Continued from Part 2

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Perhaps it is a consequence of our social structures and how ideas spread, but my observation from my half century on Earth is that societal ideas and values, and thus policies and political trends, seem to act like a pendulum with the bottom of the swing the point at which there is most momentum to continue to move in that direction away from what in reality is the equilibrium (stable\sustainable) state until all of that (kinetic) energy is transferred and builds up inexorably into potential energy to swing back in the opposite direction with ultimately equal force.

Because I have an overall optimism in humanity I do believe that in the third dimension – imagine turning your view of the swinging pendulum 90 degrees – you will observe more easily that the pivot point is on a gradually rising trajectory, but experiencing the amplitudes of the swinging pendulum is why it can really feel like sometimes we are going backwards.

The secret for humanity is really to learn how to dampen those oscillations so that our progress can be more smooth and feel less disengaging for large swathes of society when the pendulum is at its least favourable so that positioning is not extreme.

This pretty much spells out the situation for contemporary extreme capitalism and the political ideology based on its value of greed and never-ending aspiration for materialism.

Here I should note that I do not consider aspiration in itself a negative as I am certain that those who wish to apportion me or paint me as belonging to an anti-capitalist tribe have assumed. It all depends on what the aspiration is towards. I think it is fair to say that each and every parent aspires to keep their family safe and to work towards maximising their moments of happiness in an uncertain world. But I think it is a reasonable argument to make that never-ending aspiration for more material wealth, power and influence is instead a toxic form of aspiration, and I would argue that it is encouraged within this contemporary extreme capitalism.

That we have reached this moment in time, and no doubt a major factor has been the pandemic providing a rare moment in time when many people will reflect on their existence as it has been in recent years and how they would like it to be in the future, is understood intuitively by very many. Some of us have intuitively understood that this moment would come at some point.

Trickle down economics never was a sustainable model on which to run society and the potential energy created within society to swing back in the other direction now has a certain degree of inevitability to it (writing by others indicates that they feel similarly, for example Ray Dalio, the head of the largest contemporary hedge fund, who perhaps I should have included on my earlier list of elites whom I respect.)

But it does make you wonder just what Dr. Friedman would have recommended for societal leaders to do in the face of this pandemic. To answer that one needs to decide to which Dr. Friedman we are referring – the contemporary perception of what he stood for, the man who wrote his doctrine as the pendulum reached its most extreme position disfavourable to his own views, or the man who was assisting President Reagan and PM Thatcher to reform their economies. 

I am prepared to accept that the 90 year old man that stood in front of President George W Bush to be conferred a Hero of Freedom, and so warmly embraced by the elites that had already benefitted so greatly from this movement towards extreme capitalism, might work at explaining and justifying the situation as his ego and conscience might dictate. However, I cannot help but believe that the 58 year old man that stood from his desk, after hand-writing the final draft of his doctrine, would feel disappointed and perhaps saddened that his writing and thoughts were co-opted in a fashion to arrive at such an extreme form of capitalism that has made only a very few so very wealthy and has failed so very many Americans, and many others around the world, as so devastatingly exposed in the COVID-19 pandemic.

As I pause to reflect on this piece I concede that some might suggest that I have not met my brief as indicated in the title, that I have not provided a plan for responding to COVID-19 which Dr. Friedman might have recommended. To my knowledge he had no special understanding of virology or any field of medicine, so any answer must centre predominantly on what is the state of the system into which the pandemic was seeded.

Just as in the old Irish joke, Dr. Friedman might have said “If I was going to formulate a response to this pandemic I would not be starting from here”.

As Dr. Friedman was venerated as a Hero of Freedom Present George W Bush said:

He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision: the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions. That vision has changed America and it is changing the world. All of us owe a tremendous debt to this man’s towering intellect and his devotion to liberty.

But the economic system that his writing and early advice is credited with creating a moral vision of society for has led to a middle class on a knife edge, just one act of misfortune away from homelessness and destitution, and a chronic underclass of working poor with inferior outcomes across the range of critical social services and especially for health.

That is only freedom to the elite and to people blinded by unquestioned devotion to an ideology.

Any objective observer surely would ask whether this is a better form of “freedom” than in any contemporary autocracy which has lifted living standards for broad society by adopting some open market reforms.

It might be easily said that the problems in America’s response to COVID-19 is due primarily to one man, President Donald Trump. While I am in no doubt that history will show that President Trump failed Americans miserably in the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be a mischaracterisation if he and his administration attracted all of the blame.

Undoubtedly the power was in President Trump’s hands to respond more aggressively to the threat as explained to him and his administration by February, and he clearly chose not to do all in his power to protect human life. However, Donald Trump is most definitely a product of the system, both in the way he has lived his life and how that was widely perceived from his regular appearances on television and wider media, and in the messages that he expressed to the electorate which led to him winning the 2016 election. And even moreso for the messages that he gives the powerful business elites in the bubble in which he and many of them have occupied for all or large portions of their lives.

The evidence has long been in that the system has failed the health of Americans. Even if in February 2020 a decision was made to do everything possible to protect human life, the chronic failings of the system was going to be challenged in ways that would show greater similarity with developing countries than other developed countries. The disparity of living conditions between the haves and have-nots, especially along racial lines, have been shown up globally in the COVID-19 pandemic in the tragedy of infection and mortality rates and nowhere is that more true than in America.

That President Trump so callously disregards the realities of the failings of the American health system, especially on demographic and racial lines, emphasises that, while the blame for America’s poor performance in protecting the public during the COVID-19 pandemic is not entirely his, the necessary reforms cannot begin while he remains President.

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As I draw to a conclusion, I already recognise what many – if my writing were taken seriously enough – would proffer in counter-argument. “In earlier writing he said Trump was standing firm against businesses profiting from China’s emergence, now Trump is too close to business elites!” – well, yes, but to suggest that Trump has not lived a life in a bubble of elitism is patently absurd. He is obsessed by wealth – measuring his Presidential success by the level of asset prices, chiefly the stockmarket – and he is most comfortable surrounded by other wealthy businessmen (intentionally gender-specific) as long as one condition is met, that they do not disagree in the slightest with him or suggest in any way that they are more anything (successful, intelligent, …) than he.

Perhaps more than ever before we citizens of Western countries – and possibly elsewhere – have developed a habit of believing what we want of what has been said or written by others. President Trump’s success has largely been built on asserting to his base that he knows perfectly what are others’ motives and intentions, and this has further stripped nuance from public discourse resulting in greater intolerance, misunderstanding and outright misinformation. Such behaviour detracts from public debate as the value of expressed opinion is diminished because there is a loss of faith that others will take the time to consider those views faithfully prior to responding.

Thus debating views in open fora on the internet can seem fruitless, especially when opponents are shielded by a fog of anonymity and might well be a paid troll (who has little conviction for what they are argue other than to earn an income) or even an artificial intelligence “bot”.

The one issue I do want to address, though, is the re-emergence of what Dr. Friedman referred to as “social responsibility” in the business sector, including through activist, impact and\or ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) investing themes, as well as what I mentioned briefly above, corporate leaders responding to critical social issues of the time.

These activities would certainly fit that description and thus be the prime target of Dr. Friedman’s main objections stated within his doctrine.

Again, the contemporary reality has moved on from the time in which Dr. Friedman wrote his doctrine. A leadership void has opened in the developed world. This void was growing before President Trump adopted an “America first” foreign policy. It is a result of the dearth of genuine political leadership over recent decades throughout much of the Western world.

In my own country of Australia discontent with poor political leadership has been growing through this millennium, and to me this issue reached a real low point earlier this year when Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, and former Australian Treasurer, Joe Hockey, appeared on 7.30 on the ABC:

LEIGH SALES:  Do you think that ministerial standards are at the same height that they were 20 years ago?

JOE HOCKEY:  I mean, it’s all changed, Leigh. Social media has changed everything. Social media has made the voice of the critic much, much louder than the voice of the advocate.

And the second thing that’s changed is disruption.

Everyone keeps calling for government to initiate reform, but really, what’s happening is the private sector is initiating reform, on a scale that we’ve never seen before.

LEIGH SALES:  Is there something fundamentally wrong with that though, if Government is not leading?

JOE HOCKEY:  No. Because it empowers individuals and we all believe that individuals should be their best.

When I heard Mr. Hockey’s intellectually feeble utterings I was immediately transported, to the words of a brilliant actor bringing to life a period that lingers long in humanity’s collective imaginations:

Gracchus: I think he [Commodus] knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it’s the sand of the Colosseum. He’ll bring them death…and they will love him for it.

From the motion picture “Gladiator” directed by Ridley Scott, a Dreamworks production.

I see social media platforms as modern day arenas; Facebook the Colosseum.

(I leave it to the reader to imagine who might be Commodus.)

The truth is that individuals can not fill that void and that is creating widespread insecurity and thus anxiety (no matter how much I and others, like Brene Brown, might attempt to inspire and\or cajole all to have the courage to lead). That is why behaviour on social media often resembles that of a mob.

In Steve Biddulph’s seminal book “Raising Boys” (Finch Publishing, Sydney, 2003) he describes how young males require structure.

Boys act tough to cover up their fear. If someone is clearly the boss, they relax. But the boss must not be erratic or punitive. If the person in charge is a bully, the boys’ stress levels rise, and it’s back to the law of the jungle. If the teacher, scoutmaster or parent is kind and fair (as well as being strict) then boys will drop their ‘macho’ act and get on with learning.

Biddulph further explains that without that structure males become insecure and fearful, and relationships within groups become turbulent as they attempt to establish hierarchies.

I find a lot of similarity between these descriptions and broader society where politicians have withdrawn from their leadership roles and thus from providing their vision on where our societies are heading.

Right now society in much of the developed world is behaving like the fearful teenage boys that Biddulph describes. The lack of direction provided by mainstream, conventional politicians has led to at first a flirtation with, and then an acceptance of, populist leaders because their willingness to express strong ideas made the anxious mob feel more secure. Many within the mob have become aggressively supportive because they do not want to go back to feeling insecure and directionless, and so are prepared to accept their leaders’ short-comings unless and until the consequences are very personal.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a few female politicians who have stepped into that leadership void. But they remain the exception.

Into that leadership void business leaders have also stepped forward. Whereas 1970 Dr. Friedman painted a picture of business leaders feeling that they were pressured by Government bureaucracy, or agents of socialism, to act with social responsibility, it seems clear this time around that businesspeople recognised the vacuum from the political withdrawal and stepped forward in part out of necessity. In many nations, including my own, that is especially the case with diversity and inclusion, and environmental policy.

On diversity and inclusion, there has been a growing awareness that more than just a social issue, diverse and inclusive cultures are more productive and innovative. Consequently, filling the void left by politicians in relation to diversity and inclusion within society, and even at times countering their divisive impulses, comes with significant benefits to business which will positively impact their financial performance.

It is important to note that businesspeople now acting on climate change is not antithetical to Dr. Friedman’s views as some will no doubt suggest.

Critically, this issue has not “blown up” overnight or even recently. Global warming from greenhouse gases had been identified and was being taught when I studied for my undergraduate science degree in the late 80’s. Businesspeople have observed the ebbing of global political leadership, even in areas of critical concern for humanity, and have become concerned by the impacts of that on business functioning and certainty.

More to the point, however, businesspeople are recognising that the collective view of the human beings that decided to specialise as scientific researchers is that our climate is changing due to humanity’s actions and that the consequences to us humans and our planet are severe and will be devastating if corrective actions are not progressed urgently.

It is this faith in human specialisation, a key underpinning of capitalism, that provides the majority of businesspeople with the surety that they need to act definitively on climate change. It would be better if politicians would leave behind their partisan political self interest, often due to lobbying from disaffected industry sectors, so that a truly global response could be formulated to guide businesses. Absent this, businesspeople now realise that taking measures alone or with the support of localised groupings which may assist in the battle against climate change is far preferable to continuing business as usual which they know will contribute to more climate change.

This is the political and social environment into which the COVID-19 pandemic was seeded.

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Martin Wolf, a highly regarded Financial Times journalist, recently suggested that the critical distinction between populist leaders in their varying responses to COVID-19, thus the impacts on their people, is whether the leaders are more interested in the theatre of leading rather than actually governing. Perhaps whether they seek to be a modern-day Commodus. Mr. Wolf is clear that even theatrical populists definitely do want to effect change on their societies.

I would suggest a more relevant factor, however, is how closely these leaders are linked with the business elite. In the extreme capitalism in Western societies that linkage has become very close, but it does exist elsewhere. On the other hand, in a few other countries, especially autocracies such as in China and Vietnam, the link is not as strong and this separation has allowed their governments to act assertively to stamp out clusters.

The Chinese Communist Party, for example, clearly decided early that their political fate would be decided by how well they protected their people and as such have proven themselves to be the gold standard in stamping out a serious outbreak and at working at preventing the seeding of new clusters.

Just one example of their relentless efforts to identify and manage risks is remaining open-minded on the potential for re-introduction with processed meat, a risk that I have discussed on these pages since end of April with an open letter to Prime Minister Morrison and a detailed post, but which has been ignored throughout much of the world including in my own country. In recent weeks Chinese scientists have published data linking two clusters in China to frozen food imports.

