Why University Economics sucks!

 

Is this a significant shift in Indians' political preferences? Look at the data

 

Is life in the UK really as bad as the numbers suggest? Yes, it is

The past 15 years have been a disappointment on a scale we could hardly have imagined writes Tim Harford in The FT 

At a time of shortages, we are certainly not short of gloomy economic forecasts. The Resolution Foundation think-tank notes that average real earnings have fallen by 7 per cent since a year ago and predicts that earnings will take four or five years to recover to the levels of January 2022. 

Yet if the forecasts are bad, it is the scene in the rear-view mirror that is truly horrifying. The British economy is in a generation-long slough of despond, a slow-burning economic catastrophe. Real household disposable income per capita has barely increased for 15 years. 

This is not normal. Since 1948, this measure of spending power reliably increased in the UK, doubling every 30 years. It was about twice as high in 1978 as in 1948 and was in touching distance of doubling again by 2008, before the financial crisis intervened. Today, it’s back at those pre-crisis levels. 

It’s worth lingering on this point because it is so extraordinary. Had the pre-crisis trend continued, the typical Brit would by now be 40 per cent richer. Instead, no progress has been made at all. No wonder the Institute for Fiscal Studies is now talking of a second lost decade. 

Go back and look for historical precedents for this, and you will not find much. In the National Institute Economic Review, economic historians Nick Crafts and Terence Mills examined the growth in labour productivity over the very long run. (This is defined as the total output of the UK economy divided by the total number of hours worked; labour productivity is closely connected to material standards of living.) They do find worse runs of performance — 1760 to 1800 was not much fun — but none within living memory. Nowhere in 260 years of data do they find a sharper shortfall from the previous trend. The past 15 years have been a disappointment on a scale that previous generations of British economists could hardly have imagined. 

The questions of how this can have happened, and what can be done to change things, can be left for another column. (Part of the problem, in any case, may have been government by newspaper columnists.) But it is worth looking for symptoms. Is life in the UK really as bad as the apocalyptically bad economic numbers suggest? Perhaps so. There are some obvious problems: widespread worry about the cost of living; strikes everywhere; the utter meltdown of the UK’s emergency healthcare. 

There are also subtler indicators of chronic economic disease. Consider the public finances. In an ideal world, governments offer their citizens low taxes, excellent public services and falling national debt. In normal circumstances, we can’t have it all. Right now, we can’t have any of it. 

We have rising taxes. At more than 37 per cent of national income, they are four percentage points higher than they’ve tended to be over the past four decades. Yet those high taxes are doing nothing to shore up public services, which have been steadily squeezed for more than a decade. (The NHS, believe it or not, has been shielded from this squeeze; if it’s bad at your local A&E, don’t think too deeply about schools, courts or social services.) Low growth puts pressure on public sector wage settlements — if the pie isn’t growing, no wonder there is such a scrap over each slice. 

One might at least hope that, with high taxes and spending constraints, debt would be low and falling. No. Debt is high, the deficit is a permanent fixture and interest payments on public debt have risen to levels not seen for 40 years. 

Many people struggle to pay for the basics. A large survey conducted by the Resolution Foundation in late November found that about a quarter of people said they couldn’t afford regular savings of £10 a month, couldn’t afford to spend small sums on themselves, couldn’t afford to replace electrical goods and couldn’t afford to switch on the heating when needed. Three years ago, only an unlucky few — between 2 and 8 per cent — described themselves as having such concerns over spending. More than 10 per cent of respondents said that at times over the previous 30 days, they’d not eaten when hungry because they didn’t have money for food. 

This is not supposed to happen in one of the world’s richest countries. But then, the UK is no longer in that club. As my colleague John Burn-Murdoch has recently shown, median incomes in the UK are well below those in places such as Norway, Switzerland or the US and well below the average of developed countries. Incomes of the poor, those at the 10th percentile, are lower in the UK than in Slovenia. 

 

If all this was happening during a deep recession, we could have hope. “One day,” we’d say to ourselves, “the business cycle will turn, businesses will start hiring again, tax revenues will increase and some of our problems will disappear of their own accord.” 

But we are not in a deep recession. Recently unemployment has been lower than at any time since before the prime minister was born, which suggests that a dramatic cyclical uptick is unlikely. The UK economy has the accelerator to the floor yet is barely able to gain speed. That is hardly likely to improve as the Bank of England applies the brakes. 

I don’t believe the situation is hopeless. The UK has many strengths and many resources and has overcome adversity before. But if we are to solve this chronic economic problem together, we first need to acknowledge just how serious — and how stubborn — the issue has become.

The DWP has become Britain’s biggest debt collector.

Gordon Brown in The Guardian

Prime Minister Sunak talks about the need for “compassion” from the government this winter. But how far do social security benefits have to fall before our welfare system descends into a form of cruelty?

Take a couple with three children whose universal credit payment is, in theory, £46.11 a day. However, when their payment lands they have just £35, because around a quarter of their benefit has been deducted to pay back the loan they had to take out on joining universal credit to cover the five weeks they were denied benefit. And an extra 5% has been deducted as back payment to their utility company. According to Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) rules, money can be deducted for repayment of advance or emergency loans, and even on behalf of third parties for rent, utilities and service charge payments.

With gas and electricity likely to cost, at a minimum, £7 on cold days like today, and with a council tax contribution to be paid on top, they find that they have just £25. 80 a day left over, or £5.16 per person, to pay for food and all other essentials. Even if the Scottish child poverty payment comes their way, clothes, travel, toiletries and home furnishings remain out of reach. Parents like them are just about the best accountants I could ever meet , but you can’t budget with nothing to budget with. And that’s why so many have had to tell their children they can’t afford presents this Christmas. No wonder they need the weekly bag of food they get from the local food bank. But they also need a toiletries and hygiene bank, a clothes bank, a bedding bank, a home furnishings bank, and a baby bank.

