Thursday 7 May 2020
Monday 4 May 2020
Can governments afford the debts they are piling up to stabilise economies?
Two experts debate the long-term impact on inflation of the Covid-19 rescue packages
Stephanie Kelton and Edward Chancellor in The FT
YES - It poses no inherent danger to states that issue their own currency
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments around the world to spend large sums in an effort to stabilise their economies, writes Stephanie Kelton. Gone, for now, are concerns about how to “pay for” it all. Instead we are seeing wartime levels of spending, driving deficits — and public debt — to new highs.
France, Spain, the US, and the UK are all projected to end the year with public debt levels of more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product, while Goldman Sachs predicts that Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio will soar above 160 per cent. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has committed to nearly $1tn in new deficit spending to protect a $5tn economy, a move that will push Japan’s debt ratio well above its record of 237 per cent. With GDP collapsing on a global scale, few countries will escape. In advanced economies, the IMF expects average debt-to-GDP ratios to be above 120 per cent in 2021.
Stephanie Kelton and Edward Chancellor in The FT
YES - It poses no inherent danger to states that issue their own currency
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments around the world to spend large sums in an effort to stabilise their economies, writes Stephanie Kelton. Gone, for now, are concerns about how to “pay for” it all. Instead we are seeing wartime levels of spending, driving deficits — and public debt — to new highs.
France, Spain, the US, and the UK are all projected to end the year with public debt levels of more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product, while Goldman Sachs predicts that Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio will soar above 160 per cent. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has committed to nearly $1tn in new deficit spending to protect a $5tn economy, a move that will push Japan’s debt ratio well above its record of 237 per cent. With GDP collapsing on a global scale, few countries will escape. In advanced economies, the IMF expects average debt-to-GDP ratios to be above 120 per cent in 2021.
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While most see big deficits as a price worth paying to combat the crisis, many worry about a debt overhang in a post-pandemic world. Some fear that investors will grow weary of lending to cash-strapped governments, forcing countries to borrow at higher interest rates. Others worry governments will need to impose painful austerity in the years ahead, requiring the private sector to tighten its belt to pay down public debt. They should not.
While public debt can create problems in certain circumstances, it poses no inherent danger to currency-issuing governments, such as the US, Japan, or the UK. This is not, as some argue, because these countries can currently borrow at very low cost, or because a strong recovery will allow them to grow their way out of debt.
There are three real reasons. First, a currency-issuing government never needs to borrow its own currency. Second, it can always determine the interest rate on bonds it chooses to sell. Third, government bonds help to shore up the private sector’s finances.
The first point should be obvious, but it is often obscured by the way governments manage their fiscal operations. Take Japan, a country with its own sovereign currency. To spend more, Tokyo simply authorises payments and the Bank of Japan uses the computer to increase the quantity of Yen in the bank account. Being the issuer of a sovereign currency means never having to worry about how you are going to pay your bills. The Japanese government can afford to buy whatever is available for sale in its own currency. True, it can spend too much, fuelling inflationary pressure, but it never needs to borrow Yen.
If that is true, why do governments sell bonds whenever they run deficits? Why not just spend without adding to the national debt? It is an important question. Part of the reason is habit. Under a gold standard, governments sold bonds so deficits would not leave too much currency in people’s hands. Borrowing replaced currency (which was convertible into gold) with government bonds which were not. In other words, countries sold bonds to reduce pressure on their gold reserves. But that’s not why they borrow in the modern era.
Today, borrowing is voluntary, at least for countries with sovereign currencies. Sovereign bonds are just an interest-bearing form of government money. The UK, for example, is under no obligation to offer an interest-bearing alternative to its zero-interest currency, nor must it pay market rates when it borrows. As Japan has demonstrated with yield curve control, the interest rate on government bonds is a policy choice.
So today, governments sell bonds to protect something more valuable than gold: a well-guarded secret about the true nature of their fiscal capacities, which, if widely understood, might lead to calls for “overt monetary financing” to pay for public goods. By selling bonds, they maintain the illusion of being financially constrained.
In truth, currency-issuing governments can safely spend without borrowing. The debt overhang that many are worried about can be avoided. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with offering people an interest-bearing alternative to government currency. Bonds are a gift to investors, not a sign of dependency on them. The question we should be debating, then, is how much “interest income” should governments be paying out, and to whom?