It is noteworthy that the International Monetary Fund forecasts that it is only China amongst the major global economies that will make a genuine V-shaped economic recovery on the back of their ability to get the pandemic under control to the point that in a country with over a billion people they have had few clusters of community transmission in recent months. What is more, the only thing that appears likely to dampen that recovery at this stage appears to be the economic impacts from the uncontrolled pandemic in the majority of the rest of the globe and especially in important consumer markets in America and Europe.

Together with a growing appreciation of the severe pitfalls to many in society from the current extreme capitalism in the Western world, the better performance of countries prepared to protect human life above protestations from business elites has coalesced to suggest that the economic paradigm that Dr. Friedman and others heralded and initiated has been taken to an unsustainable extreme.

As with any change of paradigm, what occurs from here will be determined as much by the incumbents as the proponents for change. History suggests that incumbents do not willingly relinquish any of their favoured position, and given the current state of society in extremis (especially in America, patent to the most objective of observers), the pain that humanity is collectively suffering in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pressure of a re-emergent geopolitical superpower, this transition to a new paradigm is shaping to be more disruptive than most in recent human history.

We should all hope that from the midst of the Western world comes a cohort of brilliant leaders, with intellectual rigor and iron fisted determination to sustain the effort to continue to carry humanity forward with the least possible disruption. Presently it is the European female leaders who are leading the way, though as great as they are, they cannot do it alone.

If assistance comes in the form of a re-awakened, progressive America, such that it retained the mantle of global leadership, then there would be nobody happier than I. What I have observed over recent decades, however, prevents me from being sanguine for America. I hope that that recency bias proves to be my error in the same way it was Dr. Friedman’s.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

Continued from Part 1

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In this age of tribalism, where everybody must be apportioned to a particular tribe with a specific agenda, I am well aware that I will already have been painted as a socialist and\or anti-capitalist. In fact in my earlier blogging for less manipulated and fairer Australian housing markets a decade ago I frequently received angry emails and posts describing me as such.

The truth is that I have a very high regard for many who might be considered business “elites”.

Very early in life I intuitively understood that a system built on little or even no reward for your own individual combination of hard and smart work is not sustainable, and I feel no amount of jealousy towards those who have earned a comfortable living. But note the definitive word is most definitely “earned”. Moreover, I make this statement with a heavy heart in knowing that we live in a massively inequitable world and there are very many who deserve so much more opportunity for a better life than they have and they would have it if the world were a perfect and genuinely equitable meritocracy.

Embedded in my use of the term “earned” is an expectation that a right to the benefits from society have been earned by paying through our taxation systems a fair and proportionate contribution to administering our society.

The elites that I respect, as I explained in “Your Life: Something The Elites Have Always Been Prepared To Sacrifice For Their Ends“:

are those who authentically understand the privilege that they have enjoyed, usually from birth by virtue of the luck of being born in a developed country or into middle class even if they consider themselves ‘self-made’, as well as respect and appreciate relationships with other human beings … 

I do not identify with those who list very wealthy individuals saying that it is obscene that they have accumulated such wealth. If they hurt people, either knowingly or by choosing to remain ignorant to it, in accumulating that wealth, then I would certainly consider them as deplorable. 

Of course I prefer that everybody on this Earth does what they can to assist other people, so obviously I would hope that people of greater means undertake genuinely significant philanthropic activities aimed at making a difference for others (rather than just promoting themselves in social circles, or only engaging in egotistical and vain projects with lesser returns to humanity, or to gain goodwill which will be cashed in later for personal advantage.) I must admit, however, that in my day to day life in the suburbs I regularly encounter people who say that they can not afford to donate to charities or give of their time or in some other capacity.

I believe that giving is relative to what you have, and I have learned many times over through my life and on my travels, especially in developing countries, that one has something to give as soon as one has something, and even before that we have ourselves to give.

While perhaps it is a greater pity that somebody with means to make a more significant difference, whether that is due to their wealth or their public profile or position, declines to do so, I do not care for any mean-spirited person irrespective of their means.

Foremost among the many undeniable elites who I admire would be Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Bill Gates, and George Soros. I also know, for certain, that there would be many, many more who I would like and respect if I were to know them personally or observe them often and closely enough to be able to develop an informed opinion.

As I look at that list it strikes me that they are all white American men. There are some Australian men I might include such as John Hewson (I mentioned my admiration before on these pages) and probably Mike Cannon Brookes (but I do not really know that much about him).

Interestingly much of the elite political leadership that I admire presently are women including Jacinda Ardern, Christine Lagarde, Ursula von der Leyen and Kristalina Georgieva – so mostly white European women.

I also have to say that I have been impressed by some more of these individuals, who belong to a very fortunate and privileged group within society, in how they have responded to the outpouring of emotion and drive for societal change through the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. Here I would make special mention of the African-American businesswoman Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox, who I knew little of before but who I found extremely impressive. But there were also other white men whose response was impressive and suggested that real, durable change is finally possible.

The truth is that I like people, and I want to believe the best in all people, so it fills me with pride when I see good people stand up to be counted and try to be the best version of themselves to the benefit of humanity. And I tend to be fiercely loyal to someone once they have shown themselves to be authentic.

My view is unequivocal that capitalism is the best system that mankind has developed to allocate resources for the betterment of humanity and I do find it difficult to believe that a better system is attainable.

I am in little doubt, however, that the form of capitalism that we practice in this early period of the 21st century has gone too far as I first began to articulate in my post “The Magic Sauce Of American Economic Dynamism Is Not Based On Personal Greed“. I see greed as a deleterious byproduct of wealth which leads to corruption of the capitalist system, and I do not see it as a basic core nature of human beings even though proponents of this extreme form of capitalism have co-opted biological theories, notably the Selfish Gene Theory, to justify its centrality to their preferred form of capitalism. The current form of extreme capitalism based on the centrality of personal greed is exemplified by the theory of Trickle Down Economics which is in reality no different from any other form of sequestering of wealth by the elites practiced down through the ages.

Taking superficially attractive ideas and extrapolating them to extremes is common in financial systems, in fact it is the basis for nearly all speculative bubbles. And I would suggest that the same can be said for the formative ideas of Dr. Milton Friedman who is a hero to the proponents of our current extreme form of capitalism. Reflecting on that recently, after reading his Doctrine  “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is To Increase Its Profits” for the first time, I was left with a ruminating question – How might Dr. Friedman respond to the COVID-19 pandemic?

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Dr. Milton Friedman is proclaimed as a key architect of the current American economic paradigm which has been variously described as based on supply-side economics, Reaganomics and trickle-down economics, amongst other descriptors. Dr. Friedman wrote extensively of his views on dealing with economic problems that prevailed in the 1950’s through the 1970’s in western countries, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. Dr. Friedman was a key economic advisor to President Reagan and to Prime Minister Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and their joint success at reforming their economies out from prolonged periods of low economic growth with high inflation earned Dr. Friedman widespread acclaim.

In reading Dr. Friedman’s words in his famous “Doctrine” I was struck with the perception that I share some views which are central to his doctrine as he expressed it in 1970. I even wondered whether these are so central to his doctrine that it is possible that my own views are more consistent to his, at that time, than are the views of many contemporary elites. As I read I realised just how much the basic premise of the essay had been co-opted by contemporary elites to justify their political motivations to garner more power and influence. I would go as far as to suggest that the man who sat down to write that essay likely would not be supportive of the way capitalism is practiced today even though he is venerated by it’s proponents – those who have prospered so greatly from it – for establishing the roadmap towards it, what President George W Bush described as the “moral vision”, and for being intimately involved in the early stages of reform.

(Obviously this situation is not uncommon, where many can agree on what are important problems and it is the solutions chosen, often with a political agenda in mind, where the problems arise. As one example I would admit that when I have listened to Steve Bannon speak I have been impressed by the way he has set out the issues and grievances of many in contemporary Western society. I even find common ground with some of the causes he identifies. But it is his solutions and especially his politics where we sharply disagree. That is precisely why these are the situations which can prove to be dangerous inflection points for society because the details and nuances are critical.)

The best way to discuss Dr. Friedman’s doctrine is to “reverse engineer” the document, commencing with his conclusion:

the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”

Many contemporary readers will immediately seize on the key words here unlike they might have done 50 years ago. Of course these are the final twenty-three words of the document, “so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”

Everything that is written in this doctrine is from the point of view – no, the assumption – that Government oversight of corporations will always remain robust, powerful, active and diligent.

civil servants… must be selected through a political process. If they are to impose taxes and make expenditures to foster “social” objectives, then political machinery must be set up to guide the assessment of taxes and to determine through a political process the objectives to be served.

It does not allow for the regulatory capture that is now so prevalent and pervasive in most of the western world.

Dr. Friedman wrote with a frame of reference of having been immersed in the heavily regulated and unionised 60’s and 70’s. He expressed a disdain for “pure and unadulterated socialism”. His views of the environment in which he had formulated his ideas are summed up in these key quotes:

In the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to “capitalism,” “profits,” the “soulless corporation” and so on

The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends… In fact they are – or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously – preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades

speeches by business men on social responsibility… may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, business men seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.

Clearly Dr. Friedman considered that he was in an intellectual struggle against a foe, which perhaps he feared was in an entrenched ascendant epoch, but which, in no small part due to his own efforts, was on the cusp of terminal decline.

One has to wonder what that man would think if the minute he finished the final version of that doctrine he entered a wormhole and emerged from it any time over the twenty-tens, with the major developed economies having undergone continual deregulation – with only minor and temporary tracebacks – for half a century, and with the cold war having been won over two decades earlier, and with China having been welcomed to become so deeply enmeshed in the Global economy (even if that is currently undergoing adjustment – which I have previously stated was both necessary and overdue – but perhaps soon to be managed by more intelligent and adept hands.)

While the “iron fist of Government bureaucrats” and powerful labour unions have largely been relegated to historical accounts of nearly all western society, there are other ways in which economies have been managed which are antithetical to libertarian ideals.

Certainly fresh from exiting a worm hole a 1970 Dr. Friedman would question where are “free markets”, with Government institutions globally – the central banks – being the main purchasers of the main funding instruments of Governments (bonds), and increasingly of private business debt, and even stocks of publicly traded companies already in some countries and foreshadowed in others. Most developed countries have engaged in this in one form or another. In my own country, the distortions away from free markets are perhaps best exemplified by the continual “management” (i.e. manipulation) of our residential property markets given the extreme level of household debt based on this one asset class.

The reality is that markets have been increasingly manipulated in the first two decades of this millenium, and those manipulations have had the effect of benefitting the elites.

Dr. Friedman’s views on taxation are linked to the assumption of enduring robust Government oversight based on public values. But his views on taxation extend to improper or sub-optimal usage of funds for and by those who are not in a position to make such decisions.

In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stock holders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employes, he is spending their money….

But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other.

This process raises political questions on two levels: principle and consequences. On the level of political principle, the imposition of taxes and the expenditure of tax proceeds are governmental functions. We have established elaborate constitutional, parliamentary and judicial provisions to control these functions, to assure that taxes are imposed so far as possible in accordance with the preferences and desires of the public— after all, “taxation without representation” was one of the battle cries of the American Revolution. We have a system of checks and balances to separate the legislative function of imposing taxes and enacting expenditures from the executive function of collecting taxes and administering expenditure programs and from the judicial function of mediating disputes and interpreting the law.

The difficulty of exercising “social responsibility” illustrates, of course, the great virtue of private competitive enterprise — it forces people to be responsible for their own actions and makes it difficult for them to “exploit” other people for either selfish or unselfish purposes. They can do good—but only at their own expense.

On the first point of taxation by Government I shall leave it to a Republican who was “present at the creation” of the current American economic paradigm, working for both President Reagan and President George HW Bush, Bruce Bartlett writing in 2007 in The New York Times:

Today, supply-side economics has become associated with an obsession for cutting taxes under any and all circumstances… [it’s advocates in Congress] support even the most gimmicky, economically dubious tax cuts with the same intensity.

…today it is common to hear tax cutters claim, implausibly, that all tax cuts raise revenue

Critically, Mr. Bartlett goes on to explain the context into which the present economic paradigm was spawned, and he was strident in his disapproval of these reforms being continued almost without boundaries. Essentially his point was that the ideas had become so embedded as to almost be redundant, and that continuing reforms on those same lines – in that case, relating to taxation – had become deleterious. (Sound familiar?)

The second point flows from the first. To borrow Dr. Friedman’s words, when the businessperson uses their political power to reduce taxes on businesses and the wealthy, they are in fact taxing the remainder of society, and then the businessperson is deciding where those proceeds will be spent.

Even when the businessperson uses some of those funds charitably, Dr. Friedman has already spelt out that it is not their right to make those decisions as they are society-wide decisions, and often such endeavours performed by individuals are done with additional objectives in mind including vanity or creating good will which elicits potential for extraction of favour at a later point in time.

Thus the “good” that they do is not genuinely at their own expense.

(And yes, in an Australian context, you can bet I have in mind the watering down of the resources rent tax and at the same time deposing of a sitting Prime Minister as a particularly poignant example.)

