May 22, 2020. As we await the nation finding an equilibrium between Covid-19 deaths and routine life, observers are biding their shelter time forecasting the great social changes that the pandemic will have left in its wake. How much, how transformative, social change can we expect this pandemic to have brought?
Whether you anticipate profound changes or instead expect pretty much the same America after Covid-19 may depend on how you generally understand the way profound social change occurs. Does it entail “asteroidal” or “glacial” events? I borrow the terms from evolutionary history. An asteroid’s impact about 66 million years ago suddenly transformed life on Earth, including terminating the dinosaurs. On the other hand, gradual alterations in the earth’s spin and orientation expanded and reduced glacier coverage of the planet, which, in turn, slowly forced Earth’s life forms to adapt.
Is the Covid-19 pandemic an asteroidal shock to America, or will, a decade from now, its occurrence hardly be noted amidst America’s glacial changes?
Change in American History
Most of the great changes in American society, culture, and ways of life have been glacial. The United States was once an agricultural, small land-holder society. Over about a 200-year span, it became, first, a manufacturing and then a service economy. Where once about 95 in 100 American families farmed, barely 2 in 100 do today; an overwhelmingly rural society turned into an overwhelmingly urban one. These two linked transformations in turn transformed daily routines and, to a lesser degree, culture, glacially.
Early America was a hierarchical society, even if less so than Europe. Over time, male householders’ total domination of family, servants, and sometimes slaves, crumbled. In particular, women’s empowerment changed family life, sex, and economy, glacially. Rising levels of education over several generations altered economic activity, individual literacy, and world views, glacially.
America has experienced a few “asteroidal” shocks. The Revolution and Constitution created a new political system. The Civil War was a national trauma, but Emancipation was the greater shock, even though its full consequences took an additional century. While the Great Depression propelled America toward a modern welfare state, one shouldn’t overestimate that transformation. National responses to Covid-19 reveal a society still more committed to sauve-qui-peut self-reliance than to shared-fate communalism.
How will Covid-19 fit into American history?
Anticipations
Some have argued that after Covid-19, things will never be the same. Dr. Anthony Fauci himself has commented that “the effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be ‘imprinted on the personality of our nation for a very long time.’” Among more specific speculations, we read that dating will be slower, more thoughtful; that American marriage will revert to a more dutiful, family-oriented form (rather than being a partnership conditional on continuing passion); that there will be more xenophobia as the plague raises fear of outsiders and more paranoia, but perhaps more economic redistribution along with a mobilized working-class but also more mutual compassion between management and labor (having Zoomed from home with one another); and that perhaps we will no longer shake hands or casually hug one another, something Dr. Fauci himself has recommended. A sociologist, a friend, told the press that “There’s no road map from the past. There’s never been this level of social upheaval.”
I beg to differ. No one can predict, of course, but my bet is that, though we will go through considerable pain and disruption, several years from now American life will not have been substantially altered. I bet we will also be shaking hands. How can I say that? Because there is a road map from the past and there have been greater social upheavals that left little change in deep American culture and practices.
Comparing Consequences
As I write, the official Covid-19 death count, surely a serious undercount, approaches 100,000. There may well be 150,000 or so deaths in this wave of the pandemic alone. And many more Americans have suffered long-term damage. The economy has shuddered into low gear; businesses, jobs, and public services have been lost; food bank lines stretch for miles. This has been a terrible cost physically, financially, and emotionally. And, as usual in America, the poor pay more. Americans’ reports of worry and stress attributable to the virus have surged (by over 15 points, according to Gallup). Nearly half of Americans say that they talk about the virus most of the time and that it has changed their lives significantly. Many critical institutions, such as small churches and museums, will perish.
Yet, in historical perspective, Covid-19 seems not asteroidal. How can I say that?
The 1918-19 Spanish Flu took American lives at a rate that, with today’s population, would total 2 million deaths. Yet, as I argued in an earlier post, that pandemic did not markedly change America. Nor did the periodic plagues of the 19th century, such as cholera in the 1870s, which took American lives at a rate that would be over 400,000 deaths today. Furthermore, we have every reason to expect, notwithstanding the clown-car and criminal chaos of the national administration, that the country and its health systems will be much better and sooner prepared for the next waves of Covid-19 than they were for the later flare-ups of the 1918 flu.
The Spanish Flu brought many lock downs in its time, albeit not as universal or severe as some today. But in those days the sequestered could not Zoom, Facetime, nor really call (only about one-third of homes had phones) one another. Radio was a decade off, television over three decades off. In 1918, physical distancing was social distancing in an entirely more complete way than it is today.
As to the economy, the unemployment rate rose to about 15 percent in April of this year, is projected to be about that level in the fall, but to start dropping to single digits in 2021. Bad, yes, but compare: In the Great Depression, the national unemployment rate was around 20 percent for four straight years. (During the Panic of 1893, unemployment rates were about 25 percent in the eastern industrial states.) Moreover, unemployment in earlier eras was far more consequential than it is today, for three major reasons.