The writer is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and author of the forthcoming book “The Deficit Myth”
No — This dangerous monetary practice ensures inflation is around the corner
How to pay for the fathomless costs of fighting a pandemic? All the state’s expenses, whether a Green New Deal, jobs-for-all or the economic lockdowns, can be met simply by printing money. That is what modern monetary theory claims, writes Edward Chancellor.
Adherents of this unorthodox school of economics would have us believe, like Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast. Governments can never go bust. They don’t need to raise taxes or issue bonds to finance themselves. Borrowing creates savings. Fiscal deficits are not the problem, they are the cure. We could even pay off the national debt tomorrow.
As theory, MMT has been rejected by mainstream economists. But as a matter of practical policy, it is already being deployed. Ever since Ben Bernanke, as governor of the US Federal Reserve, delivered his “helicopter money” speech in November 2002, the world has been moving in this direction. As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi proved that even the most indebted countries need not default. Last year, the US federal deficit exceeded $1tn at a time when the Fed was acquiring Treasuries with newly printed dollars — that’s pure MMT.
This crisis has accelerated the process. Fiscal and monetary policy are now being openly co-ordinated, just as MMT recommends. The US budget deficit is set to reach nearly $4tn this year. But tax rises are not on the agenda. Instead, the Fed will write the cheques. Across the Atlantic, the Bank of England is directly financing the largest peacetime deficit in its history. MMT claims that money is a creature of the state. The Fed’s share of an expanding US money supply is close to 40 per cent and rising. Again, we are seeing MMT in practice.
The lockdown is a propitious moment to implement MMT. During crises, the public has an abnormally high demand to hold cash; debt monetisation appears less of a problem. But governments can print money to cover their costs for only as long as the public retains confidence in a currency. When the crisis passes, the excess money must be mopped up.
Proponents of MMT claim this shouldn’t be a problem. But then they admit that nobody has a good inflation model. We cannot accurately measure the economy’s spare capacity, either. This means that politicians are unlikely to raise taxes in time to nip inflation in the bud. Bonds can always be issued to withdraw money from circulation. But once inflation is under way, bondholders demand higher coupons. From a fiscal perspective, it makes more sense to issue government debt when rates are low — as they are today — than to print money now and pay higher rates later.
Great historic inflations have been caused not by monetary excesses but by supply shocks, say MMT exponents. It’s likely that coronavirus will turn out to be one of those shocks. Besides, history casts doubt on attempts to explain inflation by non-monetary factors. The closest example of MMT in implementation comes from France’s experiment with paper money. In 1720, the Scottish adventurer John Law served as French finance minister and head of the central bank. The bank printed lots of paper money, the national debt was repaid and France enjoyed brief prosperity. But inflation soon took off and crisis ensued.
The truth is that governments have an inherent bias towards inflation, especially under adverse conditions such as wars and revolutions. The Covid-19 lockdown is another such condition. Tomorrow’s inflation will alleviate some of today’s financial problems: debt levels will come down and inequalities of wealth will be mitigated. Once excessive debt has been inflated away, interest rates can return to normal. When that happens, homes should be more affordable and returns on savings will rise.
But the evils of inflation should not be overlooked. Economies do not function well when everyone is scrambling to keep pace with soaring prices. Inflations produce their own distributional pain. Workers whose incomes rise with inflation do better than retirees. Debtors will thrive at the expense of creditors. Profiteers arise, along with populists who feed on social discontents.
Modern monetary practices ensure another inflation is around the corner. MMT provides the intellectual gloss. It promises a free lunch. Even Alice shouldn’t believe that.
The writer, a financial historian, is author of a forthcoming history of interest
While most see big deficits as a price worth paying to combat the crisis, many worry about a debt overhang in a post-pandemic world. Some fear that investors will grow weary of lending to cash-strapped governments, forcing countries to borrow at higher interest rates. Others worry governments will need to impose painful austerity in the years ahead, requiring the private sector to tighten its belt to pay down public debt. They should not.
While public debt can create problems in certain circumstances, it poses no inherent danger to currency-issuing governments, such as the US, Japan, or the UK. This is not, as some argue, because these countries can currently borrow at very low cost, or because a strong recovery will allow them to grow their way out of debt.
There are three real reasons. First, a currency-issuing government never needs to borrow its own currency. Second, it can always determine the interest rate on bonds it chooses to sell. Third, government bonds help to shore up the private sector’s finances.