Thus there should be little doubt that a 1970 Dr. Friedman, too, would not look favourably upon businesspeople seeking to, disproportionately to the remainder of society, reduce their Government taxation obligations either directly or indirectly.

One of our greatest shared views is our belief in the power of human specialisation which is central to his 1970 doctrine. My favourite quote is this:

WHETHER blameworthy or not, the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society. I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in matters that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general.

Dr. Friedman’s main argument against anybody else other than Government and eleemosynary organisations involvement in decisions around social responsibility are that they are not equipped to do so.

That has patent relevancy to the COVID-19 pandemic where the collective voice of business people works to undermine measures to protect life. While business people have a clear view of what are the impacts of stringent social isolation measures on their businesses, they are not capable of understanding the broad complexity of issues of relevance to society and thus how that mix of issues will ultimately affect their businesses. That has already been proven in this pandemic where businesspeople have allowed their visceral fears – which we human beings have all felt at times this year – to advocate, with their disproportionately loud voices, for policies which have been more deleterious to their businesses than swift and stringent measures to protect human life.

None of that would surprise 1970 Dr. Friedman, clearly, and if he were consistent he would be exalting all to ignore the short-sighted muddle-headed rantings of the business elite on what Governments should be doing to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Importantly, Dr. Friedman also clearly endorses that in some human endeavours the profit imperative must be usurped by other objectives.

A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services.

Health is an area where the profit imperative has penetrated especially in the last half century, in this pandemic leaving Americans at the point of being intubated in the battle to save their life concerningly asking who will pay for their treatment.

Clearly for many Americans there is indeed a fate worse than death – living to pay for the medical costs incurred.

From the Wikipedia page on Dr. Friedman I followed a link to an interview with Friedman on the Phil Donahue show in 1979 where he was pressed on whether the military could ever be privatised given the vast sums spent annually. He said “Very likely, if you could turn that over to private enterprise [an aircraft carrier] would cost half [what it currently costs], but we have to have a strong military” (his emphasis).

Clearly his view then was that some things were just too important to turn over to the private sector, with it’s profit imperative before all else.

Thus there is a line to be drawn in the sand, but where one draws that line will necessarily be subjective and thus will ultimately be politicised.

I do not think that it is at all controversial to suggest the severe impacts that COVID-19 has had on Americans and their society have shown that, where this line was drawn on health, it did not provide sufficient protection to the American people. Many will argue that this has been apparent for a long time and I certainly expressed early in the COVID-19 pandemic, on March 4, that I feared “all of these deficiencies of the US health system… [would] be revealed in a truly terrible manner”.

What Dr. Friedman failed to realise as he wrote in 1970 – so focused on arguing for his ideas in the face of his socialist foes, “monopolistic unions” and “iron fisted Government bureaucrats” – was how the balance of political power would shift as his reforms took effect. A cycle between reducing political power and increasing inequality caused a hollowed-out and precarious middle class with less political influence. The increasing political influence garnered by the increasingly wealthy elites, unsurprisingly, has not been driven by altruism seeking a reversal of these multi-decade trends – collectively, ironically, the political influence that this weight of wealth has bought has sought to entrench their advantage for subsequent generations as has been the pattern of human society through the ages.

I truly wonder whether the man who argued passionately in that doctrine, but before he became quite so acclaimed for his work as to receive a Nobel Prize and be taken in by the political elite to usher in a prolonged period of economic reform and societal change, writing the words quoted above, would wish to stake claim to the view that the system that so comprehensively failed so many people was based on his doctrine and views which together formed his “moral vision… which has changed America and it is changing the world”.

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Part 3 – Conclusion – follows…

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

I have written extensively detailing my views on why conservatives are hell-bent on minimising introductions of stringent measures to retard the COVID-19 pandemic in their jurisdictions which would reduce preventable deaths.

It boils down to their political power base being the business class elite, and their greatest fear is that The Great Reset will lead to people in developed countries questioning their consumerist existence.

In my earliest writings, before a pandemic was declared, even before it was understood that the disease had escaped the biosecurity net around Wuhan, I was clear that I understood the global economic impacts would be severe (though admittedly I was a little cryptic initially – not wanting to be declared alarmist – in inferring that a depression may be the consequence).

When the rapid progression of events forced these conservative politicians to confront their cognitive dissonance, e.g. Morrison having to accept he would not be able to attend the opening week of the NRL, this fear of a depression was what gripped these conservative (mostly) men.

Such deep scarring to the psyche of people would lead to significant changes in society which leads to uncertainty for the business elites as to whether their powerful advantage would endure. At worst, for them, people might even turn away from materialistic consumerism, which had been the bedrock of their wealth and power, and people might instead place a higher importance on other aspects of their life which are not valuable or tradeable in market economies.

Moreover, if that paradigm shift were to occur it would spell the end of a political ideology espoused for decades by conservatives, and let’s face it, also espoused by many who declare themselves on the other side of the political divide, of ceaseless aspiration, which would leave a powerful and extensive global political aparatus rudderless and in search of a new narrative.

Thus this political apparatus continually pushes against introductions of stringent measures to minimise and slow their usage in an attempt to minimise that paradigm shift by people as they lose their previous habits and develop new ones, in many ways having had time and space, and in some cases sad shocks which caused them, to reflect on what it really is that enriches their lives.

For many years, and especially since the global financial crisis, this apparatus has focused on one factor perhaps above all others – confidence.

Confidence to spend. Confidence to invest. And most of all in recent decades, confidence to borrow.

As I said in “If After 30 years Of Unbroken Economic Growth Australia Can’t Afford To Protect The Most Vulnerable, Then Who Really Benefitted From That Economic Growth?“, fear of losing your own life trumps all other fears, logically. 

Thus it is impossible for people to be confident until they do not fear losing their lives. Note that this is also the finding of a report by McKinsey & Company, the premier consultancy to corporations, where they concluded that “only when the novel coronavirus is under control will economic growth resume”.

Now I realise that this political apparatus has spent a good amount of energy in misinforming and confusing people in order to pull the wool over their eyes since this pandemic began (I actually wrote that line before the WHO swung into damage control as they felt Dr. Nabarro’s comments about lockdowns were taken out of context which I will discuss in another post which I am now drafting).

However, the human reality of the pandemic continually asserts itself in a way that can not be ignored by the people no matter how much they might like to believe that they will be safe or that the risks to them are overstated by such reputable people as Dr. Fauci.

The shock that people are experiencing is real, and just as the shock from The Great Depression led to a deep scarring causing risk aversion that had repercussions even beyond that generation, these shocks are also likely to be long-lasting.

Strategists behind this political apparatus are very intelligent and sophisticated, and know that they are in a conundrum that cannot be solved.

Their political ideology and base of power will remain under threat until an effective vaccine is administered en masse, and to minimise the damage to them they will continually fight for minimal interventions (think of Tony Abbott’s views). When the sheer level of human pain forces increased measures, they will then immediately move to ruminate for rapid easing.

Everybody who genuinely believes in the primacy of protecting human life should be fighting against this apparatus, and should be prepared to continue arguing because it will not stop working to protect the privilege and power of the conservatives and elites.

In the second part of this essay I will pose the question on how might Dr. Milton Friedman, a hero to these conservative and elites, have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

WHO has stopped releasing daily Situation Reports and wisely is publishing a dashboard (similar to Johns Hopkins). As at 3:24 pm CEST 8 October, there have been 36,002,827 confirmed cases globally with 1,049,810 deaths.

Even though the WHO data shows over 36,000,000 human beings confirmed as having been infected by the virus, and the WHO suggesting that that number may only be 5% of the actual number suggesting that 10% of the global population has been infected, and over 1 million people have died with COVID-19 (the WHO suggests it is likely double that figure), news is full of the antics of just one infected person – the orange man who lives in the white house.

I am not going to waste my energy to comment other than to say two things: on Friday, including when he took his tour in front of the small gathering of “fans” outside the hospital, further endangering those salaried to obey his whims (not commands), and subsequently, he has reminded me of a 10 year old kid excited about heading out on a big adventure such is the level of his ignorance and narcissism; and I think it worth everybody considering the weight of medical intervention that was thrown at protecting this highly susceptible man to the ravages of this virus – reportedly to this point (less than 1 week post-infection) likely very early detection of infection, monoclonal antibodies, 3 courses of Remdesivir, and dexamethasone. That is an unprecedented level of care that probably nobody has previously received in the pandemic and most of the Americans who have contracted the virus, excepting the one percenters, could only dream of being fortunate enough to receive care that comes even close.

In my Coronavirus Update of 4th March I said the following:

My greatest concern is that all of the deficiencies of the US health system, that President Obama wanted to begin to address, are about to be laid bare. For all of the rhetoric about having the best health care in the world, the truth that that level of care is only accessible to the one percenters, while the average experience across American society is below that experienced in other comparable developed countries, is going to be revealed in a truly terrible manner I fear.

The problem is not the level of care that one man has received – I am very much against “an eye for an eye” philosophy including capital punishment – the problem is the strong contrast with the care received by others in the world including the many Americans who have lost their battle with COVID-19, still worried by who would pay for their treatment, while this man continually down-played its impacts to the point that distinguished medical journals are describing him as “dangerously incompetent“.

Enough said…

What I want most to talk about in this update is further developments on a theme that I have been discussing since late April – the risks around spread of COVID-19 with processed meat, concentrating on developments since my latest post on the subject one month ago.

As I discussed in that latest report I came across a link to some excellent research on the persistence of virus infectivity on meat – which I correctly quoted from the newspaper article as involving pork, salmon and shrimp (prawns), but which the actual research paper in pre-print showed involved pork, salmon and chicken – which reported that infectivity was maintained without loss over 3 weeks. Now I believe that these authors most likely were aware of my work drawing attention to the threat posed via this route and that this likely played a part in them deciding to conduct the study, as I stated in a post which I linked to in a comment below that pre-print, and so I have questioned whether they might consider whether that is worthy of acknowledgment. That does not detract in any way from the quality of research performed and the significance of the data.

It is highly significant that this research shows that the virus does not lose infectivity on meat over a 3 week period at refrigeration temperature or frozen. It highlights the risk that processed meat poses to spread the coronavirus geographically and to potentially cause clusters, even from meat that was stored for some period of time – perhaps after several years as another coronavirus has been shown to maintain infectivity for 2 years when frozen – even if biosecurity had been “perfect” at preventing introductions in the intervening period.

Now Australian and New Zealand’s food safety authority has been updating (as at 22 September) it’s published opinions on COVID-19, but the effect is still very much to downplay the risk of transmission to suggest that it should not be considered by consumers.

So let me expose their biases (possibly forced upon them by political interference) with one very simple statement of logic. Right from the very beginning of the pandemic – and still today, even in the aforementioned updated statement -these “experts” highlighted first that this is a respiratory virus so it is not a “foodborne disease”. However, it has been known for perhaps 100 years or more that respiratory viruses can be spread not only by inhaling droplets containing virus but by touching surfaces where those droplets settle and then transferring the virus to membranes such as in the eyes and nose. That, after all, is why one of the key management strategies stressed by all is to wash hands frequently. So what is so different about meat that it can not be one of those surfaces where the virus settles? (As I pointed out in my first writing it is my view that this is likely how at least some of the significant transmission that occurs in meat processing plants has occurred.)

Note that the published opinion is technical about what constitutes a foodborne disease – infection must be acquired through the digestive tract following consumption. This is known as a straw man strategy – set up a (false) proposition and knock it down, never acknowledging that this proposition was never what was originally claimed.

I have seen nobody, and certainly not myself, suggest that the main risk with meat was in consuming it (although I will say that this virus has a knack of surprising scientists -i.e. revealing that assumptions were made that proved incorrect – and infection in the process of ingesting uncooked foods of any form may yet be proven to present a risk). The main issue with potential infection by SARS-CoV-2 from contaminated (or infected) meat that I have been discussing is with handling it when uncooked including during food preparation.

Now this updated opinion does include some other relatively current information, much of it about how China has been responding to this threat, mostly to disparage them, and it is also draws on an opinion given by the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Food. With a title like that, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is a specialist group set up under the auspices of the United Nations/Food and Agriculture Organisation/World Health Organisation. No, on it’s site it says that:

Currently the Commission includes 18 members from 13 different countries: 8 members are from academia, 4 from governmental organisations and 6 from industry

The description does go on to attempt to further suggest close alignment with these supranational organisations by stating that some members have participated in their working groups, meetings and consultations, but that is a far, far cry from this being an outfit under the auspices of these important organisations. (After all, many of us can make the same point.)

For those who have experienced first-hand the many conflicts that scientists and researchers face, like these people, or if you have read my post “Politics and Biosecurity“, “On The Likelihood Of Transmission Of SARS-CoV-2 From Contaminated Meat” and even my R U OK Day post, you will note that the membership of this grouping does little to provide confidence that published opinions would be free from conflict.

