to coexist with others is to develop a Theory of Mind.  It means we have some sense how another person feels in a set of circumstances.  This allows us to be empathetic and understanding and, thus, adjust our behavior.  In our present state, it looks like our different groups’ Theory of Mind has diminished.  Wealthy Americans understand less of the financial insecurity of working-class Americans.  Intellectual and urban elites are on a different page from rural Americans.  White Americans don’t seem to understand the grievances of black Americans.  And so on.

Fairness in fiscal policies, collaborative international presence, and rebuilding social capital will be sorely needed if America is to emerge better from this pandemic.

In my last post I wrote how uncritical reliance on quantitative economic growth that ignores individual, social and natural vulnerabilities creates uneven and unsustainable living standards and leaves us unprepared to cope with crises, like the present pandemic.  This perilous state of affairs is the product of an economic and social model that has taken hold over several decades.  Despite the dislocations and damages this model has wrought to the economic and social fabric of America, it has proven to be resilient and politically viable.

Its currency, however, does not exist in a vacuum.  It reflects underlying beliefs that drive the electorate’s choices.  And in turn, these beliefs are propagated by well-heeled opinion shapers and find fertile ground in cultural conditions.  No matter how wide-spread these beliefs are, they need not be true or still valid.  They may reflect fallacies used to provide some moral or functional cover for the prevailing way of doing things.  The list of fallacies I have identified is not necessarily exhaustive but it goes far enough in explaining our reluctance to change course.

The fallacy of meritocracy.  Achievement often comes with merit.  But merit is not the only thing that matters.  Luck and circumstances also matter.  More critically, merit is environment-dependent.  The family and social background one is born into, what one inherits, and the bending of rules can make all the difference.  If innate merit was the only determinant of future success, we would expect Americans from diverse demographic and socio-economic backgrounds to be equally represented in the upper echelons.  And yet this is not what we observe.  Meritocracy, however, is an appealing belief to Americans because of our individualistic culture.  In this culture the individual and its own strengths take a central place in the stories of successful men and women.

The fallacy of justified inequality.  This fallacy is born out of the previous fallacy.  If you believe that merit is all that matters for success then income and wealth inequalities become easily acceptable.  The role of inheritance, the influence of a nurturing family and social networks, and especially of preferential taxation and other legislated privileges is pushed aside.

The fallacy that inequality is just a statistic.  The notion that inequality is just an economic metric without serious consequences flies in the face of evidence.  Inequality does matter and matters in negative ways.  The evidence shows that inequality reduces social capital, leads to voter apathy, makes people less healthy and fuels criminal behavior.  Thus, reducing inequality is in the interest of making society better.

The fallacy of equal opportunities.   This fallacy justifies inequality in outcomes (like income, health, etc.) on the ground that opportunities are equal.  Well, except that opportunities are not equal.  Born into poverty, or going through a subpar educational system, or living in neighborhoods with less material resources and healthy cultures but with more deprivation and crime does not afford one the same opportunities like those available to one born into the opposite kind of environment.  A fact that undercuts both the meritocracy and the equal-opportunities arguments is the lower social mobility for recent generations of Americans compared to their parents and grandparents.

The fallacy of the “American dream.”  This goes along with the fallacy of equal opportunities but with a twist.  To the original version, it has tacked the alluring message “You need not be concerned with inequality because one day you can be rich.”  In this message, the insanely wealthy top tier is presented as an aspirational, regardless how impossible, destination to those in the lower rungs of the ladder.  Its true purpose is to keep people endorsing the system, because one day they could be part of that top tier.  You may recall that book “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” that found that even low-income people align with policies that favor the wealthy because they themselves hope, one day, to be among the privileged few.  It is not even close.  While a vast majority of Americans of earlier generations earned more than their parents by age 30, far fewer members of recent generations achieve this.  And fewer and fewer of today’s young Americans believe they will attain their parents’ standard of living.