The DWP has now become the country’s biggest debt collector, seizing money that should never have had to be paid back, from people who cannot afford to pay anyway. In fact, the majority of families on universal credit do not receive the full benefit that the DWP advertises. More than 20% is deducted at source from each benefit payment made to a million households, leaving them surviving on scraps and charity as they run out of cash in the days before their next payment. In total, 2 million children are in families suffering deductions.

Gordon Brown with workers at the Big Hoose multi-bank project, Fife, 8 November 2022. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

When the money runs out, and the food bank tokens are gone, parents become desperate and ashamed that their children cannot be fed, and fall victim to loan sharks hiding in the back alleys who exploit hardship and compound it, and prey on pain and inflame it.

The case for each community having its own multi-bank – its reservoir of supplies for those without – is more urgent this winter than at any time I have known. Since the Trussell Trust’s brilliant expansion of UK food banks, creative local and national charities have pioneered community banks of all kinds offering free clothes, furnishings, bedding, electrical goods and, in the case of the national charity In Kind Direct, toiletries.

In Fife, Amazon, PepsiCo, Scotmid Fishers and other companies helped to set up a multi-bank. It’s a simple idea that could be replicated nationwide: they meet unmet needs by using unused goods. The companies have the goods people need, and the charities know the people who need them. With a coordinating charity, a warehouse to amass donations and a proper referral system, multi-banks can ensure their goods alleviate poverty.

But the charities know themselves that they can never do enough. With the state privatisations of gas, water, electricity and telecoms, the government gave up on responsibility for essential national assets. But now, with what is in effect the privatisation of welfare, our government is giving up on its responsibility to those in greatest need – passing the buck to charities, which cannot cope. Just as breadwinners cannot afford bread, food banks are running out of food.

Charities, too,are at the mercy of exceptionally high demand and the changing circumstances of donors whose help can be withdrawn as suddenly as it has been given. And so while voluntary organisations – and not the welfare state – are currently our last line of defence, the gap they have to bridge is too big for them to ever be the country’s safety net.

According to Prof Donald Hirsch and the team researching minimum income standards at Loughborough University, benefit levels for those out of work now fall 50% short of what most of us would think is a minimum living income, with their real value falling faster in 2022 than at any time for 50 years since up-ratings were introduced. And still 800,000 of the poorest children in England go without free school meals.

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I’m so cold I live in my bed – like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Marin

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When it comes to helping with heating, the maximum that any family will receive, no matter its size, is £24 a week emergency help to cover what the government accepts is the £50 a week typical cost of heating a home. From April, the extra payments will be even less – just £16 to cover nearly the typical £60 a week they now expect gas and electricity to cost. And then, as Jeremy Hunt says, help with heating will become a thing of the past.

One hundred years ago, Winston Churchill was moved to talk of the unacceptable contrast between the accumulated excesses of unjustified privilege and “the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions”. Our long term priority must be to persuade a highly unequal country of the need for a decent minimum income for all, but our immediate demand must be for the government to suspend for the duration of this energy crisis the deductions that will soon cause destitution.

Ministers have been forced to change tack before. In April 2021 the government reduced the cap on the proportion of income deducted from 30% to 25%. During the first phase of Covid, ministers temporarily halted all deductions. In April, they discouraged utility firms from demanding them, but deductions as high as 30% of income are still commonplace.

There is no huge cost to the government in suspending deductions, for it will get its money back later. But this could be a lifesaver for millions now suffering under a regime that seems vindictive beyond austerity. Let this be a Christmas of compassion, instead of cruelty.

Gujaratification of India

 From The Economist

Agashiye, a popular restaurant in Ahmedabad, serves only one thing: Gujarati thali. But the dish contains multitudes: curries, pulses, veggies and sweets, along with flatbreads, rice, salad, pickles, poppadums and more. Its fans say the thali strikes the perfect balance. But that depends how it is consumed. Presented with a plate featuring greens next to fried delights and thick, sweet cream, few diners choose to gorge on cabbage.

So it is with Gujarat’s strangely uneven development record. Ruled by Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) since 1998, India’s westernmost state is a great success story overall. It is the sixth-richest state and accounts for 30% of exports. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 11% between 2011 and 2021, the fastest in the country.

It is this record that Mr Modi, after 13 years running Gujarat, stressed when he sought India’s top job in 2014. Just as the thali contains a balance of fibre, protein and carbohydrates, his “Gujarat model” was said to be a perfect mix of good education, jobs, higher incomes and a “better life”. After a decade of welfarism, state meddling and graft under the Congress party, many Indians were hungry for it.

Critics of Mr Modi pointed to communal riots on his watch in 2002 that left over 1,000 Gujaratis dead, most of them Muslims. They also noted that the state was pro-business long before he showed up. And that Gujarat’s social indicators, which track changes in the lives of the poor, were far from perfect—indeed much worse than its economic ones. That seemed like a bad lookout for a country with more than twice as many very poor people as any other. Sure enough, eight years and two crushing election victories later, the hopes and fears for Mr Modi’s economic stewardship have largely been realised. He and his party have taken the Gujarat model India-wide.

In the state of 62m people, where the bjp won its seventh straight election this week, social indicators still trail economic ones. On a development index that accounts for life expectancy, education and income, Gujarat ranks 21st out of 36 states and territories. It is in the bottom half of states for underage marriage, child stunting, infant mortality, and school and college enrolment. Last year its gdp per head matched Tamil Nadu’s, but its share of people living in poverty, at 14%, was nearly four times bigger (see chart 1).

This reflects the Hindu nationalists’ priorities. Gujarat’s social spending is the lowest of all Indian states. It also directs a smaller share of its total expenditure to rural development and a larger portion to cities than the state average. Many of its rural districts lack basics such as secondary schools as a result. Meanwhile, its cities are thriving, as they like to illustrate with shiny new building projects. When the national government solicited proposals for urban-renewal plans in the early 2000s, most cities in Gujarat wanted funds for flyovers, says Himani Baxi of Pandit Deendayal Energy University in Gandhinagar, the state capital. Just one city proposed building an unglamorous but necessary sewage-treatment plant.