The first point should be obvious, but it is often obscured by the way governments manage their fiscal operations. Take Japan, a country with its own sovereign currency. To spend more, Tokyo simply authorises payments and the Bank of Japan uses the computer to increase the quantity of Yen in the bank account. Being the issuer of a sovereign currency means never having to worry about how you are going to pay your bills. The Japanese government can afford to buy whatever is available for sale in its own currency. True, it can spend too much, fuelling inflationary pressure, but it never needs to borrow Yen.
If that is true, why do governments sell bonds whenever they run deficits? Why not just spend without adding to the national debt? It is an important question. Part of the reason is habit. Under a gold standard, governments sold bonds so deficits would not leave too much currency in people’s hands. Borrowing replaced currency (which was convertible into gold) with government bonds which were not. In other words, countries sold bonds to reduce pressure on their gold reserves. But that’s not why they borrow in the modern era.
Today, borrowing is voluntary, at least for countries with sovereign currencies. Sovereign bonds are just an interest-bearing form of government money. The UK, for example, is under no obligation to offer an interest-bearing alternative to its zero-interest currency, nor must it pay market rates when it borrows. As Japan has demonstrated with yield curve control, the interest rate on government bonds is a policy choice.
So today, governments sell bonds to protect something more valuable than gold: a well-guarded secret about the true nature of their fiscal capacities, which, if widely understood, might lead to calls for “overt monetary financing” to pay for public goods. By selling bonds, they maintain the illusion of being financially constrained.
In truth, currency-issuing governments can safely spend without borrowing. The debt overhang that many are worried about can be avoided. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with offering people an interest-bearing alternative to government currency. Bonds are a gift to investors, not a sign of dependency on them. The question we should be debating, then, is how much “interest income” should governments be paying out, and to whom?
The writer is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and author of the forthcoming book “The Deficit Myth”
No — This dangerous monetary practice ensures inflation is around the corner
How to pay for the fathomless costs of fighting a pandemic? All the state’s expenses, whether a Green New Deal, jobs-for-all or the economic lockdowns, can be met simply by printing money. That is what modern monetary theory claims, writes Edward Chancellor.
Adherents of this unorthodox school of economics would have us believe, like Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast. Governments can never go bust. They don’t need to raise taxes or issue bonds to finance themselves. Borrowing creates savings. Fiscal deficits are not the problem, they are the cure. We could even pay off the national debt tomorrow.
As theory, MMT has been rejected by mainstream economists. But as a matter of practical policy, it is already being deployed. Ever since Ben Bernanke, as governor of the US Federal Reserve, delivered his “helicopter money” speech in November 2002, the world has been moving in this direction. As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi proved that even the most indebted countries need not default. Last year, the US federal deficit exceeded $1tn at a time when the Fed was acquiring Treasuries with newly printed dollars — that’s pure MMT.
This crisis has accelerated the process. Fiscal and monetary policy are now being openly co-ordinated, just as MMT recommends. The US budget deficit is set to reach nearly $4tn this year. But tax rises are not on the agenda. Instead, the Fed will write the cheques. Across the Atlantic, the Bank of England is directly financing the largest peacetime deficit in its history. MMT claims that money is a creature of the state. The Fed’s share of an expanding US money supply is close to 40 per cent and rising. Again, we are seeing MMT in practice.
The lockdown is a propitious moment to implement MMT. During crises, the public has an abnormally high demand to hold cash; debt monetisation appears less of a problem. But governments can print money to cover their costs for only as long as the public retains confidence in a currency. When the crisis passes, the excess money must be mopped up.
Proponents of MMT claim this shouldn’t be a problem. But then they admit that nobody has a good inflation model. We cannot accurately measure the economy’s spare capacity, either. This means that politicians are unlikely to raise taxes in time to nip inflation in the bud. Bonds can always be issued to withdraw money from circulation. But once inflation is under way, bondholders demand higher coupons. From a fiscal perspective, it makes more sense to issue government debt when rates are low — as they are today — than to print money now and pay higher rates later.
Great historic inflations have been caused not by monetary excesses but by supply shocks, say MMT exponents. It’s likely that coronavirus will turn out to be one of those shocks. Besides, history casts doubt on attempts to explain inflation by non-monetary factors. The closest example of MMT in implementation comes from France’s experiment with paper money. In 1720, the Scottish adventurer John Law served as French finance minister and head of the central bank. The bank printed lots of paper money, the national debt was repaid and France enjoyed brief prosperity. But inflation soon took off and crisis ensued.
