David Foster Wallace: The Nature of Fun

[ed. Excerpt from DFW's posthumously published collection Both Flesh and Not on a writer's motivation.]

But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labour-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple of days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed wild horses on to his farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says: "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between 10 and 60 for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4-F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?

This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavour's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works – and it's terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which – since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow – is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal fun starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive.

Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, now, writing – your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At this point 90+% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will make you disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone.

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation: fun. And, if you can find your way back to the fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralysing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likeable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

by David Foster Wallace, Brain Pickings |  Read more:

Photograph: © Gary Hannabarger/Corbis
[ed. Repost.]

Jeffrey Chong Wang
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Media Malfeasance

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[ed. The media thrives on conflict and is currently amplifying and politicizing what (up to this point) have been relatively minor protests (but hey, more clicks!). See also: Americans Support the Shutdown, Not the Protests (Bloomberg); and Seeing The ‘Open the Economy’ Protests In Their Proper Light (TPM).]

Coronavirus Crisis Spurs Access To Online Treatment For Opioid Addiction

Opioid addiction isn't taking a break during the coronavirus pandemic.

But the U.S. response to the viral crisis is making addiction treatment easier to get.

Under the national emergency declared by the Trump administration in March, the government has suspended a federal law that required patients to have an in-person visit with a physician before they could be prescribed drugs that help quell withdrawal symptoms, such as Suboxone. Patients can now get those prescriptions via a phone call or videoconference with a doctor.

Addiction experts have been calling for that change for years to help expand access for patients in many parts of the country that have shortages of physicians eligible to prescribe these medication-assisted treatments. A federal report in January found that 40% of U.S. counties don't have a single health care provider approved to prescribe buprenorphine, an active ingredient in Suboxone.

A 2018 law called for the new policy, but regulations were never finalized.

"I wish there was another way to get this done besides a pandemic," says Dr. David Kan, chief medical officer of Bright Heart Health, a Walnut Creek, Calif., company. It has recently started working with insurers and health providers to help addicted patients get therapy and medications without having to leave their homes. He said he hopes the administration will make the changes permanent after the national emergency ends.

Years before the emergency regulations were issued, Bright Heart — along with several other telemedicine counseling providers — began offering opioid addiction treatment and counseling via telemedicine, even if they couldn't prescribe initial medication for addiction. Patients can renew prescriptions for drugs to deal with withdrawal symptoms, get drug-tested and meet with counselors for therapy.

When Nathan Post needed help overcoming a decade-long drug addiction, he went online in 2018 and used Bright Heart Health to connect to a doctor and weekly individual and group counseling sessions. He says the convenience is a big benefit.

"As an addict, it was easy to have excuses not to do stuff, but this was easy because I could just be in my living room and turn on my computer, so I had no reason to blow it off," he says.

Post, 38, a tattoo artist who recently moved from New Mexico to Iowa City, Iowa, was addicted to Suboxone, the drug he was prescribed in 2009 to deal with an addiction to opioid pills.

Officials with the insurer Anthem say Bright Heart's telemedicine option has helped increase medication-assisted treatment for members with opioid drug abuse issues from 16% to more than 30% in California and nine other states. While fewer than 5% of Anthem patients seeking addiction treatment use telemedicine, the company expects the option to become more common.

One barometer of the effectiveness of the care, Bright Heart Health officials say, is that 90% of patients are still in treatment after 90 days and 65% after 90 days — far higher than with traditional treatment.

by Phil Galewitz, NPR | Read more:

Image: Ian Hooton/Getty Images/Science Photo Library
[ed. See also: A high-risk perfect storm': loneliness and financial despair take toll on US mental health (The Guardian)]

For Many Small Businesses, Coronavirus Aid Comes With Major Risks

To understand just how hard it could be to recover from a COVID-19 recession, consider the case of Jim Harrer.

Last week, the owner of kickboxing gyms in Kent and Federal Way learned he’d qualified for a $107,000 loan under the Payroll Protection Program — one of the last to do so before the U.S. Small Business Administration announced that the $349 billion program was out of funds.

But like many other business owners who scrambled to get the loans, Harrer isn’t sure he’ll be able to use the money.

The loans, of up to 2.5 times a company’s monthly payroll, are meant to encourage businesses to retain or rehire staff while they wait for their state economies to reopen, which in Washington could start next month. If Harrer uses most of the loan to rehire his 15 furloughed employees within eight weeks (he can spend some on rent and other expenses) he won’t have to pay it back.