Note this one piece of critical logic: the report by this grouping was published 3 September, but it failed to mention, let alone detail, the key findings that SARS-CoV-2 remains without appreciable loss of infectivity on a variety of processed meat for at least 3 weeks which was published in pre-print over 2 weeks earlier (and for which there was also articles in the mainstream media and discussion on Twitter). Even if the article was found following last minute searches prior to publication very late in the drafting process, such critical information should have been inserted in the “opinion” prior to it being published. Alternatively, if the finding was considered so significant as to require a significant redrafting process, then what is the point in publishing an “opinion” that is already out of date? That a paper was yet to be peer-reviewed, when dealing with a pathogen known to mankind for 9 months, is hardly a viable reason to exclude it entirely, after all the most powerful man in the world has just undergone multiple still experimental treatments for the disease it causes.

To say, or to use a quote from an opinion by a grouping of potentially industry-conflicted individuals, to say that “there is no documented evidence that food is a significant source or vehicle for transmission” is weak, misleading and utterly disappointing.

Again, it is another straw man argument – nobody has ever said that it is likely to be a route for a significant proportion of cases.

However, it does not need to be that for it to be a major concern in regions that have eliminated or stamped out the virus. That is why China’s approach is entirely valid, and why other nations – that have fought hard to protect their people from the extreme human costs of this pandemic – and where food security is not an even greater issue and\or can be managed satisfactorily – should consider doing likewise.

In fact, very much of Australia’s animal and plant biosecurity policy is based on that very premise! Australia has a global reputation for setting a very conservative “appropriate level of protection” for animal and plant biosecurity supported by very stringent measures for the importation of animals and plants, and their products, to prevent disease and pest introductions.

So I will say again, it is a great pity when Australian politicians appear to care more for the health of our prawns and bananas (and businesses) than they do about the health of our people.

Now, having said all of that I do want to say that it appears that the state Governments have heard my calls for extra measures in meat processing facilities and have instituted a number of risk management measures which should significantly reduce the likelihood of serious outbreaks which threaten their workers and the potential for spread of outbreaks. These measures include reducing the workforce in these facilities and weekly testing for the virus in 25% of the workforce. That is excellent and should be a comfort to everybody residing in and\or consuming Australian meat products, but I do note that an epidemiologist for whom I have a high regard, Prof. McLaws, is recommending that testing in high-risk workplaces should be increased.

For as long as we can have trust in the competence of our Government authorities tasked with managing the quality and safety of our meats – a standard assessment criterion in biosecurity – we can be confident that the risks associated with COVID-19 are being managed better than for many other countries. However, the paradox is that when officials understate and downplay the risks, to uphold confidence and thus minimise economic impacts on the industry and more broadly, the more they erode that trust and suggest that their actions will be less than transparent should there be important developments.

I have always also been quite concerned with butchers, for the same reasons (i.e. they are in regular contact with a product that may be contaminated with virus in the similar conditions as in meat processors), and the cluster involving the Chadstone shopping centre, and specifically a butchery, came as little surprise to me. I would note while authorities seem to suggest that the infection was brought into the premise on people, specifically a family who were contracted as their cleaners, without definitive evidence to the contrary, it is also possible that they became infected in the process of cleaning the facilities due to contaminated meat.

Moreover, I also noted these comments by Prof. Sutton, CHO for Victoria, with regards to this cluster (my emphasis):

The interactions probably would have been less than what we would call a close contact for customers. But again, you can get individuals who are very infectious. And you can be unlucky with that interaction and that’s why the callout has been to everyone who was there at that time.

I have a high regard for Prof. Sutton, and I am willing to look past known errors made by Victorian politicians at this point because I do believe that their motivation has very much been to protect human life, but these comments do reveal how lesser likely routes of transmission – such as with food contaminated by infected workers – can remain underappreciated.

On a related issue, to demonstrate just how serious can be the animal reservoir and spread issue when dealing with susceptible species, a further 1 Million mink will be culled in Denmark as SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was found to infect animals in 41 farms and is suspected in another 20 farms!

That this issue is not more widely discussed should be proof enough for just how much desire there is for the general public to not be alerted to the nature of these risks.

In “COVID-19 Elephants In The Room” which I released 10 March – think about how early in the pandemic that was – I said the following:

Something has been in the back of my mind – a nagging concern – that I did not really want to acknowledge even to myself.

This is a new viral disease to humanity. The very basics are barely understood such as what type of disease does it cause and how severe is it, how does it transfer, and how do people become unwell and how many will become so unwell that they will die. There is still very much unknown. My friend Dr Shi Zhengli only discovered the viral cause of the new pneumonia-related disease, now referred to as COVID-19, just over 2 months ago.

Now think about HIV and how long it took for scientists to get a reasonable understanding on how it caused disease in humans. Sure, our tools have improved since early in the HIV pandemic but that virus was tricky compared with other viruses then known to science.

So what has been in my mind is that the superficially apparent aspect of disease visible as the pandemic ramps up may not be the only aspect of how this virus causes disease in humans. If we were unlucky, there could be some more chronic element – perhaps more chronic disease leading to mortalities or disability, or foetal defects – who knows, almost anything is possible.

The main point of my article then was to discuss how foolhardy it would be of decision-makers to assume at that very early stage that they fully understood the risks that would be involved with not doing everything within their power to halt the progress of the pandemic, or worse, if a strategy like herd immunity from natural infection were adopted.

Since writing this there have been many surprises in the areas to which I was pointing. There have been a plethora of stories of chronic impacts from even mild infection and support groups have sprung up throughout social media. One of the most recent stories to emerge is detailed in this story on ABC.net.au entitled “Experts warn coronavirus may cause ‘wave’ of neurological conditions including Parkinson’s disease“.

Unbelievably that herd immunity debate continues as some will not give up on the concept even though many scientists are openly pointing to the catastrophic consequences of such a strategy. Even in the UK where the pandemic has raged with inconsistent and typically delayed responses, it is believed that only 8% of people are immune due to prior infection. Obviously the mathematics do not add up – at this rate it would take 3-4 more years for 60-70% of the population to have developed immunity (required for herd immunity) from having been infected – and that assumes that immunity is not lost over time, when in reality early research is suggesting that is in fact what occurs. Thus herd immunity is unlikely to ever be achieved by natural infection. To this point, with the pandemic raging in the UK for 6 months, over 40,000 Britons have died from COVID-19. At an annual rate of around 80,000 lives lost that is a very high cost indeed for a likely ineffective strategy.

For my next update I will recap the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and outline my views on what lies ahead for next year…

Addendum: A highly significant piece of research from CSIRO has shown that the novel coronavirus can persist and remain infective on a variety of surfaces for much longer than most would have predicted (i.e. assumed) including for 28 days on glass, stainless steel and paper and polymer bank notes at 20C. (Infectivity was rapidly lost when subjected to 40C). That is hugely significant for risk management and even needs to be considered when goods travel across borders from regions with high prevalence of COVID-19 to regions that have worked hard to minimise the spread of COVID-19 and\or eliminate it. Ironically, when I first mentioned that risk, in my landmark coronavirus update of 11 February, I wondered whether people might fear receiving goods shipped from China. Now one must wonder whether electronics and other products containing glass or other hard materials shipped from the US and other regions severely impacted by the pandemic may be treated with suspicion. Perhaps an idea to decline expedited shipping and\or ensure packaged goods are subjected to 40C for a period prior to opening…

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

If I could draw a cartoon to depict the Treasurer as he presented his budget, I would draw a balding man sitting at a table with two whisks of hair pulled from each side to form a large, taught cross on the top of his head, all fingers and toes crossed tightly, and multiple 6-sided dice atop the budget document with all of them having the coronavirus on 5 sides and only 1 with a syringe symbolising a safe and effective vaccine.

I see this Australian federal budget as an enormous gamble with our future.

Everything is on (and for) business to lead the recovery which requires no further, perhaps wider, phases of significant community transmission by the mass administration of an effective vaccine delivered soon, or highly effective suppression (because even though not admitted by Morrison, elimination is out the window because it would delay Victorian re-opening) which global experience suggests is unlikely.

Globally, an issue with the proliferation of cheap\free financing to businesses widely discussed by money managers – fund managers and financial analysts – has been the zombification of businesses through the ending of creative destruction where unsustainable businesses are able to continue, thus soaking up resources which would more productively be put to use in innovative businesses of the future.

The tax breaks to business will exacerbate that.

I have a close contact in the residential building industry. He told me that he was surprised his business was eligible for Jobkeeper, etc, and that his business has been literally raking it in. On top of that, each month since July they have set successive records for incoming business (been in operation for 20+years), no doubt because the Government assured the banks ahead of time that they would loosen the responsible lending regulations to ensure they kept shovelling out finance to the property-addicted.

(Just remember who is the back-stop for the banks and thus the housing bubble! )

Clearly these measures are blunt, much of it will be wasted, we won’t have an economy fit for our future, and we are likely to borrow much more again when all that becomes clear or even earlier with further waves of the pandemic.

This Government has repeatedly shown that it has no idea of how to manage an economy of the future. They only want to manage our economy back to the past.

Where is the Government infrastructure spend to make long term investments in our productive capacity and environmental sustainability?

On 11 February in my “Coronavirus Update” I said the following:

Any stimulus to create activity will need to be activity that does not require people to come together.

Nine months later into this pandemic and the Morrison Government still fails to grasp the reality of a global pandemic, and has wasted an enormous amount of time and human capital by focusing only on attempting to take us back to the way things were instead of setting the people free to innovate a brighter future.

I find no succour in this Government’s willingness to borrow more against my family’s future if this plan fails on the back of a devastating pandemic. And I am reminded that the second wave of the 1918 flu in Australia was devastating, and fear that we are setting up for history to repeat (note I do not consider the cases in April\May this year to represent a genuine first wave as there was minimal community transmission).

Morrison and Frydenberg have continually thrown jibes at people who understood early the consequences of pandemic and who continue to argue for the primacy of protecting human life – they say that we want to wish the virus away.

On the contrary, this budget proves it is they who have continually refused to come to terms with the human reality of pandemic, and thus have only one strategy to which they repeatedly return – minimise interventions aiming to impede the pandemic spread, and when other state leaders impose them, mount political pressure to have them eased as soon as possible.

This budget attaches every last bit of their political capital to not undergoing lockdown again, and that makes these politicians dangerous.

It should now be obvious to all that for their budget strategy to have any chance of success, then it is absolutely imperative that Victoria must act on the side of caution when re-opening to ensure the outbreak is fully stamped out. Yet they have continually mounted political pressure for it to be brought forward.

The Morrison Government strategy underpinning the budget assumptions also highlights the need to genuinely give attention to a broader set of risks on how new clusters could be initiated – as discussed at MacroEdgo – such as with processed meat contaminated by infected workers (take particular note of the current Chadstone cluster) and from reservoirs of infected animals as this virus infects many more species than just us homo sapiens. 

Note that both of these pathways may represent a risk for a number of years into the future even if our international biosecurity measures are perfect from now on (e.g. it is possible that people may be infected by handling meat contaminated with virus that has been frozen for a significant period).

I am tired of the press, even from the left, granting this Government a pass apparently based on “a good effort”. 

That is ironic given the ideology that these conservatives sprout.

This budget adds to the Morrison Government’s failures. They are clueless and place political ideology ahead of the national interest, and this budget attaches their political fortunes entirely to opening up for business so that they will become as desperate and dangerous as other populist conservatives if or when events run away from them.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

We have all been duped, like in a classic Rob Mariano double-cross maneuvre in the Survivor series my family is currently binge watching.

At the end of July, and early in the latest outbreak in Melbourne, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his aim was now “aggressive” suppression and when pressed on what that meant, clarified that as zero community transmission.

It must have felt right to him to give this message to fearful Melbournians uncertain of what lay ahead.

Now the fissures in the conservatives are being exposed since the blow torch is being applied in the public glare first by the ultra conservatives exemplified by Tony Abbott’s recent comments in the UK – no doubt trying to impress his populist-leaning future employer – and now by business elites, traditionally strong supporters of the conservatives.

From these groups Morrison is under enormous political pressure to back away from his commitment to zero community transmission, and instead to have lesser measures which would minimise impacts on businesses.

That is how we arrived in recent weeks at Morrison attempting to try Premier Palaszczuk in the court of public opinion, especially when a young woman was prevented from attending her father’s funeral due to Queensland’s strong biosecurity measures. Cynically he used the emotion surrounding one funeral – incredibly traumatic and stressful for the people impacted – to put political pressure to force a reduction in biosecurity measures which as a consequence would increase the likelihood of more funerals being held than otherwise, and thus many more people grieving for the loss of loved-ones.

For Morrison zero community transmission was apparently just a thought bubble for that moment in time, but he has never really gotten the idea behind “People Before Money” which the majority of Australians naturally support.

If, on the other hand, he did finally find his road to Damascus and realised that minimising human impacts was the humane path to follow, he has wilted as the blow torch was applied.

In either case it is a less than acceptable performance by Morrison.

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While the prescience of my writing on COVID-19 is undeniable, I do not suggest for a moment that my record is perfect – it is just closer than any “expert” or any other person who has had the courage to utter their views publicly from early on (obviously in this tongue-in-cheek comment I am guilty of not being sufficiently modest, but if you read my R U OK day post then perhaps you might agree that I have earned the right to grandstand a little, even if from the outset of the pandemic I had wished that I was wrong).

