Posts Tagged ‘COVID’
“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”*…
The number of households that live above the poverty line but are barely scraping by is ticking higher…
Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.”
Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by.
That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans [individuals, as opposed to families as measured above] who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“ALICE is the nation’s child-care workers, home health aides and cashiers heralded during the pandemic — those working low-wage jobs, with little or no savings and one emergency from poverty,” said Stephanie Hoopes, national director at United for ALICE…
Read on for an explanation of how high inflation and higher interest rates have aggravated what was already a problem: “29% of households have jobs but struggle to cover basic needs,” from @CNBC.
Apposite: “Millions of Americans are about to lose internet access, and Congress is to blame.”
(Image above: source)
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As we knit a safety net, we might recall that, on this date in 2020, as a product of the COVID-19 recession, the U.S. unemployment rate to hit 14.9 percent, its worst rate since the Great Depression. Federal legislators enacted six major bills, centered on the American Rescue Plan and costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Those programs have now expired.
“Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society”*…
… and in the U.S., as Adam Tooze explains, we’re doing not so well of late…
In August America’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a set of data that ought to have brought political, economic and social debate to a standstill. If there is one question that should surely dominate public policy debate, it is the question of life and death. What did the Declaration of Independence promise, after all, if not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But on that score the CDC in 2022 delivered alarming news. In the last three years, life expectancy in the United States has plunged in a way not seen at any point in recent history.
America is inured to bad news about its health. Life expectancy in the United States has stagnated since 2011, a trend which separates the United States not just from rich peer countries but from most other countries in the world, rich or poor.
Given economic growth and advances in medicine for life expectancy to stagnate requires serious headwinds. In the United States those headwinds include, homicides and suicides, the opioid epidemic (so-called deaths of despair) car accidents and obesity. As John Burn-Murdoch shows in the FT, without those factors the US would have tracked its peer societies much more closely…
But stagnation is one thing, the collapse since 2019 is a phenomenon of a different quality. It is a full measure of the disaster that was the COVID pandemic in the United States. Over a million Americans died of COVID, one of the worst outcomes on the planet.
…
…it is not only China that has overtaken the United States based on this metric. In 2021 Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US. So does Albania.
In a society marked by inequality as deep as modern America’s, to speak in terms of national averages is not very meaningful. The circumstances of life and health outcomes are vastly different…
…One might think that faced with these stark facts all other subjects of political debate would pale into insignificance. Whatever else a society should do, whatever else a political system promises, it should ensure that its citizens have a healthy life expectancy commensurate with their nation’s overall level of economic development. An ambitious society should aim to do more, as Japan does for instance. Judged by this basic metric, the contemporary United States fails and for a substantial minority of its population, it fails spectacularly. And yet that extraordinary and shameful fact barely registers in political debate, a silence that is both symptom and cause.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? How China, Cuba and Albania came to have higher life expectancy than the USA,” from @adam_tooze. Eminently worth reading in full.
For an example of the ways in which these wounds are self-inflicted: “The Human Psyche Was Not Built for This.”
* P. J. O’Rourke
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As we ponder priorities, we might recall that it was on this date in 1892 that the first diagnostic public heath laboratory in the U.S. was founded by New York City (as its “Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection”). Spurred by the cholera epidemic of the time, it soon took on the diagnosis and tracing of diphtheria and tuberculosis; in 1895, it began production of a smallpox vaccine.
The New York City public health laboratory became a model for other cities’ public health departments. Within a few years, similar labs had become essential components of an effective health departments across the nation.
“There will be sleeping enough in the grave”*…
After a busy year, morticians let loose at their annual gathering in Nashville…
The theme of the National Funeral Directors Association’s 2021 convention and expo was “Together Again!” That may sound like an oddly upbeat slogan following a global pandemic, but morticians like to party as much as anyone — especially after a big year for business. So this October, roughly 5,000 funeral service providers from around the country descended on Nashville, trading in their mortuary makeup and three-piece suits for cowboy hats and boots.
On a surprisingly chilly morning, I joined them at Music City Center, the city’s sprawling convention facility and, for the next few days, the beating heart of the American funeral industry. The enormous hallways were clogged with reunions, as former students chatted with their mentors, funeral home owners met their favorite vendors in the flesh, and fans introduced themselves to niche podcasters and social media stars. “Funeral directors, we’re not the most popular kids at the party,” Glenda Stansbury, a licensed funeral director and embalmer in Oklahoma, told me, with her signature raspy laugh. But in the riverside city, with its total lack of COVID restrictions, the pandemic’s last responders could finally let loose…
Eleanor Cummins (@elliepses) reports: “‘I feel like a survivor’: Inside the funeral industry’s 2021 national convention,” from @mic.
* Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
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As we undertake to understand undertakers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that the Nobel Prizes were established. In 1888, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, read his own obituary– entited “The merchant of death is dead”– in a French newspaper. (It was actually meant to be the obit of his brother, Ludvig.) Chastened, Alfred redrew his will with an eye to creating a more positive– and popular– legacy.
On this date in 1896, Nobel actually died. His estate established a series of prizes for those who confer the “greatest benefit on mankind” in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace (economics was added later). The first Prizes were awarded in 1901.
“It is what it is”*…
COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have topped 700,000, which means that more Americans have died in the pandemic than died in every foreign conflict the U.S. has ever fought (combined combat deaths in all U.S foreign wars are estimated at 659,267).
This graphic is from r/dataisbeautiful.
Two things to note:
- Deaths in the American Civil War were equal or higher (they’re estimated to have been 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties).
- On a death-per-100,000-population basis, COVID-19 deaths are at roughly 211 per 100,000. That’s materially more than deaths in any U.S. foreign war except World War II (which had a death toll of 307 per 100,000). See here and here for the underlying data.
* then-President Donald Trump, on COVID deaths
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As we mourn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Desmond Doss received the U.S. Medal of Honor. A conscientious objector serving as a U.S. Army medic, he saved 75 men during the Battle of Okinawa during World War II. (Prior to that, he had twice been awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in Guam and the Philippines.) He was the only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor for his actions during the war; his story has been told in several books, a documentary (The Conscientious Objector), and the 2016 Oscar-winning film Hacksaw Ridge.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters”*…
Historian Adam Tooze‘s new book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, is released today. You can (and, I’d suggest, should) read excerpts from its introduction in The Guardian and The New York Times.
In his newsletter, he unpacks the fundamental historiographic challenge that he encountered in writing it, why that challenge matters… and why we must all face (and face up to) it:
I generally prefer a narrative mode that plunges you in to the middle of things, rather than beginning at the beginning. The in medias res approach is more engaging. It catches the reader’s attention from the start because they have to scramble to orientate themselves. It is also more transparent in its artifice. I prefer the deliberate and obvious break in the linear flow produced by a flashback – “now we interrupt the action to explain something you really need to know” – to the apparent simplicity and calm of “beginning at the beginning”, which in its own way begs all the same questions, but smuggles the answers into the smooth flow of a linear narrative.
As [critic Perry] Anderson suggested [here], this stylistic preference also reflects a certain understanding of politics and agency and their relationship to history, which might broadly be described as Keynesian left-liberalism. As he puts it, “a ‘situational and tactical’ approach to the subject in hand determines entry to” the subject matter “in medias res”. It mirrors my preoccupation with “pragmatic crisis management in the form of punctual adjustments without illusion of permanency”.
I side with those who see “in medias res”, not just as a stylistic choice and a mode of historical and political analysis, but as defining the human condition – apologies for the boldness of that claim. Being thrown into pre-given situations define us, whether though social structure, language, concepts, identities or chains of action and interaction, in which we are willy nilly enrolled and to which we ourselves contribute, thereby enrolling others as well.
Whatever thinking or writing we do, however we choose to couch it and whatever our explanatory ambition, we do it from the midst of things, not from above or beyond the fray. There are different ways of articulating that relationship – more remote or more immediate – but no way out of that situatedness.
We are thrown into situations. Most of the time they don’t come with instructions. If they do come with instructions we should probably not trust them. We have to perform enquiries to figure out how we got here, what our options are and where we might be headed. To do the work of figuring out our situation we might resort to the tools of social science, like statistics or economic concepts. Political theory may help. But history writing too is part of the effort at rendering our situations more intelligible.
For some colleagues, history is distinctive because it studies the distant past, or because it takes the archive as its source. For me, self-consciously inhabiting our situatedness in time is what differentiates historical enquiry and writing from other forms of social knowledge. History is the attempt to produce knowledge of the flux from within the flux. As Croce remarks: “All true history is contemporary history.”
The speed, intensity and generality of the COVID pandemic and the cognitive challenges it posed, gave this entanglement a new intensity. Even at the best of times, however, the problem is that being in medias res it is easier said than done. It is both inescapable and, at the same time, mysterious.
We are in medias res you say? In the middle of things? But which things? And how do those things relate to us and define us? Who or what are we in relation to these things? How do we chart the middle of this world? Who has the map? Who has the compass?…
@adam_tooze goes on to propose if not concrete answers to those questions, then a approach that can keep one honest. Eminently worth reading in full. History in the thick of it: “Writing in medias res.”
* Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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As we ponder perspective, we might spare a thought for Alan John Percivale (A. J. P.) Taylor; he died on this date in 1990. A historian, he wrote (albeit not overtly in media res) and taught briefly at Manchester Uinversity, then for most of his career at Oxford, focused largely on 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. But he gained a popular audience of millions via his journalism and broadcast lectures. His combination of academic rigor and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as “the Macaulay of our age.”
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