| Abstract |
We found ourselves in a transformed world sometime in the month of March In half the world we had eerily empty streets, closed shops and unusually clear skies, with climbing death tolls being reported daily: something unprecedented was unfolding before our eyes The news about the economy was especially alarming: the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest and deepest economic contraction in the history of capitalism (see Roubini, 2020) To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto, all that was solid melted into air: ‘globalization’ went into reverse;long supply chains, that were previously the only ‘rational’ way to organize production, collapsed and hard borders returned;trade declined drastically;and international travel was severely constrained In a matter of days, tens of millions of workers became unemployed and millions of businesses lost their employees, customers, suppliers and credit lines 2 Economists started speculating about unthinkably large contractions of gross domestic product (GDP) in various countries in 2020, and a long line of sectors rushed to the closest government to beg for a bailout The line often started with the banks, always fastest at everything that matters, followed by railways, airlines, airports, the tourism sector, charities, the entertainment industry and, where they were marketized, universities;all were pushed to the verge of bankruptcy, and this is not to speak of the displaced workers and the (nominally) self-employed, who lost everything in an instant 3 In the USA, with a highly ‘flexible’ economy and an even more supple job market, tens of millions of workers were thrown into the scrapheap almost instantaneously, often losing their work-related health insurance at the same time: a catastrophe for themselves and their families and a massive health problem for the collective This ‘first wave’ of unemployment was compounded by a second wave, in which mid-level posts (office managers, law clerks, etc ) were culled since they had no production to oversee and no one left to supervise, in a textbook-case Keynesian downward spiral that could be halted only by public policy Unbelievably long lines of pedestrians and automobiles rapidly formed at food banks across the USA, while homeless people were regimented into sleeping in improvised spaces in car parks in Las Vegas, below hotel towers that, although empty, were too lavish for them: astonishing spectacles of need, suffering and waste in the richest country in the world
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