Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy - Softcover

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Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Crashed, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, one of The Economist's Books of the Year, and a New York Times Critics' Top Book. He lives in New York City.

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Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed.

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.

Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation

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Chapter 1

Organized

Irresponsibility

Skeptics-and there have been skeptics from the start-like to point out that the remarkable thing about the Covid crisis is that we turned something ordinary into a global crisis. No matter what we do, people die, and the same people die of Covid as die normally-old people with preexisting conditions. In a normal year, those people die of flu and pneumonia. Outside the privileged core of the rich world, millions of people die of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. And yet "life goes on." Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was, by the standards of historic plagues, not very lethal. What was unprecedented was the reaction. All over the world, public life shut down, and so too did large parts of commerce and the regular flow of business. All over the world this massive interruption of normality stirred, in various degrees, incomprehension, indignation, resistance, noncompliance, and protest. One need not sympathize with the politics of the objectors to acknowledge the historical force of their point. In a new and remarkable fashion, a medical challenge became a much wider crisis. Explaining how this might have happened not as the result of effete and overly protective political culture or as the result of a deliberate policy of repression, but as a result of structural tensions within early twenty-first-century societies, will help set the stage for understanding the crisis of 2020.

It is true that old people die, but what matters is how many and at what rate and from which causes. At any given moment, this rank order of mortality can be described in terms of a matrix of probabilities that has evolved over time and is held in place by medical possibilities, health economics, and the pattern of social advantage and disadvantage.

Table 1: Causes of Death                                                                                             

            Total deaths                 Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (%)             Noncommunicable diseases (%)            Injury (%)       

            m         m         %         %         %         %         %         %

            1990    2017    1990    2017    1990    2017    1990    2017

Western Europe 3.86     4.16     4          5          90        91        6          4

United States    2.14     2.86     6          5          87        89        7          7

Latin America

and Caribbean  2.36     3.39     28        12        57        76        15        13

China   8.14     10.45   17        3          72        89        11        7

India    8.38     9.91     51        27        40        63        9          10

Sub-Saharan

Africa  6.77     7.48     69        58        24        34        7          7

World  4.65     5.59     33        19        58        73        9          8

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death

Seen globally, the story of the last decades is one of considerable advance in reducing death from diseases of poverty-communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases. Nevertheless, it remains true that poor people and people in low-income countries die soonest and of the most preventable conditions. In a low-income country like Nigeria, where life expectancy at birth is fifty-five, 68 percent of deaths are due to diseases of poverty. In Germany, where life expectancy is eighty-one, that share is 3.5 percent; in the UK, 6.8. The United States is in-between. In 2017, health spending per capita in high-income countries was 49 times greater in purchasing power parity terms than in low-income countries.

Within rich countries, there are appalling disparities in infant and maternal mortality and overall life expectancy along lines of race and class. Epidemics of drug use in disadvantaged and marginalized populations, asthma, and lead poisoning go unaddressed. In Germany, 27 percent of men in the lowest income class die before the age of sixty-five, compared to 14 percent for the highest income group. For women, the disparities are only slightly less stark. In the country's two-class health insurance system, the life expectancy of the 11 percent in private insurance is four years longer than those in the public system. In the United States, commonly described as the richest country in the world, according to a study of 2009, 45,000 people died for lack of health insurance. People in low-income census tracts in the United States are twice as likely as those in high-income areas to be hospitalized with flu, to require intensive care, and to die of it. The difference is starkest for poor people over the age of sixty-five.

It would be too much to say that these...