The fallacy of the moral hazard.   A frequently used argument against stronger social support programs (what we call the safety net) in the US is the concern that they weaken the incentive to work.  Or differently put, social support programs potentially reduce the supply of labor and, thus, hurt the economy.  But is there clear evidence for this?  Observation and research (some of that done by last year’s winners of the Nobel prize in Economics Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee) show that people spend no less effort when they are granted some leeway and relief.  Even worse, the moral hazard concern, one can argue, is an insult to human nature, and often reflects racial biases.  The overwhelming majority of people have an inner sense of pride and fairness as well as a need to maintain their dignity and improve their lot.  All that works against the urge to live off the dole as a burden to others.

The fallacy of trickle-down economics.  This is the jewel of the fallacies that nurture the present system.  It preaches that economic growth is fueled by the supply of business activity whose promotion dictates low taxes, as little regulation as possible, and availability of labor at low cost and with little friction (read no labor union protection).  Thus, the trickle-down theory elevates the importance of the so-called job-creators above that of working people.  As an economic policy, it is responsible for the abuse of public fiscal resources.  So even when economic inequities or a demand deficit require supporting middle and lower incomes, taxes and government aid are primarily designed to benefit businesses and capital holders.   The $1.5 trillion tax law of 2017 and even parts of the coronavirus rescue plan are examples of trickle-down dogma.  Almost invariably, trickle-down policies leave behind a legacy of red ink as budget deficits and public debt explode as a result of the tax relief and aid doled out to the job creators.  Later it falls upon all of us to restore fiscal soundness.

Some of these fallacies have cultural antecedents related to an early reliance on individual effort and resourcefulness in the making of the country.  Others have been promoted by special interests that have little regard for social cohesion and solidarity.  And others are driven by narratives that are no-longer valid, and others by racial stereotypes.  The sooner we convince the majority of people these fallacies are harmful, the sooner we will start moving toward socially responsible economic progress.

The coronavirus pandemic caught most of the world ill-prepared to defend itself against a new and deadlier virus.  Our unpreparedness became evident in our financial fragility, inadequacy of health systems, and fragmented international cooperation.  As usual, lots of ideas as to what we need to do the day after are tossed around.  Thinking, however, in terms of piecemeal steps is not enough.  We will be better served if we think big and revise the premise of our current approach.

What I have in mind is a reexamination of how we manage economic growth and its risks.  By growth, I primarily mean the growth of GDP and our fixation that annual output increases at the highest possible rate.  By risk, I mean the exposure of a nation or the world to human illness and deaths, hardship as a result of fragile household finances, and breakdown of social cohesion.

In finance and economics, we talk of a tradeoff of risk and return.  That is, higher return comes with higher risk.  Businesses and individuals have to make decisions that involve this tradeoff almost every day.  Each one of us is supposed to choose the combination or tradeoff of risk and return that leaves us most comfortable (or with the highest utility in economic parlance).  The implication is significant.  There is no one combination that is best for all of us.  We can all be happy at our different tradeoffs.

What happens, however, when the tradeoff refers to the total output (GDP) of a nation and its accompanying risks?  Who chooses the growth-risk tradeoff?  In democracies the tradeoff is decided at the ballot box.  So here is the challenge: to move a democratic country from one growth-risk tradeoff to another we need to marshal a majority of votes in favor of a new tradeoff.  Leaving the rest of the world aside, it is fair to say that for various reasons, the American choice is one that favors a pro-growth tradeoff by putting lesser weight on the risks.

But does this pro-growth stance serve us well?  Many (and I am one of them) argue that the economic growth, as we have practiced it for several decades, dangerously ignores some important risks.  First, it ignores the risks from the consequences of economic and social inequities it creates.  We should, at long last, realize that inequality of income and wealth harms everybody.  Economic insecurity and fragility as well as poverty (especially among children) deprive large segments of Americans of the ability to grow their human capital and better weather shocks to their income sources.  Inequities also expose financially weaker people unevenly to health risks.  We are currently seeing these effects in the proportionately higher numbers of the infected and dead among minority and less economically-privileged Americans.  Economic inequality can also deplete social capital and lead to political instability.  Episodic and temporary rescue plans are not a sustainable solution.  A country with extended fragility pays a higher cost to fight systemic disruption of its economic and social fabric.