The truth is that governments have an inherent bias towards inflation, especially under adverse conditions such as wars and revolutions. The Covid-19 lockdown is another such condition. Tomorrow’s inflation will alleviate some of today’s financial problems: debt levels will come down and inequalities of wealth will be mitigated. Once excessive debt has been inflated away, interest rates can return to normal. When that happens, homes should be more affordable and returns on savings will rise.
But the evils of inflation should not be overlooked. Economies do not function well when everyone is scrambling to keep pace with soaring prices. Inflations produce their own distributional pain. Workers whose incomes rise with inflation do better than retirees. Debtors will thrive at the expense of creditors. Profiteers arise, along with populists who feed on social discontents.
Modern monetary practices ensure another inflation is around the corner. MMT provides the intellectual gloss. It promises a free lunch. Even Alice shouldn’t believe that.
The writer, a financial historian, is author of a forthcoming history of interest
Sunday 3 May 2020
Saturday 2 May 2020
Deliveroo was the poster child for venture capitalism. It's not looking so good now
The food delivery company is a case study in the destructive nature of its own ‘disruptive’ business model writes James Ball in The Guardian
‘Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500.’ Photograph: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
If any company can weather coronavirus well, it should be Deliveroo. The early days of lockdown saw demand surge for the service delivering food from restaurants and takeaways. The decision by several major restaurant and fast-food chains to shut for weeks during the early stages of lockdown might have dented demand, but as they begin to reopen for delivery – with most other activities still curtailed – prospects would seem bright for the tech company.
The reality looks quite different. Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Others seem to be in similarly bleak positions – Uber is said to be discussing plans to let go around 20% of its workforce, some 5,400 roles. The broader UK start-up scene has asked for – and secured – government bailout funds.
Why Deliveroo is struggling during a crisis that should benefit its business model tells us about much more than just one start-up. The company’s nominal reasoning for needing cuts is that coronavirus will be followed by an economic downturn, which could hit orders. That’s plausible, but far from a given.
The financial crash of 2008 – which led to the most severe recession since the Great Depression – saw “cheap luxuries” perform quite well. People would swap a restaurant meal for, say, a £10 Marks & Spencer meal deal. Deliveroo is far cheaper than a restaurant meal for many people – there’s no need to pay for a childminder, or travel, and there’s no need to purchase alcohol at restaurant prices. Why would Deliveroo be so certain a downturn would be bad news?
The answer lies in the fact that Deliveroo’s real business model has almost nothing to do with making money from delivering food. Like pretty much every other start-up of its sort, once you take all of the costs into account, Deliveroo loses money on every single delivery it makes, even after taking a big cut from the restaurant and a delivery fee from the customer. Uber, now more than a decade old, still loses money for every ride its service offers and every meal its couriers deliver.
When every customer loses you money, it’s not good news for your business if customer numbers stay solid or even increase, unless there’s someone else who believes that’s a good thing. What these companies rely on is telling a story – largely to people who will invest in them. Their narrative is they’re “disrupting” existing industries, will build huge market share and customer bases, and thus can’t help but eventually become hugely profitable – just not yet.
This is the entire venture capital model – the financial model for Silicon Valley and the whole technology sector beyond it. Don’t worry about growing slowly and sustainably, don’t worry about profit, don’t worry about consequences. Just go flat out, hell for leather, and get as big as you can as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter than most companies will try and fail, provided a few succeed. Valuations will soar, the company will become publicly listed (a procedure known as an IPO) and then the company will either actually work out how to make profit – in which case, great – or by the time it’s clear it won’t, the venture capital funds have sold most of their stake at vast profits, and left regular investors holding the stock when the music stops.
This is a whole business model based on optimism. Without that optimism, and the accompanying free-flowing money to power through astronomical losses, the entire system breaks down. That’s the real struggle facing this type of company. It’s also why the very idea of bailing out this sector should be a joke: venture capital chases returns of at 10 times their investment, on the basis that it’s high risk and high reward. If we take out the element of “risk”, we’re basically just funnelling public money to make ultra-rich investors richer.
What pushes this beyond a tale that many of us might be happy to write down to karma, though, is the effects it has well beyond the rest of the world.
Tech giants move in on existing sectors that previously supported millions of jobs and helped people make their livelihoods – cabs and private hire, the restaurant business, to name just a few. They offer a new, subsidised alternative, that makes customers believe a service can be delivered much more cheaply, or that lets them cherry-pick from the restaurant experience – many restaurants relied on those alcohol sales with a meal to cover their margins, for example.
