Author: George Papaioannou

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.

They say a crisis is too good a thing to waste.  Crises create opportunities to learn.  Crises are like natural experiments, that is, real-life situations we cannot replicate for the sake of research because of the high cost or because we cannot design with high degree of authenticity.  The coronavirus pandemic is a devastating calamity but one that also comes with some valuable teaching moments.

Government matters.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became the heroes of conservative politics and thought by declaring that “government is the problem not the solution.”  The experience of the last forty years teaches us the opposite.  When governments retreat infrastructure decays, social problems flare up and crises take a heavier toll, human and economic.  Government has not been invented by people as a parasite of the private sector.  It exists because it has a crucial and unique role to play.  Adam Smith’s profit motive can take us so far in meeting our needs.  At the end of that road it is only the government that can pick up the task of providing for the rest of our needs.

Take the case of hospital beds in the US.  We currently have 2.8 beds per 1,000 persons, much below what is available in other advanced countries.  This may make sense as a cost containment solution at the level of each hospital system.  But it doesn’t from a public policy standpoint in cases of health emergencies.  Think of this.  The US has more beds for its inmate population (about 2.3 million) than it has to take care of its sick people in a case of a pandemic like this one.  Not to mention, of course, the deficit in other medical equipment.

We need to understand that the government and public sectors have distinct priorities and missions.  The bias in favor of private sector solutions and less government has brought us to where we are now and will continue to be the root cause of future failures.

Preparedness matters.  The lack of preparedness and quick response to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a direct consequence of the mantra “a smaller government is a better government.”  We now find the hard way that fighting a tiny virus requires a really big government.  Assigning a secondary role to government to address local and national problems translates into less monetary, administrative and professional resources and, hence, delayed and inadequate responses.  There is no way we can sugarcoat the current inadequacy of tactical and strategic planning on part of the federal government to face this crisis.  A country that is obsessed with all kinds of statistics and data cannot gain a reliable knowledge of the extent of the pandemic because of our failure to test in big numbers. *  We have failed to measure and count the one thing that right now matters the most for how we plan our economic and medical response to the crisis.

Fiscal responsibility matters.  When the government passed the $1.5 trillion tax law in 2017 amidst a period of economic growth and falling unemployment, wiser voices warned that we were over-straining the debt capacity of the country and leaving very little room to fight the next economic crisis.  As predicted by experts outside the Administration, the last three years annual fiscal deficits have ballooned to $1 trillion and the national debt has climbed by a similar magnitude.  And now the chicken has come home to roost.  The additional $2 trillion (and most likely much more) of debt we have to assume finds our national finances without any slack for more debt.  The money that is truly needed now will bring the indebtedness of the federal government to unprecedented heights for a peace time economy.  Who will pay? (See below.)

Economic inequality matters.  Prior to the coronavirus crisis we were told that we have a thriving economy.  But for whom?  First, let’s state the fact that average GDP growth has not exceeded in any significant order that of the pre-2017 years, let alone the President’s uninformed assurances for growth much higher than 3%.  Instead the tax cuts created additional deficits and debt with the vast bulk of the benefits in after-tax income and stock market gains going to the top 1 to 10%.  Despite a very low unemployment, significant segments of American families are exposed to financial fragility.  Forty percent of Americans do not have more than $400 to spare in an emergency and credit card delinquencies among young Americans are rising.  Average savings in 401K plans are also woefully low for the size and growth record of the American economy. **  What does this terribly skewed distribution of incomes and wealth mean?  It means that this supposedly thriving economy does not have the capacity at the household level to endure a dislocation of jobs and money in times of crises.  As a result, we need much larger stop gap rescue measures, as now, to avert the economic collapse of households.  So here is the shortsightedness of the trickle-down theory.  It prefers to create immense wealth for the few instead of economically empowering all citizens so they can become better masters of their economic fate.  Ironically, the conservatives’ trickle-down theory betrays the spirit of individual independence they espouse by creating what amounts to a modern-day type of economic serfdom by keeping large numbers of Americans in a perpetual state of financial fragility. ***

Who pays matters.  Who do we think will pay for the exploding fiscal deficits and debt?  Our children and their children and grandchildren, of course.  And we know why.  Because over thirty years the effective tax rates on high and very high incomes has declined without producing enough economic growth to sustain or boost tax revenues.  This has left the federal and state governments with fewer fiscal resources to prepare us for emergencies and minimal capacity to absorb economic shocks without resorting to extreme fiscal measures.  If we have any sense of fairness and social solidarity, Congress should soon adopt legislation to impose a tax surcharge on high incomes and later undertake a radical restructuring of the tax code to restore robust funding of the government so it can do its own job, the job the private sector is not designed to deliver.