The problem? Harrer has no idea when gyms and other businesses that rely on dense, group-based activities will actually be allowed to open. He worries that it might not be until July or even later that he can welcome back members – which means by the time he’s ready to rehire staff, the loan won’t be forgivable.

In that case, Harrer says, he may just use the loan funds to “pay off the loan and pretend it never happened.”

Harrer isn’t the only one with mixed feelings about a government rescue strategy that is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to small businesses, including nearly $5 billion in Washington state.

The Marqueen Hotel, a stately, 59-unit property near downtown Seattle, also applied for a Payroll Protection Program loan to help recover from a roughly 80% loss in business.

But, like Harrer, hotel executives don’t know when they’ll be able to reopen or how quickly guests will return. That makes it difficult to know when to ramp up operations and how fast to rehire furloughed staff, says Matt Hagerman, senior vice president at Seattle-based Columbia Hospitality, which manages the Marqueen and other local hotels. The worry, says Hagerman, is that “you could ramp up and then have to ramp back down.”

What both Harrer and Hagerman are struggling with, policymakers and economists say, is the mismatch between the crisis the government is trying to fix and the tools it is trying to use.

Partly, it’s mismatch of scale. Early on, both Congress and the White House vastly underestimated how deeply COVID-19 would disrupt the economy.

The first relief package, enacted March 6, included just $7 billion for the Small Business Administration. “And what you’ve seen, week after week after week, is a replay of the scene from ‘Jaws,’ where the guy says, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’” says U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor, who has proposed changes to the loan program.

Congress did get a bigger boat. The $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES), enacted March 27, included $349 billion in forgivable loans for small business to encourage them to rehire laid-off workers or, better still, not lay them off in the first place.

But as all that money has been doled out, it has become clear that the challenges facing small business will require more than eight weeks of payroll to fix. Not only are government-ordered shutdowns likely to stretch out past eight weeks, but the recovery, when it eventually starts, won’t be like anything policy experts — or businesses — have ever seen.

Where most economic recoveries are fueled by revived consumer demand and business investment — which often can be accelerated by government stimulus — the pace of this recovery will be governed largely by the coronavirus.

by Paul Roberts, Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times

Jimmy Fallon, Sting & The Roots

[ed. Fallon does an impressive job hitting the high ones. Don't Stand So Close to Me.]

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We’ll All Be Social Media Sellouts Soon

In 1932, Lester Gaba set out to create the ideal woman. His aim was simple: she would be beautiful but attainable, a figure that the everyday person could see themselves in. Gaba named his creation Cynthia. Though Cynthia was technically a mannequin—one commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue—Gaba started bringing her out into the world, treating her like a real person at all times.

Cynthia quickly became a quasi celebrity. She was a regular sight at parties and events and was even photographed for a Life magazine feature. Companies, sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the attention, started sending her their products. “She received free dresses from Saks, diamonds from Tiffany’s, tickets to the Metropolitan Opera,” said journalist Roman Mars on an episode of the design podcast 99% Invisible. “When she showed up in tabloids, she was wearing designer clothes.” Cynthia may not have been sentient, but she was a trendsetter; her brief time as a socialite-cum-advertiser also foreshadowed the world of social media influencers who dominate Instagram feeds and marketing campaigns today.

Like Cynthia, social media influencers aren’t usually celebrities, at least not in the traditional sense. They tend to be regular people—often young, often attractive—who have turned posting pictures or videos to YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok into jobs. For just about any niche or hobby, whether it’s travel, fashion, video games, or fishing, there’s an influencer posting about it on a daily (or hourly) basis, amassing a large and loyal following. Companies have taken note, and they are buying access to these audiences in exchange for merchandise and cash.

This new realm of influencer marketing is less than ten years old, but it’s become a central strategy for certain sales departments because, unlike more traditional formats, such as television spots and billboards, influencer posts are advertisements that don’t feel like ads. Up until the past couple of years, most paid-for posts weren’t even labelled as such. Still, despite the new best practice of noting “#ad” or “#sponsored” in captions, the intimacy of social media means that, for the audience, it can still feel like the influencer just had to let everyone know that they love a particular makeup brand, or a pricey pair of headphones, or, in the case of Kim Kardashian West, a new appetite-suppressing weight-loss product. Canon, Starbucks, Volvo, H&M, the tourism board of Nova Scotia: all have used influencer marketing in recent campaigns. According to Business Insider’s 2019 Influencer Market Report, companies are projected to spend $15 billion on the field by 2022.