The two areas where I have been most wrong are related. Like the Swedish epidemiologist who advocated for developing a herd immunity strategy, I made several assumptions automatically of which I was not aware until developments revealed them because they were wrong.

Firstly, in those first writings in early February, I thought that all wealthy developed countries would do everything in their power to minimise loss of life. As a former animal biosecurity policy analyst I knew that our health officials would have plans in place to deal with this eventuality, and I just assumed that national decision-makers would automatically implement them.

Secondly, and flowing on from the first, I considered that closing of land borders between states and like-minded countries would not occur. In other words I thought that ring fencing would be more localised and dynamic\adaptive (bearing in mind that the level of granularity on measures would necessarily need to reflect the wide degree and large number of uncertainties with a pathogen known to mankind for only a short period of time).

Because the first assumption was not met, and balancing economic impacts with human impacts has fallen on sharp ideological political lines between right wing conservatives and left wing progressives, the importance of these borders demarcated by political jurisdictions has grown in importance in biosecurity risk management to those who have prioritised minimising loss of human life.

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Let me be clear, I am tough on politicians – I know that – but the world has been crying out for good leadership for a very long time, including in Australia. Still politicians are human beings, also, and in a crisis nobody will be perfect.

What is important, however, is from where the motivation for actions come – if at their very basis is a deep love for humanity, or whether it is driven by greed and aspiration for personal power and advantage.

Most human beings have a reasonably good antenna for detecting that motivation.

One additional motivation in Australia that has existed for decades, but is rarely discussed in terms of costs to the nation, is the imperative to stay in good stead with the United States. Over the decades this has led to Australia taking part in US conflicts which were thinly justified for the US let alone Australia. Now in the COVID-19 pandemic we have a US president who has chosen to not protect human life as he could, and is extremely sensitive to being shown up – especially by comparison to other English-speaking countries – for doing a better job at protecting their citizens. It is perverse now that a factor to be considered especially by like-minded conservative politicians is not earning the ire of the US President for being seen to better protect our citizens.

With retrospect, it is hardly any wonder why Trump has gotten particularly provocative towards China over the origin of the virus given how China showed how to get on top of the pandemic and protect its people so that over the last month there have been zero cases of community transmission in mainland China and the official death toll stood at 4,743 in mid-September as the US’s closed in on 200,000. In a population of over a billion people, coming from where they were with the limited knowledge they possessed on the virus in those first few weeks of January, this is a remarkable effort. I have never discounted the likelihood of some level of management of official data in China, but equally I have been clear that I understood that virtually every country has the potential to do likewise, and likely has to varying degrees. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the scale of the catastrophe in the US is far, far worse than in China.

The reality of the matter is that now that the economic data is rolling in from around the world, the anticipated economic benefit of lesser social isolation measures by some countries has not materialised. Moreover, it is becoming clear that the economic impacts on nations is somewhat proportional to the degree of human impacts (i.e. in terms of lost lives). In other words, countries that have fought hard to stop the spread of the virus (with strong social isolation measures, etc) and thus minimised human costs have experienced lesser falls in economic growth than countries where the pandemic has spread widely and caused larger numbers of deaths. Again, in retrospect this should be of no surprise as common sense says that the greatest fear for anybody is death – it supersedes all other fears – which highlights the extreme short-sightedness of those with an eye on “confidence” by arguing against the use of face masks as just one example.

Summing it up well is this passage from Milton Friedman’s famous doctrine “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is To Increase Its Profits“:

WHETHER blameworthy or not, the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society. I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in matters that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general.

In the face of this emerging evidence, clearly politicians and others still arguing for reduced measures on the grounds of national economies have alternate motivations.

I believe that the key to those other motives are found in the plethora of articles reflecting on the simpler lives being led in the COVID-19 era, as I pre-empted early in the pandemic in “The Great Reset” and which I discussed in several articles would frighten the incumbent business elites.

This fear is highlighted by the following comment on an ABC.net.au post inviting people to reflect on how the pandemic has affected their spending habits:

Conservative politicians the world over through the pandemic have used the mental anguish of those in social isolation to garner support for reducing and minimising biosecurity measures. I understand from personal experience that mental health is a serious issue but it misses the point that to choose to ameliorate this by loosening the measures is the same as treating the symptom and not the cause.

Young Australians have increasingly been feeling despondent for their prospects in the lucky country before the pandemic. A far more compassionate and better approach for these people who are the future of our country would be to use this pandemic-induced paradigm shift to authentically address the inequities and other issues which have long held them back from feeling that their future is as bright and full of optimism as earlier generations enjoyed.

Politically intractable issues such as equality and equity, affordable housing and environmental issues must be central to confidence-building reforms.

There needs to be a bright spotlight shone on the fact that many do not want things to simply return to the past, because that is depressing in itself.

Instead of concerning himself only with the optimism of business, Morrison should concern himself with the optimism of our future – young Australians – and while protecting their health he should open his mind to a program which can lead to a genuinely bright future rather than trying to take everyone back to the “Truman Show” nirvana built on nothingness.

It is a very great pity that PM Morrison has chosen to politicise state Government responses, pitting state against state, and especially using harsh comparisons of the Victorian response in relation to the NSW response which has been placed on a pedestal. This only serves to increase the pressure on first line responders who are doing their best, both in Victoria and NSW. It also increases the political capital invested in the continued success of those NSW contact tracers, and thus incentivises a reduction in transparency should these data become less flattering (so that its public release is obscured, delayed or worse).

It is becoming apparent that what the conservatives fear most from the pandemic is not serious impacts to the Australian economy. What they really fear is the end of their ideological paradigm – the end of laissez faire greed is good, walking over anybody is justified, win at all costs, nothing is ever enough, toxic aspiration.

Through this pandemic it has been a common refrain of right wing conservatives to say that people who are for strong measures aimed at minimising loss of human life are driven by a desire to pretend the virus does not exist. In fact it is the opposite, and it is those who continually argue for minimal measures and quick re-openings who are guilty of continually making that mistake. Whenever such a course of action has been followed, the reality of the pandemic quickly asserted itself and people’s reaction to the escalating human cost either forced a rapid reversal or at least people’s behaviour has produced the same result.

For example, in recent days Jamie Dimon, long-term CEO of US investment bank JP Morgan, incidentally known as a Democrat supporter (I have to admit that I consider very few Wall Street professionals to be genuinely left of centre), has insisted that his employees begin to return to their offices but that was dealt an immediate blow when one of their traders in New York was found to be infected and the office was shut. Moving into winter such efforts in the northern hemisphere will be very problematic.

These are not unintelligent people and surely are well aware of Einstein’s definition of insanity. Thus it is difficult to escape the conclusion that what is being defended is not national economies but an ideology on what constitutes contemporary capitalism.

I was prepared to accept Mr Morrison at his word when he said that his aim was for zero community transmission. However, it appears that I repeated my error of believing that decision makers would naturally want to minimise human impacts.

Addendum: This article by Ian Varrender on ABC.net.au quotes a McKinsey review which supports the assertion that economic activity can be best protected in the pandemic by strong measures to protect human life.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

Readers who have followed my commentary since early February will know that I have been prescient from the beginning of the pandemic.

Those who have found my commentary more recently will have some idea of my accuracy, but it is reading ahead of time my views on what is likely to occur and then seeing that come to fruition when the perception of prescience is really underlined.

Typing away in isolation without contact with anybody who would even remotely be considered an Australian “insider” has been useful to keep my ideas as free as possible from groupthink, but is also difficult as even the most self-assured writer appreciates some (evidence of) positive feedback – though I must admit to being a bit like Groucho Marx, sceptical of any group\club that would want me to join it! – and in my “About Me” page I made it clear that I have good reasons for not permitting comments (interaction, debate or trolling) on my site.

Then came the pandemic! In other words, this is how I have worked for years before it became fashionable in 2020!

I have, however, had that confirmation from a few sources during the pandemic – a coffee mate who also reads my FB posts said in April “if only they listened to you – everything has happened exactly the way you said it would”, and a portfolio manager at one of Australia’s best-known boutique fund managers in a personal email thanked me for pointing him in the right direction early in the pandemic.

Perhaps most important to me has been my friendship with Zhengli. I do not wish to betray our friendship by saying too much. I will just say that in our email contact she has said very little about her own work to me (and what she did mention is widely known), and has been sparing in her own views of the future, other than to say early on that she agreed with my concerns over the potential for meat to play a role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

That is a concern I began expressing publicly in late April and is summed up in this passage from my open letter to The Australian Prime Minister and Ministers for Health and Agriculture published on my site on 29 April:

A far more significant and society-wide concern is the potential for SARS-CoV-2 contamination of meat during processing and its persistence in product which may lead to processed meat being a significant factor in spreading and prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic.

I then released on 1 May a detailed post on the issue entitled “COVID-19 And Food Safety in Processed Meat“.

I also expressed these concerns in comments on “The Conversation” which has been my go-to site to drive reader interest in my own site (given that I am hamstrung by not participating in Twitter for the same reasons discussed above).

Now that potential has been proven by a nice piece of research by a group in Singapore headed by an ex-pat Australian (whom I had been aware of since he wrote an interesting article published on The Conversation in March). I stumbled upon a reference to this new research in a news article just prior to publishing my most recent piece on the topic, which prompted a quick but prominent paragraph insertion in that post.

Given that in my piece I had been writing about my being an outsider being an advantage to me, including by not being subjected to the omnipresent coercive pressures that career scientists face (which this more recent article has also highlighted), I was keen to write to the senior author with some questions on why he did the work and how it was funded. Dale responded promptly and was very obliging.

It was not until later that I began to think about how I had a reader from Singapore looking around my site some time back, who had not visited again since. When I looked through the viewing logs for my site I saw that they had visited on 1 May and again on 5 May looking at several pages, when I had just released my report on the potential for contaminated meat to spread SARS-CoV-2, “COVID-19 and Food Safety“, and when I had been active in promoting my concerns over this potential including writing comments on “The Conversation” and open letters to politicians.

As I said in my recent post about my career, I had to accept when I retired that I was never going to be given the full credit I deserved for my contribution to my field.

Now in the COVID-19 pandemic what is most important is that good science is performed to help humanity to overcome our serious challenges. And as I said in a comment below the pre-print of this research, I am very pleased that these researchers have conducted this research and so very well.

If, however, the idea, or the seed of the idea, to conduct this research was gained by reading my ideas then it is only right that I be recognised for my contribution in some manner, even if I am a maverick outsider!

Just a little food for thought to those who can make or encourage the adjustment…

Or not…

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

I have 23 cousins on my father’s side, but when I was a young boy, Ernie stood out above all others. Ernie was my brother’s age, 8 years older than me, and he was a real farm boy. He was always with my Uncle Charlie on his frequent visits to help Dad out in our early years on our own farm. One day Ernie was helping fit a “quick hitch” to the hydraulic lifting bars at the back of a tractor when the heavy steel implement jumped and cut him above the eye. I cried for ages because Ernie was hurt.

When I was 13 we received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was my uncle (or perhaps aunt) informing Dad and Mum that Ernie had taken his own life. My siblings and I had woken and come out of our rooms in time to understand what had happened, and to see Mum tell Dad that he needed to go and be with his brother.

My father’s response never left me: with eyes wide like a wild cat trapped in the corner of a pen he said “Why, what am I going to do, tell him I’m sorry his boy bumped himself off!”

I now understand that he was in shock and did not know how to cope with his own emotions. But as a boy the shock of seeing and hearing that compounded the confusion and shock that I was feeling.

A few years later when I was 15 that same inability to deal with strong emotions led to an even greater shock to my system in a near catastrophic way that bore many similarities. I discussed the event briefly on the “About Me” page and in my post “People Before Money“, and will not add further detail here.

Many years later, the consequent impacts on me were revealed when I reached a low point as I had to face up to grief at the loss of my career, of hopes of what I wanted to achieve for myself and my family (e.g. home ownership), and even of my original family connections, the strains of which had been growing since I decided not to go back to the farm after completing my undergraduate degree.

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In the preceding years the strains on me had been growing inexorably. By the time I finished my PhD I already felt exhausted as for the final pivotal 2.5+ years of that program I had to manage a very difficult relationship with my supervisor. In fact, if it were not for the fact that in that second last year we were on separate continents for 9 full months, through the most critical and most productive period of my research, there is a good chance that I would have quit my PhD program.

I recall saying to my wife that I felt that I came really close to a breakdown then and I never really had a chance to recover. And the threat that was made to my career, which on the one hand drove me to excel in an attempt to create some buffer against this threat, was a continual source of extreme anxiety as I felt as if I was forever walking on eggshells. No it felt like I was continually dancing on burning coals.

After completing my PhD I had a series of professionally unfulfilling roles. All the while I was doing extra work in my own time to keep up a publication record in order to get my research career on track. Then a brilliant opportunity to work alongside JR Bonami in France proved that it is difficult to have everything – the price of taking up the opportunity was an enormous drop in family income (of 80%), severe isolation for me as nobody would talk to me in the lab while I was unable to speak French, and extreme isolation for my wife which left her in such awful shape that I almost declined the opportunity to take a prestigious fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the following year.

