COVID-19
The State of the Science
The state of the science for COVID 19 is embryonic and as a result most projections are little more than speculation. As yet, there is no consensus on what if any future immunity or temporary immunity those who have recovered from the virus will receive from what antibodies they might have. Timelines of 18 to 30 months for development of a vaccine assume some sustained immunity from the development to antibodies, but to date there is insufficient evidence to conclude whether COVID-19 has more in common with seasonal flues, for which vaccination works, or another coronavirus, the common cold for which there is no possibility of vaccination due to the inherent mutability of the virus.
This level of medical and scientific uncertainty combined with the demonstrated lethality of the virus argues strongly that “the precautionary principle” should be observed until such time as the narrow question of acquired immunity is reasonably answered. Taleb et al are worth quoting in full on this:
General Precautionary Principle : The general (non-naive) precautionary principle [3] delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level. In technical terms, the precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.
Spreading rate : Historically based estimates of spreading rates for pandemics in general, and for the current one in particular, underestimate the rate of spread because of the rapid increases in transportation connectivity over recent years. This means that expectations of the extent of harm are underestimates both because events are inherently fat tailed, and because the tail is becoming fatter as connectivity increases. Global connectivity is at an all-time high, with China one of the most globally connected societies. Fundamentally, viral contagion events depend on the interaction of agents in physical space, and with the forward-looking uncertainty that novel outbreaks necessarily carry, reducing connectivity temporarily to slow flows of potentially contagious individuals is the only approach that is robust against misestimations in the properties of a virus or other pathogen.
Asymmetric Uncertainty : Properties of the virus that are uncertain will have substantial impact on whether policies implemented are effective. For instance, whether contagious asymptomatic carriers exist. These uncertainties make it unclear whether measures such as temperature screening at major ports will have the desired impact. Practically all the uncertainty tends to make the problem potentially worse, not better, as these processes are convex to uncertainty.
Conclusion : Standard individual-scale policy approaches such as isolation, contact tracing and monitoring are rapidly (computationally) overwhelmed in the face of mass infection, and thus also cannot be relied upon to stop a pandemic. Multiscale population approaches including drastically pruning contact networks using collective boundaries and social behavior change, and community self-monitoring, are essential. Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.
It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to “paranoia,” or the converse a belief that nothing can be done.
Taleb et al rely on “
complex systems dynamic analysis,” which was first systematized by the authors of “The Limits of Growth” around the work of Nobel Prize philosopher and economist Fredrich Hayek. Its importance is that it looks at complex systems as radically dynamic where tipping points, once crossed, confer logarithmic, non-linear change. When “The Limits of Growth” was published the non-linearity of its conclusions were immediately
challenged by William Nordhaus, another Nobel Prize economist, who’s arguments have been incorporated into the mainstream economics we now live with. Nordhaus’ linearity ignores the real, nonlinear risks of disruptive events in dynamic systems like the earths ecology in the case of “The Limits of Growth” or extinction risks in the case of recurring global pandemics. This discounting of what Taleb calls fat tail risk by mainstream economists and scientists is what drove him to write his best-selling 2007 book, “The Black Swan”, anticipating of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Where Nordhaus and most economists using linear models to describe non-linear systems failed to see the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression until after the fact. Taleb wrote and sold his book into the collapse after anticipating it and its catastrophic effects.
With the mortality seen to date and only somewhere between 5 and 50 million infected (world-wide as of this time of writing), the pandemic is clearly far from having worked its way through the population, which it will do. Even without a vaccination, medical science is likely to identify best practice treatments and ameliorative behaviors over the course of the coming several years. If/when evidence confirms or disproves the possibility of vaccination we will be able to narrow our planning horizons, until then we need to think in terms of real uncertainty rather that risk. Science is popping at the moment with best minds around the world fully engaged, so there is reason to hope that good news is immanent, but the present reality is that politics around the world are being driven more by flawed economic than real public health concerns.
It was the same William Nordhaus who pulled dynamic systems analysis out of the
IPCC Reports on which world governments are basing their inaction on Climate Change. Nordhaus linear models project modest sea level increase and warming this century because his model is linear and excludes the “tipping points”
complex systems analysis describes and that have logarithmic rather than linear impacts: fat tail risk. It is particularly discouraging that almost all economic models of COVID-19 are of the Nordhaus rather than Taleb variety and are systematically disregarding risks of non-linear, logarithmic outcomes of a known logarithmic system: viral infection with R0 of greater than 1. While medical science is carrying its own weight in the crisis, it will take time. The science of risk management is not pulling its weight because ergodic models are being applied to a non-ergodic system: life in a Darwinian universe where nature is indifferent to human survival.