Still, influencer marketing on social media is a new business model, and the tactic of throwing money at young personalities and hoping it translates into sales has led to some not-so-surprising results. In 2018, megainfluencer Luka Sabbat (then with 1.4 million followers) was sued for failing to fulfill a $60,000 deal that required him to wear Snapchat’s new product, Snap Spectacles, at high-end fashion shows. (Sabbat had agreed to a minimum of four Instagram posts that included the product; he uploaded only two.) The effectiveness of influencers was further questioned last May, when Instagram star @Arii (then with 2.5 million followers) launched her own clothing line and sold fewer than thirty-six shirts.

It’s failures like these that Bryan Gold is trying to prevent. Gold, a twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, is the co-founder and CEO of #Paid, a pioneering Toronto-based software company that deals in influencers. #Paid exists somewhere between talent agency and ad agency—it doesn’t directly manage influencers, but it’s positioning itself as a professional middleman that can work with big businesses to develop and oversee social media campaigns while wrangling the thousands of young social media users who have the desired captive audiences.

Gold knows that influencers have a checkered reputation: despite the value they offer brands, they can be inexperienced and unpredictable, making them potential threats to companies’ images. But the roster that works for #Paid, he explains, is different from the rest. For one, his nearly 22,000 social media stars aren’t mere influencers, he insists—they’re creators.

I trip on this bit of semantics again and again over the few days I spend at the #Paid office—a contemporary open space complete with the requisite startup perks of LaCroix sparkling water and a Ping-Pong table. Each time “influencers” leaves my mouth, I earn a stern look. The difference between the two, various staff members explain to me, is that, unlike typical influencers, #Paid creators care about what they do. They are discerning about whom they’ll work with. (Gold tells me that, when his company received a shipment of a weight-loss product, they sent it right back.) I’m told that, whenever a #Paid creator embarks on a campaign—with, say, Coca-Cola or Uber Eats—the result is an authentic expression of how they feel about the product; the relationship is about more than just making money. “A lot of the creators I spoke with wanted to use their influence for good,” Gold tells me. “They were genuinely passionate about making a difference in the world and making the world a better place.”

While soda endorsements and food-on-demand probably won’t change society for the better, recent trends seem to show that influencer marketing is the future that’s coming for us all: one where social media becomes work, the work never stops, and all online identities are commodities to be constantly managed.

by Tatum Dooley, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Vivian Rosas

The History of the Hawaiian Shirt

Mainland Americans have long looked to Hawaii to ease their minds. At the height of World War I, with America about to enter the conflict, Hawaiian music was all the rage. In 1916, Hawaiian records outsold all other genres, while ukuleles were so ubiquitous in college dorms and upper-crust nightclubs that the New York Tribune ran a full-page illustration of an imagined “Ukulele Square, the Hawaiian Quarter of New York.” During the Great Depression, Americans again cast their eyes toward Hawaii, co-opting another piece of Hawaiian culture: the aloha shirt.

Though its precise origins are lost to history, the aloha shirt first appeared in Hawaii in the 1920s or ’30s, probably when local Japanese women adapted kimono fabric for use in men’s shirting. The shirts achieved some popularity among tourists to Hawaii and found greater commercial success when they hit the mainland in the mid-1930s. America at the time was riddled with hardship and anxiety, with many men out of work and many others struggling to hold on to their breadwinner status. Perhaps in response, hyper-manliness came into vogue—the popularity of bodybuilding skyrocketed, Superman burst onto the scene. It may seem paradoxical that men embraced a garment with such feminine appeal. “You’d better get two or three because it’s a cinch your daughter, sister, wife or even mother will want this bright-colored shirt as soon as she sees it,” the Los Angeles Times teased in 1936. That didn’t stop men from buying. By 1940, aloha shirts were bringing in more than $11 million annually (in today’s money).

One reason men adopted a garment otherwise suited to their sisters’ closet was that rich, famous men wore it. Visitors to Hawaii in the 1930s were invariably wealthy, and before long, aloha shirts were being sold by celebrities whom everyday Americans sought to emulate. American heroes from three-time Olympic swimming champion and surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku to singer Bing Crosby were lending their names to particular brands. Those endorsements, says Dale Hope, a historian and the author of The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands, had “a huge effect on people purchasing those shirts.” If you could wear what the man unscathed by the Depression was wearing, it didn’t matter that it was feminine: You looked like someone who didn’t need to worry about his masculine bona fides.