After a number of false starts, India’s economy is also booming. On December 6th the World Bank upgraded its forecast for growth this year from 6.5% to 6.9%. If that is not as fast as Gujarat tends to grow, it is faster than any other big economy. Mr Modi’s highly publicised new mantra is “Together, for everyone’s growth, with everyone’s trust”. And ambitious infrastructure projects such as highways and digitisation are, as in Gujarat, a prominent part of his plan. Most large cities now have metro lines; over 10,000km of highways are being added each year, twice the rate the previous Congress-led government managed. The infrastructure push is helping households, too. Many more now have access to bank accounts and clean fuel. Internet penetration is rising rapidly.

bjp rule has been much less successful at improving Indians’ poor health and woeful education. Child-mortality rates are falling, but patchily. More than a third of children under five are stunted, a higher rate than in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In 2018 around half of all rural children in fifth grade could not read to second-grade levels. And after two years of school closures during the pandemic, the situation is unlikely to have improved.

These failures, again, reflect the bjp’s choices. It has been more generous to India’s poor than its government in Gujarat; the percentage of spending given to welfare schemes such as food and cooking-fuel subsidies is in line with the long-term average. Yet the Modi government is devoting a much smaller portion of India’s bumper tax revenues to social spending, including health care and education, than its predecessor (see chart 2). In 2018-19 government spending on health represented 3.2% of gdp, down from 3.9% the year before it came to power. Spending on education, at 3.1%, is far below its target of 6%.

The poorest bits of the country are missing out most, largely because India’s growth is so unequally distributed. According to official figures, unemployment in Gujarat is 2.9%; in Uttar Pradesh (up), a poor northern state of 240m people, it is 7.1%. Yet the bjp has suffered little or no blowback in such places. This year it became the first party to win a second consecutive majority in up since 1985. Why?

A lot of the answer is its Hindu chauvinism. In Gujarat, up and elsewhere, the bjp has successfully presented itself as a defender of high-caste Hindus, while mollifying the populous lower castes with hate speech against Muslims and just enough welfare. Yet it also seems that Indians like its spending priorities far more than would once have been imagined.

The long-abysmal state of public services—and proliferation of private alternatives—have downgraded Indians’ expectations of them. Less than a third rely on public health care. In an international survey in 2016, just 46% of Indians agreed that “the primary responsibility for providing school education rested with government”, the lowest of any country polled. Meanwhile, the bjp’s infrastructure projects, and relentless efforts to put Mr Modi’s imprimatur on them, have made the projects and prime minister alike powerful symbols of national progress.

As anyone who has tackled a thali knows, to eat is to choose. And so it is to govern. Not every element of the Hindu-nationalist development policy is good for Indians. But it is fuelling their growth and keeping them coming back for more. Mr Modi’s approval rating, at around 77%, may be the highest of any major world leader. His prospects of winning a third parliamentary majority in 2024 appear exceptionally strong.

There is a global debt crisis coming – and it won’t stop at Sri Lanka

Foreign capital flees poorer countries at the first sign of instability. The pandemic and Ukraine war ensure there is plenty of that around writes Jayati Ghosh in The Guardian





This January, even before Sanjana Mudalige’s salary as a sales worker in a shopping mall in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was slashed in half, she had pawned her gold jewellery to try to make ends meet. Ultimately, she quit her job, because the travel costs alone exceeded the pay. Since then, she has shifted from using gas for cooking to chopping firewood, and eats just a quarter of what she did before. Her story, reported in the Washington Post, is one of many in Sri Lanka, where people are watching their children go hungry and their elderly relations suffer for lack of medicines.

The human costs of the crisis only really captured international attention when the massive popular upsurge earlier this month, known as Aragalaya (Sinhalese for “struggle”), led to the peaceful overthrow of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. His family had ruled Sri Lanka with an iron fist, albeit with electoral legitimacy, for more than 15 years, and is now being blamed by both national and international media for the desperate economic mess the country is in.

But blaming the Rajapaksas alone is too simple. Certainly, the aggressive majoritarianism that they unleashed, along with the alleged corruption and major economic policy disasters of recent years (such as drastic tax cuts and bans on fertiliser imports), were crucial elements of the economic debacle. But this is only part of the story. The deeper and underlying causes of the crisis in Sri Lanka are barely mentioned by most mainstream commentators, perhaps because they reveal uncomfortable truths about the way the global economy works.

This is not a crisis created by a few recent external and internal factors, it has been decades in the making. Ever since its “open economic policy” was adopted in the late 1970s, Sri Lanka has been Asia’s poster boy for neoliberal reform, much like Chile in Latin America. The strategy was the now-familiar one of making exports the basis for economic growth, supported by foreign capital inflows. This led to a significant increase in foreign currency debt, something the IMF and the Davos crowd actively encouraged. 

In the period after the 2008 global financial crisis, as low interest rates in advanced economies led to the availability of cheap credit, the Sri Lankan government relied on international sovereign bonds to finance its own spending. Between 2012 and 2020, the debt to GDP ratio doubled to around 80%, with a growing share of this in bonds. The payments due on these debts kept rising in relation to what Sri Lanka could earn from exports and the money sent back home by Sri Lankans working abroad. The disruptions caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine made matters much worse, by causing export earnings to fall and sharply increasing the price of essential imports including food and fuel. Foreign exchange reserves plummeted – but the government had to keep paying interest even when it could not import essential fuel.

Looked at in this light, it is clear that Sri Lanka is not alone; if anything, it’s just a harbinger of a coming storm of debt distress in what economists call the “emerging markets”. The past period of incredibly low interest rates in the advanced economies meant that more funds flowed to “emerging” and “frontier” markets from the richer world. While this found cheerleaders in the international financial institutions (IFIs), it was always a problematic process. This is because, unlike in places such as the EU and US, capital leaves low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) at the first sign of any problem.

And these countries were much more battered economically by the pandemic. Advanced economies were able to provide massive countercyclical measures – think of the UK’s furlough programme – because financial markets effectively allowed and even encouraged them to do so. By contrast, LMICs were prevented from increasing fiscal spending by much – because of those same financial markets, which threatened the possibility of credit downgrades and capital flight as government deficits grew larger. Plus they faced significant declines in export and tourism revenues and tighter balance of payments constraints. As a result, their economic recovery has been much more muted and economic conditions remain mostly dire.