If conditions were difficult in France they got downright surreal in Munich. The first 6 months were productive even though there was little interaction with colleagues as the person I was going to work with had been seconded to another city to work on a project. But about half way through the year I somehow offended a favourite student of the head of the institute and the next day all of my work disappeared from the lab. After a series of meetings the head of the institute suggested that the (histology) technician would continue looking for my work and would let me know if it was found. That night I returned to the institute and found that all of my samples were stored behind locked doors in a long series of store cupboards outside the histology lab. Even though I could reach them from the adjoining unlocked compartment by contorting myself in a way that I could not hope to repeat even a few years later, rescuing my work would have to wait until the final night of my fellowship as they were worthless to me without access to the equipment I needed to process the samples. I informed the Humboldt foundation of developments all the way along, and they were very apologetic, but there was nothing they could do. I spent the final months in Munich working in our apartment on papers and reviewing others’ papers while my wife had an excellent job working on an international project with Wrigley confectionary company.

I said that I “somehow” offended the student, but here is the full strange story if it is of interest.

We were stuck in limbo in Munich. For my career the best approach was to accept the opportunity to work in Don Lightner’s lab in Tucson, Arizona, whose partnership with Bonami led to them being the leaders in the field of crustacean virology. But my wife had personal reasons for wanting to move to Brisbane, many of which she did not even fully understand. To breach the impasse I acquiesced even though I knew that the chances of me being able to continue in my career were not good.

I spent 18 months in Brisbane unemployed, working from a desk at an institute at University of Queensland, furiously writing research proposals for a fellowship and/or research funding, along with trying to prove my worth to the institute as a potential staff member. Universities across Australia have long been full of such unemployed or massively underemployed people with PhDs and Masters degrees – it is an enormous waste of human capital.

Although I had been with the love of my life since 20, and we both desperately wanted to have a family, it never seemed the right time due to the pressure that we had been living under for my career and now I was 34. Just as we decided to try for a family, I was approached to take up a 3 month contract position in Bangkok. I accepted it, but it did more damage to my mental health in that I do not think that I slept well even for the fortnight that my wife joined me, as I heard every creak and groan in my colleague’s apartment – essentially I was a place-holder, and at a local wage about a half of an Australian wage (which was not going to help us to afford to buy a home in Brisbane).

A few months later we were blessed with the news of our expecting arrival, and for that next door to open it was clear that the door must be closed on my career. I knew that the pursuit of my career had done a lot of damage to my mental health, after dancing on those burning coals for 14 years so well as to be considered an emerging world leader in a field that had value to my country. My mind had become accustomed to running at 120% of capacity since I had returned from Europe as it continually whirled to come up with the right plan to continue my career.

The grief at my loss was overwhelming, and the hole that was left in my thoughts was so immense that I fell into a very dark and frightening place of despair. I was warned by friends that I needed to begin to fill that void even before I retired, but my pain felt so great that I felt unable to do that. I think I felt that I needed to experience all of the pain and self pity, to let it almost destroy me.

The weaknesses that had been built into my thoughts and resilience at home before moving to university then came into play. These strains pulled at every fibre of my security. Home prices in Brisbane had doubled in the few years since we first moved to Europe and it seemed like the pursuit of my career had cost us a chance at ever owning a home. Virtually all family relationships had been straining for years, in part because of the stringency of conditions under which were raised fearing the loss of our farm, and in part because both families struggled with dealing with a mixed culture marriage. Both my wife and I were struggling to find our feet in a new city with all of these pressures. 

After presenting at a hospital, panicked with anxiety at how I could possibly find the strength to go on, I was referred to a psychologist who helped me to confront these fears that I had been avoiding. It was not easy by any stretch, and it was not achieved in one session or even one period of sessions. After that initial breakdown I spoke with her for a period mainly about my professional career, decompressed for a while, and then as I got low again I went through another period of sessions this time to mostly sort out what had happened with my family. 

I have gone through cycles because there were a lot of issues to cover. The psychologist suggested that the shock that I experienced as a 15 year old was so great that it probably manifested a form of post traumatic stress disorder, and that such things often create blockage to development especially when it happens at such a critical age for maturation and personal development.

Twenty years of emotional stunting cannot be overcome quickly, and as the therapist once said to me, there is no need to put pressure on myself to solve everything – some work must be left for the next generation! 

Thankfully, each cycle has been less acute and frightening than the previous, and it is my sincerest hope that I have not passed on too many weaknesses for my sons to work through for themselves. But anxiety and panic is like an addictive disorder – one can never feel cured, and an important aspect of recovery is accepting that it is a lifelong affliction that will need to be managed carefully.

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I was always a very shy lad. I don’t really know how much my school friends were aware of it. I was always well liked but I felt unconfident. I remember in high school riding the school bus home most afternoons sitting near the front facing out the window continuously out of fear that the other kids would see my watery eyes seeping as a symptom of social anxiety. I was big and well-built, captain of the rep football team and even captained my region, which is well known for birthing football stars, at the state carnival. My social awkwardness meant that I would rather sit at school with other young lads who were probably a little less mature, and less socially competent, and play sports (mostly football) at lunch time.

When I finished year 12 I asked my parents if I could stay on the farm, but they said that I needed some sort of qualification behind me in case they one day sold or lost the farm. School came very easily to me even though I barely studied, while I never felt competent or interested in any trade skills, so I decided to go to university.

My parents drove me the 275Kms to university in our early 70s Toyota Landcruiser single cab, me on the outside and mum in the middle. I was 17 and 1 month to the day. For the first 6 months I called home regularly, sometimes in tears, begging to be able to come home. My parents stayed strong, even though they surely would have been tempted to weaken, and then I began to flourish socially. When I shaved my head for a university ball towards the end of that first year, they must have realised that I was not coming home soon, and the possibility that I might never come home should have crossed their minds (although I almost certainly would have returned to the farm if I had not met the love of my life in the final year of my undergraduate degree).

Even though I was popular, big and strong, no doubt a “real country boy” for the “city slicker” students who were common in my marine biology course, I was still extremely shy and unconfident behind those shoulders that could bench press 130 kg by the time I was 18 years. In my second year at college a meeting was held with just the first year students to find out why they were not joining in the social activities, and I snuck in with a mate and sat on the billiard table at the back of the room. After some discussion a common theme emerged, and then a young female stood and said that she was afraid of me. Virtually everybody agreed, and the story went along the lines that when walking along the long corridors towards them they found my size intimidating, and that I only “grunted” at them. A senior female friend assured them that I was really a nice guy if they just looked past the muscles. The truth was that I was more afraid of them, especially the girls, and the prettier I considered them, the less able I was to get out any intelligible words.

The ultimate irony is that the young lady who stood first to say that she was afraid of me had a long-term boyfriend, but later that year, on the night that she broke up with him, her friends rushed to tell me what had happened and that she was on a mission to find me!

Admittedly, for the guys I was happy to let them believe of me what they wanted.  For boys the relationship historically did involve some level of intimidation, especially in O Week which culminated in the Fresher Vs Fossils football game, and the football field was my domain. Part of that is to see who has grit and character to earn the respect of the seniors. But people assuming who I was based on how I looked was also a bit of a defense mechanism. The truth is that I was not an aggressive guy. I did do very well at 2 of the 3 “F’s” which marked an archetypical country boy good night out – and the third which I was hopeless at should be plain from above – but I was far less angry than many other lads that I came up against. I never picked fights, but as a big young guy there are often lads with a chip on their shoulder who feel they need to continually prove themselves. I did not take a backward step to that behaviour, and most of the time they were very quick to realise their error, but on a few occasions I came up against other lads that clearly had so much anger and aggression that they would do anything to win and would not stop until either they or I were unable to continue.

I was a mixed-up lad, not an angry mixed-up lad, thankfully.

I carried my pain in a less explosive way. My bombs tended to blow up internally in me, creating continual and profound sadness, and lingering self doubt. I remember as a teenager I asked my family at the breakfast table once whether anybody else woke up every morning feeling sick in the pit of their stomach. 

These were all symptoms of the pain that I carried but I had never addressed or even acknowledged until that visit to the hospital. They had undermined me for over half of my life, and had robbed me of contentment and joy. I knew that I had to come to terms with the events of my life to become the father that I desperately wanted to be to my unborn child, and to continue to develop into the best husband I could be to my beautiful wife.

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In those first few years after the breakdown it literally felt like I was thinking through mud. Actually, through molten copper as the wiring in my brain had overheated due to the over-revving, never managing to gain traction, causing everything to shut down as in a burnt out electric motor. 

I was extremely fortunate to have the love of an amazing woman who understood what I went through and prioritised me and our family’s wellbeing. 

In this world where we are encouraged to be forever competitive and aspirational, and always on a treadmill, wheels spinning endlessly but never appearing to go anywhere, I learned that the secret to me not feeling anxious was to stop placing expectations on myself. In my role as primary caregiver for my family there were just a few things that were absolutely vital, but even many of them could be flexible based on how I felt on the day. For instance, if I did not get around to making dinner, well there is always another solution – leftovers or something in the cupboard or a quick visit to the shop. 

When I worked professionally I used lists, physically or in my mind, to hold myself to account and make myself guilty when I failed to accomplish every task. In the early days after my breakdown the only time I used lists was when I felt a little confused and muddled, so it acted as security when I was feeling low to give me ideas on things I might want to do.

Being kind to myself mostly meant not making myself accountable to lists of things that “needed doing”. In many ways I now live like the archetypical Italian where the philosophy is the reverse of typical Anglo culture – put off until tomorrow what you possibly can and want to. And given our links into Italian culture nowadays, it was interesting to learn that just how Anglo’s can become stressed by Italians’ apparent unwillingness to commit themselves ahead of time, Italians become stressed by Anglo’s desire and pushing for them to commit themselves to plans ahead of time. It is not in their nature or culture, and for me it works, too.

If I reflect on it, I probably have three levels of priority of tasks (and nowadays I very rarely use lists of any type). There are a very few things that I must do according to a strict routine, like dropping the kids at school; there are things that I should do some time during the day or even week, but if that slips it’s not the end of the world; and things that I would like to do some day but only when I feel like it.

What I find is that I do a lot of those tasks that I would like to do some day – my home and  surrounds are full of those completed projects – but I don’t beat myself up and feel guilty when I let projects slide.

This attitude should not be confused with a careless attitude. Not at all. The nature that led to me being a world-class scientist remains and I still have a strong internal drive to always seek improvement, optimisation, efficiency, and always seek to excel at whatever it is that I do. I just learned to stop kicking myself, concentrating more on the process and effort, not so much the outcome while understanding it will take care of itself, and I have raised my sons in the same fashion.

My ever supportive wife, having seen me at my lowest, understands how I must now work, and even if it is not her style, she actually has been realising that there are very significant health benefits to this attitude towards tasks.

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I have learned through my life that people’s perception of me usually has more to do with them than me, and no matter whether it is positive or negative, it often acts to fulfill a need they have for whatever reason. To some I have been a wonderful person of real character and substance who can be depended on, while to others at the same time I have been a terrible person, and in fact the source of all that was wrong with their lives. 

Sadly the latter has been the view of some who under different circumstances may have been very close to me, and I have learned to console myself in the fact that I have at least played some purpose in their lives by being their villain.

I never was the person many people thought I was as a lad. I may have been a big strong country boy, good and tough footballer, but I never was a “blokey bloke”. Perhaps it is my fault that I never set about putting them straight, but my social awkwardness meant that if they assumed that I was somebody not to be messed with then that gave me some buffer of protection. I had never been in a fight until I was 15 when a guy almost 2 years older than me thought he would call my bluff. He was right, it was a bluff, but that day in the school ground he and I both learned that I could back it up in dramatic fashion.

If how people perceive us has at least as much to do with them as it does us, and if authenticity is a rare commodity in adults, well lets just say that genuine authenticity in teenagers is feared by them as much as superman fears kryptonite.

When I returned to my home town while I was studying for my PhD, old football mates would ask whether I was still playing, and my response that I was concentrating on my PhD invariably drew the response “that’s a pity”. On one level it was humorous to me, on another it was an uncomfortable feeling of not meeting others’ expectations based on past perceptions of me.

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Now that I have fully set the scene on what led me to have a breakdown, roughly what happened, and what was the immediate aftermath and effects, here are some final thoughts and specific tips on my recovery and my life dealing with the consequent challenges.

One thing that I have learned from dealing with depression, anxiety and panic is the absolute concrete truth in that no psychological state lasts. Those predisposed to melancholy know only too well that happiness is fleeting, as is excitement, and here I have to admit that the breakdown did rob me of the ability to feel excitement because excited energy always gives way to anxious energy in me, so I have had to suppress this emotion. But I have learned to tell myself that depression and anxiety will pass, too, and then the days will feel lighter and brighter again, and that will be even quicker if I can manage to turn things around before becoming anxious about being anxious. That is the insidious nature of dealing with depression and anxiety.

