There are two general ways to reduce the transmission of the virus.  One is “engineering”, changing the physical environment, the other is “social”, changing behavior to keep people distant from each other.  Under engineering, we can include not only physical partitions, UV lighting and ventilation, but also mask-wearing and other PPE.  I know, there is a very large behavioral component to masking, but I want to focus on the distancing aspect, so let’s put everything else in the engineering box.

Now for distancing.  Suppose we know instantaneously and with certainty everyone who is infected.  In that case, we can selectively quarantine them, and this will cut off transmission.  That is possible only in rare circumstances, such as a country that has fully eradicated the virus but has occasional external visitors.  If you have a reliable test you can identify anyone arriving with the disease and isolate them.  The rest of the population, known to be uninfected and unexposed, can move freely and congregate as they want.

A more realistic case is that you know with near certainty everyone who is infected, but only with a delay.  Then those who came into contact with them during their potential spreading period are also suspect and need to be isolated.  This is the idea behind contact tracing, which imposes distancing on a small subset of the population who may not be infected but leaves everyone else free to go on with their life.

Trump is staggering.  He’s plunging in the polls, and his behavior has become erratic and unhinged.  I don’t mean he’s being crude, infantile and wrapped in a world of fantasy—he’s always like that.  Rather, I see him as suddenly incoherent, fumbling with threats and catchphrases as if he were locked out of his house at night, frantically trying one key after another to see if any will work.

Why?

Here’s my theory: throughout his career, Trump has been resolutely self-defining.  He selects his issues, positions and attributes (clever deal-maker, hardass boss, financial/sexual/political winner, tough guy warrior for patriarchal values, underdog rebel against the Establishment) to construct a persona of his own choice.  He takes the initiative.

2016 was a great year for him.  While much was wrong with America, none of it was urgent in a screaming you-can’t-look-away-from-this sort of way.  There was plenty of political space for Trump to define what he thought the country should be focused on and why he would be the one to fix it.  The media provided invaluable service, making a big deal of every tweet, boastful claim or rally-fueled hyperbole.  Through them, Trump told us what the election was about: the invasion of dangerous immigrants pouring through our undefended borders, the humiliation of the America by China, and the haughty, corrupt elitism of Democratic politicians.  Even by disputing his take on these things, the media reinforced the notion that these were the main issues facing the country.

What has collapsed for Trump, finally in 2020, is not just the economy, the health of the population or the racial order, but his ability to determine what the issues are: he has lost control of the narrative.  This is not because the Democrats have beat him at his own game.  On the contrary, they are as clueless about these things as they’ve always been.  His problem is that we are facing real crises that demand our attention whether we want them to or not.  Trump has almost no influence over what politics are about in an election year; the pandemic, the economy and the revulsion against racism and police violence define the political moment on their own.  This is why he seems to be flailing: his entire career has been based on his projection of his needs onto the world, and he has hardly any capacity to respond to the demands of others.

Bad news for Trump: we don’t know how long the current challenge to the racial order will last, but the pandemic and the economic crisis will be with us well beyond November.  They will call the shots.  Trump can blather about some other fantasy issue being the real problem, but few will listen.

This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism.  Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines.  No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers.  Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China.  Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune.  The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid fantasies also emanate from the left/alternative world.

So to counter the conspiracy pandemic, mainstream experts have come forward to advise us on how to detect and puncture unfounded rumors.  The problem I see is that sometimes there really are conspiracies, and it isn’t immediately obvious how to separate the ones that might be true from the purely crazy.

In the public interest, I offer the following rule of thumb.  A conspiracy, of course, is an agreement by a group of insiders to keep something important secret from the public.  If the group is tightly organized, motivated and able to operate separately from those on the outside, it is capable of waging a conspiracy.  If you relax these assumptions, however, you need additional groups to hide the initial conspiracy—in other words, secondary conspiracies.  And if the secondary conspirators aren’t tight enough a third ring of conspiracies is required.  As soon as you find yourself imagining lots of interlocking conspiracies to keep the central one secret you’ve wandered over the line.

So Mitch McConnell and the senate Republicans want blanket employer liability protection as the price of another round of economic support.  They have this leverage because Democrats kept postponing their agenda until they were the only ones with a list of things they wanted to spend money on.

(This illustrates classic bargaining theory to a T.  Bargaining power depends on how much you think you will lose if the agreement is delayed [Rubinstein] or fails completely.  Democrats feared economic damage to the public if bailout bills weren’t approved immediately.  Once the financial markets were backstopped Republicans considered the rest to be low stakes.  Hence the strong tilt to McConnell et al.)

So here is a possible Democratic counter:

OK, you want liability protection.  Let’s give it to any employer, large or small, that sets up a health and safety committee to oversee protections on the job, elected by the whole workforce, one person one vote.  If protections are consensual, liability is waived.  Otherwise proceed at your own risk.

This would be good policy, and it has the political advantage of placing liability within a larger, readily communicable frame about participation and consent.

We live in a drastically unequal society.  Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation.  Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it?  There’s a progressive solution, to change the system so injustice, constraint and exploitation are minimized.  And then there’s the woke solution, to demand benefits targeted to minorities (and women) that will more evenly distribute the injustice, constraint and exploitation that remains.

You can support the woke solution, but please don’t confuse it with progressive social change.