The Crisis in Medicine:
The American for profit medical industry has demonstrated decisively in the last two month’s markets cannot deliver public health. Rather, profit is maximized at the expense or public health with individual deaths as one of the costs externalized to society. The consolidation of the medical industry has deliberately reduced the bed count in private hospitals while beds in public hospitals have been
cut by local government as Federal and State support has subsided. The COVID-19 shut downs are adding pressure
causing even more reductions. This has left Private Equity
planning our COVID-19 response for profit, cutting front line responders pay during the height of the pandemic.
This is the result of 40 years of viewing “public goods” as a cost rather than investments. From
defunding sanitariums for the mentally ill, who now mostly live on the streets or in prison, to the privatization and public subsidy of hospital and other health care facilities, even before the current pandemic, the American for profit and most expensive “health care” system in the world produced
significantly worse health outcomes. Combined with the deregulation of capital and the offshoring of production, the Business School ethos of “just in time” management brought to public health by privatization has eliminated all spare capacity and any stockpiles of medical supplies like PPE or ventilators, viewing them as stranded capital to be liquidated to
bolster current profits.
Public health is a non-ergodic system, there is no reason to assume health is self-equilibrating (ergodic), the history of plagues and pandemics is well known. But the analytical models of mainstream economics on which our politics have come to rely make no room for the absolute uncertainty of non-ergodic systems (life, biology). This is directly resulting in elevated mortality rates in States like New York where economizing on public health is resulting in extreme shortages of hospital beds, ICUs, ventilators and PPE. This economic rationalization of a non-economic system, public health, has made the actual New York system unfit for purpose, demonstrably unable to provision for public health in a
predictable and predicted crisis.
There is more money to be made from shortages of PPE and pharmaceuticals than there is from stockpiling adequate supply. Our privatized “public health” system is effectively doing exactly that right now. Because the demand is highly irregular, there will be no incentive for private investment in the production of PPE or even vaccines without significant public subsidy. Even then, the business incentive will be to leave supplies somewhere short of projected demand as emergency production with incompetent government oversight
will be more profitable.
Oversight of public expenditures on public goods, whether health, finance or war spending, was one of the core functions for the US Government from the beginning of the WW2 mobilization until the Reagan era of deregulation began. “Deregulation” can usefully be thought of as de-criminalization of
“profiteering”, the making of unreasonable profits not justified by any risks taken, across the financial economy. The financialization of US medicine through the medical insurance industry has optimized for exactly this kind of profiteering, primarily through “
upcoding” and “
surprise billing”. Generally, wherever lack of government oversight allows exploitation of market power, the introduction of IT has resulted in the optimization of public expenditure for
private profit rather than public health.
As demonstrated by the numerous countries who have managed to
stop the pandemic, the public health disaster in The United States is a man-made disaster. As recently as February, the world considered the US CDC as the go to source for pandemic planning and it is the past recommendations of this agency that have structured the major successes elsewhere in the world. That the United States has lost the competence to execute on policies it has itself developed and trained governments around the world to adopt represents a systemic decay. It was made plain in March that the US is incapable of correcting course. This demonstrates that the privately run medical system, paid for by profit making insurance companies, is not a health system but a system of profiteering from illness and death. This has nothing to do with medical professionals and everything to do with systems designed to exploit rather than heal that deliberately subvert the efforts of healers.
The Crisis of Politics:
“The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.”
Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (Vintage Books, 1972)
If it weren’t so deadly, it’s so absurd it would be funny. With the exception of China, and its economic hinterlands, political responses to COVID-19 are being informed by economic models like that Nordhaus used in his critique of “The Limits of Growth”: linear and ergodic. Within the mineral and geophysical parameters of the earth, life might be thought of as a self-equilibrating, as ergodic, but as an isolated biome, part of a larger Darwinian process, human life certainly isn’t self-equilibrating: species go extinct all the time. Such wholly unfounded ergodic assumptions blinded economists as a profession to the
systemically obvious GCF in 2008. Ergodic DSGE and IS-LM economic models failed to account for debt dynamics which are actually carefully tracked and published by
bank regulators. Western politicians who are being systematically misinformed by their economic advisors are visibly making a difficult situation worse, as they have for the last decade, letting all the same risks that drove the 2008 crash flourish. This time, however, the virus burst the bubble rather than the usual “animal spirits”.
