The Gentry Is Getting Nervous

A piece by Emily Oster from Monday in the Atlantic, home of David Brooks and Francis Fukuyama, Let's Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, has attracted a certain amount of comment. Ms Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, points this out in her piece to establish her credentialed membership in the elite, which is the platform from which she makes her proposal:

In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020.

. . . Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

The problem with her argument is that she treats it as a zero-sum exercise. Some of us did things that were silly, heh heh. Some of us were smarter, but this is probably just luck, and it's all over now, anyway. This is actually not the case -- toward the end, she sneaks in a brief question among the things we still need to study:

Why have some states recovered faster than others?

The answer here isn't off in the dark matter of the universe; it's not a question like "Why do the wicked prosper?" We pretty much already have the answer. Florida and Texas did quite well. while New York, Michigan, and California did poorly. The states that fared better had common-sense leadership that actively resisted unreasonable mandates from Washington like lockdowns and compulsory masking from the start. The results at the ballot box so far this year have rewarded those leaders and appear to be penalizing the political establishments in many of the blue states that enforced the mandates. Even Gavin Newsom, among the most visible of the COVID authoritarians, now complains,

“We’re getting crushed on narrative,” Newsom told CBS News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett. “We’re going to have to do better in terms of getting on the offense and stop being on the damn defense.”

My goodness, how could such a thing be happening? This goes some distance to contradict Oster's assertion that the successful policy choices were a matter of luck in an environment where nobody had good information. Other policy choices were forced by the courts, which ruled restrictions on specific religious observance were unconstitutional. When churches and synagogues reopened, there were no spikes in COVID. Everyone had access to the US First Amendment, this policy choice was not a matter of luck or uncertainty.

Oster, a professor in the Ivy League who writes for the Atlantic, is a member of the gentry, which is effectively the class that actually benefited from COVID as others suffered. Professors, teachers, bureaucrats, administrators, managemeent, journalists, and many professionals kept their jobs as government mandates shut the economy at large -- indeed, many in this group, likely Prof Oster herself, were able to indulge in the "working from home" charade, teaching classes or attending meetings via ZOOM sessions but with other duties heavily reduced.

On the other hand, the restaurant industry, service workers like barbers and beauticians, movie theaters, small-business retail, auto salesmen and mechanics, were closed and out of work for the duration. This has permanently affected the blue-collar workforce; it's still harder to get a haircut. Other members of the working class who actually had to be productive to earn a buck still had to come to work, assuming they weren't laid off due to the collapse in demand.

This leaves out the medical policy disasters, people gravely ill forcibly separated from their families by draconian quarantine, or elderly patients with COVID returned to nursing homes, where they simply spread the disease. For those groups, this isn't water under the bridge, bygones that can be bygones. I think at a certain level, Oster recognizes this, and she's effectively arguing her own case here. I think this is at least partly because COVID is a largely unmentioned subtext of the current election cycle. Look at the Schadenfreude surrounding Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter:

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk will reportedly eliminate half of the company’s workforce at the end of this week as he tries to make the company profitable.

Bloomberg News reported that Musk is cutting 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees and that employees will be notified of their dismissal on Friday.

Musk is also reportedly canceling a work-from-anywhere policy and is going to force employees to come into the office to work.

Think of that -- members of the gentry, coddled employees who got free beer on Fridays or "worked from home" if they chose, facing layoffs just like barbers, cooks, and mechanics. These changes are about more than COVID, although COVID had a lot to do with bringing them about. The gentry is nervous.