These start-ups come in to existing sectors essentially offering customers free money: £10 worth of stuff for a fiver. It turns out that’s easy to sell. But in the process, they rip the core out of existing businesses and reshape whole sectors of the economy in their image. And now, in the face of a pandemic, they are starting to struggle just like everyone else. It’s not hard to see how this sorry story ends. Having disrupted their industries to the point of leaving business after business on the verge of collapse, the start-ups could be tumbling down after them.
If any company can weather coronavirus well, it should be Deliveroo. The early days of lockdown saw demand surge for the service delivering food from restaurants and takeaways. The decision by several major restaurant and fast-food chains to shut for weeks during the early stages of lockdown might have dented demand, but as they begin to reopen for delivery – with most other activities still curtailed – prospects would seem bright for the tech company.
The reality looks quite different. Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Others seem to be in similarly bleak positions – Uber is said to be discussing plans to let go around 20% of its workforce, some 5,400 roles. The broader UK start-up scene has asked for – and secured – government bailout funds.
Why Deliveroo is struggling during a crisis that should benefit its business model tells us about much more than just one start-up. The company’s nominal reasoning for needing cuts is that coronavirus will be followed by an economic downturn, which could hit orders. That’s plausible, but far from a given.
The financial crash of 2008 – which led to the most severe recession since the Great Depression – saw “cheap luxuries” perform quite well. People would swap a restaurant meal for, say, a £10 Marks & Spencer meal deal. Deliveroo is far cheaper than a restaurant meal for many people – there’s no need to pay for a childminder, or travel, and there’s no need to purchase alcohol at restaurant prices. Why would Deliveroo be so certain a downturn would be bad news?
The answer lies in the fact that Deliveroo’s real business model has almost nothing to do with making money from delivering food. Like pretty much every other start-up of its sort, once you take all of the costs into account, Deliveroo loses money on every single delivery it makes, even after taking a big cut from the restaurant and a delivery fee from the customer. Uber, now more than a decade old, still loses money for every ride its service offers and every meal its couriers deliver.
When every customer loses you money, it’s not good news for your business if customer numbers stay solid or even increase, unless there’s someone else who believes that’s a good thing. What these companies rely on is telling a story – largely to people who will invest in them. Their narrative is they’re “disrupting” existing industries, will build huge market share and customer bases, and thus can’t help but eventually become hugely profitable – just not yet.
This is the entire venture capital model – the financial model for Silicon Valley and the whole technology sector beyond it. Don’t worry about growing slowly and sustainably, don’t worry about profit, don’t worry about consequences. Just go flat out, hell for leather, and get as big as you can as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter than most companies will try and fail, provided a few succeed. Valuations will soar, the company will become publicly listed (a procedure known as an IPO) and then the company will either actually work out how to make profit – in which case, great – or by the time it’s clear it won’t, the venture capital funds have sold most of their stake at vast profits, and left regular investors holding the stock when the music stops.
This is a whole business model based on optimism. Without that optimism, and the accompanying free-flowing money to power through astronomical losses, the entire system breaks down. That’s the real struggle facing this type of company. It’s also why the very idea of bailing out this sector should be a joke: venture capital chases returns of at 10 times their investment, on the basis that it’s high risk and high reward. If we take out the element of “risk”, we’re basically just funnelling public money to make ultra-rich investors richer.
What pushes this beyond a tale that many of us might be happy to write down to karma, though, is the effects it has well beyond the rest of the world.
Tech giants move in on existing sectors that previously supported millions of jobs and helped people make their livelihoods – cabs and private hire, the restaurant business, to name just a few. They offer a new, subsidised alternative, that makes customers believe a service can be delivered much more cheaply, or that lets them cherry-pick from the restaurant experience – many restaurants relied on those alcohol sales with a meal to cover their margins, for example.
These start-ups come in to existing sectors essentially offering customers free money: £10 worth of stuff for a fiver. It turns out that’s easy to sell. But in the process, they rip the core out of existing businesses and reshape whole sectors of the economy in their image. And now, in the face of a pandemic, they are starting to struggle just like everyone else. It’s not hard to see how this sorry story ends. Having disrupted their industries to the point of leaving business after business on the verge of collapse, the start-ups could be tumbling down after them.
'A deluge of death': how reading obituaries can humanise a crisis
Those brief features have long provided readers with a moment of connection that help us stay in touch with our humanity writes Oscar Schwartz in The Guardian
Obituaries can help readers stay in touch with humanity during an overwhelming crisis. Photograph: Kzenon/Alamy Stock Photo
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”
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