Daikoku, Ebisu, and Fukurokuju Counting Money, by Keisai Eisen
The COVID-19 pandemic elicited an unprecedented response from governments around the world. The goal of the fierce restrictions on personal contact and travel was to slow or perhaps stop the spread of the disease. Whether the measures helped reach this narrow medical goal can be debated, but the social, psychological, and political effects of widespread “lockdowns” are undeniable. As is the economic damage.
From a distance, the economic effects have been almost mechanical. The sudden stops imposed on large sections of the economy necessarily led to sharp drops in both the goods and services produced and the number of people with jobs to do. Conversely, output can be expected to recover automatically in rough proportion to the elimination of restraints, with adjustments for the levels of post-restriction fear and financial distress.
Even within these constraints, though, the political authorities and business and financial leaders have made many choices. They decided how much money to distribute to which people and enterprises at what times. They arranged practical support for people and organisations affected by the restrictions. They adjusted, or didn’t, wages and prices to reflect the truncated economy’s stresses and responsibilities.
Such decisions can and should be evaluated ethically. The basic question is simple: how well did the choices made promote the common good? The answers, however, are complicated and contested, since the common good is far from self-evident. Catholic Social Teaching can help, as it provides five sound, relevant, and quite practical principles of economic justice.
The evaluations here are generalisations. There are many exceptions and nuances, and my analysis is narrowly economic. I do not discuss whether the policies adopted served the common social, psychological, medical, educational and spiritual good.
1) The universal destination of goods
Since all that we have comes from the God who calls us to love all people, justice requires that all our goods and skills be used for the benefit of everyone. Within rich countries, the techniques that spread the pain of the anti-COVID-19 restrictions largely respected this universal obligation.
The effective government benefit systems were used to ensure that people whose jobs were lost or suspended were able to continue consuming the goods and services that remained available, pretty much as they had before. Indeed, in the United States, the COVID-related benefits were generous enough that the lesser output may have been more universally shared than usual. However, there are alarming reports of a fairly large group of the “left behind” who are not sharing in the nation’s bounty.
The situation is quite different – and much worse – in poorer countries, which generally lack the benefit systems needed for this sort of universality. Especially in cities, the majority of labour typically takes place outside of the formal taxed economy, so the often cumbersome administrations have been unable to provide money to compensate for lost incomes. In addition, the physical distribution systems for food and other goods have often not been resilient enough to overcome the anti-pandemic restrictions. The economic situation of hundreds of millions of people around the world deteriorated sharply.
2) The universal dignity of labour
All people should have work to do, and all their work deserves social respect and reasonable consumption rewards. The anti-pandemic restrictions necessarily took away many people’s paid labour, but that temporary attack on their dignity as workers was probably unavoidable.
What should have been but was not avoided was a sharply unequal and unjust division of labour pain. Relatively few of the successful professionals at the top of the labour pyramid have lost their jobs and most of this privileged group could work from the safety of generally quite comfortable homes. In contrast, younger, poorer, and more psychologically vulnerable people were typically forced to take more health risks, were deprived of more professional opportunities, and were quarantined in less attractive residences.
While the disproportionate suffering at the bottom of the pyramid was often noted in rich countries’ media, neither governments nor employers did much to reverse it. Wage increases for the people most exposed to danger were scarce, as were efforts to maintain the communities that are vital to working life and programmes to provide more space for the home-working people who most need it. The lack of universal respect was even more evident in poor countries, where even less was done to correct it.
3) Solidarity
People should care for each other, and governments and the organisations of civil society should support that mutual respect and communal consideration. The enforced isolation of the COVID period has undoubtedly reduced societies’ capacity for economic solidarity, but where communal support for those under the most stress could be shown, it often has been.
On the labour side of the economy, employers generally made allowances for the additional stresses of workers with children unable to go to school. In the medical system, workers at all levels almost always put the needs of the community before their own safety and comfort, often isolating themselves from their families to do so. There was also solidarity in consumption. After some initial self-fulfilling panic buying, most customers accepted lesser availability of some goods and reduced levels of service.
4) Preferential option for the poor
Justice requires policies that favour the interests of the most vulnerable. The economic world rarely takes up this option, and the responses to the anti-pandemic measures were sadly typical.
Within rich countries, the treatment of education is most striking example. When schools were closed, it was clear that the children with the least nurturing home environments could only keep up with their schooling if they received extra help. The mobilisation the economic resources needed to provide that help – skilled labour and advanced technology – should have been a priority. In fact, the efforts have been minimal.
More generally, the world has given no preference to its poorest residents. Little has been done to alleviate the disproportionate suffering of such vulnerable groups as migrant labourers, subsistence farmers, and the chronically ill. Some additional medical attention to COVID may have been unavoidable, but the lack of interest in finding additional medical resources to deal with other serious conditions has led to disproportionate suffering for the people least able to cope.
5) Subsidiarity
As much as possible, decisions should be made by the people and organisations most affected by them, with large and distant governments providing only support and guidance. Subsidiarity has been waning in the economic world for more than a century. It took another step backwards in this pandemic.
Some of the loss was inevitable, since public health is typically is a large-scale affair. However, there was no need for all the employment and business relief programmes to be designed and operated nationally, as they almost all were. As a result, little attention was paid to regional and local differences, and little effort was made to construct and fortify local support systems. At the lowest level, families and individuals were often given few choices in how to arrange their own labour and consumption. Decisions about what risks they considered acceptable were made for them by governments that were more dictatorial than supportive.
Conclusion
The economic choices made in response to the public health restrictions could certainly have been much less in accord with Catholic Social Teaching than they actually have been. The sincere and, at least in rich countries, largely successful efforts to keep as much of the economy going as possible under the circumstances were commendable.
However, the lack of solidarity, subsidiarity, respect for all labour, and special attention to the poor show just how distant the principles of this Teaching are from the mainstream thinking of public policymakers and economic leaders. To judge from the almost total silence on the topic from bishops and lay Catholics, these principles are also far from foundational in the thinking of the Catholic faithful.
Edward Hadas is a research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University and a regular contributor to Reuters Breakingviews, a financial commentary service. His book, Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking Through Catholic Social Teaching, will be published by Catholic University of America Press in November.
Update: Edward Hadas used this article as the basis for a talk given to Together for the Common Good. A transcript can be found here.