David Dayen: Introduction
Paul Starr: Post-Pandemic America
Harold Meyerson: The Uncertain Future for Workers
Robert Kuttner: Made in America: The Post-Corona Economy We Need
David Dayen: After the Crisis, Big Business Could Get Even Bigger
Listen to The Post-Corona World Podcast
INTRODUCTION
BY DAVID DAYEN
It’s clear that we’re facing a Depression-level event economically and a public-health crisis with no easing in sight, even as the current administration has decided to give up on containment and safeguarding the general welfare. It’s a moment of rapid change and uncertainty. But we tried in our May-June issue to take a snapshot, to look at what we know today and what we can surmise about the future.
Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/SIPA USA via AP Images
Our senior editors, meanwhile, tried to look beyond the horizon at what the aftermath of the crisis will yield. And it’s a very uncertain picture. Paul Starr lays out the multiple options: a rebirth of egalitarian spirit, or an accelerant of ugly nationalism and entrenchment. Harold Meyerson sees labor either battered by mass unemployment and impossible legal barriers, or uplifted by radical collective action and newfound “essential” status. Bob Kuttner forecasts either the rise of China as an economic hegemon, or a renewed domestic manufacturing sector and a green stimulus powering America back to a sustainable prosperity. And I look at concentrated corporate power, which will either become unbearably dominant after the crisis, or be felled by all the shortcomings the crisis has exposed.
We decided to take a foray into podcasting, a new medium for us, by having Paul, Harold, Bob, and myself discuss these possibilities of the post-coronavirus world. You can listen to the full podcast and view a transcript at prospect.org/post-corona-podcast.
The pandemic is simply too important to neglect the opportunity to understand it, make sense of our response, and map out our future. It’s what the Prospect is known for, and where we will continue to aim.
Post-Pandemic America
BY PAUL STARR
For nearly everyone in America today, the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented. Nothing in our experience has prepared us to make sense of what is happening or might happen next. But as we struggle to survive this horror, history and epidemiology may at least provide reference points for thinking about the world ahead.
Epidemics can produce lasting effects on society in at least three ways. The most direct is through the impact on the health and demography of populations. In the 14th century, the bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe’s people, chiefly working-age adults, and the ensuing shortages of labor led to rising wages and the end of serfdom in England and other parts of Western Europe.
A second kind of effect stems from the societal response to an epidemic. After expanding powers to control epidemics, governments have often retained those powers afterward. During a recurrence of the plague in the 15th century, Venice confined arriving ships to outlying islands for 40 days, the origin of our word “quarantine.” Although its scientific basis was not understood at the time, the quarantine helped reduce the disease’s spread, as 40 days was long enough for infected rats and sailors to die off. In his book Epidemics and Society, the historian Frank M. Snowden argues that such public-health measures contributed to the growing powers of the modern state.
A third kind of effect arises from the meaning that people give to a crisis brought about by an epidemic. When the Spanish invaded the Americas in the 16th century, they brought smallpox and other diseases with them that devastated indigenous peoples. In his classic Plagues and Peoples, the historian William McNeill argues that it wasn’t just the mortality from disease that led to the collapse of the Aztec and Inca empires. The faith of the indigenous in their gods and their leaders collapsed in the face of diseases from which the invading Spanish seemed to be mysteriously immune.
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The Uncertain Future for Workers
BY HAROLD MEYERSON
What the future holds for American workers—and how those workers might shape that future—lies shrouded in uncertainty. We don’t know when it will be safe for “nonessential” businesses to reopen. We don’t know how many businesses will go bust, or how many will bring back just a fraction of their workforce, perhaps at half-time or half-pay. We don’t know how many retail transactions will remain online, and how many retail jobs that will destroy. We don’t know how prolonged will be the vicious circle of “uns” and “unders”—unemployment and underemployment leading to underconsumption leading to underproduction leading to still more unemployment.
High unemployment seldom leads to labor’s advances—except that it surely did in the era of labor’s greatest advances, the Great Depression. Might the dynamic in our own day be similar—a rendezvous of heightened worker militancy with a sympathetic public and friendly presidency and Congress? As I write, there have been at least 150 reported instances of workers walking off the job demanding safer conditions.
