It’s Our Expectations That Are Broken, Pierre
Life does not always bend to accommodate human needs or wants, and it is our expectation, even insistence, that it must, is what is broken.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, and the party’s presumptive prime ministerial candidate at the next federal election, due by late 2025, has made his catchphrase “Canada is broken, and Justin Trudeau broke it.” While it causes eye rolls among Trudeau’s supporters, there is a degree of truth to Poilievre’s claim. The Canadian government has gone from one operational disaster to another over the past two years or so, ranging from the utter breakdown in response to the occupation of Ottawa and multiple Canada-United States border crossings by groups opposed to public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic to chaos in airport security lines to the inability of Canadians to renew their passports just as the country’s borders were reopening after pandemic lockdown. Even this week, Quebec’s new computerized system for renewing drivers licenses and other motor vehicle documentation has collapsed, with police showing no reluctance to ticket those whose licenses expired due to the breakdown.
I have discussed the sharp decline in Canadian state capacity elsewhere, but the sensation that things are “broken” is not simply, or even chiefly, about government efficiency. We all have the sense that things are not working properly. We see it at stores and restaurants closed because there is not enough staff. Some days the mail is not delivered, or overnight shipments take the better part of a week to arrive. The airlines have lost baggage at airports and are taking weeks to return it to owners, if it gets there at all. Commonly prescribed medications are out of stock at pharmacies. And let us not forget all the inflation that has accompanied these shortages.
So yes, we’re mad, mostly because we cannot get what we want when we want it, and we feel very wronged by this. There is a sense in which this is understandable. We have grown to getting whatever we want at a click of a button, or more properly, at the tap of a screen on our phones. A film from 1984 depicting a nuclear war from the British point of view was titled Threads, and it made the point that society was built on delicate systems that needed to work together, and that they were easy to destroy. But there did not need to be a nuclear war for everyone to feel the threads of the title being broken. It turns out that a global pandemic will also cut the threads of a global just in time economy.
We started to feel it in the summer of 2021. Vaccinations were starting to show results, and societies were emerging from extreme lockdown, even if the virus was still rampant, and we were able to do things that had been impossible for ever a year. We could go to restaurants, travel, buy things that had not been available because those producing them were themselves locked down. And for those who had kept their jobs during the lockdown, perhaps able to do them remotely from home, there was probably plenty of money as spending for discretionary expenses went in the bank instead.
The economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compared pandemic lockdowns to a patient being put into a medically induced coma. The coma was needed to save the patient’s life, and the patient needed to be fed intravenously, in the form of government spending. In those early days of the pandemic, no one was ready to think through what would happen when the pandemic ended (beyond glorious normal life coming back), and Krugman never thought to ask what bringing the patient out of the metaphorical coma could look like. It turns out the patient wanted a meal long before he was able to return to work, but the people who would make the meal were still coming out of their own comas.
In economic terms, demand came out of lockdown long before supply did. In mid-2021 reports of “supply chain disruptions” dominated the news. International shipping was heavily disrupted, not only because shipping containers were out of position, but because the crews of cargo vessels were disproportionately affected by Covid-19 infections. Many who left jobs when the pandemic began were unwilling to return as businesses reopened, in some cases because workers were still suffering the effects of their infections, and others because they did not believe their workplaces to be safe. Some workers, such as airline pilots, were offered retirement packages when the pandemic began and decided not to return to employment right away.
But these same people were anxious to shop. In particular, they were anxious to travel. “I put up with those lockdowns, and they were so unfair. I deserve a trip to Europe.” “I’m just so done with the pandemic. It wasn’t that serious anyway.” (What about “I’m grateful that this didn’t turn into another Black Death and that my entire family, especially my elderly parents, made it through intact, and that is more gratifying than waiting a couple of weeks for the new 82-inch screen is aggravating?) Commentators have even given a name to the phenomenon: revenge spending or revenge travel. So everyone wanted to go out and spend whale the producers were still sick or had left their jobs entirely. Economics 101 puts it best: more money chasing fewer goods means inflation.
Three years into a pandemic, it would be a shock if things did not feel broken. SARS-CoV2 is a serious virus. The Omicron variant pushed measles aside to become the most contagious airborne virus that epidemiologists have ever encountered. It killed millions around the world, and “long Covid” has afflicted a substantial portion of those who were infected, even after vaccination. Science told us that a pandemic was coming for us eventually, but we did not expect it to be as bad as it was. We expected an influenza virus, and past pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza, were over and done in about three years, even without vaccines. SARS in 2003 should have left us more aware of the risk of coronaviruses, whose pandemics last longer because coronaviruses mutate more rapidly than the flu. The “Russian Flu” of 1890, which scientists now suspect to have been caused by a coronavirus, roared for five years and took a decade to recede. The world may not seem normal before 2030. But this is better than the Black Death, whose effects shaped daily life in Europe for the worse for centuries.
The SARS-CoV2 pandemic has been disruptive, but the disruption has followed fairly predictable patterns. Pandemics are felt throughout society and the economy for years. The sooner we accept this, the easier it will be for us to live with the disruptions. Instead, most of us seem to have decided that the whole thing was unfair and we did not deserve it. The political scientist and public intellectual Tom Nichols has written about the modern epidemic of childishness and narcissism that became evident long before the pandemic
Humanity regularly deludes itself, and this tendency toward delusion has made enduring the pandemic more difficult. Life does not always bend to accommodate human needs or wants, and it is our expectation, even insistence, that it must, is what is broken.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190925-was-threads-the-scariest-tv-show-ever-made
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/effects/social.php
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