The ultimate lesson in a crisis is that’s when a nation needs a leader.  A leader who accepts responsibility, displays humility before the enormity of the challenge, shows compassion, knows how to inspire the people, and gives hope based on facts, reason, and the resoluteness of the human spirit.  I wish I had that leader.

* As of March 25, the number of tests in the US stood at 418,810 whereas it stood at 357,896 in South Korea.  South Korea has a population of 51 million people compared to 330 million in the US.  Therefore, on a per person basis, the US is behind by an order of 6.  And, of course, it took longer for us to ramp up testing than it took for So. Korea.  Without extensive testing, we cannot plan our way out.

** The financial fragility or state of American households has been tracked by the Federal Reserve since 2013.

*** If the word “serfdom” bothers anyone, I suggest reading the main editorial of today’s (March 27, 2020) NYT that describes how several European countries are handling the crisis-induced unemployment.  Instead of boosting unemployment benefits, these countries committed to compensate firms for keeping their employees on the rolls.  It is much more dignified, and eventually productive, to keep people employed than laying them off.

This week I was supposed to be in a warm and sunny place visiting and having good time with friends.  But the plans were cancelled and now here I am feeling duty-bound to write one more blog post.  I could take the week off as originally planned but I don’t want to surrender too much to this bug.  It can control my movements but not my pen, oops sorry, my keyboard.

Fighting a virus is so frustrating.  It is not big enough to slap it or whack it.  You can’t hose it down or blow it away.  Invisible and tiny infiltrates everything.  We close the door behind us as we come home and we may carry it inside with us.  We look out the window wondering when it will invade our privacy but we can’t see anything.  We wash our hands but it could be on our clothes and shoes.  How do you escape such an intruder and stalker?

I could go on like that listing all the frustrating thoughts that come to mind, but I prefer to write down some loftier (oh, just poetic license) thoughts I made as this virus is taking more and more of a foothold in our daily lives.

We are first and foremost biological creatures.  This is a virus attacking a species.  It affects us, sickens us and kills us biologically.  Time for us to think of ourselves as a species not as individuals or groups, or nations.  It is in such moments we realize we are one and the same species and we need to defend us together, grieve together, recover together.   We humans have done a horrible job exterminating countless species.  This is the moment to reflect what that means when we ourselves feel that existential threat.

We are also social creatures.  To endure and overcome the challenges and risks of our biological journey on earth, we created art, and literature, and culture and religion to find beauty and meaning as an antidote to our fears and the anxiety of our eventual end that we, better than any other species, are able to contemplate.  But none of these we do alone.  We share and enjoy them together.  It is in sociality our species has found an instinct that increases our chances to survive.  But now this social life we value is under attack.  Our natural inclination to socialize puts us at risk and could kill us.  Imagine if the biological balance between us and other forms of life were such that we had to give up our sociability.  We would no longer be able to learn from each other or develop empathy for strangers.  And we would not be capable to trust others to care for our offsprings, to feed us or defend us.  We would not be the same species.

Trust matters.  Nothing is more important in our social life than trust.  It keeps us together, establishing expectations of reciprocity, fairness and solidarity.  Those who betray our trust we consider unworthy of interacting with us.  In serious matters, societies often ostracize those who violate the unwritten rules of trustworthiness.  In cases, like the one we face now, when we have to engage in collective behavior as pluribus not unum, we need to trust those who have the responsibility to lead the common effort and fight.  We expect of them reliable information, transparency and unvarnished truth.  As harmful as this virus is, it gives us the opportunity to judge the trustworthiness of our leaders and inform ourselves in future political decisions.

Science matters.  Thanks to our developed brains, we humans can learn about the laws of nature and develop technologies and responses to natural forces.  That helps us gain some – not total – control over our fate.  We don’t have to wait and see what the course of the virus will be for our survival.  We can counterattack it biologically as well.  Funny, though, that our reliance in science increases when we face a clear and present danger that threatens us now not down the road.  We are wired to have this strong response to present dangers.  It would be even better if we could overcome our relative indifference to future risks, like those lurking due to climate change, and let science guide us.  Being selective in our acceptance of scientific knowledge is not wise.

Character matters.  The virus has the potential to kill us one at a time.  But it will kill less of us if we show solidarity.  A person’s character is tested in crises.  We have to do the right thing not only for us but also for our fellow humans.  We have to sanitize, stay home and keep our distance from others.  We are not used to living like that.  Our contemporary life is full of recreation and entertainment opportunities that take us away from home and mix us with many people, often strangers to us, in all sorts of interactions.  How can we suspend this life style without feeling being out of our skin?  But we need the temperance and perseverance to do it.

We have become a complex species.  Not just a host to billions of biological cells, but also social players as well as cultural and spiritual beings wielding technology and interacting politically to organize the path of our finite lives.  As such we can suffer or perish in many different ways because of our multifaceted nature.  Biologically, socially, technologically, culturally, spiritually.