The half-hearted attempts at debt relief, such as the moratorium on debt servicing in the first part of the pandemic, only postponed the problem. There has been no meaningful debt restructuring at all. The IMF bewails the situation and does almost nothing, and both it and World Bank add to the problem through their own rigid insistence on repayments and the appalling system of surcharges imposed by the IMF. The G7 and “international community” have been missing in action, which is deeply irresponsible given the scale of the problem and their role in creating it.

The sad truth is that “investor sentiment” moves against poorer economies regardless of the real economic conditions in specific countries. Private credit rating agencies amplify the problem. This means that contagion is all too likely, and it will affect not just economies that are already experiencing difficulties, but a much wider range of LMICs that will face real difficulties in servicing their debts. Lebanon, Suriname and Zambia are already in formal default; Belarus is on the brink; and Egypt, Ghana and Tunisia are in severe debt distress.

Many countries with lower per-capita income and significant absolute poverty are facing stagflation. Billions of people are increasingly unable to afford a basic nutritious diet, and cannot meet basic health expenses. Material insecurity and social tensions are inevitable.

The situation can still be resolved, but it requires urgent action, especially on the part of the IFIs and G7. Speedy and systematic debt resolution actions to bring in private creditors and other creditors, such as China, are needed, as is IFIs doing their own bit to provide debt relief and ending punitive measures such as surcharges. In addition, policies to limit speculation in commodity markets and profiteering by big food and fuel companies must be put in place. Finally, the recycling of special drawing rights (SDRs) – essentially “IMF coupons” – by countries that will not use them to countries that desperately need them is vital, as is another release of SDRs equating to about $650bn to provide immediate relief.

Without these minimal measures, the post-Covid, post-Ukraine global economy is likely to be engulfed in a dystopia of debt defaults, increasing poverty and sociopolitical instability.

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As Joe Biden moves to double the US minimum wage, Australia can't be complacent

Van Badham in The Guardian

When I was writing about minimum wages for the Guardian six years ago, the United States only guaranteed workers US$7.25 an hour as a minimum rate of pay, dropping to a shocking US$2.13 for workers in industries that expect customers to tip (some states have higher minimum wages).

It is now 2021, and yet those federal rates remain exactly the same.

They’ve not moved since 2009. Meaningfully, America’s minimum wages have been in decline since their relative purchasing power peaked in 1968. Meanwhile, America’s cost of living has kept going up; the minimum wage is worth less now than it was half a century ago.

Now, new president Joe Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief plan proposes a doubling of the US federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.


 
It’s a position advocated both by economists who have studied comprehensive, positive effects of minimum wage increases across the world, as well as American unions of the “Fight for 15” campaign who’ve been organising minimum-wage workplaces demanding better for their members.

The logic of these arguments have been accepted across the ideological spectrum of leadership in Biden’s Democratic party. The majority of Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and even billionaire capitalist Mike Bloomberg – are all on record supporting it and in very influential positions to advance it now.

In a 14 January speech, Biden made a simple and powerful case. “No one working 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line,” he said. “If you work for less than $15 an hour and work 40 hours a week, you’re living in poverty.”

And yet the forces opposed to minimum wage increases retain the intensity that first fought attempts at its introduction, as far back as the 1890s. America did not adopt the policy until 1938 – 31 years after Australia’s Harvester Decision legislated an explicit right for a family of four “to live in frugal comfort” within our wage standards. 

As an Australian, it’s easy to feel smug about our framework. The concept is so ingrained within our basic industrial contract we consume it almost mindlessly, in the manner our cousins might gobble a hotdog in the stands of a Sox game.

But in both cases, the appreciation of the taste depends on your level of distraction from the meat. While wage-earning Australians may tut-tut an American framework that presently allows 7 million people to both hold jobs and live in poverty, local agitation persists for the Americanisation of our own established standards.

When I wrote about minimum wages six years ago, it was in the context of Australia’s Liberal government attempting to erode and compromise them. That government is still in power and that activism from the Liberals and their spruikers is still present. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaigned against minimum wage increases last year. So did the federal government – using the economic downtown of coronavirus as a foil to repeat American mythologies about higher wages causing unemployment increases.


 

They don’t. The “supply side” insistence is that labour is a transactable commodity, and therefore subject to a law of demand in which better-paid jobs equate to fewer employment opportunities … but a neoclassical economic model is not real life.

We know this because some American districts have independently increased their minimum wages over the past few years, and data from places like New York and Seattle has reaffirmed what’s been observed in the UK and internationally. There is no discernible impact on employment when minimum wage is increased. An impact on prices is also fleeting.

As Biden presses his case, economists, sociologists and even health researchers have years of additional data to back him in. Repeated studies have found that increasing the minimum wage results in communities having less crime, less poverty, less inequality and more economic growth. One study suggested it helped bring down the suicide rate. Conversely, with greater wage suppression comes more smoking, drinking, eating of fatty foods and poorer health outcomes overall.

Only the threadbare counter-argument remains that improving the income of “burger-flippers” somehow devalues the labour of qualified paramedics, teachers and ironworkers. This is both classist and weak. Removing impediments to collective bargaining and unionisation is actually what enables workers – across all industries – to negotiate an appropriate pay level.

Australians have been living with the comparative benefits of these assumptions for decades, and have been spared the vicissitudes of America’s boom-bust economic cycles in that time.

But after seven years of Liberal government policy actively corroding standards into a historical wage stagnation, if Biden’s proposals pass, the American minimum wage will suddenly leapfrog Australia’s, in both real dollar terms and purchasing power.

It’ll be a sad day of realisation for Australia to see the Americans overtake us, while we try to comprehend just why we decided to get left behind.

Covid prompts a new approach to economic growth

 An FT Editorial 

The coronavirus pandemic means that 2020 will go down in history as the year with one of the deepest plunges in national income on record. In the UK, which has one of the longest continuous logs of economic output, gross domestic product looks likely to have fallen around a tenth this year, making for the biggest recession in three centuries. Yet even these figures, however eye-watering, do not capture the true collapse in wellbeing, which must be the ultimate goal of economic policy. 