Once the shirt reached stores in the Lower 48, any day laborer could have for just a dollar what before had required an exorbitant trip. A man in an aloha shirt, with its depictions of hula dancers and luaus—“symbol[s] of the comfortable, gay and picturesque,” one journalist put it in 1939—could look the part of the carefree swell.

The notion that Hawaii was a quiet paradise was shattered in 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and makers of aloha shirts, like others in the garment industry, turned to supplying the war effort. When production resumed, Japanese-influenced designs that had been common—featuring cherry blossoms and shrines—temporarily fell out of fashion, supplanted by designs that highlighted Hawaii’s local culture. Service members returning to the mainland from the Pacific made the signature apparel more popular than ever.

By the 1960s, the shirt had become truly ubiquitous. Aloha Fridays were a fixture of a certain kind of workplace, and everyone—from Elvis to the decidedly unhip Richard Nixon—seemed to have an aloha shirt. Over time, perhaps inevitably, it lapsed into the realm of corny suburban-dad-wear.

Yet in just the past five years, fashion magazines have been heralding a comeback, and high-end labels like Gucci are taking the aloha shirt to new heights, with prints that draw on Japanese designs favored in the garment’s early days. Meanwhile, some shirtmakers from Hawaii’s old guard are still going strong. Kahala, founded in 1936 as one of the first brands producing aloha shirts, has been raiding its vaults to reproduce designs dating back to the 1930s—including some popularized by Duke Kahanamoku. “People are looking to bring some light, some color, some vibrancy into their lives,” says Jason Morgan, Kahala’s general manager. “I think that’s needed now more than ever. If an aloha shirt can help improve somebody’s day, I think that’s pretty powerful.”

by Teddy Brokaw, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: Paramount Pictures/Getty Images
[ed. See also: The Charming Story of George Harrison's Vacation in Small Town America (Smithsonian).] 

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The Trickle-Up Bailout

"80% of the benefit of the bill went to just 43,000 taxpayers each earning over $1 million a year"

As we head into the second month of pandemic lockdown, two parallel narratives are developing about the financial rescue.

In one, ordinary people receive aid through programs that are piecemeal, complex, and riddled with conditions.

A law freezing evictions applies to holders of government-backed mortgages only. “Disaster grants” are coming more slowly and in smaller amounts than expected; small businesses were disappointed to learn from the SBA early last week that aid would be limited to $1000 per employee.

A one-time “economic impact payment,” reportedly delayed so recipients could experience the thrilling visual of Donald Trump’s name on the check, might help make half a rent payment. Unemployment insurance amounts have been raised, so tip and gig workers can now be ineligible for $600 a week more than before! The cost of a coronavirus test might be free, but you test positive, you could up paying $50,000 or more in hospital costs even with insurance. And so on.

Meanwhile, “relief” programs aimed at the top income levels were immediate, staggering in size and scope, and often appeared as grants rather than loans. One of the biggest layouts of the Covid-19 rescue was a political carrying charge that members of congress extracted just to get the larger bailout out the door – a pre-bailout bailout, if you will.

Although the $2 trillion coronavirus rescue was approved unanimously, a set of tax breaks was stuck in by Republicans, in the original version of the CARES Act put forward by Mitch McConnell.

When Donald Trump signed his whopper Tax Cuts and Jobs Act two years ago, the bill contained clauses to offset the loss of revenue that would entail from shaving down the top individual tax rate relatively a little (from 39.6% to 37%) and slashing the corporate tax rate a lot (from 35% all the way down to 21%).

One of those changes limited the amount of losses that could be used to offset taxable income in any given year. Another limited the amount of losses from so-called “pass-through” businesses (i.e. businesses that don’t pay corporate taxes) that wealthy individuals could use to offset taxable income. These provisions particularly impacted real estate developers (!), hedge fund managers, and other high net worth individuals with volatile revenue profiles.

The second provision only affected people making at least $250,000, or couples earning at least $500,000.

The CARES Act sought to wipe out or alter both provisions. Republicans also tried to include tax relief for multinationals who offshore profits, but that provision was stripped out in favor of these first two loopholes, seemingly reflecting their importance to the caucus.