For a current example, look at this recent op-ed in the New York Times by Pamela Shifman and Salamishah Tillet, “How We Spend Tells Us Whose Lives Matter”.  They point out, “only 12 percent of the black and Latino [small business] owners in a survey who applied for aid reported receiving what they had asked for.”  I don’t know how that compares to white/Anglo owners, and no link is provided to the source they relied on.  But let’s assume with them this means minority SB owners have been disadvantaged in the expanded lending program to counter the effects of the coronavirus.  Knowing this country, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true.

Two reasons are given for the disparity.  First, minority-owned businesses are less likely to have an existing loan relationship with a bank, and private banks are being used to funnel loans authorized by Congress.  Second, these businesses have slimmer reserves and are less able to survive the process of application, review and disbursement.  Again, let’s assume this analysis is correct.

The progressive solution would be to either impose greater obligations on the private banking system or bypass it altogether in administering the program.  If commercial banks are to be deputized to distribute public funds they should be required to do so not just for their existing clients but their share of the applicant pool, and streamlined procedures should be in place to get the money out the door as quickly as possible.  Or perhaps it would have been possible to forego using commercial banks altogether (or in part) and to quickly ramp up a dedicated lending facility operating in conjunction with the Fed or a specialized government agency.  (How much easier all of this would have been if we had a nationwide public banking system already in place.)

And then there’s the woke solution: “providing dedicated funding opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses, and within that funding pool, for women of color-owned businesses.”  So the inadequacies and unfairness of the lending arrangement are OK as long as they don’t disproportionately fall on these groups.  I suppose white business owners locked out of the deal can console themselves with their privilege.

Again, the woke program is a choice some may make; it’s goal is to take the racism and sexism out of exploitation.  Just don’t confuse social justice with a more equally distributed injustice.

Donald Trump, cheering on his “warriors” who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary people can get their jobs and normal lives back.  Elitist liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don’t care, but “real” people do.

The reality is different.  The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces didn’t begin with government orders and won’t end with them.  If the rate of new infection and death is too high, a lot of people won’t go along.  Not everyone, but enough to make a huge economic difference.  Ask any small business owner what it would mean for demand to drop by 25-50%.  Lifting government orders won’t magically restore the economic conditions of mid-winter.

Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs but featuring Michael Moore as its “presenter”, has been viewed by almost five and a half million people since it popped up on YouTube last month.  In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite a provocation, and the response from almost every quarter of the environmental movement has been outrage.  It traffics in disinformation and scurrilous personal attacks, they say, and I can’t argue.  Two big problems: it falsely claims that more carbon is emitted over the lifespan of a photovoltaic cell than by generating the same energy through fossil fuels, and it uses dishonest editing techniques to portray activist Bill McKibben as having sold out to billionaire ecological exploiters.  You can read about the misrepresentations elsewhere; my point is that, whatever else it is, the film is a logically consistent statement of the de-growth position.

Alas, much of the “left” has concluded that the chief obstacle to meeting our climate and other environmental challenges is the “capitalist” faith in economic growth.  Capitalism requires growth, they say, and growth is destroying the earth, therefore we must abolish capitalism and embrace de-growth.  Anything less is a sellout.

This philosophy is central to Planet; twice (at least) Gibbs proclaims, “You can’t have endless growth on a finite planet.”  He shows charts depicting human population and consumption growth that portray us as a metastasizing cancer.  Early in the film, when he’s setting the tone for what’s to come, he asks, “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?”

But movies are not just words; they make their arguments visually as well.  Planet has horrific scenes of mining and logging, as well as speeded up, frenzied shots of manufacturing, warehousing and shipping.  It ends with heartbreaking footage of doomed orangutans amid a wasteland of deforestation.  The message is clear: human use of nature is a travesty, and any activity that imposes a cost on Mother Earth is immoral.

Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed.  Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars.  Their key policy conclusion is

A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with realistic goals for testing and contact-tracing.

If we had a reliable government, it would get this done, but we don’t.  Concretely, one of the main jobs of a shadow government organized by Democrats would be to assemble this group and give it a regular, high profile platform.

Republican rule in the US is a horror show.  We get incoherent ramblings from our president on injecting bleach into our veins, calls for the states to file for bankruptcy from the Senate majority leader, a veto of modest IMF support for developing countries hammered financially by the virus, and a complete absence of guidance on the most crucial aspects of public health.

We already know this.

The greater tragedy is that the Democrats are barely better.  Their program, to the extent it makes sense to speak of one, is protecting the immediate interests of their key constituents.  This begins with the financial sector, and since the Republicans share the same commitment, their multi-trillion dollar bailout zipped right through.  Small business is also important to both parties, if not quite as much, and upwards of a billion will wend its way to them—via the banks, of course.  Lots of health sector money flows to the Democrats, and Pelosi and Schumer found a way to bail them out too.  Beyond this it has been hit or miss.  The unemployed will get greater wage replacement, even above 100% for the bottom end of the labor market.  There may be future money for the states.  A few billion for testing, and that’s about it.

What all this adds up to is top-heavy interest group protection.  It’s not a plan.

The irony is that informed opinion has largely converged in the two key areas of public policy.  To overcome the pandemic we need four things:

Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”.

As usual, I monitored the posts through the day to see if they were being picked up anywhere.  This has become largely an exercise in nostalgia, since with the fading of the economics blogosphere there isn’t much to track.  What happened next was interesting, however.