12 minute read
The Spanish Flu Didn’t Wreck the Global Economy
olitics P
The Spanish Flu Didn’t Wreck the Global Economy
What Is Different About the Coronavirus Pandemic?
by Walter Scheidel
In October 1918, the Spanish flu descended on Stanford University. Residents donned facemasks, football games were cancelled, and students were asked to quarantine on campus. But classes and assemblies continued to meet. And in addition to fulfilling their regular academic obligations, male students trained to combat German machine guns and poison gas in World War I. Over a tenth of all students fell ill, and a dozen died—roughly in line with the 45,000 cases and 3,000 fatalities re-
In an unspecified barbershop, a man receives a shave from a barber in an influenza mask during the ongoing pandemic, Chicago, Illinois, 1918. (Photo by Chicago Sun-Times/ Chicago Daily News collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)
corded in nearby San Francisco. Yet faculty and students started to abandon face coverings just a month after the initial outbreak. Football returned to campus shortly thereafter, even as the disease .lingered throughout the winter
The contrast with the current coronavirus pandemic is striking. I cannot enter my office at Stanford without special permission from the dean. Almost all undergraduates have left campus, and everyone who can is required to work online. The university hospital, recently rebuilt to the tune of $2 billion, had to cut pay by a fifth for all of its 14,000 employees as anxious patients put off treatment. San Francisco County, now almost twice as populous as a century ago, has reported 2,400 infections and 40 deaths—a per capita fatality rate 99.2 percent lower than that of the 1918–19 pandemic. But two full months after California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered residents to “shelter in place,” the prospect of even a gradual return to normalcy remains elusive at .best
Scaling up California’s experience by several orders of magnitude gives a good sense of the state of the world right now. Several hundred million workers have lost their jobs. Global GDP is set to decline by a greater percentage than at any time since the Great Depression. One and a half billion students—some 90 percent of the world’s total— have been affected by school shutdowns. Most societies now face a prolonged economic slump .that will derail and blight countless lives
The economic fallout from the Spanish flu was far less dramatic. In the United States, industrial output fell sharply but rebounded within a few months. Retail was barely affected, and businesses did not declare bankruptcy at higher rates than usual. According to the latest econometric analysis, the pandemic of 1918–19 cut the United States’ real GDP and consumption by no more than two percent. The same appears to have been .true for most advanced Western economies
Yet the Spanish flu may turn out to have been far deadlier than the novel coronavirus. It killed at least 550,000 Americans—0.5 percent of the population. Adjusted for population growth over the last century, this would work out to a little
under two million deaths today, close to the number predicted in the worst-case, zero-distancing scenario for the coronavirus that Imperial College London published in March. Death rates in 1918–19 were far higher outside of the industrialized world. Worldwide, the Spanish flu carried off 40 million people, or two percept of humanity, equivalent to more than 150 million people today. Even worse, it stalked not only the elderly and infirm but also infants and those in their twenties and thirties. This squeezed the workforce and snuffed out the lives of many who had just started families, leaving behind spouses and children to .fend for themselves in a sink-or-swim society
So why did this ferocious pandemic fail to wreck the economy? The answer is deceptively simple: for the most part, whether by necessity or choice, .people barrelled through
Authorities in many countries recommended hand washing and the use of handkerchiefs as face coverings. In the United States, measures varied widely from city to city and state to state, but across the country, local officials closed many schools and large public venues. For the most part, however, nonessential businesses remained open, and customer demand was sufficiently robust to keep them afloat without the help of costly .stimulus packages
Were the lives of Americans back then worth less than they are today? Only in the most technical sense. In recent years, various U.S. government agencies have set the value of a human life at around $10 million. Estimates in other high-income societies are not far behind. A century ago,
olitics P
no one would have thought of putting similarly hefty price tags on human beings. More to the point, life was shorter overall. In the mid-1910s, mean life expectancy at birth in the United States was only two-thirds of what it is now. Worldwide, .it has doubled since
What is more, a century ago Americans still inhabited a physical and mental universe that had not yet been sanitized by modern science. The older generation would have remembered catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever. There were no vaccines for influenza, tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria, typhus, measles, or polio, no antibacterial sulfonamide drugs, no penicillin, no antiviral drugs, and no chemotherapy. Wealth offered limited protection at best: more often than not, the rich and poor were in it to- .gether
Over the last hundred years, peace, medicine, and prosperity have steered humanity toward greater comfort, safety, and predictability. For the first time in history, the residents of the developed world have good reason to expect science to shield and heal them. To varying degrees, these expectations have also taken hold in developing countries as income and education have expanded, hunger and premature death have receded, and conscription has gone
out of fashion. People expect more from life .and behave accordingly
It may be tempting to take the collective embrace of lockdowns and social-distancing measures as signs that higher expectations have made people kinder, ready to shoulder economic burdens in order to protect the elderly, the immunocompromised, and the plain unlucky in their midst. But diligent citizens under lockdown ought to be wary of congratulating themselves for letting the better angels of their nature take flight. Empathy remains in short
A woman works from her home in streaming contact with a colleague. The Italian government has ordered the closure of all schools and offices until further notice in an attempt to control the spread of the coronavirus COVID19-. (Getty)
supply: if Americans really cared about refugees or those affected by their foreign wars, their politics would look quite different. Their kindness does not extend even to their fellow citizens—witness the endless plight of the unor underinsured and those doomed in so many .ways by their ZIP codes
Viewed against this unflattering background, the response of many Americans to the pandemic can be more plausibly explained by the fear—unfamiliar in these times of prosperity and science— that the next victim could be a vulnerable spouse, a devoted parent, or a beloved grandparent. It is these personal anxieties and tribal empathies that have sucked the oxygen out of the economy and .put lives on hold