In theory, gross domestic product adds up everything that a country produces in one year. The fall in national income during 2020 is easy to explain: interruptions to normal economic activity have meant that far less has been produced. In this regard the drop in gross domestic product will capture some of the missed outings and trips to the cinema, the cancelled holidays and all the meals and drinks with friends that had to be postponed.  

There is, however, plenty that the figures miss. To aggregate the value of very different activities that take place in an economy statisticians use market prices — allowing them to compare the production of both apples and oranges on a common scale. But the absence of these prices for much of healthcare and education in many countries — statisticians merely impute their production from how much the government spends on them — means the disruptions to schools and delays in administering non-coronavirus medical care is missed. Spending on healthcare might have risen but on a net basis societies got far less for their money. 

On the other hand, public parks and other green spaces have become much more important but their contribution to the economy will not be registered as part of GDP. Unpaid labour too, those who tried to teach their children at home, sewed personal protective equipment or baked banana bread, will not appear in the story of the year told by national income figures. Nor will the drop in air pollution or the volunteers who took care of neighbours. 

Even an accurate counting of the drop in production this year would still miss the psychological damage done by prolonged isolation and loneliness; the “hidden pandemic” of mental health problems. That suggests the solution would not be to expand the definition of gross domestic product to include the production it misses but to consider focusing on wellbeing directly.  

All the same, the experience of this year — when governments shut down their economies in order to protect public health — has shown that economic growth has not been prioritised above all else. Already, a wider definition of wellbeing than a pure economic one is implicitly being used to inform policy. Daily count cases and death rates have played a much bigger role in policymaking than quarterly growth figures. Suggestions that health measures represent a trade-off with economic fortunes have also been overplayed. The best way of protecting jobs this year has been keeping the virus under control: New Zealand, which managed to remain virtually virus-free thanks to an early and strict lockdown, is reaping the economic rewards. 

This will remain true when the pandemic has passed. A healthy and well-educated workforce is one of the most important prerequisites to growth and secure, well-paid, high quality jobs are among the best foundations to protect mental wellbeing. Unemployment and poor-quality work can easily destroy people’s sense of self-worth while a robust private sector is essential to provide the tax revenues for health and education. The goal should be to create the kind of society where economic growth and wellbeing go hand in hand.

Ten years from graduating, I'm still not sure university was a good decision

I studied English, slept a lot and developed an aversion to ‘hard’ books. Was university anything more than an expensive blip? asks Eleanor Margolis in The Guardian


 

‘I suppose I’d say, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.’ Photograph: incamerastock / Alamy/Alamy


Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?

Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.

It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.

I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.

It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.

How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.

Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?

What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.

And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.

Socialism in Venezuela

Inside China’s race to beat poverty

China may be currently unpopular with the rest of the world; but, like the Soviets before them, they claim to have lifted large numbers of people out of poverty writes Yuan Yang and Nian Liu in The FT


Two A3-sized cards hanging outside the door of Jike Shibu’s house in Atule’er, a village perched on a cliff in the mountains of south-west China, were enough to determine his family’s fate. One was white and divided into four sections: “Having a good house; living a good life; cultivating good habits; creating a good atmosphere.” Each section was scored out of 100, with Jike’s family gaining just 65 points on the issue of housing. 

Next to the white card was a red one, granting them the title of “poverty-stricken household with a card and record”. On it, an official’s handwritten recommendations for how the family could improve their lot. Their “main cause of poverty” was diagnosed as “bad transport infrastructure and lack of money”. Recommended measures included growing higher-profit crops, such as Sichuanese peppercorn, and “changing their customs”. 

By themselves, the cards are not much use to the villagers: very few of those born before the 2000s read Chinese characters fluently. But the writing on them has changed their futures — in Jike’s case, resettling his family in a purpose-built, bustling compound in the nearby market town of Zhaojue. 

Zhaojue is a place in a hurry. The government has set a deadline of the end of this month to end extreme poverty in the surrounding county of Liangshan, one of the most deprived in China. “Win the tough battle to end poverty,” proclaims the central hotel on a red electronic marquee — along with the number of days to the deadline. On the narrow streets outside, farmers rush around with wicker baskets full of produce, and vendors sell shoes and clothes piled high on plastic sheets. 

The roots of this frantic activity go back to 2013, when leader Xi Jinping set a deadline for all of China’s rural counties to eradicate extreme poverty by the end of 2020. In the four decades since market reform began, China has already made huge advances in this area, winning praise from the UN, World Bank and figures from Bill Gates to Bernie Sanders, for raising 850 million people out of extreme poverty. 

For both Xi and the Chinese Communist party, poverty-alleviation goals are more than a policy target. They are also a major source of legitimacy, both inside China and globally. “In my opinion, western politicians act for the next election. [By contrast] China has a ruling party that wants to achieve big goals,” says Hu Angang, a government adviser and head of China Studies at Tsinghua university. “In the history of human development, China achieving this is, if not unique, then at least something worthy of admiration.” 

In the five years of Xi’s first term, an average of 13 million people were lifted out of poverty each year, according to the government. Some 775,000 officials were sent to villages to lead poverty alleviation and the government fund for this purpose increased by more than 20 per cent annually since 2013. State media said in March that central coffers had already handed out Rmb139.6bn (£15.8bn) of an estimated Rmb146bn this year. But the Covid-19 epidemic has led to an economic downturn, with the country’s GDP for the first quarter shrinking for the first time in four decades. Areas that were already deprived have been some of the hardest hit. 

By the end of 2019, there were still 5.5 million individuals in extreme rural poverty around China. Xi’s goal is to bring this figure to zero in time for the centenary of the Communist party in July 2021. Coinciding with this would allow him to declare that China is prosperous and deserves to be a world leader, says Gao Qin, an expert on China’s social welfare at Columbia University. “The government is determined to achieve this goal,” says Gao. “Since March, official publications have reaffirmed that it must happen by the end of the year.” 

