Dear market please take care of my
friends, my family, loved ones.
Particularly take care of the elderly...
also could you please look after my
transport, my food, housing, healthcare -
I know I've sinned this year but I'd be
really grateful if you could also look
after the outbreak of a new virus which is
asymptomatic for 40 percent of
the population.
Imagine if every last aspect of human
society was the remit of this thing
which most people don't understand, is an
entirely human construct and yet it's
apparently all-knowing and all-powerful. If you described it a century ago
people would have called it God, most people
these days just call it the market.
The default ideology of the last 40 years
is something called neoliberalism
that's the academic word but in everyday
terms it means 'the market always knows
best'. it's kind of a secular way of
saying God willing in an age dominated by
public and rational choice theory. "Will
we have good fruit this summer?" market
willing, "should we build a new library in
town?" well let's all go consult the
market oracle - alas no the oracle says
letting kids borrow books for free isn't
possible I'm afraid - let's have four
Pret-a-mangers on one high street
instead that's a much more rational
allocation of resources...
I'm afraid I'm the kind of guy who spends his time going to Pret-a-manger...
Not everything is subordinated to this logic: market economics might make your phone or
your razor blades but for essentials
we've generally decided to not be so 'market
supremacist' - it's generally agreed that
whether you die from cancer or not
shouldn't depend on your ability to pay...unless of course you live in the United States.
It's similar when it comes to
things like primary and secondary
education or your ability to use a
pavement or calling the police
in the event of an emergency. Now 
market supremacists are the people who want the
logic of markets applied to as many things
as possible. This might sound kind of weird
but there are quite a few people
who actually think like this: economists
like Milton Friedman, FA Hayek,
James Buchanan. And then there are the
politicians they subsequently influenced
to varying degrees which basically
includes every Prime Minister and
President on both sides of the Atlantic since 1980.
That's before we get to Ayn Rand, the libertarian novelist who Sajid
Javid reads to his wife every year...my
terms are a man's right to exist for his own sake.
Ayn Rand believed that any form of
government benefit was evil and yet
claimed social security payments before
she died...
Imagine, it's 1940 Britain stands alone against
Nazi Germany in Europe, messerschmitts
and stukkas dominate the sky, blitzkrieg
warfare is inflicting pandemonium on
Belgium and Poland - France falls in weeks.
Confronted with all of this the British
ruling class decides to act decisively and
...leave it to the market. I mean why
shouldn't they - after all they say the
market's always right, it leads to optimal
outcomes, perfect equilibria - any
disruption any disruption at all is negative.
There are highly influential
economists who actually think like this
they effectively designed the economic
policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan. One of them was Alan Greenspan, he
was the Chairman of the US Federal
Reserve when the global financial system
crashed in 2008, something which until
then he thought was impossible, "I still
do not fully understand why it happened".
During the 2008 financial crisis
hundreds of billions of dollars were
poured into banks around the world by
central governments, from Britain to the
U.S, South Korea to Russia.
They were taken into public ownership
and recapitalized -
all to keep the system on life support.
It was free-market capitalism and
nothing else until that
system broke down then we had
socialism for financial services paid
for by the rest of us, "it would have been
the end of our economic system and our
political system as we know it". Now
there's the coronavirus it's a big deal.
At the time of this video there are around
111,000 known cases, with around
3,890 deaths - that's approaching a 4% fatality rate
but that would be a misreading because actually
a significant number of people show no
symptoms at all, while others show some
symptoms but they're indistinguishable
from a cold or the flu which means we
don't really know how many people have
the disease or more importantly who
might transmit it.
In this context self-isolation likely
won't be very effective. So it's quite
possible that many, many people get this
indeed Harvard epidemiology professor
Marc Lipsitch recently stated that the
likely outcome is that it ultimately
won't be containable, "this will transmit
in a global fashion and take a big toll
on essentially the entire globe."
He predicts that within the coming year
some 40% to 70% of people around
the world will be infected with
the virus that causes Covid-19, but he
clarifies emphatically this does not
mean we will all be subject to severe
illnesses it's likely that many will
have mild disease or may be
asymptomatic - but still for a significant
minority the consequences are horrible
even deadly. Cold and flu season might
become cold, flu and covid-19 season
that is until a vaccine is created and
if this is the case we clearly need to
create a sustained
state-led response just like we've seen
in China - but if you believe in market economics then why should the state do
anything at all? After all doesn't the
market always know best? Well every
senior politician in Europe and North
America knows when push comes to shove
that isn't really true but it's also the
officially sanctioned ideology which
means they're caught in this weird
middle ground between the Chinese state,
who will deploy massive state resources at speed,
and the official neoliberal ideology of
'leave it to the market and don't forget
to wash your hands'.
In Britain that sounds something like this:
"That's where a lot of the debate has been and one of the theories is
that perhaps you could...sort of take it on the chin."
And in America it looks
something like this:
"So I think we're in great shape".
If coronavirus as bad as we think it might that 'oh the market will sort it' approach,
like Carillion and Northern Rail, will lead to collapse, except in this instance it won't be an
outsourcing company or rail operator that has problems but us - with large numbers of fatalities and the
comparatively minor sideshow of a...global
economic recession. By the way it was
only a month ago that coronavirus was
being treated in a similar way in Italy
now the Italian government is adopting
decisive measures which are unthinkable
under neoliberal ideology: quarantining an
entire country and suspending mortgage
payments is as unfathomable as capital
controls or nationalising food supplies.
But here's the thing this is a crisis,
there is a problem and it needs a
solution the state has to act
accordingly. Now will the vanguard of the
1970s neoliberal revolution, Britain and
America, deliver the goods? That remains to be seen.
And when it comes to health
care it's not just coronavirus where
neoliberalism is inadequate. Not a single
new antibiotic has been created for 35
years by private pharmaceutical
companies otherwise called 'big pharma'. 35 years!
The market isn't innovating when it comes to healthcare at the very moment we need it the most.
At the start of the 20th century the leading causes of death were infection-related but now
they are age-related. This is a sign of success and something which we thought was permanent
but now they're running out. The development of antibiotics has not kept pace with
microbial evolution - after a golden age
of innovation between the 1930s and 1970s
when the state played a central role in
the economy, the 1980s saw global
investment in antibiotic research
plummet. Why? Lack of profit because no
matter how deadly dealing with
infections just isn't profitable, big
pharma favours treatments that they can
give to as many people as possible for
as long as possible - two things you don't
have with antibiotics. For market
fanatics that means that drugs which are
hugely necessary just shouldn't be made
the reason being they don't make money. But the consequences of that thinking
could be deadly - infection might start
killing people as effectively as it did
in the early 1900s when flu,
measles, cholera, typhus were the biggest
killers rather than stroke, cancer and
heart disease. The coronavirus as with
the 2008 financial crisis reveals our
economic system for what it really is:
a religion.
The thing is whether it's climate change,
demographic ageing and now a viral pandemic,
the market doesn't really have
the answers, it's holding us back and it
certainly can't help us. The failure of
an outsourcing company or trains running
late most of us can accept, but hundreds
of thousands of people dying I'm not so sure.