I was introduced to guided meditation as a lad by a body builder from my home town who gave me some tapes which I really enjoyed. Back then I could manage to relax very deeply. I have found guided meditation an excellent way to regain control when I feel quite anxious. Even if I have rarely managed to achieve the depth of relaxation I did as a lad, with practice I always manage to gain quite a good deal of relief and control over anxious thoughts with guided meditation.

The last time I got fairly low, which was quite a few years ago now, I did a course in cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). I found it extremely helpful because I learned some useful physical techniques, such as stomach breathing to calm myself down quickly if I feel anxious, and I learned to monitor my stress and anxiety levels, and then techniques to deal with the thoughts that were creating anxiety. I recommend CBT highly.

The most important takeaway that I would give anybody about my experience – the one thing that I would say if I could somehow send a message to myself at a prior point in time – would be to do everything possible to find the courage to seek help before falling into that hole. Even if I could not bring myself to develop another focus before ending my career, if I ensured that I began talking with a therapist before and regularly during those weeks I may have been able to limit the damage.

For the first few years after my breakdown, it was not only the loss of my career and the personal challenges that I needed to deal with, I also lost a part of myself through the breakdown. I had to accept that I would never be the same person that I was before it. I had a youthful exuberance and excitement to my personality, yes about my work, but also about a lot of things. I lost the ability to feel excitement, and I had to learn to live with a far greater level of background anxiety, or at least a far greater appreciation of its presence.

I felt like the breakdown stripped me bare, so that I was just the core of who I am as a human being. It was frightening, and for many years I felt like I could almost feel that my nails were raw and bleeding, with dirt and muck stuck under them, from fighting my way out of that hole.

I feel that less so these days. Instead I feel mostly proud of myself for achieving what I have.

In many ways I have rebuilt myself, and because I genuinely love who I am, I feel that I built myself back better. It would have been a lot more difficult, and I doubt the result would have been nearly as complete, without the love of an amazing woman to whom I will forever be indebted.

One thing that I accepted early was the importance of learning to talk about myself, about all of the things that made me sad and angry, about how much hurt I harboured for what had happened, even how much I wished things could have been different.

I learnt in those early teen years that a man unable to let out what he is feeling is a danger to himself as well as others, and after my breakdown I learned what was real courage.

In truth I think it is unlikely that I could have avoided some form of breakdown in my life – I just carried too much emotional baggage into my early adulthood. A coalescing of events led me to be unable to continue to suppress all of the pain that I felt, but it was always there and always would have been if I did not deal with it.

Nelson Mandela told us that courage is not the absence of fear but the conquering of it. While I did not manage to find the courage to act before I fell, I found the courage to make myself my own project.

My life, my values, my behaviours, they might not be for everyone. That is the beauty of the diversity of the human condition. But when I see what I have remade of myself reflected in my sons, it is then that I know that I have achieved all that I need to on this Earth, and I have found a profound truth and contentment amongst all of the continual daily challenges.

And it is that which gives me the confidence to share my own solution to what I have termed The Human-Time Paradox, which I now feel ready to complete drafting, and which has never been more relevant in my lifetime given the challenges that humanity currently face and the consequent changing perceptions towards our life and our time that we are all now experiencing.

Oh, by the way, if you are wondering whether Joel Edgerton is one of my 23 cousins, or many more second cousins, or their children, hate to disappoint if you have read this far just to learn the answer to that one question. Is it relevant to your perception of me?…

Dedicated to my beautiful wife. My parents may have provided me with my first “compass” and a good heart, but it is knowing and being loved by you that inspired me, and provided me with the opportunity, to work towards being the best possible version of myself. Thank you. I love you to infinity and beyond.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

WHO has stopped releasing daily Situation Reports and wisely is publishing a dashboard (similar to Johns Hopkins). As at 6:31 pm CEST 3 September, there have been 25,884,895 confirmed cases globally with 859,130 deaths.

It is difficult to believe that one whole month has passed since my last “Update”. Of course, I have not remained silent over that time writing 3 COVID-19-related posts which I consider some of my most important work:

• On The Likelihood Of Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 From Contaminated Meat
• COVID-19 Risks With Animals
• If After 30 Years of Unbroken Economic Growth Australia Can’t Afford To Protect It’s Most Vulnerable, Who Really Benefitted From That Economic Growth?

The outbreak in Melbourne has been dampened by the introduction of stringent social distancing measures but daily new cases are not yet consistently below 100. Moreover, the psychology of the situation, understanding that stringent measures will not be eased until confirmed cases fall, may be making people with only minor symptoms reluctant to be tested. That is why I agree with mass testing (initially based on pooled testing such as households, etc.) In my previous update on 4 August I spoke of my concern of a northward progression to the outbreaks, and indeed NSW is having a difficult time constraining the growing number of cases (though, being a conservative government, officials are extremely reticent to introduce stricter measures.) And in my state of Queensland authorities are throwing everything at contract tracing what seems to be increasing numbers of flare-ups. While I feel very indebted to the contact tracers, I have serious concerns that (especially) NSW is straining to sustain the effort and prevent a dangerous escalation.

I have to be honest – I am wondering whether we in Australian have been duped by conservative politicians, because I have not heard anything recently about that aggressive suppression strategy defined by an aim for zero community transmission. Instead all I hear from them is pressure, in the other direction, on loosening measures. Worse still, a recent past conservative PM spoke out in very dark Trumpian/BoJo-ian terms (which means it is definitely time to call it out in another upcoming post).

This contrasts with New Zealand which has dealt swiftly, including promptly introducing strict social isolation measures, with an outbreak centred around a frozen food importer and distributor. These measures aimed at minimising loss of life have a high level of support and their people are justifiably proud of their achievements which seem to have enhanced national confidence and cohesiveness.

On a personal note, while I have settled into my new normal, which will persist for some considerable time, and which will never return to its pre-COVID state, but will eventually settle somewhere between the two – the exact positioning largely determined by how effective are the vaccines currently under trial – I have been dealing with a persistent melancholy causing significant intraspection even though my region of Australia has had only minor restrictions over the recent months.

(I should be clear that my family’s behaviour, other than our children returning to school, has not altered greatly since March as we well understand that by the time we learn of clusters often many will already be infected, and we consider it a better psychological strategy to consider life under a COVID suppression strategy to consist of rolling periods of greater restrictions interspersed with only slightly greater freedoms.)

If I am accurate in my intraspection, the sadness that I feel is not really that my freedoms have been impacted by the ongoing pandemic. Rather it is the knowledge that humanity still suffers unbearable loss, and I remain at risk of personal loss, while the pandemic is ongoing.

We are in a flat period of waiting for news on vaccine trials – the hoped for silver bullet. Donald Trump has set a deadline of 1 November for the initiation of a mass vaccination program – conveniently before the election, but not too early before the election so that the undoubted issues will become well known.

As I said in my 23 July update, it is difficult to overstate what is at stake for vaccine companies. In investing parlance, I would describe the risks around an early vaccine delivery to be asymmetric for the vaccine companies, in that they have much more to lose from it going wrong then they have to gain from delivering it a few months earlier.

Of course President Trump only cares about the risks to his re-election.

I doubt very much that many Americans will be given the opportunity to receive the vaccine prior to their winter.

My family, like all others, are in search of some light to the end of the tunnel and I wanted to share how I have come to rationalise our future and how I have been preparing them for it as I do believe it to be one of optimism from where we currently stand if one basic condition is met – that Australia does actually prioritise protecting human life and does authentically aim for zero community transmission.

(If we were to listen to the likes of Tony Abbott, who like to pretend that only “old people” are killed by this virus – as bad as that is in itself – then our misery will certainly escalate along with case numbers and deaths as all but the most ignorant people fear loss of their own and others’ lives.)

I believe that one major key to feel optimistic about the future is to have worked hard on accepting that our pre-COVID reality is lost forever. I said it from my very first writing on the subject in February, and I said it to my family then, also. I also believe that once that has been accepted broadly within society, at that point we will have been through the worst of the psychological challenges because I am certain that things will improve from here if only because we have so much lower expectations. (Of course for some of us it will get worse as we experience personal loss, and that should never be forgotten or downplayed.)

Based on what I am hearing from vaccine experts, I think that we should prepare for (again in investing parlance, my base case is for) a vaccine ready to be administered en masse in about 6-8 months throughout much of the developed world that is around 50% effective and which will require a booster at least half yearly. If we are lucky it may be 70% effective.

I think hoping for more would be to set ourselves up for disappointment, and we also need to be prepared for a lower effectiveness for some (hopefully not all) of the earliest candidates.

I think it will be difficult to make vaccination compulsory, especially given how “new” each of the vaccines will be, especially if they have low efficacy – so lower benefit at the individual level. However, at the population level a lower efficacy level increases the importance of a very high vaccination rate. That will be a very difficult paradox for politicians to deal with.

At the individual level, those who are vaccinated will gain appreciable advantage even from a 50% effective vaccine. If I am confident that the safety protocols have been followed on the vaccine development, then I will certainly be very pleased for each of my family to have a 50% reduction in the probability of becoming infected, and then introducing infection into our household. When that probability is multiplied by the probabilities of adverse outcomes from being infected, the worst of course being death, then I see this as a significant advance for my family.

At the population level, however, a 50% effective vaccine would mean that many measures that have been introduced – by Government regulation and/or by individual choice (such as wearing of face masks) – will need to be continued to reduce the risk of infection to both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

Complacency and fear will continue to drive responses by people. The hard-hearted right wing types who have been pushing for looser measures all along will seek to encourage complacency and over-confidence in the benefits of the vaccine. However, the trauma of the pandemic will mean that many will remain cautious and fearful, which to a point will be justified, but for some that anxiety may create lifelong risk aversion (as the Great Depression did for young adults who remained distrustful of banks for the rest of their lives to the point of stashing cash in their houses and even in their yards!)

The opportunity for a 50% reduction of risk is significant, and those with the capacity to logically think through risk will recognise that quickly and behave accordingly, especially if those additional risk measures are maintained. On the whole I think the population will only gradually shift away from “pandemic behaviours”, and the longer it takes to develop a vaccine with 80-90% effectiveness against the novel coronavirus, and preferably coronaviruses in general, the more long-lasting on a society-wide basis will be those “pandemic behaviours”.

To conclude, the more effective a vaccine and the higher the vaccination rate, the more measures can be loosened without increasing risk to the entire population. These reductions while being at least as safe will improve sentiment amongst the population. For that reason I do believe that for those prepared to accept that we will never go back to how things were before will find this as a source of optimism. (I will discuss in that upcoming post that this inability to let go of the past, as encouraged by conservative politicians including Tony Abbott, is holding people back from feeling greater optimism.)

Bear in mind, again, however, that all of this is predicated on the pandemic not worsening from where it is now. If that occurs, then there is significantly less reason for optimism going forward because our expectations will first need to re-base even lower.

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone the most intense of spotlights on the weaknesses in our societies including: the lack of cohesion and increase in racism, inequality in opportunity leading to lower living standards which results in far greater impacts especially on exploited minorities and temporary workers, and inadequate care for the elderly in part due to greater dependence on institutional care as double fulltime income families struggle to meet their aspirations.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began to rewrite economic histories for countries, Australia was basking in the glow of a world record run of economic growth. Treasurer after treasurer for the last decade and half returned from overseas gatherings of international finance ministers continually telling us that we were the envy of the world.

At home, however, there was an increasing feeling, especially amongst young Australians, that the prosperity was not being shared equally. That the previous generations, of landlords and share investors, had had the better of things. Worse still, for a chance of attaining their level of prosperity the younger generations had to commit to a life of vulnerable debt servitude, or give up on the ideas of attaining the trappings of the Aussie middle class, such as home ownership, if their parents were not in the position to assist them. Of course the persistence of this aspiration allowed the previous generations to continue to experience their good fortune by keeping aloft asset prices. However, even that chance of parental assistance at reaching the middle class was under attack with some parents indulging in the tongue-in-cheek Baby Boomer SKI passion – spending the kids inheritance.

Such was the passion resulting from these intergenerational tensions that a plate of smashed avocado become emblematic for all that was wrong with an insufficiently aspirational and\or hardworking young generation, according to many senior Australians.

Middle-aged Australian families that had not purchased property before the new millennium were increasingly being squeezed by rampaging rents.

Of course the property bubble was kicked off in large part by huge incentives for Australians to speculate on house prices, not invest because housing supply was always tightly managed to keep the bubble from bursting. Finally after years of increasing distortions (e.g. First Home Owners Boost during the GFC to keep house prices high) in the most recent Federal election Australians had a real choice to take away these housing and share market distortions (i.e. franking credit reimbursement). Australians declined that opportunity, and in many ways I believe that is a reflection of many young Australians’ compassion for their parents and grandparents leading them to take “their side” while not fully understanding the intergeneration inequity that such measures would have addressed. 

While the young generations are castigated by many senior Australians for being selfish in seeking instant gratification, as exemplified by the smashed avo “debate”, research shows that younger generations are generous with their time through volunteering and definitely are community-minded.

