2020 is going to go down in history as one of those years that will forever be defined by a single event. No historically literate person hears 1914 without immediately thinking World War I, 1929 means the crash, 1776 conjures to mind the American Revolution. There is no disputing the fact that we are experiencing a disaster on a generation defining scale. What is subject to dispute is the nature of that disaster. Even that is a bit of an oversimplification. Most people of any intellectual honesty perceive all three faces of the crisis, the disagreement is about emphasis and relative importance.

So what are the three faces? Covid-19, the economic devastation resulting from the disease and the response, and the unprecedented level of government interference in our daily lives, three heads on a rabid junkyard Cerberus. We wake up each morning to updates on the spread of the disease, breathless counts of deaths, earnest Doctors draw us curves demonstrating doubling rates, numbers of ventilators and hospital beds, and foretelling death carts lined up to the horizon. Midday announcements from our Governors, the President, and various functionaries give us our latest marching, or more accurately no marching allowed, orders. These are never more than vaguely tied to a legal justification, but come with ample discussion of the need to flatten the aforementioned curves. And the stock ticker chatters away, a steady stream of numbers disappearing off the left side of the screen along with our hopes and dreams of retirement, or even ongoing employment.

How we rank the three faces is tied to how we view the world. For the most part the person you are fighting with on Facebook or Twitter does not in fact want your Grandparent to die, nor are they delighted that your business is folding and that your IRA is now a smaller entry on your financial statement than the change in your couch cushions. They probably aren’t actually happy about the idea that Governors have assumed emergency powers over every aspect of daily life. Most of them are just scared, and the disagreements, and the heat behind those disagreements, come from the fact that they are scared differently than you are.

To some extent the differing viewpoints are linked to Political views. This contributes to the inability to appreciate each other’s point of view because politics is, above all else, a team sport. We are inherently tribal creatures. Take away our tribal lifestyle by building a modern, highly mobile, industrial world and we create new tribes. If you doubt this, consider how you as a fan of tOSU feel about Michigan, go to Tuscaloosa and yell “War Eagle”, ask a guy in UK blue about Christian Laettner’s buzzer beater, or to swing back around to politics, just mention Trump to a lifelong Democrat or Hillary to a Republican. But at the root, the difficulty in communication comes from our hardwired reaction to threats.

When you are frightened your fight, freeze, or flight instincts kick in, and absent serious training and willpower, they overwhelm your conscious decision making. You get angry at obstacles. Anything you perceive as obstructing your path of flight, or entering your hiding place, or worst of all opposing you in the fight, becomes an existential threat, and you react accordingly. This response is on a trigger so automatic, and buried so deep in the hind brain, that it is almost impossible to override. So you are just being human when you lash out at someone who disagrees with your view, but humans are more than that hind brain, so when the frontal lobes take back the reins after the initial scared lizard reaction, make the appropriate apologies and reexamine what made you lash out.

Yes, obnoxious Twitter behavior is largely rooted in the fact that we were simultaneously predators and prey. We have instincts telling us to run and hide from threats, and instincts telling us to pounce on the weak. Be thankful this mostly plays out in nasty, ill-considered words online these days. You can deal with a Twitter dispute; you are descended from thousands of generations that survived worse.

So what does all of this have to do with the current crisis? The virus is not merely a misunderstanding. It does in fact seem to spread readily, and it does kill people in large numbers, or at least numbers that we perceive as large.

The economic disruption is likewise real. In a week we effectively doubled the number of unemployed. Thousands of businesses are in fact going under. Almost none of us are financially secure at the moment, even people with significant savings are seeing the value of their investments drop precipitously, at precisely the time that they are faced with the possibility that they may need to use that money to survive.

And whether you regard the government orders as appropriate and necessary responses to a massive threat, or power grabs far out of proportion to the threat, you cannot reasonably deny that closing businesses, schools, churches, and forbidding people from coming together in groups is largely unprecedented and represents a massive interference in our lives, and with our most basic rights.

In other words, all three heads of this hellhound bark, and all three bite. We cannot ignore two of the heads to deal with the one that scares us most. Frederic Bastiat called this the problem of the seen and the unseen.

The problem arises anytime a centralized, top down, response tries to confront a threat. Government is made up of two cohorts. Politicians who are, either by nature, or by virtue of the demands of election, focused on popularity, and bureaucrats who are focused on process over results. Neither group has any particular skill dealing with crises. That is not the basis by which they are selected, retained, or promoted. Bureaucrats advance by seniority and avoiding scandal, their jobs are largely about making sure the paperwork is all filed correctly. Politicians are hired, retained, and promoted by winning popularity contests. So what happens when a crisis arises?