As Steve Wamhoff of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy points out, the changes on the use of “pass-through” losses only benefit a select group. “It has to be stressed that this exclusively helps wealthy people,” Wamhoff says. “It only has an impact on people already making over $250,000.”

Because the CARES Act was rushed to the floor, members didn’t have all of the information they might have wanted before the vote. After the bill passed, Democratic staffers sent these tax provisions in the CARES Act, sections 2303 and 2304, to the Joint Committee on Taxation, to be scored. They were stunned to learn they would cost $195 billion over ten years.

In other words, what seemed like a run-of-the-mill offhand legislative pork provision ended up dwarfing the airline bailout and other main parts of the bill.

“The cost of caring for this small slice of the wealthiest one percent is greater than the CARES Act funded for all hospitals in America,” says Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett. “It’s greater than CARES provided for all state and local governments.”

The JCT analysis found that 80% of the benefit of the bill went to just 43,000 taxpayers each earning over $1 million a year. The average tax break for those 43,000 individuals was $1.6 million, an interesting number when one considers the loudness of the controversy over $1,200 relief checks for everyone else.

by Matt Taibbi, Taibbi Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Georges Barbier, Le Silence De Mnasidika 1922
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How Coronavirus Almost Brought Down the Global Financial System

In the third week of March, while most of our minds were fixed on surging coronavirus death rates and the apocalyptic scenes in hospital wards, global financial markets came as close to a collapse as they have since September 2008. The price of shares in the world’s major corporations plunged. The value of the dollar surged against every currency in the world, squeezing debtors everywhere from Indonesia to Mexico. Trillion-dollar markets for government debt, the basic foundation of the financial system, lurched up and down in terror-stricken cycles.

On the terminal screens, interest rates danced. Traders hunched over improvised home workstations – known in the new slang of March 2020 as “Rona rigs” – screaming with frustration as sluggish home wifi systems dragged behind the movement of the markets. At the low point on 23 March, $26tn had been wiped off the value of global equity markets, inflicting huge losses both on the fortunate few who own shares, and on the collective pools of savings held by pension and insurance funds.

What the markets were reacting to was an unthinkable turn of events. After a fatal period of hesitation, governments around the world were ordering comprehensive lockdowns to contain a lethal pandemic. Built for growth, the global economic machine was being brought to a screeching halt. In 2020, for the first time since the second world war, production around the world will contract. It is not only Europe and the US that have been shut down, but once-booming emerging market economies in Asia. Commodity exporters from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa face collapsing markets.

It is now clear that we can, if circumstances demand, turn the economy off. But the consequences are catastrophic. Across the world, hundreds of millions of people have been thrown out of work. From the street hawkers of Delhi to the personal trainers of LA, the service sector – by far the most important employer in the modern economy – has been poleaxed. Never before has the global economy suffered a shock of this scale all at once. In the US alone, at least 17 million people have lost their jobs in the last three weeks. A severe global recession is now inevitable.

The crucial question is how much of the world economy will survive the lockdown, and this depends on the availability of credit. Business runs on credit. The bits of the economy that do continue to function – the warehouses, the mobile phone providers and internet firms – all need credit. Wage bills for those still working are financed through credit. Even greater is the need of those who are not working. If they can’t get loans, bills will go unpaid, which spreads the pain. To survive the lockdown, millions of families and firms around the world are relying on grants and loans from the state. But tax revenues have collapsed, so states need credit, too. Across the world we are witnessing the largest surge in deficits and government debt since the second world war.

But who do we borrow from? Banks, financial markets and money markets provide the financial fuel of the world economy. Normally, credit is sustained by the optimistic promise of growth. When that dissolves, you face a self-reinforcing cycle of collapsing confidence, contracting credit, unemployment and bankruptcy, which spreads a poison cloud of pessimism. Like an epidemic, if left uncontrolled, it will sweep all before it, destroying first the financially fragile and then much else besides. It is not for nothing that we speak of financial contagion.

What began with the lockdown in Wuhan in January is more intense and more fast-moving than any recession we have seen before. In a matter of weeks we have been confronted with an economic outlook that is as grim as at any moment since the 1930s. But it could have been even worse. Imagine a situation in which, on top of the pain of the lockdown and the hellish scenes in hospital wards, we also face calls for austerity because the government cannot safely finance extra spending. Imagine that interest rates were surging, and the terms for credit cards, car loans and mortgages were suddenly getting stiffer. All of this may still happen. It is already happening to the weaker economies around the world. But for now at least, it has not happened in Europe and the US – even after the turbulence of March 2020, when the pandemic hit with full force.