Or we can marshal all these constituents of our species and survive one more time and try again to become a better species for ourselves and the rest of the natural world.

Every time I hit the “I Agree” tag on a commercial, government or health care web site I have mixed feelings.  One is positive because agreement will give me passage to a flow of information between me and the site owner.  The other is trepidation because I am uncertain how my personal information will be used.  These hits occur by the millions every hour.  With every hit, the volume of data under the control of the various data aggregators mushrooms.

Never before, humanity as a whole has given away a valuable good (in this case private personal information) at such a huge scale in return of benefits we can hardly grasp and without any competitive mechanism that would give us some bargaining power.  Once our data are collected, they are compiled, spliced, diced and analyzed to yield as much information about our identity, habits and relationships.  Then the scary part comes: the manipulation of our emotions and the programming of our next moves.  From my reading on the subject, I have come down to understanding this business as a three-stage process: data collection; information processing; manipulation and programming of human action.

The private data industry is nothing resembling the perfect competition of Economics 101 textbooks.  It is highly oligopolistic and anti-competitive.  It is part of what Shoshana Zuboff (NYT Jan. 26, 2020) calls Surveillance Capitalism.  It is concentrated in the hands of few players, the most formidable being the Big Four: Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.  The private data industry works like a natural monopoly.  That is, the firm that first achieves a critical volume in its business is the one that keeps expanding thwarting competition from others.  As someone put it, “it doesn’t make sense for you and your friend to be on different Facebook-like platforms if the two of you cannot communicate.”  But these giants don’t leave things to chance.  Once a potent start-up rival appears on the horizon, they buy it out.  They devour their competitors as if they are playing Pac Man.

According to Zuboff, the concentration of private data leads to epistemic inequality, that is, an uneven distribution of knowledge.  A few large players know a lot more about everyone and everything than the rest of us.  And because private information about us can be gleaned from the release of data by our relations, we have no idea what the data aggregators know about us.

I have limited footprint in social media but from my occasional online buying I know that each time we buy an item, we are prompted to consider other items that presumably appeal to our taste or that of cohort groups.  By analyzing our information, data aggregators can infer our preferences and influence our choices.  Now, if such firms are really able to coral large numbers of consumers to buy their suggested goods and services, you can plan the production and sales of manufacturers and vendors.  The until a few years ago unpredictable consumption patterns of millions of people now become a little more predictable.  Project this line of data-information processing-manipulation longer and longer and you arrive close to a centrally planned economy.  With hindsight, we can say Lenin misspoke when he said “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  Instead, he should have said “The capitalists will sell us the data to plan them.”  Had the Soviet Union survived thirty more years, this could have possibly happened.

Corporations are, after all, mini planned economies.  One of the first things I learned as an MBA student was the value of planning.  To plan what millions of consumers will purchase is a very inexact science.  But if you have access to information and behavioral buying patterns provided by big data aggregators you can reduce the uncertainty to manageable levels.  This means corporations have a big interest in manipulated and programmed activities which makes them natural allies of the data aggregators.  This means there is a strong lobby willing to resist serious government oversight.  The US Congress, for one, has been quite inactive in relation to this matter.  Data collection and oligopoly on information and knowledge are, however, too important to ignore for the health of an open economic and democratic society.

These thoughts are echoed in the article “Can technology plan economies and destroy democracy?” by Benedetto Cristofani in the Christmas 2019 edition of The Economist.  This article as well as Zuboff’s piece in the NYT and another related article by Yuval Harari (author of Sapiens) in the October 2019 issue of The Atlantic make the same points.  Namely, exploitation of private personal data diminishes individual autonomy.  Individual autonomy is based on diffuse and decentralized information.  When information is concentrated in the hands of a few players, individuals can be herded toward behavior that is not necessarily optimal to them.

Ironically, surveillance capitalism is the perverse result of a democratic system averse to regulation of large business as it slowly slides toward economic and political oligarchy.  As such, surveillance capitalism is the exact opposite outcome of what libertarians, the defenders of individualism, would advocate for but are unwilling to block.  In this new world, the arguments of unfettered market evangelists, like the Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek and the American economist Milton Friedman, that free markets and democracies are superior to command economies and centralized political systems thanks to the free flow of information and knowledge are severely challenged.  Private data in the hands of Artificial Intelligence could move the “invisible hand” more efficiently than free markets.  But this “invisible hand” would be waved by a centralized cabal not by multitudes of autonomous individuals.

The end result of these possibilities and warnings may exaggerate the capabilities of information technologies and lie years ahead.  But so did a lot of other transformative human inventions at the time they were imagined.  So, it’s not too early to start reflecting and deliberating on what lies ahead.