For the first time in history, many in the developed world can afford to give free rein to their anxieties. Even 20 years ago, hardly anybody could have worked or studied from home. Technology alone has made sustained distancing feasible, even tolerable. But not for all. The days when Stanford students braved the same risks to life and limb as today’s cops and cashiers are long gone. Expectations of life have grown across the board, yet more for some than for .others
Today, the selective empathy of privilege amplifies existing inequalities. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, Americans have long been in the habit of transferring wealth from young to old. But now they have taken the more radical step of destroying resources—by shrinking the economy—to safeguard the often few remaining years of those most at risk from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Technology renders this gambit least painful for the most protected, those who can hope to ride out the storm from the relative security of their home offices and higher- .paying work
Meanwhile, a large part of society is left behind, mired in unemployment and precarity or stuck in face-to-face jobs that promise on-going exposure. The young and the poor, already held down by inequality, debt, and fading prospects of social mobility, are bound to pay the heaviest .price
Pundits have yet to tire of predicting how this crisis will change everything. But will the unnerving experience of this pandemic also inspire humanity to review some of the loftier expectations we have nurtured? We must face up to the tradeoffs we are rushing to accept with scant regard for those who .can least afford them
This article was originally published on ForeignAf- .fairs.com
opinion Everlasting Memories of a Dark May in Syria
by Alia Mansour
May 25 marked eight years since the Houla massacre and nine years since the death of Hamzah al-Khateeb, a Syian boy who was killed in one of al-Assad’s prisons. His horrifically mutilated body was later handed back to his family. Days before the massacre of Houla, another massacre was perpetrated in Al-Bayda and Ras al-Nabaa in the city of Baniyas. Hardly a day goes by in Syria without the memory of a massacre or an atrocity committed by Assad’s regime, his forces, and militias. What these two massacres and Hamzah’s murder have in common is the extreme use of violence by someone who claims to be the country’s president. Not only has his regime engaged in mass killings and executions, but it has also continuously adopted brutal methods unprecedented in modern history. The Houla massacre is one of the most atrocious massacres against civilians. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the massacre claimed the lives of more than 107 people, including 49 children under the age of ten and 32 women. “Two men raped me and then raped my 21-year-old daughter Sawsan in front of my husband who was screaming and crying before they shot him in the head. Out of the 27 people in that house, only seven of us came out alive. They were even checking if children and women were alive, and those who were found still breathing were finished off with a knife,” Umm Alaa, Fawzia Hussein Al-Khalaf, a Houla massacre survivor said in her testimony. That day, the regime’s forces murdered their victims with knives and used rape as a means of humiliation before slaughtering innocent civilians, and the same horrifying tactic was repeated a year later in the Baniyas countryside. Images taken by “Caesar”, a Syrian military police defector show photographic evidence of torture and death of thousands of civilians in Assad’s prisons. Assad could have chosen to execute them, but he and his regime would rather indulge in brutal violence. Families of detainees and missing people spent many long months looking through thousands of pictures to figure out if their children are still alive or have already been killed. Can any sane person bear watching a mother search for a photograph of her only child among thousands of other victims’ pictures to know his fate? And while looking at the these photographs, how many times did she envisage the horrifying methods of torture that her son had to endure? Hamzah al-Khateeb, a thirteen-year-old Syrian child, left his home town al-Giza in the Daraa governorate with others to call for the lifting the siege in Daraa at the beginning of the Syrian revolution. He was arrested at a Syrian security checkpoint on April 29, 2011, and his body was handed over to his family on May 25, 2011. Hamzah’s torture and death were performed under the close supervision of people who are supposedly entrusted to protect him. Some speculate that by using violence - sectarian violence in particular - the regime’s aim was to compel people to take up arms to transform the killing of innocent civilians and children to a battle against armed extremists to add a façade of legitimacy. These speculations may be true, but how do these explanations benefit the families of the victims, and how do Syrians forget something that had happened years ago and is still ongoing to this day? The Qur’an says: “Whoever kills a person—unless it is for murder or corruption on Earth—it is as if he killed the whole of mankind.” What then can be said then about someone who is responsible for the murder of more than half a million people? The Houla massacre sent shockwaves around the world, as a result, the 15-member UN Security Council unanimously condemned the Syrian government, while the United States, the United Kingdom, and eleven other countries expelled Syrian ambassadors and diplomats. “Caesar” and others had succeeded in smuggling pictures of torture victims out of Syria. As a result, The Ceasar Act was signed into American law in 2019 to help end the horrific and ongoing conflict in Syria by promoting accountability for the Assad regime. Even if small steps have been taken towards justice, Syrians expect much more: they await a homeland befitting their sacrifices, a homeland to which millions of displaced and homeless people yearn to return to without the fear of massacres and tragedies. They are awaiting support in combating terrorism in all its forms, whether that be in the form of organisations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, or a doctor who studied in the West and inherited his father’s rule after his brother was killed in a traffic accident. At the end of her testimony about the Houla massacre, Umm Alaa says: ‘I do not wish anyone to experience what I have encountered, and I do not want anyone to see even small part of it. I never thought that humans can stoop to such a level of immorality, sectarian hatred and brutality. I will always tell my story as I wait for justice that will bring back my children back to life, and I will remember the massacre for as long as I live. The victims will never overcome the memory of this tragedy, as Umm Alaa said: No one wants revenge, only justice - for these are only fragments of our memories from the month of May in Assad’s Syria...
A Weekly Political News Magazine Issue 1803- June - 05/06/2020
Elon Musk: The Eccentric Genius Who Put America Back in the Space Race
2