First, relatively few women, about 20 percent of them, and especially few wives, about 10 percent of them, had paid employment in the 1920s and early ‘30s. Today, 50 to about 70 percent do, depending on age. Back then, therefore, unemployment meant no income for the great majority of households, while it is far more common now for some income to keep coming in. Second, in the early 1930s, there were few programs in few states to support the unemployed. Indeed, economic downturns in previous eras commonly spurred legions of laid-off men to tramp the roads or ride the rails in search of work, set up hobo camps, and beg at back doors for some food. Now, we have many support programs, from unemployment insurance to food stamps, that cushion the shock. Third, we now have tools which government and the central bank deploy, massively if necessary, to shorten the economic downturn. We are into multi-trillions of dollars already, including a $1200 check sent to virtually every adult.
These are the sorts of close historical comparisons that suggest that our level of “social upheaval” is neither unprecedented nor asteroidal. Here are a few looser comparisons: World War II; 1968, when it seemed that race war was just around the next dark corner; and 9/11, which set us off on a 20-year-long “forever war.”
More evidence that Covid-19 is not asteroidal in scale can be found in the popular reaction.
How Americans Have Taken It
Cellphone data show that Americans started curtailing their activities as Covid-19 cases and deaths grew, even before official lock downs and shelter-in-place directives. And Americans have started emerging from the lock downs even before official relaxations. Requests on the iPhone app for driving directions plummeted in the second half of March, but started coming back through April. Cellphone location data also show more Americans leaving home ahead of official relaxations. On March 22, 58 percent of Gallup’s respondents said that they were isolating themselves. That figure rose to 75 percent in early April, but was back down to 58 percent by May 10. Between April 7 and May 19, the percentage of the USC Center for Economic and Social Research’s respondents who said that they were staying home dropped from 80 to 60 percent and percentage who said that they were making or getting social visits rose from 22 to 38 percent. (Visiting places like bars stayed at essentially zero percent; mask-wearing increased greatly.)
Venturing out has had little to do with state rules (so far), nor with Donald Trump’s demands, nor with the threats of gun-toting harlequins in state capitols, but much to do with average Americans’ itchiness to get on with things, to see family, friends, and lovers and with the declining risks they perceive. Even in the super locked-down, health- and science-conscious Bay Area, car traffic is increasing, people are sneaking into barber shops and salons for haircuts, and grandparents are arranging to see grandchildren. At the same time, even in the quick-to-open states, most residents are not flocking to eating and entertainment venues.
What this suggests is that Americans are cautiously weighing the trade-off between the risk and benefit of becoming more active. This translates into a nation weighing further disease and death against enjoying some sort of normalcy.
In a recent Senate hearing, Senator Sherrod Brown asked Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, “How many workers should give their lives to increase our [gross domestic product] by half a percent?” and Mnuchin answered, “No workers should give their lives to do that, Mr. Senator.” But, of course, workers and others die for GDP all the time. Generations of coal miners and their families have suffered severely shortened lives to fuel the economy. About 20 years ago, we accepted the equivalent of 185,000 deaths from lung cancer each year without stopping smoking. Why wouldn’t Americans accept, say, 300,000 deaths spread over only two years to get back to semi-normal? (Particularly, sorry to say, if those dead are heavily people of color.) Economists are busy calculating the cost-benefit ratios for lock downs; average Americans are doing it more loosely.
All this is to say that Covid-19 does not appear to be an unprecedented “level of social upheaval,” but instead appears to be a precedented disruption.
Speculating about Long-Term Consequences
If, then, Covid-19 is not an asteroidal event for American society, what might the long-term changes be after the disease is defeated or subsides, after the economy recovers, after governments regain some fiscal stability, after Zoom dinners have become nostalgia?
Medicine and the health institutions will have learned a lot about the disease, about pandemics, and about how to handle the next one–as they did after the 1918 flu.
Some believe (rather, hope) that the experience will lead to another lurch forward in the American welfare state: much greater public provision of health services and much greater public provision of economic security, perhaps even a guaranteed annual income. The odds of that seem low. More critical than the Covid-19 experience will be the results of the 2020 elections. If the Democrats win big, they could make some important changes, as they did after the 1932 and the 1964 elections. If not, expect no important (progressive) changes.
There will be economic losses, of course, especially for young people starting out. New workers in a recession fall behind and catch up late in their careers, if at all. This will be another cohort, like the Great Recession cohort, struggling to attain the living standards of their parents.
A truly unprecedented feature of this pandemic has been the massive use of internet communications. By one estimate, 60 percent of American workers in April were working from home. Experts are arguing about how much of that will last (e.g., this one versus this one). The key thing is that millions of Americans and many American institutions will have tried out telework, teleschool, telechurch, telemedicine, and such. Even if the vast majority of teleactivity goes away as people return to usual practices, a modest permanent increase in teledoing would have noticeable knock-on effects for commuting, real estate values, and the like. Not asteroidal, but important.
When it comes to grander things like changing Americans’ consciousness and culture, there is even less reason to expect serious change. The Covid-19 experience to date tells us this: Instead of creating a broad, shared awareness of, say, human frailty or human commonality, understandings of the pandemic itself are strongly shaped by existing party loyalties. Republicans and Democrats see different threats to be parried (e.g., here, here, and here).
In the end, going through the Covid-19 crucible will probably not be asteroidal in its effects and will probably leave America largely unchanged. That is not necessarily a good thing.