Don’t Make “The Economy Matters” a Republican Talking Point It was turf the left fought over until like six days ago

“Do you have any idea what you just did?”

“Come on, we just made the deal of our lifetimes. We should celebrate.”
“You just bet against the American economy.”
“Fuck yeah we did. Fuck yeah!”
“Which means, if we’re right, people lose homes, people lose jobs, people lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number: for every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that? Did you know that?
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Whoa. I just got really scared.”

That’s dialogue from a scene in the 2015 movie The Big Short. Here’s the BBC looking into the eye-popping claim made by Brad Pitt’s character, featuring an interview with Harvey Brenner, the veteran public health researcher the number traces to. It’s complicated, but this statistic is in textbooks and studies — and the film — because over the decades, health behavior experts have continued to find something like it to be true.

The factoid doesn’t prove what we should do in our unprecedented current moment of coronavirus. Going out to work in America is a lot deadlier relative to staying home compared to one month ago. But it does show an odd change in the way we discuss the economy and public health. The Big Short is not a right-wing film, and the characters hand-waving away concerns about economic recession are supposed to be the callous and evil bankers. But these days, being concerned about the effects of a ghastly recession is treated as right-wing propaganda.

To be sure, the conservative discussion of “trade-offs” between economic losses and public health policies that minimize deaths has gotten very stupid. On the right, pundit and idiot Jesse Kelly tweeted on Tuesday that, “if given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” President Trump was operating at roughly the same level of intelligence and responsibility on Wednesday, writing that “the LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success.”

It’s worth noting that while the country has stopped working faster than at any
 point in history, it isn’t currently “closed” and the economy isn’t “shut down” per se. A New York Times editorial urged the president to institute a nationwide lockdown, partially because some workers are still on the job everywhere. Some states still have few or no quarantine measures at all.

But in the preceding days, a much less brain-dead version of the argument against a monomania for public health measures was circulating on the right. Reason’s Nick Gillespie wrote a piece called “We Will Regret Not Taking the Economic Effects of Quarantine More Seriously,” arguing that “with a virtually complete halt of the American economy about to begin, we should enter this phase with full awareness that it wasn’t the only choice available to us.” (Gillespie arguably downplays the public health risk by citing an analysis of how the impact of the virus has gone in South Korea, which took drastic early testing and containment measures, as a guide for how things would likely play out in America, which did not.) Within the right, Reason and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have not often been close together on economic policy in the Trump years, but Gillespie also quotes a March 19 Journal op-ed, which argues that “no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health.”

The left used to deeply agree with this, if its magazines and star presidential candidates are anything to go by. Until a couple of weeks ago, it was considered not only acceptable but fairly dogmatic to talk about economic losses in terms of the harm they will cause people. That harm included medical problems and death, and the people harmed by economic privation were not Wall Streeters.

And rightly so. A January paper by Hannes Schwandt and Till von Wachter looked at a large cross section of the population and concluded that graduating during the 2008 recession depressed lifelong wages and correlated with higher rates of death from both suicides and medical problems, including lung cancer and heart disease.

This is one of those moments in the Trump Era when I wonder how I keep missing the memos about what to memoryhole and when. This was a major issue for the left, one liberals and progressives liked to put at the center of their rhetoric until repudiating it as insane and psychopathic roughly five minutes ago. Remember how medical bankruptcy and America’s coldly capitalist system morally amounted to something like the murder of its most vulnerable and poor citizens? Or remember when Larry Summers said that his estimate that ten thousand Americans would die annually as a result of the GOP tax bill was actually a conservative guess? Here’s Roge Karma in The New Republic in 2019 on “the health-wealth gap”:

One of the most disquieting facts about life in the United States today is that the richest American men live 15 years longer than the poorest men, while for women it’s 10 years. Put a different way, the life expectancy gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is wider than the gap between the average American and the average Yemeni or Ethiopian.

The article goes on to call the recent growth of the “health-wealth gap” the equivalent of “curing cancer for only the rich.” Lest I be informed that the existence of any health-wealth connection proves the need to decouple health from wealth, please note that our current crisis does not demonstrate that this is a matter of making public healthcare available on the Scandinavian model. That model relies on vigorous economies. It is predicated on people paying in to the funds the single payer draws on. And so it, too, connects economic health with literal public health — arguably even more directly.