The pro-growth bias also impacts our financial and environmental safety.   Since 1980, the US has suffered three major financial crises – the banking crisis of the 1980s due to imprudent lending practices, the stock market collapse of early 2000s due to accounting and financial shenanigans, and the housing-banking crisis of 2008 again as a result of unscrupulous financial practices.  In each of these crises, billions and trillions of dollars of wealth evaporated and millions of livelihoods were destroyed.  And yet we don’t seem to learn.  Each crisis gives birth to regulatory legislation only to be compromised or reversed by business and political interests in a few short years.* The unspoken motive of these reversals is always the same: to protect or raise private profits.  However, when the crisis comes and decimates these profits, the same actors ask the government to socialize their losses by passing the bill to all of us.

Common sense would dictate that wealthy nations can afford and should invest in clean water and air.  And yet our record is one of advances and reversals.  Especially this administration is hell bent on its policy to juice economic growth at the expense of the environmental progress this country has made the last few decades.  It is an irony that the pandemic with its restrictions on movement is making air cleaner and saves lives.  Why can’t we use policies to the same effect?  How many lives are we willing to sacrifice in order to eke a little bit more of GDP growth?  And what about the looming risks of climate change?

The argument that underlies our current emphasis on economic growth is that it is the indispensable ingredient to our quality of life.  But if that’s so, why do we then stick with a model that keeps middle class and lower incomes woefully insufficient while upper incomes grow much faster?  The current premise of our economic model is also wrong on other grounds.  First, it implies that quality of life is primarily measured in economic terms.  But as I wrote above, our comfort and satisfaction depend on both economic resources and risks to other aspects of our lives.  International country rankings show that size and growth of GDP do not necessarily predict happiness.  Harnessing a country’s wealth to achieve greater financial security, richer personal fulfillment and social harmony can be even more rewarding and worth-pursuing goals.

Second, growth heavily and at an increasing rate depends on the quality of human capital.  Better education, health and financial security contribute significantly to that quality and by extension to productivity, which is a major driver of economic growth.

Finally, redirecting our economic model to green energy, better and universal health care, scientific research, better education and better social services can produce engines of economic growth which also mitigate our exposure to unwanted risks.

* In their book Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Henry Poulsen, the major architects of the policy response to the 2008 crisis, who come from both aisles of American politics, argue that the regulatory reforms instituted after the crisis still serve us well, a view that challenges the recent demolition efforts in the hands of the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress.

Courage is one of those virtues, societies idolize, poets extol in verses and authors lionize in epic stories.  We see it as physical courage in soldiers, firefighters and police officers.  We see it in parents protecting their children.  We see it in anonymous people rescuing strangers.  We also see it as moral courage in people who stand up for justice and human rights, theirs and those of others.  We see it as professional courage in people who stand up for what is right in their work.

But where does courage come from?  What makes doctors, nurses, emergency medical and hospital workers around the world get up each day and put themselves at risk in order to deliver life-saving services to the rest of us in this deadly pandemic?  And most remarkably of all, what makes them excited and animated when they talk about their work?  Certainly, it’s not because of the monetary rewards.  Many of them earn below average salaries.

Our first inclination in answering these questions is to say that courage and selflessness are the outcomes of a very long process of inculcation from one generation to the next.  Or that they come with the job.  Or that courageous and helping people self-select to enter careers that require these traits.  All that has a grain of truth.  But let’s remember that there is no behavior that has no origin in our nature or, more plainly, in what nature has endowed us in order to survive very challenging and changing environments.  Inculcation and upbringing matter.  But they are not the whole story.  How do we know this?  Because the same courageous and selfless behavior is found in other species!