In a bid to do this, the fronts for Xi’s “tough battle” on poverty are shifting. “Some villages are in extreme poverty that is difficult to alleviate, because of natural conditions and of the lack of transport infrastructure. In these places, very few villagers can become migrant workers and they rely on subsistence agriculture,” says Wang Xiangyang, assistant professor of public affairs at Southwest Jiaotong University. These include remote mountain communities such as the one in which Jike lives. 


Atule’er — or Cliff Village as it is now widely known in China — sits atop a 1,400m mountain. Like many of the Yi ethnic minority areas of Liangshan, it is infrequently visited by tourists and difficult to reach, and may well have stayed that way had it not come to national prominence in 2016. That year, a local media feature showed children clinging to an old, crumbling vine ladder on their two-hour descent to the nearest school. Soon, more journalists arrived, and the local government pledged a new 800m steel ladder. 

“Liangshan became the forefront of poverty alleviation — a lab within the country,” says Jan Karlach, research fellow at the Czech Academy of Sciences, whose research has focused on Liangshan and the Nuosu-Yi for the past 10 years. In 2017, at the annual meeting of China’s parliament, Xi dropped by the Sichuan province delegation to ask about progress alleviating poverty among the Yi people. “When I saw a report about the Liangshan cliff village on television . . . I felt anxious,” he said. 

Over the past few months, the local government has resettled 84 households, or half the village, in Zhaojue, giving them apartments at the heavily subsidised price of Rmb10,000 (£1,130) per apartment. The “resettlement homes” are located a two-hour drive away from the base of Atule’er’s mountain, with a red banner across the entrance welcoming new residents. 

The villagers allocated these flats are happy to have them. On the mountaintop, their earthen houses are exposed to the rain, as well as fatal rock slides. There, the only industry is subsistence farming. There is no medical care or formal education. 

While some Yi academics question the changing of local (non-Han Chinese) customs for those moved from Cliff Village, the Communist party’s efforts have been largely welcomed. “Even my traditionalist friend — who said he couldn’t live in a house without a Yi fireplace — ditched the idea within a year,” says Karlach. His friend now lives in a town apartment with a picture of Xi on the wall: a poster handed out by local officials to remind poor households who to thank. 

But others are not yet sure how to adapt to life in the town, where they will have to transform their mountain-dwelling culture to fit the 100 sq m apartments. “My mother isn’t keen to come down from the mountaintop,” says the 24-year-old Jike. “Elderly people don’t like the town, they say there’s no land and nothing to eat there. I say, ‘What others eat, you’ll eat.’ The elderly can’t stay up there on their own.” 

Recently, Jike has been carrying heavy loads of bedding and clothes on his trips down the mountain, getting ready for his move. He has also acquired a following on social media. Hopping between slippery footholds, his giant plastic pack on his back, he holds his smartphone out on a selfie stick and chats cheerfully to fans on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok. Jike can earn Rmb3,000 per month from live-streaming: a fortune compared with the Rmb700 average for rural locals. 

He has agreed to take us up to his village in part because he believes the residents who remain there need a better platform to air their views. In some regions, China’s strategy of development through urbanisation has led to forced demolitions, and farmers stripped of the land their families had tended for generations. But Cliff Village faces the opposite problem: there are many more people who want to move than the government has relocated. 

 Over the two days that we spend there, more people approach us, wanting to show us the insides of their houses and tell us how the local government has overlooked them. In Zhaojue, the threshold for being extremely poor is living on less than Rmb4,200 per year (£475) and, in Cliff Village, such officially “poverty-stricken” households receive a basic income guarantee, the right to buy cut-price new apartments — and even 30 chickens. 

But there are also those unlucky enough to be officially logged as poor, either through neglect, miscalculation or mere bureaucracy. They do not receive the same benefits, although they are entitled to some payments, such as the minimum livelihood guarantee. They also do not count towards the government’s poverty-eradication target. In some cases, the government has solved meeting its poverty targets administratively: certain areas have stopped logging residents as “impoverished” since the start of the year. “It’s all been counted, the system no longer takes new impoverished households,” says Azi Aniu, a local county-level party secretary. (He later vacillated on this point, telling us that they were able to log new impoverished households but chose not to.) 

While the rapid rate of alleviation is real, the true level of poverty may be impossible to gauge in a system not designed to admit mistakes. According to official policy, if the minimum-livelihood guarantee was being implemented properly, such impoverished households would not exist. The current database will be overhauled for the next step of China’s development plan, which will move on to “precarious” or “borderline” households. 

According to Li Shi, professor of economics at Beijing Normal University, surveys from 2014 suggested some 60 per cent of those who should qualify for “poverty-stricken” status based on their low incomes did not get the designation. In the years that followed, “some adjustments were made, and there should be some improvement,” Li wrote. 

But many of those still in Atule’er feel left behind. “You’re not going to write one of those ‘Goodbye to Cliff Village’ articles, are you?” asks Jike Quri, a man who had waited all day at the top of the steel ladder for us to arrive. “There is no goodbye: half of us are still here.” 


Within an hour of us checking in, local authorities arrived at our hotel door, indicating the sensitivities around this story. State media had come the week before to report on one of the most high-profile battlegrounds in China’s anti-poverty push, and had written stories about happy villagers moving into their flats. 

In one local media spread, the family of Mou’se Xiongti, a 25-year-old man, were photographed in their new flat, the bed decked with blankets. When we visited Mou’se’s flat, it was empty except for the government-provided furniture: a set of cabinets, sofa, chairs, tables and bed. Many items were stamped with “People’s Government of Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China”. 

The nervousness of local politicians is largely due to the fact that Cliff Village is now renowned for its role as part of a high-level target: Xi has personally embraced poverty alleviation, boosting his populist image as a “peasant emperor” with sympathies for ordinary Chinese people — a persona not dissimilar to that cultivated by Mao Zedong. State propaganda often depicts Xi chatting with farmers about the harvest, sitting cross-legged in village homes or laughing with pensioners. In his first five-year presidential term from 2012, he visited 180 poor regions across 20 provinces. He visited Liangshan in 2018. 