The combination of being hailed as essential and treated as disposable has been consciousness-raising for millions of frontline workers. It’s been consciousness-raising, too, for the media, for the government, and for upper-middle-class professionals, for whom these workers—health care aides, farmworkers, packing-plant workers, supermarket employees, drivers, transit workers, warehouse workers, hands-on public employees, and many others—have been politically invisible for decades. Public sympathy has also swelled for the “nonessential” retail, hospitality, and other workers who can’t work at home and have been abruptly laid off.
Moreover, the economic earthquake the pandemic has triggered comes at a time of heightened public awareness of the injustice of our stratospheric levels of economic inequality. Might all this potential energy for social and economic reform yield actions that effectively overcome the damper that depressions put on worker uprisings?
Again, we don’t know yet. We do know that misery needs company if it’s to be transformed into effective action for change. With the self-isolation and social distancing imposed by the coronavirus, however, company has been hard to come by. When workers can’t huddle with co-workers, welcome organizers into their homes, or go to mass meetings, the hurdles erected by our deficient labor laws, hostile employers, and public officials become even higher. Despite the successes of digital union organizing among the largely young employees of media outlets, nonprofits, and universities, the stirrings of remote organizing for the broader workforce are at best a precursor to real organizing.
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Made in America: The Post-Corona Economy We Need
BY ROBERT KUTTNER
America needs a reconstruction strategy that goes well beyond emergency relief measures. This is a moment for a broad public initiative that links modernization of infrastructure, reclamation of domestic industry, and investment in climate transition, at a scale well into the trillions of dollars. The economy, coming out of the corona depression, will need these public investments both to augment a feeble private-sector recovery and to bring the U.S. economy into a new, post-neoliberal, greener era.
Without this national strategy, the U.S. will slip behind China, surviving as a second-class power facing a first-class climate catastrophe. We will become even more a society divided into globalist billionaires and nation-bound low-wage workers. As the crisis revealed, we are not the richest country in the world. The world’s richest country would figure out how to make a cloth mask. The cure for America’s ills must go far beyond recovering from the corona depression—but only if we seize the moment.
The subservience to ultra-free-market ideology combined with a willful blind spot about the rise of mercantilist China, under presidents of both parties (who were all-too-hawkish when it came to Soviet Russia) is explained only by the huge profits made by U.S. corporations from the current arrangement. Trump has broken with this consensus at the level of nativist rhetoric and scattershot tariffs. But he has no strategic trade, diplomatic, or industrial policies that would alter the status quo. We need a managed form of globalization as well as a managed economy at home.
The resonance of the New Deal is not accidental, since progressive economic nationalism was precisely the strategy of the Roosevelt administration—national economic goals, explicit planning, government support of science and technology, public capital, and a rejection of deflationary financial globalism. This continued well into the post-FDR Cold War era because of national-security concerns about the USSR as a geopolitical rival. Today, our geo-economic rival is China, and national economic security should be no less of a driver of policy.
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After the Crisis, Big Business Could Get Even Bigger
BY DAVID DAYEN
In 2017, 13,024 U.S. companies merged, a record number. In the first six months of 2018, $2.5 trillion in merger deals were announced worldwide, a record value. New business formation is half of what it was in the 1970s. In October 2018, researchers Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, and Roni Michaely identified increased market concentration in 75 percent of all industries over the past two decades.
But this period could soon look like a golden age of competition if the coronavirus crisis continues its heartbreaking trajectory.
We effectively stopped enforcing antitrust laws in the early 1980s, and markets predictably consolidated as a result, with drastic consequences for worker wages, innovation, entrepreneurship, inequality, and democracy itself. But those 40 years have not seen an accelerant like the Corona Depression could provide, handing over even more power to a select few.
Banks and financiers, already riding a wave of deregulation to record profits before the pandemic, will be primary beneficiaries. The entire retail sector is at risk, putting even more economic activity at the whim of a few executives. Already-dominant platforms could find themselves in position to dominate like never before. And the post-corona economy could further transform who grows our food, who heals our ailments, and who tells us what’s happening in the world.
This doesn’t have to be the end of the story, however. Laws on the books intended to protect citizens from monopolies still exist, needing only sufficient political will to snap into action. Our economy is poised to suffer the greatest shock of our lifetimes. But policymakers still set policy, and we all have the opportunity to affect who acts in our name. The extraordinary nature of this crisis, and the community it is building in the struggle in real time, could provide the necessary spark for a movement that demands democracy work for all of us. But it will take massive organizing and leadership to climb out of the deep hole the crisis will create.
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