What Europe and the US have succeeded in doing is to flatten the curve of financial panic. They have maintained the all-important flow of credit. Without that, large parts of their economies would not be on life support – they would be stone dead. And our governments would be struggling with a financial crunch to boot. Maintaining the flow of credit has been the precondition for sustaining the lockdown. It is the precondition for a concerted public health response to the pandemic.

During major crises, we are reminded of the fact that at the heart of the profit-driven, private financial economy is a public institution, the central bank. When financial markets are functioning normally, it remains in the background. But when they threaten to break down, it has the option of stepping forward to act as a lender of last resort. It can make loans, or it can buy assets from banks, funds or other businesses that are desperate for cash. Because it is the ultimate backer of the currency, its budget is unlimited. That means it can decide who sinks and who swims. We learned this in 2008. But 2020 has driven home the point as never before.

The last six weeks have seen a bout of intervention without precedent. The results have been momentous. A giant public safety net has been stretched out across the financial system. We may never know what went on behind the closed doors of the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England during those critical moments in March. So far, only muffled sounds of argument have reached the outside. But as the virus struck, the men and women in those three central banks held the economic survival of hundreds of millions of people and the fate of nations in their hands. This is the story of how global financial meltdown was averted by central banks taking decisions that, just a month earlier, they would have dismissed as utterly impossible.

by Adam Tooze, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Peter Reynolds

The Lure of Fascism

Ours is the age of the rule by ‘strong men’: leaders who believe that they have been elected to deliver the will of the people. Woe betide anything that stands in the way, be it the political opposition, the courts, the media or brave individuals. While these demonised guardians of freedom are belittled, brushed aside or destroyed, vulnerable groups, such as refugees, immigrants, minorities and those living in poverty, bear the brunt. What can be done to halt or reverse this process? And what will happen if we simply stand by and watch? Some commentators see parallels with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Others agree that democracy is under threat but suggest that the threats are new. A fair point, but with its dangers. Yes, we must attend to new threats, but old ones can reoccur too.

Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author of Jewish descent, saw his books burnt in university towns across Germany in 1933. His memoirs paint a picture in which everything was normal until it wasn’t. But it would be wrong to think that we can predict how things will turn out. Who foresaw where we are now? The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1934, probably had it right: ‘We are in a period of transition; but a transition towards what? No one has the slightest idea.’

Liberal democratic institutions, such as those we have now, exist only so long as people believe in them. When that belief evaporates, change can be rapid. Beware leaders riding a wave of crude nationalism. Beware democracy submerging into a vague notion of the will of the people. But why now? In 1920s Germany, it was obvious. The novelist and journalist Joseph Roth remarked:

Without the free food [that the unemployed man in Hamburg] gets in assembly halls he would starve to death. And in these assembly halls, where people used to go to smooch and drink, they are now daubing swastikas and Soviet stars on the grimy walls.

Mass unemployment isn’t what threatens us today. [ed. It does now, post-virus] Instead, we’re facing something closer to the situation observed by Hannah Arendt in 1951:
It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence … and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

Powerlessness can lead to detachment. But it can also lead to exuberant support for whomever seems to be on your wavelength. This is what happened in the 1930s. In considering the parallels between then and now, the Irish journalist Emily Lorimer’s book What Hitler Wants (1939) – written in October 1938, a month before Kristallnacht, and just after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia – is a remarkable resource. Lorimer realised that the English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925) was highly censored; for example, it left out Hitler’s detailed plans to invade England. Few English people could read German, so Lorimer set out to make an English-language digest and summary of the key elements of the book. She suggested that three key elements [ed. emphasis added] drove Hitler’s initial plans: a concern for workers’ rights; a desire to create a purely German state; and violent opposition to social democracy. (...)

At the heart of democracy is a tension between the rule of the majority and the protection of the rights of the minority. Protecting minority rights means that, in practice, liberal democracy limits the rule of the majority. Many countries have a written constitution, covering issues that are simply too important to be left to ordinary day-to-day politics. They need a special, drawn-out process for change. For some matters of even greater importance, change can happen only at the hands of the international community. And these, of course, are human rights. A simple majority should not be enough to overturn constitutional or human rights.