The red and white cards that ultimately gave Jike Shibu’s family a flat are part of a policy which required creating a database of households and checking their progress. This campaign came with a boost in government funding for rural social welfare projects, a powerful committee to guide policy and the establishment of a national database of poor households. By the end of this year, that system must be cleared of households like Jike’s.  
But the villagers still left in Atule’er say they have not received such targeted attention from the local officials, who, they allege, don’t bother to visit their mountaintop homes that often. (The local official Azi counters that he has trekked up the mountain so many times he has damaged his legs.) As a result, they complain there is no meaningful distinction between “poverty-stricken” households and others, and those in need of help are not getting it. 

Some households face the problem of getting lumped together into one record. This happens when adults with their own children are still marked on the record of their parents, meaning they are only assigned one house. Often, officials reject their requests to register new households. 

Others suffer Kafkaesque bureaucratic processes. Jizu Wuluo, a 37-year-old widow and mother to four children, two of whom she had to give up for adoption, is determined to give her youngest a good education and rents a flat near the school at the bottom of the cliff. Jizu ticks many of the boxes of an “impoverished” household: she lives in one of the fragile houses on Cliff Village, heads a single-earner family and also “suffers hardship for education”. 

However, although she has tried to get “impoverished” status on several occasions, each time officials told her to wait. In October last year she and her two sons were finally each given a minimum livelihood guarantee of Rmb2,940 per year, part of the government’s package of anti-poverty measures that it uses when all else fails. About 43 million people receive it nationwide. In Zhaojue county, the maximum paid per rural recipient per year is Rmb4,200. 

“I know Xi Jinping said to help those poor and suffering ordinary folk, but when it comes to grassroots officials like you, you only help those people who already have standing in society,” she says in a meeting with Azi, who listened patiently to a string of complaints. 

After we left, Azi quickly followed up on Jizu’s case. The explanation for why she had not been prioritised for an apartment raised more questions than it answered. Jizu had been missed out of the first survey of impoverished households in 2013. Later, she was recorded as “an impoverished household without an official record”. Azi says they could not create an official “impoverished household” record for her after her husband died in 2018. Instead, they added more labels to her case. Azi couldn’t say when the list of impoverished households stopped being amended but, he says, Jizu will be moved into town by the end of the year. 

“The relocation apartments are beautiful, they are better than other properties in town, so some villagers get a bit jealous,” says Azi. “I’m being very straightforward with you.” 


Moving into town may be one step towards ensuring a secure livelihood, but the most important is finding work. Local officials encourage the younger generation to seek jobs in cities, particularly those along the industrialised south-east coast. For decades, rural-urban migration has been the standard way of improving livelihoods: some 236 million people in China are migrant workers, according to government statistics. 

Of the locals we spoke to in their late teens and twenties, many had gone out to work for a few months at a time. Most did unskilled labour in construction and went in groups arranged by friends or relatives. Like migrants from around China, Liangshan’s workers live as second-class citizens when they arrive in major cities, where it is almost impossible to access healthcare or education for their children. During the coronavirus epidemic, these workers — who often had to continue delivering groceries and cleaning hospitals — were highly vulnerable. 

The work that Liangshan locals can do is also limited by their education. Most of our interviewees were semi-literate at best, and some did not speak Mandarin. The internet is changing that. Social media, ecommerce and live-streaming have created greater opportunity for reading and writing outside of the world of formal education. Jike, who received just two years of schooling, says he learnt a lot about reading, writing and speaking Chinese from live-streaming. Every now and then, as viewers’ comments flash in real time across his screen, he addresses the commenter by saying, “Sister, I can’t read that.” 

Education is another way of leaving the village. While some families prefer to let their children work, others are keen to send them to school. Mou’se Lazuo, the 17-year-old sister of Xiongti, hopes to break the trend in her village by going to university. She is the oldest girl in Cliff Village still at school; the older ones have gone to work or got married. She is one of 72 students in her class. 

While she speaks Yi at home, Mou’se studies in Mandarin, with the exception of an hour and a half of Yi language classes per week. “I think it’s fine for Han culture to come here, so long as Han culture and Yi exist side by side,” she says. “We can’t leave parts of our traditional culture, like our legends and our language.” 


The Yi didn’t come to China: China came to the Yi. Yi people have lived in the mountains of Liangshan for centuries, not far from Sichuan’s borders with Tibet and Myanmar. After teetering on the edge of the Chinese empire for over a millennium, Liangshan was brought under Communist rule in 1957 with the help of the People’s Liberation Army. The Yi were categorised as such by anthropologists sent by the Beijing-based national government in the 1950s, who determined the roster of 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities. 

“It’s a civilising project,” says Karlach, the researcher who has lived in Liangshan, describing the government’s attitude towards poverty alleviation with ethnic minorities. “In Liangshan, in many places, they’re not offered to indigenise or develop their own modernity: they are given the modernity from the outside. They want to be Chinese and are proud to be Chinese, but also want to be Yi.” 

For the government, teaching the Mandarin language and Han customs not only makes ethnic minorities easier to govern, but also helps them fit into a Han-dominated economy. Also, rapid urbanisation has changed all traditional cultures in China, subsuming them into the monoculture of the city and of earning money. 

In Zhaojue, most shops employ at least some locals, although the newer ones are largely run by Han Chinese migrants from richer parts of China. “Generally, local workers don’t stay for long,” says Mao Dongtian, an entrepreneur from the coastal city of Wenzhou. He has opened a local chain of cafés and karaoke bars. His staff earn between Rmb1,000 and Rmb3,000 — a decent amount for the area — but don’t like the discipline and loss of freedom that come with a full-time job, he says. 

“Their ways are more backwards than the Han people, and we are trying to teach them our ways,” continues Mao, describing how he encouraged his staff to seek medical help for ailments rather than rely on folk treatments. Such beliefs are typical of the majority ethnic group’s attitudes towards China’s minorities. Though some of these attitudes are rooted in stereotypes, others reflect a way of life shaped by subsistence agriculture. 


