Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink
what the economy is for
Malcolm
Bull
The pandemic has revealed the danger of prizing ‘efficiency’
above all else. The recent slowdown in our lives points to another way of doing
things
Sun 31 May
2020 12.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 31 May 2020 14.19 BST
Illustration:
Matt Kenyon/The Guardian
There’s
been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but
if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that
governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back
to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less
self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that
it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have
saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more
growth.
But there
is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since
Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency
planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the
full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of
fortune.
It wasn’t
until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be
better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous
shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as
“idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also
economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian
consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for
example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having
large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs,
falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so
some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
Trying to
manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious
labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t
enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of
the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls
to get the economy moving again.
For Donald
Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it
threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other
nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently.
That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his
constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption
(the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the
Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat
at the hands of your rivals.
For
Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity,
a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition,
with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a
life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of
slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through
laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in
the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition
to do the same.
But there’s
a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged
that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and
that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you
can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court
corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.
With
hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness
tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient
Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant
to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were
forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William
Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National
Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National
Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the
largest sum of happiness for all”.
Benbow’s
plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown
might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that
the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a
partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the
closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever
experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has
also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on
free money from the government.
Generally
speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure
mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The
benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather
than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic
global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse
gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial
production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed
exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what
post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock
therapy would galvanise the economy.
The
pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of
galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning
to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political
change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed
that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually
turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race …
travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”
Everyone
keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange
about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are
living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing
still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there
ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would
have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change
and renewal.
For some,
this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it
might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political
system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the
lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.
• Malcolm
Bull teaches at Oxford. His latest book is On Mercy
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