Tuesday, 22 September 2020

Risk: sharing our viral currency

 

The current crisis raises some interesting questions which no-one seems to be keen to address. I can understand why: I’ve been snapped at for even daring to ask them. But if we don’t think about these things, we’re guaranteed to be wrong.

Politics is about trade-offs. If we had infinite resources we wouldn’t need much economic governance. Some trade-offs are unpleasant to consider: it feels bad to decide that one person’s medicine is too expensive. That’s indirectly condemning someone to death; but that money will fund two other people’s medicine, saving them. Refusing to make the decision kills two people as surely as making it kills one.

So let’s be clear about the decisions being made in the pandemic. The problem for the country is twofold: that anyone’s chance of infection and ill-health is higher when infection rates are high; and that the NHS has a limited capacity to deal with severe illnesses. The national risk level affects us all, and it’s something we all contribute to. Every time one of us wears a mask, we reduce our contribution to the national risk. Risk is like a currency that can’t be exchanged with pounds. We pay tax in the form of lockdown behaviours, and we withdraw from the shared risk pool with risky behaviours.

So when the government encouraged people to be good, but refused to enforce any restrictions, it was relying on good people’s voluntary donations to cover arrogant, entitled people’s withdrawals. And for as long as enforcement is insufficient, this will continue to be the case. Of course, things have changed, and it’s not all entitled, selfish people using up the risk allowance any more. There are conspiracy idiots who refuse to follow the rules because they refuse to understand simple facts.

And, most importantly, we come to the trade-offs that have been in our rulers’ minds from the beginning: the economy versus our health versus our happiness. There is one national risk allowance. This is why we get rules that seem to imply that the virus goes to sleep during the day when people go to work but wakes up when people want to socialise: the government is trying to prevent us living our own lives in favour of us living to work.

The economy is more important than our happiness. We could expect nothing less from a government whose funding comes from the wealthy rentier class. We should all go back to work and risk infection just so that we can continue to buy coffee and lunch from a shop rather than a supermarket, because a shop contributes more to the economy (and to the Conservative party?).

Owners and workers at coffee shops in office districts want to get their money. But is their economic survival worth any of the risk budget? Surely in a capitalist society businesses survive or shrink based on demand, and trying to control that demand in order to help industry is market interference?

We should ignore companies’ concerns about demand. We have welfare for individuals; our only concern should be rules for individuals’ safety.

A truly capitalist, and a more caring society would expect companies to adapt and innovate, not risk people’s health in order to allow them to remain static.

 

Recently we have also seen a debate about education, with children going back to school, much to the relief of parents who don’t actually enjoy parenting. It was widely noted that children will learn much more in school, and that keeping them at home sacrifices their future.

But politics is about trade-offs. We now see a resurgence in cases and renewed restrictions on other activities: as parents sighed in relief that their creations were no longer dragging them down, the rest of us watched in horror as the national risk budget was overspent and we were asked once again to contribute more to it.

I have had almost no social life this year; an occasional park meeting and a couple of home visits during more relaxed periods. Until we start investing properly in ageing research, I’ll assume that I only have the one life, which is being sacrificed right now. I am paying the risk tax that others are spending.

Sure, I’m able to pay more than some. I am healthy and have a job that can be done from home. My income is not hugely at risk. But I’m not paying with money. This is a new currency: I am paying directly with my life. I am losing the part of my life I live for so that others can earn a bit or learn a bit. This is not a trade-off that has ever been so direct before. I have prioritised having free time in my evenings, including not having children. I have chosen to have free life in which to socialise. And now my choices are being used as an excuse to take that free life from me: others have more demands on them, and need the risk budget that I can contribute. I am wealthy in free time precisely because I have not promised it to anyone. Why should I now have all my life savings taken from me because others have made commitments that they cannot keep?

Families with children are now consuming my risk taxes but paying nothing extra themselves. If children should go to school, why not restrict those families from other engagements? Why are people arguing that children, who cough and sneeze and touch things like other humans do, shouldn’t count towards the number of people at a gathering?

It’s a constant feature of our society that people who have oriented their lives around children expect the rest of us to join them in that. I’m not the one who chose to live a fragile life, unable to cope with any extra demands.

It might be that, after you get over the shock of reading such politically incorrect thoughts, and reflect carefully, you find more reasons to tax me than to make others pay for the risk they’re incurring. It’s perfectly possible. But nothing in our media discourse has even considered the trade-off that is being made: it is as if my life is so valueless that it’s not even worth mentioning.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, because there are myriad reports of (mostly younger) people breaking lockdown rules. Some of them are just selfish and entitled, as I noted earlier. But perhaps some of them also have my nagging feeling that the rules are unfair. There is a whole group f people calling themselves Indy-SAGE, mimicking the government's scientific advisory panel but issuing more balanced advice that would target the most risky behaviours. These people clearly feel that politics is distorting science: that political trade-offs are being sold to us as scientifically necessary for the nation's health. 

If we refuse to consider these trade-offs: if we respond with outrage at those disobeying them, and equal outrage at those questioning them, we’re not being moral. You have to know that a system is moral before enforcing it can be moral, and you have to question it before you know it. If your first response to these questions is outrage, it says more about how unprepared you are to defend yourself with reason than it does about how outrageous the questions are.

If we all had an equal share of the national risk budget, I would be doing more socialising than I am. We have a new currency, and therefore a novel distribution of wealth. Some of this distribution is due to personal choices, but some is due to fortune. Given this, how do we collectively trade this new currency for both wealth and health across the population?

We can laugh at the Conservatives’ focus on wealth over health, but if we refuse to consider issues of inequality and justice, we deserve as much scorn.

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