When I ask Jike what he will most miss about Cliff Village, he says “the view”. He plans to make the trip up now and again to enjoy it. After sunset, there are innumerable stars and the night is black and quiet. Zhaojue, on the other hand, is lit with streetlamps and has the bustle of people and cars. 

After June 30, the government will move on to the next stage of China’s development plan: “the strategy to revitalise villages”. Although China’s development plans have focused on the rural poor, the urban poor are of increasing concern. They are more likely to slip between the bureaucratic cracks, as they are often not registered in the places where they live and work. Cities are loath to accept such migrants: two years ago, Beijing “cleaned out” residents referred to by politicians as the “low-end population”. Some economists estimate that about 50 million migrant workers became unemployed at the start of the epidemic. 

This month, Premier Li Keqiang sparked a public outcry over Xi’s claims of success on poverty alleviation, after announcing that the bottom two-fifths of the population made on average an income of less than Rmb1,000 a month. Those 600 million people constitute a significant proportion of city dwellers as well as the rural poor. 

“Somehow or other, this [poverty] target will be declared to have been achieved and will form a part of the big celebrations next year. And then the goalposts will shift, I suspect towards issues of equality and equity,” said Kerry Brown, a scholar of Chinese politics at King’s College London. “That’s really where the key battleground will be, because inequality in China is a serious problem and it’s not getting better.”

We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight

Racism is a health crisis. But poverty is too – yet progressives blithely accepted the costs of throwing millions of people like George Floyd out of work writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Guardian


 

‘Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position was to exercise extreme caution. Many of us went further, taking to social media to shame others for insufficient social distancing.’ Photograph: Devon Ravine/AP


When I reflect back on the extraordinary year of 2020 – from, I hope, some safer, saner vantage – one of the two defining images in my mind will be the surreal figure of the Grim Reaper stalking the blazing Florida shoreline, scythe in hand, warning the sunbathing masses of imminent death and granting interviews to reporters. The other will be a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution sparked a global protest movement against racism and police violence.

Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.

Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching.

I open my laptop and glimpse a rider on horseback galloping through the Chicago streets like Ras the Destroyer in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; I scroll down further and find myself in Los Angeles, as the professional basketball star JR Smith pummels a scrawny anarchist who smashed his car window. I keep going and encounter a mixed group of business owners in Van Nuys risking their lives to defend their businesses from rampaging looters; the black community members trying to help them are swiftly rounded up by police officers who mistake them for the criminals. In Buffalo, a 75-year-old white man approaches a police phalanx and is immediately thrown to the pavement; blood spills from his ear as the police continue to march over him. Looming behind all of this chaos is a reality-TV president giddily tweeting exhortations to mass murder, only venturing out of his bunker to teargas peaceful protesters and stage propaganda pictures.


George Floyd wasn’t merely killed for being black – he was also killed for being poor

But this virus – for which we may never even find a vaccine – knows and respects none of this socio-political context. Its killing trajectory isn’t rational, emotional, or ethical – only mathematical. And just as two plus two is four, when a flood comes, low-lying areas get hit the hardest. Relatively poor, densely clustered populations with underlying conditions suffer disproportionately in any environment in which Covid-19 flourishes. Since the virus made landfall in the US, it has killed at least 20,000 black Americans.

After two and a half months of death, confinement, and unemployment figures dwarfing even the Great Depression, we have now entered the stage of competing urgencies where there are zero perfect options. Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism. Catalyzed by the spectacle of Floyd’s reprehensible death, it is clear that the emergency in Minneapolis passes my own and many peoples’ threshold for justifying the risk of contagion.

But poverty is also a public health crisis. George Floyd wasn’t merely killed for being black – he was also killed for being poor. He died over a counterfeit banknote. Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair. Yet even as the coronavirus lockdown threw 40 million Americans out of work – including Floyd himself – many progressives accepted this calamity, sometimes with stunning blitheness, as the necessary cost of guarding against Covid-19.

The new, “correct” narrative about public health – that one kind of crisis has superseded the other – grows shakier as it spans out from Minnesota, across America to as far as London, Amsterdam and Paris – cities that have in recent days seen extraordinary manifestations of public solidarity against both American and local racism, with protesters in the many thousands flooding public spaces.

Consider France, where I live. The country has only just begun reopening after two solid months of one of the world’s severest national quarantines, and in the face of the world’s fifth-highest coronavirus body count. As recently as 11 May, it was mandatory here to carry a fully executed state-administered permission slip on one’s person in order to legally exercise or go shopping. The country has only just begun to flatten the curve of deaths – nearly 30,000 and counting – which have brought its economy to a standstill. Yet even here, in the time it takes to upload a black square to your Instagram profile, those of us who move in progressive circles now find ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing is an issue of merely secondary importance.

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging? Merely pointing out the inconsistency in such a polarized landscape feels like an act of heresy. But “‘Your gatherings are a threat, mine aren’t,’ is fundamentally illogical, no matter who says it or for what reason,” as the author of The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, put it. “We’ve been told for months to stay as isolated as humanely possible,” Suzy Khimm, an NBC reporter covering Covid-19, noted, but “some of the same public officials and epidemiologists are [now] saying it’s OK to go to mass gatherings – but only certain ones.”

Public health experts – as well as many mainstream commentators, plenty of whom in the beginning of the pandemic were already incoherent about the importance of face masks and stay-at-home orders – have hemorrhaged credibility and authority. This is not merely a short-term problem; it will constitute a crisis of trust going forward, when it may be all the more urgent to convince skeptical masses to submit to an unproven vaccine or to another round of crushing stay-at-home orders. Will anyone still listen?

Seventy years ago Camus showed us that the human condition itself amounts to a plague-like emergency – we are only ever managing our losses, striving for dignity in the process. Risk and safety are relative notions and never strictly objective. However, there is one inconvenient truth that cannot be disputed: more black Americans have been killed by three months of coronavirus than the number who have been killed by cops and vigilantes since the turn of the millennium. We may or may not be willing to accept that brutal calculus, but we are obligated, at the very least, to be honest.