Fascism disagrees. Mosley wrote: ‘The will of the people is greater than the right of the minority.’ The leader is there to carry out the will of the people, irrespective of the consequences for particular individuals. No one has the right to stand in its way.

Liberal democracies have evolved a vast web of institutions that can interfere with an overreaching leader’s plans in different ways, and that collectively protect minority rights. The most visible are the formal mechanisms that limit power or authority. These include the rule of law and law courts. The upper house in parliament keeps watch over executive overreach. Local government provides an alternative source of concentrated authority. Healthy politics includes a ‘loyal opposition’, supporting the system but opposing the government of the day. The test for whether leaders understand this concept is if they dismiss expressed opposition as ‘treason’. Weil applies the Bolshevik leader Mikhail Tomsky’s comment on the feudal Russian regime to fascism: ‘One party in power and all the rest in prison.’ (...)

Authoritarian leaders, who believe that they have been elected with a mandate of radical national renewal, can become easily frustrated with the spider’s web of institutions that prevent them from exercising power as they wish. The press is biased; the news is fake; the judges are the enemies of the people; the universities crush free speech and promote subversive ideologies; the trade unions stand in the way of progress; local government is a viper’s nest; and the upper chamber is full of deluded, self-interested fools. The protective institutions of liberal democracy are being persistently chipped away.

by Jonathan Wolff, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild/Getty
[ed. See also: Studying Fascist Propaganda by Day, Watching Trump’s Coronavirus Updates by Night; and We Won’t Know the Exact Moment When Democracy Dies (New Yorker).]

Makoto Kakizaki
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My Covid-19 Thinking: 4/17

[ed. I'm cutting to the chase here and just posting the author's conclusions (you can read the whole article at the link). If you're unaquainted with Rationalist thinking, I urge you to check out LessWrong. It's not easy reading. And if you decide it's not for you, that's ok too.]

I want to wrap this up so I don’t lose even more to the speed premium, so I don’t have time to give my full thoughts on this today. In On R0 and throughout this I should be making clear what I think the physical landscape looks like. This will all be the same picture I gave then, just more explicit/direct/compact.

Over time, people get better at reducing risk while not sacrificing too much to do so. Masks get worn and improved in type and quality, delivery services scale, people stop acting like 6.1 feet is safe and 5.9 feet will kill you (seriously, this one stings every time), companies implement temperature checks and new workplace designs, the people who aren’t with the program learn the program, and so on. Testing will expand eventually, including by corporations supplying for their employees. People who are immune are placed in exposed positions increasingly with antibody testing, and even those without testing in those positions have mostly been infected anyway at this point if they have been unable to take good precautions.

There is pushing back from people sick of distancing and who need to go work and earn a living, but they mostly do so in sensible ways. There’s some risk of crazy town if things are handled badly. So far only Michigan and Ohio show signs of it I’ve heard about, which is likely because Ohio reacted so well that people don’t get why they had to, and Michigan reacted poorly and people are mad about the implementation details being terrible.

Some areas are not set up to handle things well. In those areas, things get briefly bad, but they also burn out relatively quickly. Can’t handle it translates into particular groups being unable to handle things or choosing not to, so those groups burn through infections until they’re handling it.

I do think that there’s a lot of slack for private agents to step up and help a lot more, but it’s currently illegal to do so. When there is need of it, it will happen. Corporations and individual people have come out of all this looking really good.

Trump will continue to do his best to screw things up, and it will continue to screw things up, but I expect this to not be in ways that matter that much in the big picture. The real damage done was already done early on. He’s done an admirable job of not trying to actually do things, except for some banditry and piracy involving medical equipment. Could have been a lot worse. He briefly flirted with saying he had absolute authority, but backed down as is his pattern before we started once again saying “The United States are” and I don’t expect him to try again in a serious way.

We “reopen” the country in places in mid-May and others in June or July, but that doesn’t mean open. It means people are free to do what they want. Schools mostly or entirely won’t reopen this semester, so places that ‘open’ will still be largely closed slash in the new normal as we adjust. Mostly things shut down because private citizens and corporations shut them down, and they’ll reopen the same way. If Cuomo “reopened” New York I doubt much of anything would actually change the next few weeks.

Likely by end of year we’ve found a treatment protocol that makes this all a lot less deadly. I’m guessing combining the stuff we’ve already found that works and tossing the parts that doesn’t would do a lot.