It’s not a coincidence that the U.K. and Sweden were the countries to experiment with herd immunity policies in response to coronavirus. No model fully decouples the stock market from health outcomes. When a plague requires five times more ICU beds than any country normally maintains, it doesn’t matter how democratic socialist (or market capitalist or whatever else) your system is. There will be economic concerns, not just epidemiological ones. “Give us bread, but give us roses” still assumes that everyone needs bread.

Until coronavirus and the quarantine, the intellectual vogue was not to think that the social and moral value of a good economy is a special treat for rich people, except among the Berniest of bros. Or to put it another way, even among the Berniest of bros, nobody thought the social and moral devastation of a bad economy is worst for rich people. Quite the opposite.

Now? There’s been a one-eighty on the subject of the “health-wealth” connection. There are hundreds of thousands of tweets about the trending hashtag, #dieforthedow, referring to the stock market index of 30 large companies that is often used as a colloquial stand-in for the market as a whole. The idea is that Trump (and Tom Friedman) suggest sending people back to work to die for no other reason than concern for their well-invested rich buddies’ bottom line. Talking Points Memo is keeping a list of people it characterizes as “willing to trade COVID-19 deaths for economic gains.” In the New Republic, Libby Watson also has a rundown of these “right-wing ghouls” who are concerned about the economic costs of the public health measures. She frames the position she’s attacking, in the inimitably annoying post-Gawker style, as the view that “allowing a pandemic to rage unchecked in service of Stocks Go Up Again is good and correct.” Virtually-presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is fighting equally straw men, tweeting that “No one is expendable. … No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow.”

Look, other than the people claiming that you would have supported slavery if you are worried about the economy, most people are doing the best they can right now — probably the only thing they can at a moment when fear and anger are emotionally legitimate reactions. It was much the same after 9/11, when this country probably couldn’t have been convinced by anything not to do something foolish and recriminate. But that doesn’t make our impulses right or our accusations against our political enemies true.

So, does a large portion of America have the morality of a contract killer. Or is something fundamentally dishonest going on here?

On March 22, Trump tweeted, in all-caps: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!” That freaked out a lot of people who want to commit for sure to a longer quarantine. They’re almost certainly right that a longer quarantine will be necessary. And Trump is almost certainly the worst possible person to be making these kinds of assessments. But those are separate questions from whether it’s psychopathic to worry about the economy and the human toll — and yes, the death toll — an economic depression creates.

We can’t resume life as normal and imagine the economy would rebound with hospitals overwhelmed by millions of sick and dying people. Of course we can’t. But the resumption of normal life as quickly as possible is something we should value highly, not downplay as a ridiculous thing to focus on. And not for the sake of loaded Wall Streeters.

It’s odd that once-serious bastions of intellectual left publishing have become staffed by people so enbubbled that they think the stock market is owned entirely by Jeff Bezos rather than by union and public sector worker pension funds. These are real concerns the left shouldn’t just throw away.

Think about what it means to say that the coronavirus plague year is a moment to wave off concerns about economic disruption as the concerns of the rich. Being rich means being able to afford to drive around a city in an enclosed private car, or to buy a few weeks of groceries no problem, or to see a doctor in private practice paid for with private insurance. It means being able to draw on savings to keep the bills paid for a long period when the economy goes into cold storage. So when there’s an economic downturn, it sucks, but it’s OK.

Being rich means — I can’t believe I have to say this — that you’ve got spare money. That’s the whole point of being rich, really, and it’s why the American left is at its most relevant when it is looking out for the “precariat.” It doesn’t make for good reality TV, but a paid-off mortgage is a greater luxury than a private jet.

You can’t stress caring about the precariousness of most Americans’ financial situations for years and then claim it is heartless to care about a massive economic depression. And yet much of the left is acting like the only interest in making any hard-nosed calls about weighing the economy against public health are the class interests of the bankers and the capitalist bourgeoisie. Well, they’re wrong. We’re about to see unprecedented levels of unemployment and the evaporation of huge amounts of ordinary people’s savings. And the traditional defenders of the working class don’t think that’s among the appropriate things to focus on mitigating.

As some dude in a movie once said, “Whoa. I just got really scared.”