Lockdown backers’ risk aversion is producing a more unequal society
Lockdowns, more stringent in Democratic than Republican states, have produced higher unemployment and greater drops in state revenues. Keeping unionized public schools closed is driving parents to private schools, homeschooling, and improvised pods.
As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat notes, public schools are now open for half of white pupils but only one-quarter of blacks and Hispanics. For many minority children, he writes, a key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them, and the deepening of America s racial inequalities. But extreme risk aversion imposes few costs for affluent liberals who can work comfortably and at full pay on home computers.
Which leads back to Vaclav Smil s question: why do we have economic lockdowns, school closures, empty stadiums, and empty airliners when we didn t before? My answer is a paraphrase of Bill Clinton s explanation for his sexual adventures in the White House because we can.
In Clinton s 1990s, we didn t have smartphones, Wi-Fi, Zoom. Now we the affluent we have been the lockdown s biggest backers do. In my email today, I got an ad for a $16 million house in the Hamptons, complete with home office, gym, and sauna. No need to go into Manhattan.
Meanwhile in Baltimore, 12-year-old Shemar, whom Alec MacGillis had been tutoring, is staying up late watching TV and sleeping in, unable to log into the virtual classes the city s unionized public schools are providing. Broadband Internet, wrote a respondent on MacGillis s Twitter feed, responded to MacGillis, is actually sabotaging our kids. Without it, there wouldn t even be virtual learning as an option, and every school in the country would have no choice but to take every kid back and just make the best of it.