To ask “where does courage come from?” is not a superfluous question.  Courage comes with risk.  Risking one’s life, livelihood, or standing in the community are not exactly the types of behavior favored for survival, procreation and wellbeing.  This is how Darwin himself described the dilemma of being courageous and selfless versus neither:

It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those which were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater number than the children of selfish and treacherous parents of the same tribe.”  On the contrary, the bravest, most self-sacrificial men “would on an average perish in larger number than other men.”  A noble man “would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” *

The funny thing with nature, though, is that it achieves selfish results out of selfless behavior.  Of course, the most basic example is that of a parent sacrificing him/herself for the child.  Although the parent perishes his/her genes survive in the child.  (That’s what Darwin meant in the last sentence above.)  This gene inheritance instinct also works when one sacrifices for a relative.  Choosing to risk and sacrifice can even extend beyond kin to members of one’s group (clan or tribe).  It can also be justified by reciprocal altruism that increases the chances of survival for all.  So, do nothing or take flight in the presence of danger, that is, the opposite of being courageous, is not the only behavior favored by our evolutionary path.

There is, however, another, even more heartwarming story, in the book of nature.  This is the story of empathy and social bonding.  We know that like us, other mammals like elephants and primates mourn the passing of members of their family.  They, like us, are also attracted by the distress of others in their species.  Even prairie moles and rats have been found to display signs of stress when other moles or rats are in distress.  All that shows that we are endowed with empathy and have a social sense of wellbeing.  As the primatologist Frans De Waal writes, our default mode is intensely social.  Beyond the preservation of our genes, it is also our empathy for others and our instinctual need for social cooperation that drives us to behave selflessly and even courageously, and, by doing so, to gain a survival advantage as a species.

As important empathy and selflessness are for our physical survival so are they for our survival as a good society.  It is selfless and courageous behavior that defines the moral standing of societies and, by extension, the preservation of human rights and liberties.

It is in periods of acute and nearly existential crises, like the current pandemic, our personal and collective courage is tested and matters.  It is in such periods that mischievous and power-grabbing governments attempt to curtail civic liberties and political rights by exploiting public fear and misinformation.  We see it these days in the attempts of strong men with authoritarian leanings to impose measures that go far beyond those responsible citizens are willing to surrender for the common good.

In good and trying times, courage matters the most for the preservation of liberal democracy.  And to that end, it matters a lot to have leaders who promote courage and selflessness in the interest of political liberties and the wellbeing of society.  That’s why it is sad to see that this administration is led by someone who seems so oblivious to the importance of cultivating courageous and selfless behavior.  When the leader of a country declares “I don’t take responsibility at all” and instead brags about his ratings on Facebook, you know this person is leading without courage.  And this is not all.  With an unprecedented record of firings of government officials and public servants who do not toe his line, this President has shown that courage and selflessness are punishable qualities.

Too bad he is not versed in history.  Had he been fortunate to partake of such knowledge, he   would perhaps be aware of another leader who, twenty-five centuries ago, knew the significance of courage for the wellbeing of society.  That leader was Pericles, who in his funeral oration for the fallen soldiers of Athens during the first year of the Peloponnesian War and in the midst of a plague spoke these words to his mourning people: “Happiness comes from Freedom, and Freedom comes from Courage.”

*  From The Moral Animal, Robert Wright.

Third week of the “stay home” reality for us in the US and things are not looking good.  Lives are in suspension, minds try to conceive new meanings, and ….. finding interesting new shows to stream has gained a whole new sense of urgency.  When boredom drives you to do your tax returns even when the government (US) tells you they aren’t due until three months later, you know this is not things as usual.

The drama is being played out in multiple stages.  In the hospitals, where heroic doctors, nurses and other aides give their best despite the risks they take.  In homes, where we try to overcome the dullness of repetitive daily patterns.  In the supermarkets, where we try to avoid everybody else and hope to find what we need.   (Why is it in this “Greatest Country of All” we can’t find masks and sanitizing materials?)  In the news, where all we read or see is about new cases and deaths and frantic hospital scenes.  I wonder what life would feel like if every day we were told how many people contracted this or that deadly disease.   In the government, which struggles to put us ahead of the curve but its announcements often don’t match the reality on the ground.  When Covid-19 cases stand at over 250,000, the most in the world, and deaths at over 5,000, what should I make of the message we are doing better than anybody else?  In the research labs, where scientists from around the world are putting their brains together to fight our way out from this pandemic.  It is in the hospitals and the labs I see our hope and redemption; where I see our collective humanity at work.