With biological and psychological factors as the main
exogenous shocks it’s reasonable to expect the worst from a political system structured to address economic problems as though the only variable was “the price of money”, thus solely through monetary stimulus. The virus doesn’t have an account with the Fed. I’ll return to this below in The Economic Crisis, but understanding the ubiquity of misinformation in contemporary economics is essential to understanding what the policy responses will be and why they will fail. The reliance of the West on ergodic economic forecasting models will be the first casualty of “the end of American Exceptionalism”. It will be important to follow policies and
outcomes abroad in order to understand in the next few years what actually works when it becomes obvious the American system is
fundamentally broken. As Gramsci said, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great number of morbid symptoms appear.” Politically and economically, what we are living through is epochal,
an era is ending and another one beginning. What follows is an outline of structural changes in US politics over the last half century leading to the current tipping point.
Domestically, in the 1976 Buckley vs Valeo ruling, the US Supreme Court decided that political bribery was Constitutionally protected free speech. Always and everywhere corruption has haunted the halls of politics, but the 1976 ruling set the foundation for
an incipient political market-place, an actual incorporation of corruption into formal politics. This judgement set terms under which it would hence forth be legal to bribe politicians. So long as it was open ended (without written quid pro quos) and confined to politics (nominally campaigning), specific amounts and forms and terms of payment were legally codified creating a highly regulated market-place. These rules have subsequently evolved and loosened as legislated by Congress and bracketed by subsequent rulings of the Court. The process culminated with
Citizens United which determined that anyone with money, including recently re-created corporate persons, has a barely limited right to spend whatever they choose under loose and hardly enforced rules. You and I are free to bribe under these rules too, but corporate personhood clearly privileges concentrated wealth, so our miniscule sums will be wasted. In this market, US politicians have become quite adept at the solicitation of bribes and the provisioning of those who bribe them.
As this market-place evolved, it became easier and easier for well-funded entities to encourage lawmakers to favor their interests in legislation. The Finance, Insurance & Real Estate (FIRE) industries were early to the opportunity, one uniquely available to those who could literally
create money. Financial criminals were prosecuted in mass for last time under a Republican administration for the frauds leading up to the
Savings & Loan collapse. Hundreds of executives went to jail. Finance flipped allegiance in the subsequent election, hiring Democrats instead of Republicans. Just as Buckley vs Valeo, under a Democratic administration began the development of a political market-place defined through minor legislation and court rulings, the Republican administrations of the eighties began the deregulation that led to the S&L and subsequent busts. The following Democratic one completed de-criminalization by repealing Glass Steagall and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that prevented the Wall Street casino from gambling with the savings of retail bank customers, frauds that had led to the 1929 collapse. This led within several years to the dot.com bubble and within a decade to the 2008 GFC with massive public bailouts for which no one of importance was prosecuted despite rampant,
now legal, fraud, nor were any of the bailed out bank managements even fired.
While FIRE led the way down the road of decriminalization, the Military Industrial Complex and
associated oil industry were precocious students. By the time Eisenhower coined the term, the MIC was already distributed across all fifty states to ensure political access. With its ever-expanding budget, the Pentagon has developed a private political presence of contractors and their employees who bribe congressmen on its behalf to add to its public power. By the final years of the century, the MIC was as
fully engaged in fraud as finance, and with equal impunity. Learning from these role models, as the new century dawned, every powerful public agency or private business was lining up to bribe legislators at all levels of government to similarly re-legislate the legal environment in which it operated. The Patriot Act disburdened Federal Agencies like the
FBI, CIA and NSA of most oversight and a sympathetic Executive Branch essentially abdicated on oversight so long as these agencies supported its policies. The largest anti-war protest in world history,
over 36M people, provided no brake on the US march to war on falsified information from the newly
deregulated intelligence agencies. Multiple aimless wars and the crafted hysteria of terrorism covered politically for the liberation of the most destructive and
exploitative public and
private institutions from electoral oversight and control. These agencies were empowered with surveillance and
extrajudicial punitive powers clearly at odds with any honest reading of US constitutional law. Similarly private corporations generally were given an
operational right to ignore whatever laws they
found inconvenient.
