virusfest 2020 (part 4): in which we pause.

When I was a kid and first learned about the Great Depression, I couldn't understand it. People were rich, and then suddenly everyone was poor? How can wealth just vanish from the entire world? Where did the money go to?

Some years later, my studies caught up to my questions–for some reason this wasn't covered in grade school–and the answer is that money is a social construct, not a real thing. The glib, dismissive response is to say "If you think money isn't real, try living without it," but saying that money isn't real isn't to say it isn't necessary. Deluded people will tell you different, but gold and silver have very little inherent value, most of which has arisen in the past 200 years. In reality, it's just that they're relatively rare, and extremely shiny.

(And durably shiny, since neither one corrodes over time in the atmosphere, which must have been magical in the ages of copper, bronze, and iron, which definitely do. Silver tarnish, besides not being corrosion, is actually silver sulfide, usually reacting with the sulfur dumped into the air by human industrialization.)

Our intuition rebels against the idea that our lives depend, usually all too literally, on a collective fiction; but as with everything true, it's true whether we believe in it or not.

Money may be the greatest human invention, because barter is a royally inefficient pain in the ass. How many chickens do you get for a cartload of wheat? Whose cart do you use? Is it the same number as last week? Why? Look, I know last time I said two sheep for an ingot of copper, but three sheep died on my way here, and I have expenses, so now it's four sheep.

What money and goods have in common is that they need to move in order for the system to work. Money does most of the traveling in modern times, with conversions into and out of goods and services at various points. Fundamentally, though, it's the labor of consumers, exchanged for money and then spent, that powers the global economy. The unimaginably vast amounts of incorporeal money that flow around from day to day, bigger than any nation's GDP, ultimately rely on people working and spending money.

Most of that labor and spending and services ultimately relies on interactions between human beings in the same room. And so we come to the present day.

(We are still, collectively, working our way through the euphemisms. "Situation," "current state of affairs." We're phasing in "pandemic," at least in California. I expect we'll reach "plague" eventually, whose non-metaphorical usage–except for incredulous responses to the rare incidents of actual bubonic plague–is mostly restricted to the AIDS pandemic. "Between the Pill and the plague" is the most succinct description I've ever seen of the enablement and curtailment of sexual liberation and promiscuity in the 1960s and 1970s.)

We've never tried this before. The unemployment forecasts are still looking at 40% or 50% or even more; by comparison, at the most depressed of the Great Depression, unemployment was around 25%. The billionaires are pushing for everyone to get back to work, helping conservatives adopt the belief that the control of lethal infectious disease is oppression, because people who are busy working and worrying about killing themselves or their friends or family are too busy to think about how broken the whole system is.

Not everyone is buying it. As long as we don't have a treatment or vaccine–neither of which is visible on the horizon–the health risk just doesn't diminish in a way that lets everything go back to normal. This isn't measured in months, it's measured in years.

I am not excited about this.