The experts step forward. This seems appropriate. Who should craft the response to an epidemic? The obvious choice is an epidemiologist. Obvious choices should always be questioned. No matter how sweet your tooth, getting in the Free Candy van is likely to have a bitter outcome that overwhelms the sweetest treat. The clear advantage of an expert is that experts by their nature view the world through a set of assumptions, knowledge, experience, and training specifically related to the crisis. The less obvious, but no less real, problem is that experts by their nature view the world through a set of assumptions, knowledge, experience, and training. Experts have tunnel vision.

An epidemiologist sees the world in terms of number, frequency, and type of human contacts leading to spread of a disease. To him the world reduces to a series of ‘patient zeroes’ each of which forms the center of a spreading cluster of infection, each cluster shoots out lines, as other people get infected and then travel to another city, country, or even continent, and take their turn as that locale’s patient zero, starting a new cluster of infection. The epidemiologist’s first job, quite appropriately, is all about controlling the spread; he is not by training, temperament or mission looking at non-medical considerations. So we get shelter in place, no unessential work, lock down the borders, just stay home!

Then he turns his attention toward maximizing the resources available to treat the patients soon to be flooding the hospitals, and we get all non-essential procedures cancelled to empty the hospitals, and efforts to switch all production to masks, respirators, ventilators, and disinfectants. The fact, perhaps obvious to an economist, that the economy is all interconnected and massively disrupting parts of it will ripple through the rest, is not obvious to the epidemiologist. He isn’t being malign or uncaring. He does not want to put everyone out of work. He does not want to ruin your life; he wants to save it from the threat he is fighting. He is just looking down a tunnel in which minimizing spread and diverting resources to the fight is all he sees.

So we shut down all nonessential travel, work, and businesses. We cancel all non-emergency medical procedures and tell ourselves that every resource of the nation is now directed to the fight against the virus. But that is a lie. No matter how brilliant the person calling the shots, he cannot possibly hope to understand everything he is impacting. In fact he cannot even hope to understand a significant minority of what he is affecting. The aggregation of an infinite number of choices, actions, exchanges, lives, loves, and relationships that we trivialize by calling it the ‘economy’, is beyond any human ability to comprehend. It is literally everything everyone does, desires, dreads, or dreams.

The unseen effects of the actions taken to control the spread of the disease include every suicide from the depression a lockdown, firing, or business failure produces. Every child whose education is disrupted, and now will lead a different life than she otherwise would have led. Every business that fails costs us any innovation, any job, any product or service that might have been. These effects ripple off to infinity and no one can ever know whether how much was lost.
In the very arena we are taking these extreme measures to ‘support’, negative effects are seen. The shutdown of ‘unnecessary’ procedures means hospitals and medical practices are running at a loss. That will be dismissed as mere money, but money is not ‘mere.’ It represents energy, resources, and labor. Even in the very short term the effect is fewer Doctors available to treat illness. Fewer resources available to provide treatments, fewer minds coming up with innovations, and more deaths, both from the virus and from all the myriad other diseases which get shunted aside in our rush to handle Covid.

In the medium term converting factories, built for other purposes, to producing needed materials may paradoxically kill the actual producers of those materials. Manufacturers of masks are prevented from fulfilling their contracts to sell those masks abroad because we need them here. Some of that business will not come back. Meanwhile manufacturers of other products are being tasked to retool and make masks. So the mask makers are prevented from doing their ordinary business, while we as a society subsidize new competitors, who may be useful in the very short term, but who will rapidly produce a glut of masks.

But as these effects ripple, and our lives are put on hold, the Government has an answer. We will just dump money into the system to help everyone weather the storm. Two serious problems come with this solution. First, the obvious, dumping massive piles of cash into the system is inflationary; the newly created money is all in the form of additional debt, piled on a system that was already debt heavy, and dumping into a world market that is pretty nearly universally underwater with its own debt. Meanwhile the projected day when Social Security becomes insolvent, the ticking time bomb of the American economy gets ever closer. At some point even the strongest beast will collapse under the weight piled on its back; up until the last straw the camel seems strong enough to bear any burden, but there is a last straw.

Second, less obviously, but just as seriously, any time we dump stimulus money to ‘save’ the economy that money is awarded by politicians. The market rewards businesses that please their customers and therefore we get more of what we want, and less of what we don’t. Politicians reward businesses that give them contributions; businesses that do what politicians desire. This is a well paved path toward fascism.

Shutting down the massive, beautifully complex web formed by individuals pursuing their own lives, and funding those lives by serving each other, weakens us, and weakens our ability to deal with the very crisis that justified the shutdown. Will 2020 be remembered as the year of the virus? As the start of the second Great Depression? Or will it go down through the ages as the year liberty died?