There are no individuals in the above account because the political crisis the United States faces is an institutional one. The current crisis is the result of the institutional changes outlined above, not a cause. The 2008 elections in which Americans dramatically repudiated everything to this point in my narrative resulted in a Democratic administration institutionalizing everything the electorate put it in office to end: no one was prosecuted for falsifying intelligence to coerce the public into supporting
a series of wars who’s only point is private profits; no one was prosecuted for
torturing prisoners; no one was prosecuted for
extrajudicial executions; no one was prosecuted for
systemic financial frauds. In fact, after bailing out
Wall Street with $29T, the government then
“foamed the runway” with homeowners, foreclosing on and bankrupting millions to buy time for private banks to pad their balance sheets with free money from the Fed via Quantitative Easing. All while the Wall Street gamblers who created the problem not only
kept their jobs and got their bonuses but went right back to business, scarcely changed.
Similarly this political narrative excludes all the headline political stories of the last several decades: abortion; immigration; illegal immigration; gun rights; church and state; mass shootings; Russia; North Korea; Me Too; etc. etc.. Instead it follows a chthonic narrative of bipartisan consensus about freeing business, more properly money, from political and legal constraints and shifting the locus of governmental support
from the population in general to private businesses and property, benefits limited to the extent possible to the “market makers” of politics:
the bribers. The 80s, 90s & early 00s established this new system, from the late 00s it has been playing itself out. The presentation of polarized politics to the public through corporate owned media has been a distraction from the auction block politics has become where legislators compete in the solicitation of bribes to serve
the interest of the bribers until they lose an election at which point they become lobbyists for the bribers they’ve already served, this their reward for
betraying their electorate. The dysfunction we are living is the result of disparate policies bought by disparate interests that cannot be coordinated in a crisis by design because any public good established through such coordination would cost some interest its profits.
For instance, half way though the previous Democratic administration,
deregulation of pharmaceuticals led to an
opioid epidemic causing a sustained US life expectancy decline for the first time
in almost a century. The legislative response has been non-existent. Further, this deregulation created a
replicability crisis in science as primary research was privatized for profit. The result has been a growing
mistrust of science that dovetails politically with the disinformation
campaign against climate scientists deployed for the last 40 years by the oil industry which hobbles the effectiveness of well-known epidemiological practice in the ongoing pandemic. The political right has used the real corruption of science to delegitimize policies directed towards public goods from climate change to pollution control to epidemiological responses, supporting a profitable status quo for themselves. Furthering the illegitimacy of expertise, the
college admissions scandal has made a narrative of generalized elite corruption easily believable and apparently real.
Privatized medical institutions have proven they
cannot provide for public health. Congress has proven incapable of serving any but the most
modest public goods,
legislating bailout after bailout for bribers while giving lip service to working people by calling them heroes in legislation that
essentially ignores them. The executive
promotes his investments while
fumbling his powers to coordinate public policy for public good even as the daily
death rate grows into his “reopening the economy”. The party of War and Oil wants to reopen the economy because shutdowns impede action, commerce, consumption and profit. The Party of the Finance and the Medical Industrial Complex wants to reopen the economy, but allow the PMC (who form their voting constituency, the Professional & Managerial Class) to work from home while requiring blue collar workers to shoulder all the health and financial risks for the same reasons. The galling hypocrisy of allowing those who can afford to work from home to do so while requiring those who can’t to face infection and unknowable risk isn’t lost on workers. We are half way through an election year and for their own parochial reasons both Parties would rather have more working people die than do anything meaningful to help them.
Working people and
Disaster Capitalists are both
taking note.
Abroad, as time has passed US foreign policy has been increasingly malignant. With the death of Roosevelt the vision of a popularly constrained capitalism where markets were focused on the overall needs of society was
abandoned. Instead, under the new global dollar standard set up at Bretton Woods, the US embarked on a “free trade” project
modeled on the British Empire now controlled by the US, which when combined with Monroe Doctrine trade relationships in the western hemisphere was more or less coterminous with the
American sphere of influence. As the war was winding down the State Department, Pentagon and OSS, soon to become the CIA, began a sustained campaign of expansion by regime change aimed at economic assimilation of both populations and material resources to expand the dollar empire. That campaign continues to this day. The goal has been to re-build and extend the laissez-faire capitalism that existed prior to the First World War where metropolitan capitalist centers benefited from minimally constrained exploitation of populations and resources remote from them, assigned fixed roles in a
global “division of labor” policed now by the US military and/or clandestine agencies.