It has been my view for some time that the situation is actually the inverse – it is Baby Boomer Australians who definitely have had the best of conditions – far more favourable than their parents who endured wartime and post-war frugality to provide for their growing families and who never achieved near the comparative wealth of their children – and still with such powerful electoral presence to repel attempts to lessen perks which they have enjoyed for most of their adult lives and which prevent a fair go for those younger Australians who at the same time subsidise all or some medical costs for seniors as well as fund other Government functions and pensions even for the modestly wealthy, while wealthy Australian retirees live from massively tax advantaged savings.

Now COVID-19 is exposing those inter-generational issues in an extreme manner that few have yet considered.

Young people have progressively been forced to accept that they will not have the same opportunities to acquire the same level of wealth as previous generations have done, through no fault of their own but due to the reality of politics where the greater number of votes (and of political donations) exist amongst the owning class, and this is exemplified by homeownership.

Those experiencing the greatest negative economic impacts in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic are the young working in the low-paid customer facing roles providing non-essential services. This will turn around somewhat because the longer the pandemic goes the greater the need for businesses to cut more deeply, and those older Australians made redundant will find it increasingly difficult to find another job. Up to this point in time, however, it is well understood that it is young Australians that have suffered the greatest economic hardship.

The Federal Government, especially, has wanted to pretend that it is possible to keep the national economy ticking away in some fashion by following a suppression strategy. Much of that is aimed at ensuring asset prices do not fall sharply, especially our housing markets which have long been Australia’s true economic vulnerability.

If house prices fell the older owning class would be worst affected economically, while young Australians have the most to gain by a fall in the price of assets because over their life time the opportunity to buy a home for perhaps half of the peak price would place them ahead of where they would be otherwise. That financial advantage would be so significant as to easily outweigh the negative financial impact of spending perhaps a year or two unemployed during a very serious recession or even depression.

For a long time I considered a buyer’s strike a reasonable choice for young Australians to address the intergenerational inequity that our political system has been unable to address.

Now it seems possible if not likely the pandemic will force it.

My main advice to young Australians would be that the best investment that you can make is your own health. From very early in the pandemic, well before such stories become common, I was warning through my posts that nobody should consider for a moment that all of the ways that the novel coronavirus can impact our health were understood. We are learning more about these impacts as time goes on, including an understanding that young people can fall seriously ill and die from COVID-19, and that even mild infections can cause changes within the brain. Long term impacts from infection can not be understood until that time has passed.

While many young people have come to think of themselves as invincible in this pandemic, there could be serious long term consequences to them developing even mild infection.

So I see our Governments’ response to the current crisis to be similar to previous crises: work expeditiously to get things back to “normal” as soon as possible, thus protecting asset prices which various Governments have worked hard at building and protecting over decades.

The people who are meant to save the economy from collapse are essentially the same: the young. In the GFC young Australians, those with the least life and investing experience, were bribed to enter the housing market and keep prices aloft by an increased cash grant which quickly was added to the price of the home in any case so that they got no net benefit but were left with a lifetime of vulnerable debt servitude.

In the COVID-19 pandemic young people, already economically vulnerable, are being convinced that they have the most to gain by the opening up of the economy and especially of the low-paid customer-facing service jobs. These are the jobs that can not be done remotely, and thus entail a significantly greater risk of contracting COVID-19. Note also that early discussions around herd immunity inferred that it was the young and healthy, the school children through to the pre-forties, who would have had the bulk “responsibility” for developing the infection to protect the vulnerable within the herd. (And it is here that you understand why our Federal Government fought so hard to ensure that schools remained open.)

As we have learned in Melbourne like elsewhere, older Australians are clearly more at risk of death from COVID-19, so senior Australians have the most to lose out of economic activity being prioritised over minimising loss of life. If economic impacts result in a fall in asset prices they will also lose, but common sense says that the majority would prefer the former option because wealth is of no use after death.

Yet it is the young who have the majority of their life to live with any long term consequences from COVID-19 infection. And it is young people who are most disadvantaged by our historically very high housing prices which are more likely to fall the longer and more deeply the economy is impacted.

So young people are being called on to got out and work to minimise impacts on the Australian economy, and risk their lives and their long term health, and the consequence of their bravery will be that the more successful they are in doing that the more out of reach will remain home ownership and long term financial security, especially if those long term health affects turn out to be debilitating and thus impact their lifetime earning potential.

I realise that this discussion leaves out an important group – the recent buyers, of which I would include myself. In a bubble, the most impacted are always the last buyers before the collapse. Anybody buying homes in Australia in the last 10 years in the financial expectation that the experience of the previous decades will be repeated was speculating as the fundamentals long ago ceased to stack up. At best an analysis of renting versus buying based on the current lower bound interest rates may suggest fair value in some areas of Australia, but that is not a basis for price increases going forward, and on a long term basis Australian house prices remain significantly overpriced. While I do not expect interest rates to increase appreciably for a long time in Australia, and have long held that view, whenever an asset class is over-owned by speculators there is the potential for price declines as those speculators realise their error. To those who bought understanding this dynamic, but rather made a discretionary spend to live in and\or raise a family in their own home, then these factors are of little significance. For such people the issue remains the same – maintaining a roof over one’s head – whether that be a rented roof or one to which a bank holds the mortgage.

That is the crux of intergenerational inequity in the COVID-19 era and the stakeholders in that situation are largely passive and being led by the political class. In the second part I will concentrate more on the closely related tension between business and workers, and here stakeholders are for more active and engaged in politics lobbying for the Government action that supports their aims.

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To discuss the tension between business and workers we really need to strip back this issue to economic impacts versus human impacts (i.e. loss of lives) in the COVID-19 pandemic, a topic that is a constant background of my writing at MacroEdgo.

At the outset, it is very important to spell out that by human impacts I mean loss of life and all that entails: a life cut shorter than it otherwise would have been and the loss to that individual and those who knew and loved them.

It is equally important to accept that this discussion must be held in the context of our values – the term du jour – and especially our contemporary societies’ relationships with wealth and money.

Here it is important to draw a distinction as money is one form of numerical representation of wealth. In reality wealth is just a measure of the resources at your disposal to do things while you are on Earth and after (by your benefactors).

Why is it important to make these distinctions?

Society’s relationship with wealth will be a major deciding factor in where the balance is struck: in a society where wealth is more highly valued in relation to human life, then greater loss of life will be tolerated by citizens to lessen economic impacts, and vice versa.

Of course the general wealth of the country is important. Obviously a poor country can endure far less disruption to its economy because it has far less means to assist the vulnerable who will likely need to work to prevent starvation.

So the COVID-19 pandemic, as experienced in developed countries that have the resources which provide the opportunity to decide to respond more aggressively to minimise loss of life than developing countries, really is one of those rare moments in time where citizens are needing to decide where they fit on that continuum, i.e. what are our values.

The degree to which politicians are prepared to meet those society-wide values, even if it affects their own political standing amongst historical supporter bases including powerful financial donors, will decide their political fate.

I am not going to distil this issue down to numerical representations of national wealth in terms of dollars and cents, and GDP, etc. While I enjoy reading and analysing financial and economic data, and I do agree that it must necessarily feature in decision-making, it sometimes leads to the point being missed by many and it alienates (or repulses) many others.

What we are talking about is lives: ours and of everybody we care about.

I agree that greater human impacts will affect economy (e.g. loss of valuable human capital and productivity, reduced subsets of consumers, and impacts on confidence due to fear of infection and death) and vice versa (e.g. increased suicide due to economic impacts). However, I must admit that, even though I am a professionally-trained research scientist and highly analytical in nature, I agree with those who consider the reduction of human impacts down to numbers, whether that be death tolls or dollars and cents, to be distasteful.

As such I would not link to any report that does so, unless, of course, it favoured the argument I am making – such as here (yes, tongue in cheek).

The real purpose of this post is to put as plainly as possible the qualitative assessment of the overall risks that the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing on all Australians, and I want to highlight what are the factors, as I see them, that different segments of society are choosing to elevate in importance in their own decision-making.

In the first part I discussed the intergenerational issues which should be more widely discussed in these terms, but are not because to do so would require an admission that all politicians and senior financial bureaucrats were complicit in creating and perpetuating an enormous intergenerational inequity on young Australians.

This second aspect is being discussed, but it is only being discussed tangentially and in faux terms such as a grieving for every “livelihood” without recognition that in all reality that what is being discussed is a job that barely provides a living, and certainly not a living that similar level jobs in previous generations provided especially in comparison to what workers aspire(d) to do with that livelihood (such as buy a family home).

That is because continual weakening of workers’ rights, in the name of workplace flexibility and pseudo-innovation (which essentially leads to the replacement of an already existing industry, powered by workers on more tenuous conditions), have allowed the owning class (i.e. the wealthy) to increase their wealth by keeping an increasingly greater share of profits over the last 3 decades. This is a well understood phenomenon in the English-speaking world.

So we entered the COVID-19 pandemic with Australian workers more precarious than they were decades earlier, where social safety networks have also been eroded and widely considered unable to support a respectable developed country standard of living, and where affordable housing is a real problem for many which has led to many vulnerable people living densely and\or in conditions below what many in the developed world would consider adequate.

On the other hand, our elite have continued to fete the American economic model, falling under the same malaise of mistaking greed for a necessary ingredient rather than the deleterious byproduct it is.

This explanation of the current situation, together with the information in Part I, explains the workers’ risks.

For the business elites – the business owners and executives – the risk analysis is altogether different.

The business elites gain very little benefit out of closing their business to guard against the risks to employees other than at a personal level in knowing that they have behaved morally and conscionably. However, in doing so they risk a severe financial setback to their business which, especially for medium or small businesses, may be devastating. Small or medium businesses owners may lose their business, and consequently their aspirations for wealth accumulation and business success will suffer a serious blow.

Business executives may miss out on attractive incentives awards, such as bonuses and stock\share options, for not reaching operational milestones because businesses were closed to protect employees and reduce transmission of COVID-19.

No doubt the business elites are people, also, no less susceptible to infection by the novel coronavirus, even if their wealth has afforded them a greater level of underlying health than the wider populations, and will ensure that their treatment will be gold standard should they fall seriously ill. Moreover, they are also members of families, with children, and parents, and brothers and sisters, and extended families whom they love and who they hope will not be infected or succumb to severe COVID-19 disease.

The business elites, however, unlike the workers, have done very well thank you very much out of the way that the system has developed over the last 3 or 4 decades and in order for maximum preservation of that system and their advantage they want things to get back as close as possible as soon as possible.

The business elites need for people to retain as much as possible of their spending habits and belief systems around consumer and societal status aspirations – that is why there is an emphasis on opening up the entire economy not just the genuinely essential services.

It is already clearly understood that it is the people in lower socio-economic circumstances, especially the minorities, who are doing the jobs that can not be done remotely and who, to remain employed, must accept greater risk of being infected and ultimately of dying with COVID-19.

At the crescendo of emotion over the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, a video by Kimberley Jones gained a great deal of attention for its brutal honesty. Kimberley explained for white people, many of whom may have been shocked by it, why black and other minority Americans were so willing to destroy property.

It boiled down to one thing and one thing only – after 400 years of toil and building wealth for others, they owned nothing themselves.

They did not respect that property because to them it was a symbol of a system that failed them by being biased and prejudiced against them for four centuries! And they knew it would continue to fail them and their descendants if nothing changed.

They had nothing to lose.

Again in the COVID-19 pandemic it is the business elite – the owners – who have the most to lose.

In earlier writing I spelt out that the advantage that those arguing for rapid and complete reopening of economies have is that the families that will ultimately suffer loss because of that decision do not yet know it. If they did know that they would be affected, surely many more would fight harder for measures to minimise loss of life, and be prepared to suffer greater economic hardship for the chance to save their loved-one’s life.

Right now throughout Australia measures to protect human life are popular, and Premiers of states that have experienced periods of zero detected community transmission and\or are experiencing very low levels of community transmission are very supportive of the state border closures.

At the same time, business elites are placing maximum pressure on the Federal conservative Government to remove measures which keep people safe but which hinder the operation and viability of their businesses, and currently they especially want PM Morrison to politically out-maneuver State Governments so that borders are re-opened.

If one is to listen to these business elites justifying why Australia must loosen restrictions, and thus live with greater risk and subsequently greater spread and death with COVID-19, it will almost certainly be said that Australia simply cannot afford these impediments to business functioning as it did prior to the pandemic.

When Australians hear such a comment, they might want to begin to consider why that might be so – why Australia apparently cannot afford to protect it’s citizens in this pandemic, and especially it’s most vulnerable now, after having experienced almost 30 years of continuous economic growth. They might want to consider in what ways they benefitted from all of that growth, and whether it might actually be the case that the majority of spoils were shared between only a small subset of Australians. As it becomes clear that high house prices are not a symbol of permanent wealth but are ephemeral, while the debt is real and lasting, they may wish to consider who really prospered from the bubble. They might wonder what value might have been gained from Governments thinking ahead and stashing away a lot of the windfall from a once in century resources boom into a sovereign wealth fund to be used at a time of need, and then recall what powerful lobby it was that prevented the Rudd Government from doing it.

Australians might then want to consider whether it is that same subset of Australians that are now saying that Australia cannot afford to do everything possible to minimise loss of life in our lucky country!

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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2020