I have a doctored picture on my computer somewhere of a man in a space suit standing on the moon. Almost 384,400km away (depending on timing) the earth is being obliterated by an enormous meteor. In a speech bubble the man panics: “The Economy!”
In the mind of the man on the moon the meteor did not destroy human life, waterways, landscapes, plants, animals or other living creations — it destroyed “the economy”.
It’s always the economy, and if you dare to see life in all its complexity and diversity, the irrationalities and uncertainties, it is almost as if you belong in a time when we all lived in caves or were uneducated. Here we are, then, at the start of another stage of lockdown because of the pandemic, and yes, “the economy” will take a battering.
Jobs will be lost, people will lose income, many will starve, many more may die because of this dreaded pandemic whose name no longer rolls off the tongue for its association with death and destruction. It’s not an exaggeration to say our lives have been forever changed. We will always remember this pandemic. Far in the future historians will write about it the way they have about the Justinian Plague (541-549), or the Marseilles Bubonic Plague of 1720.
One major difference between those earlier plagues and today is that there is a single political economic model (capitalism, albeit variegated across the world) that dominates the globe. With this dominance has risen an orthodoxy, the cynosure of which has to be the claim by Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the Chinese central bank in a speech to the Chinese Communist Party central committee in 2006, that “we are all capitalists now”.
It’s not too much of a caricature to make the claim that this economic orthodoxy would imagine that everything in human endeavour necessarily has to be explained and understood through economic rationalism. It goes something like this: politics, culture, sociology, religion, war and even science can and should be explained and understood through the lens of economics.
We call this form of economics imperialism, a term born in the 1930s when economist Ralph Souter explained: “The salvation of economic science in the 20th century lies in an enlightened and democratic ‘economic imperialism’, which invades the territories of its neighbours, not to enslave them or swallow them up but to aid and enrich them and promote their autonomous growth in the very process of aiding and enriching itself.”
In this way explaining something, anything and everything in economic terms has become almost de rigueur. We are faced now with a pandemic which, if left uncontained, could wipe out millions of people. Yet there are people who seem less concerned about the potential loss of human life than they are about the loss of “the economy” — like the caricatural man on the moon.
I should be clear: I am insufficiently stupid to dismiss the politico-economic consequences of a lockdown. I am also glad that I am not President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has to make the decisions about “saving lives or saving livelihoods”, where livelihoods is a euphemism for economic activity. The fact is that Ramaphosa, like political leaders from East and South East Asia and across the world, has to operate in a minefield of limited policy space.
The precarious nature of this policy space should not be underestimated. States cannot and do not make policies without constraints. For purposes of demonstration only: between 1985 and 2014 loan agreements between the IMF placed about 55,465 individual conditions on 131 countries in the world. There are things, natural and otherwise, that some countries cannot do.
We are in a position now where the president (of any country, for that matter) has to decide what is best for society, what it should do, and what policy space exists. The problem with the pandemic is that there is no blueprint. I spent most of Monday reading news reports from Beijing to San Francisco, and everybody is at a loss. The space to make policy is narrowed by the rapid spread of the virus. For most developing countries the policy space is further constrained by intellectual property rights and vaccine nationalism.
If I allow myself two bold statements and one naughty one, I would say the following: first, people who insist on opening “the economy” will not carry the cost of the health burden if it completely cripples the country. Without any sense of irony or compunction, they will place the burden on the state. Second, whether we like it and agree with it or not there is no such thing as an economy without people. Third, I have never seen so many people suddenly concerned about the welfare of poor workers.
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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