Long before COVID-19 cases rose and markets plummeted, economists had ways to measure what a human life is worth – but the public, and the health officials keeping them safe, have their own ideas about that too. Who should we listen to in this crisis, and the rebuilding that comes after?
One way to survive these long days of social isolation and disruption is to go deep on detail. There are, for instance, the compelling images of the spiky, Sputnik-like COVID-19 virus, looking like a lamp you bought and later regretted. You can spend a long time gazing at the little monster.
You can look up all the household objects people have turned into masks, now that we’ve been advised to wear them: bra cups, panty liners, underwear, T-shirts.
There’s the online festival of videos people have posted in their boredom: the hilarious assemblies of shut-ins (my favourite is the guy who pretends to play the trombone while his wife bangs her head in time with the sheet pan); the British sports announcer doing a play-by-play of his two Labradors wolfing their food; the mask-making, the hair-dyeing, the dance fests.
But there is another pair of artifacts you can stare at long enough to induce existential terror: the chart of the upward surge of global coronavirus cases, and the graph of the stock market’s harrowing plummet because of them.
Both curves are steep. The free-falling stock chart is a cliff you don’t want to stand too close to. The pitch of the rising COVID cases, on the other hand, is more like the upper slope of a glacier, if you have ever skied up one: It keeps going up, and up, and up, and even when you think you have the top in sight, you don’t. It never seems to level off.
Together, the two charts describe the world today and as far as anyone can see into the future, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, a one-of-a-kind event no human has ever experienced on this scale before…
Read the full article in Canada’s The Globe and Mail here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-your-money-or-your-life-coronavirus-era-economics-makes-us-ask-grim/
