{"id":86322,"date":"2020-10-10T02:29:12","date_gmt":"2020-10-09T23:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/covid-19-lockdowns-seriously-deepen-the-economic-divide\/"},"modified":"2020-10-10T02:29:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T23:29:12","slug":"covid-19-lockdowns-seriously-deepen-the-economic-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/covid-19-lockdowns-seriously-deepen-the-economic-divide\/","title":{"rendered":"#COVID-19 lockdowns seriously deepen the economic divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#COVID-19 lockdowns seriously deepen the economic divide<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia and former University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology<\/a> and demography. \u201cNobody,\u201d says Bill Gates, who has read every book, \u201csees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Smil sees now, he writes, he finds puzzling. The COVID-19 death rate per million is about one-fifth that of the 1957-58 Asian flu and one-third that of the 1968-70 Hong Kong flu.<\/p>\n

Yet these earlier pandemics had only \u201cevanescent economic consequences\u201d and did not \u201cleave any deep, traumatic traces in memories\u201d of the 350 million people who, like Smil (and me), were 10 or older during both. \u201cCountries did not resort to any mass-scale economic lockdowns, enforce any long-lasting school closures, ban sports events or cut flight schedules deeply,\u201d Smil writes.<\/p>\n

Why not? \u201cWas it because we had no fear-reinforcing 24\/7 cable news<\/a>, no Twitter<\/a> and no incessant and instant case-and-death tickers on all our electronic screens?\u201d asks the non-cellphone-owner Smil. \u201cOr is it we ourselves who have changed, by valuing recurrent but infrequent risks differently?\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of both is my tentative answer. As I\u2019ve written before, Americans\u2019 child-rearing practices, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have documented, are increasingly risk-averse. But not entirely consistently: Kids are kept in car seats till age 9 and then encouraged to ride bicycles in heavy traffic a few years later.<\/p>\n

And some Americans are more risk-averse than others. Polls show that political liberals are more likely than political conservatives to wear masks and support extended lockdowns (except for \u201cmostly peaceful\u201d demonstrations against police).<\/p>\n

But one-dimensional risk aversion has produced extended lockdowns with significant public health costs: reduced cancer and cardiac screenings, fewer childhood vaccinations, undue skepticism toward any COVID vaccine. And it\u2019s plainly damaging liberals\u2019 own causes.<\/p>\n

Thus, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have been refraining from door-to-door campaigning \u2014 until Oct. 1, when Democrats decided they needed the personal touch.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Democratic pols encouraged their voters\u2019 aversion to voting in person, until they realized that there would be many spoiled or undelivered ballots in states with voters and officials unfamiliar with postal voting.<\/p>\n

Lockdowns, more stringent in Democratic states than Republican states, have produced higher unemployment and greater drops in state revenues. Keeping unionized public schools closed is driving parents to private schools, home schooling and improvised pods.<\/p>\n

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat notes, schools are now open for app<\/a>roximately half of white pupils but only one-quarter of black and Hispanic pupils. For many minority children, he writes, \u201ca key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them and the deepening of America\u2019s racial inequalities.\u201d But extreme risk aversion imposes few costs for affluent liberals who can work comfortably and for full pay on home computers.<\/p>\n

Which leads back to Vaclav Smil\u2019s question: Why do we have economic lockdowns, school closures and empty stadiums and airliners when we didn\u2019t before? My answer is a paraphrase of former President Bill Clinton\u2019s explanation for his sexual adventures in the White House: because we can.<\/p>\n

In Clinton\u2019s 1990s, we didn\u2019t have smartphones, Wi-Fi, Zoom. Now we \u2014 the affluent \u201cwe\u201d have been the lockdown\u2019s biggest backers \u2014 do. In my email today, I got an ad for a $16 million house in the Hamptons, complete with home office, gym and sauna. No need to go into Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, 12-year-old Shemar, whom Alec MacGillis had been tutoring, is staying up late watching TV and sleeping in, unable to log in to the virtual classes the city\u2019s unionized public schools are providing. \u201cBroadband internet,\u201d wrote a respondent on MacGillis\u2019s Twitter feed, \u201cis actually sabotaging our kids. Without it, there wouldn\u2019t even be \u2018virtual learning\u2019 as an option, and every school in the country would have no choice but to take every kid back and just make the best of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vaclav Smil is right in documenting how technological progress has vastly improved ordinary people\u2019s lives. But excessive risk aversion can make for exceptions.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

\n

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our News category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#COVID-19 lockdowns seriously deepen the economic divide” Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia and former University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology and demography. \u201cNobody,\u201d says Bill Gates, who has read every book, \u201csees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil.\u201d What Smil…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/10659435a.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[75041,1545,71291,67243],"class_list":["post-86322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-10-9-20","tag-coronavirus","tag-inequality","tag-lockdown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}