US clandestine agencies, and the State Department and Pentagon to varying degrees, have been involved in non-stop regime change efforts towards the global integration of populations and resources in this system of private, capitalist control. Mostly successful since WWII, these efforts began with Greece in 1948, followed by Syria in 49, Albania from 49-53, Iran in 53, 54 Guatemala, Syria again in 56, Haiti in 57, Indonesia 57, Laos 58-60, Cuba 59-present, 59 Cambodia, 60 Ecuador, 60 Congo, 61 Dominican Republic, 62-64 Brazil, 63 Iraq, 63 South Vietnam, 64 Bolivia and Brazil, 65 France, 65 Indonesia again, 66 Ghana, 67 Greece again, 70 Costa Rica, 71 Bolivia again, 73-75 Australia, 73 Chile, 74 Portugal, 75 Angola, 75 Zaire, 76 Argentina, 76 Jamaica, 79-89 Afghanistan, 79 Seychelles, 80-92 Angola again, 80-89 Libya, 81-87 Nicaragua, 82 Chad, 83 Grenada, 82-84 South Yemen, 82-84 Suriname, 87 Fiji, 89 Panama, 91 Albania again, 91 Iraq, 93 Somalia, 99-2000 Yugoslavia, 2000 Ecuador again, 01 Afghanistan again, 02 Venezuela, 03 Iraq again, 04 Haiti again, 07 to present Somalia again, 11 Libya again, 12 to present Syria for a third time, 14 Ukraine, Brazil again in 16 and Bolivia and Ecuador in 2018. Ongoing destabilization efforts are underway in Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China.
When States, territories and/or populations are assimilated into the US financial empire, they are integrated into the global division of labor where the private multinational capitalist actors who can most profitably utilize these choose for them. To the extent local populations or States object they become subject to
police operations sponsored by US military and
secret agencies. The major refugee/immigration crisis of the last two decades can be
traced directly to these policies. Transfer pricing by multinationals, where they internally transfer accounts across borders to avoid taxes, has resulted in a global “offshore banking” archipelago where profits from that global division of labor, policed on the US taxpayers account, are sequestered
ahead of exposure to taxing authorities. This is the clearest manifestation of the American Empire, where nominally independent nations around the world
cannot pursue policies for the benefit of their majority populations while wealth is stripped from them and hidden in financial havens within the US empire but outside of US taxing authority, and thus of no benefit to most Americans who see only the costs. These populations serve multinational capitalism as cheap, disposable labor that can be kept at subsistence living standards while producing robust
profits for foreign investors who additionally benefit from US military and police protection without having to pay for it.
Domestically US politics has been reduced to a policy auction where whoever bids the highest gets whatever they want without any coordination of public needs, or even internal coherency.
Capital and IT began to buy up the
electoral process following the
Judicial Coup in 2000. This has led directly to the legitimacy issues of the last two Democratic Party Primaires,
destroying the credibility of the Democrats as a "popular party". The monetary empire seeks and has acquired a state that is small and weak with regard to individual political and economic rights, but as large and powerful as necessary to protect private property and other economic rights of those who control capital. What the collective of competing buyers have acquired is a communism for the rich, but one that is
liquidating its own economic basis in real production. This will be the subject of the next post.
Relying on economic models that exclude the realities of logarthmic systems, the forcast made for the policies implemented on the behalf of biribers do not account for predictable and predicted real world effects of both the virus and the human respones to it. While employment may bounce back, the financial hit of the lock down on the working population who were forced into credit card and landlord debt will be a
predictable cascading of defaults. This is simple math, but because the ergodic economic models policy makers rely on exclude finance and "fat tail risk", the obvious oncoming wave of bankruptcys and
other breaks on the chain of debt payments is not being accounted for in any of the legislation being passed at the behest of the bribing class. At the same time, the panicked reopening of the economy is already increasing the spread and fatality of the virus. Economic models that address reality rather than the needs of the financialized economy have saved lives and economies in New Zealand, South Korea and Germany, just to name a few. Obliviousness to the real hardship these breaks in the chain of debt payment are causing across the population left the political class here stunned by the explosion of outrage at the police murder of and black man in custody.
In the next post, we will look at the economic consequences of the pandemic on the uniquely financial imperialism of the US centered global economic system. This is a system that has used debt obligations as it's primary projection of power, with the US armed forces an increasingly ineffectual subsidiary. As the virus has attacked every imaginable link in the "chain of payments" that structure this empire, economics will become the driver of politics until the system collapses or re-introduces a robust conception of public goods.
“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos, the situation is excellent.” Mao Zedong