The supply chain looks like it’s straining in places, and needs deregulation of the food supply so people can pivot to residential provision faster. My guess is things get somewhat worse for a bit, then this is allowed to happen slash people find workarounds as some restaurants become de facto grocery stores. When it gets bad we’ll figure it out quickly.

Eventually there’s a vaccine and it all finally ends.

What would I bet on right now, as one commentator asked? I don’t really want to bet on such matters, especially I don’t feel good about betting on more people dying. But certainly I’d bet against the things I think are essentially can’t happens, given reasonable odds. More detail is needed to know what else I would do; trading is very context dependent.

by Zvi, LessWrong |  Read more:
[ed. Also want to link to the original Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report (pdf) that did so much to finally get governments and politicians to wake up to the severity of the crisis.]

Steely Dan

[ed. I seem to recall Donald Fagan saying this song best typified what he and Walter Becker were trying to achieve with Steely Dan. See also these past SD posts: here (Almost Gothic); here (Charlie Freak); here (Monkey in Your Soul/and the live Santa Monica version of Bodhisattva - starting at 2:25 to avoid the crazy inebriated introduction by Jerome Aniton); and here (mini-compilation: West of Hollywood, Jack of Speed, What a Shame About Me).]

White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefing

(Enter PRESIDENT TRUMP, VICE PRESIDENT PENCE, DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DR. DEBORAH BIRX, and SURGEON GENERAL JEROME ADAMS. They all stand in close proximity to each other and touch each other and their faces repeatedly. Also, ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR stands holding a folder.)

TRUMP: Let’s get started. Lots of death. Hydroxychloroquine. Ratings. I am a doctor.

REPORTER: Millions of Americans are still waiting to get tested. Can you explain the delays?

TRUMP: First of all, sports. Secondly, anyone who wants a test gets a test. I wanted a test and I got a test.

(PENCE clears throat and gently moves toward the podium.)

PENCE: I want to build on what the president said by adding that though he is 100 percent right, I should also say that the vast majority of people who want a test will not get a test.

(DR. FAUCI leans over to the podium.)

DR. FAUCI: I want to build on what the vice president said by just adding that the virus will be with us for 18 months and kill 240,000 people.

(Horrified murmurs fill the room.)

REPORTER: So should the public be wearing masks?

(Everyone near the podium shrugs. DR. FAUCI coughs into his bare hand.)

TRUMP: Here is a man who makes pillows.

MAN WHO MAKES PILLOWS: I am a man who makes pillows.

DR. BIRX: I’d like to build on the statement of the man who makes pillows. We’ve had three months of conflicting messages on masks, so I want to clarify that it is not at all necessary that you wear a mask — unless you want to avoid contracting the virus.

(TRUMP looks at DR. BIRX, who is wearing a scarf.)

TRUMP: You could also wear a scarf. I am a scientist.

by Dave Eggers, McSweeny's |  Read more:
Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Bluetooth-Based Coronavirus Contact Tracing Finds Broad Support

Consensus seems to be building globally around the idea that Bluetooth-based contact tracing could be a practical use of technology to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Why it matters: Both governments and advocacy groups agree that using Bluetooth to sense the proximity of users' phones could be more effective and less of a civil rights problem than tapping location-based data that apps and service providers often collect.

Driving the news:

• The EU on Thursday said that mobile apps can help slow the spread of the disease, when combined with ample testing and medical care resources. But it cautioned that such apps need to be interoperable and also protect privacy.
• The EU runs the globe's strictest privacy regime, so the guidelines it has offered suggest a path forward for the Bluetooth-based approach.
• The American Civil Liberties Union offered up its own guidelines on Thursday, calling for apps that minimize data retention and central storage, augment human contact tracing and are, among other things, voluntary, non-discriminatory, and built with input from health professionals. They should also be narrowly tailored to this epidemic and their use should end when the pandemic ends, or if they are shown to be ineffective at slowing its spread, the group said.

The big picture: A number of entities are working on similar technology approaches that would appear to be able to meet the goals outlined by the EU and ACLU.

Most prominently, this includes the joint Apple-Google effort announced last week, which aims to build a foundation for Bluetooth-based contact tracing in both the iOS and Android smartphone operating systems.

Other efforts include the PACT project from MIT and those from several groups in Europe. (...)

Meanwhile: Pew reported in a new survey that Americans are not only divided on whether they find tracking apps acceptable, but are also skeptical such apps will really be effective.

by Ina Fried, Axios |  Read more:

Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

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