Facts are stubborn and hard to argue against.  Sooner or later they make us adjust our perspective on many things.  So here is a list of what is in and what is out given the facts of this pandemic.

Acceptance is in, denial is out.  Not that long ago, our government and its supporters told the nation that the coronavirus pandemic was a foreign agent, another manufactured political ploy, and, if real, one that would whisk through these blessed United States of America like a light breeze, to dissolve into the warm mist of April.  Over two trillion dollars of emergency aid, massive layoffs, and projections of 200,000 potential deaths later reality has sunk in.

Scientists are in, lawyers are out.  Nature is a bitch.  You can’t fight it with sycophants, lawyers and lawsuits.  Used to taking out rivals by using all the levers of the justice system, now for this, his life’s greatest challenge and fight, our president, discovers that his best comrades are scientists, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, and all others in this country and around the globe.  You can’t take Covid-19 to the courts, nor can you shut it down with another NDA.  The only ones to fix this now are doctors, nurses and scientists.

“Make ventilators” is in, “make tanks” is out.   The defense budget is the sacred cow of the US.  We have enough power to kill everybody on earth several times over, but we don’t have what it takes to defend us against this tiny virus.  You see, defending against pandemics has no lobby to match those who push for more money to build missiles and fancy weapons.  Even mighty countries can go down by the force of their folly rather than the force of their enemies.

Living the moment is in, living for the future is out.  When the epidemiologist in charge (in the US), Dr. Birx, put on the screen the graph of potential deaths a few days ago, I bet many of us wondered whether we would still be alive when that long right tail of the curve finally hits zero.  When planning for the future – weddings, trips, parties – depends on the uncertain path of a deadly virus, then our best option is to live each moment and make the most of it.  We would also live more relaxed lives in ordinary times if we could master to live the now instead of worrying about tomorrow.  Planning for the future has its merits; but when it consumes our thoughts and energy or creates anxiety, let’s go back to enjoying the moment.  Going back to Dr. Birx’s presentation, she told us that with mitigation the model predicts about 200,000 deaths by end of August.  What if instead she had said “By August we expect 329,800,000 Americans to be alive out of 330 million today?”  Most of us would feel better, though, nothing would have changed.  Humans are emotionally biased to respond more strongly to bad than good news.  Her statement, deliberate or not, stood a better chance to make us focus on the bad outcome and thus remain extra cautious.  If, you want, however, to boost your morale, think that you have more than an excellent chance to be one of the 329,800,000 Americans still alive by August.  In fact, the probability not to die because of Covid-19 is 99.94 percent!  But remember that every time you let your guard down that probability declines.

Uncertainty is in, calculated risk is out.  If we are averse to risk, we are even more so toward uncertainty.  We talk of risk when we can, even with some error, estimate the odds of failure (and conversely of success).  If I have a deck of 52 cards, I know that I have a 4 over 52 chance to draw, say, an ace and win a wager; or I have a chance of 48 over 52 to lose.  That’s the risk I take and it is informed by that probability.  What if, however, I have to estimate my risk and I don’t know the number of cards and the number of aces in the deck?  This is uncertainty.  Insurance firms sell us coverage against risk not against uncertainty.  Investing, airplane safety, and much more in our lives are informed by risk estimates.  But risk estimates are based on patterns of events we have identified.  To our misfortune, this pandemic face us with uncertainty and that’s why it is a lot more terrifying and hard to manage.  Because it is new, we have no knowledge about the pattern of infections and deaths.  Human life has improved tremendously thanks to our ability to wrap our hands (brains if you wish) around risk.*  Now this advantage is taken away.  The essence of our battle against Covid-19 is to reduce uncertainty and improve our estimation of risk.  That’s when we ‘ll know we are taking control of this pandemic and our lives will return to some normalcy.

All this is sobering stuff.  Living with restrictions is annoying.  And if you lost someone you knew the loss is crashing.  But our blue planet will churn one more time and the sun will rise again tomorrow and more spring flowers will bloom.  And the probability to breath at the end of the summer is 99.94%.

* A wonderful book on this subject is:  Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein.