Coronavirus on this blog, in retrospect

Posted on June 5 2023

In the light of discussions over the weekend in comments on this blog I  reviewed my comments on coronavirus since March 2020.

I created a category to record posts referring to this issue on 14 March 2020, so comments on it before that data were not surveyed, although they most certainly exist. The posts are all listed here. There are 570 of them, and will be 571 when this one is added.

A number of themes stood out.

The first was my perpetual fear that the government was not doing enough.

The second was my belief that the economy would take an enormous hit once the Covid crisis was over as a result of:

  1. Debt interest and rent burdens being too high.
  2. Disruption in employment, especially caused by those who left the country in large numbers.
  3. Failing businesses.
  4. Inadequate support during reopening meaning that the economy would be left struggling.
  5. Increasing inequality.

I did not forecast post-reopening inflation. In retrospect, having spotted the inequality I should have done. But in the period I reviewed in most depth (to the end of 2020) I did not imagine furlough or lock down lasting as long as it did.

As for the rest, bigger loans than expected and long furlough did save jobs, but the early concerns on both issues were justified.

The increase in interest and debt burdens, mainly in the private sector, was correctly anticipated, as was the increase in inequality.

Looking back I got more right than wrong by some way, I think.

And that was most especially when I emphasised that Covid would not be over when the immediate physical threat was reduced. I was repeatedly clear that recession would  follow unless action on debt was taken and support for incomes was maintained.

We have instead taken the worst course possible since Covid reopening. The impact of increased  debt for some has been magnified by increasing interest rates. That has reinforced inequality. And incomes are falling, as I feared they would.

Economic forecasting is bound to be wrong: I did not foresee war in Ukraine. Few did. That  does not mean it is not worthwhile though. The aim is to identify policy options, not to get everything right. I venture that I did better than the government. For one thing, I never suggested austerity. It was always going to be the worst choice. They did it, anyway.

And so the job continues, suggesting that we can do better than the dire choices that the government and Labour put before us. What else is there to do?

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13 Responses

  1. Arif says:
    June 5 2023 at 9:52 am

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/04/first-lockdown-prevented-1700-deaths-landmark-study-finds/

    Have you had a chance to read this report by the John Hopkins University??

  2. Nigel Mace says:
    June 5 2023 at 9:54 am

    Well, overall, I reckon, you were pretty prescient – and I particularly recall your warnings that the government’s persistent choice of favouring rentier interests would have disastrous consequences. Now we have a perfect illustration in the collapse of a very large number of pub businesses triggered by exactly the kind of effect of which you had warned, of capitalists targeting unprotected lesees. Oh… and what a surprise the landlords are big Tory donors too.
    https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/03/the-billionaires-have-won-english-pubs-forced-to-close-after-owners-demand-full-rent-for-lockdown

    Smells too!

  3. Jeremy GH says:
    June 5 2023 at 10:33 am

    On the subject of pigeons coming home to roost, as predicted by Richard (as I recall), I saw a piece in the Guardian: ‘The billionaires have won’: English pubs forced to close after owners demand full rent for lockdown , at https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/03/the-billionaires-have-won-english-pubs-forced-to-close-after-owners-demand-full-rent-for-lockdown

  4. Pilgrim Slight Return says:
    June 5 2023 at 12:18 pm

    The key is to keep banging on I’m afraid – I have never seen such a paucity of ideas in the public/political realm before – an unwillingness to entertain something better or take a risk.

    It’s as if the British people have abandoned themselves to their fate.

  5. jenw says:
    June 5 2023 at 12:50 pm

    Which is also exactly why we have to follow Independent Sage and the People’s Covid Inquiry.
    https://36085122-5b58-481e-afa4-a0eb0aaf80ca.usrfiles.com/ugd/360851_310fe297a8ec410dba2f5888d6ff3d19.pdf
    236 pages of the report, and it seems to be fully searchable. Eat out to help out is mentioned four times, and all about what percentage of cases were probably attributable to that cause.
    “Eat out to help out’ (Para 2.4.3) was
    mentioned as a policy that had made
    no sense to frontline workers (and had
    probably been responsible for a sixth of
    new Covid case clusters in the summer of
    2020).”

    • Andrew Broadbent says:
      June 5 2023 at 9:40 pm

      Pretty good and consistent Richard – but we are now in a strange hiatus – where everyone thinks its gone away even though still a few hundred a week dying and a couple of thousand in hospital.

      If they were trying to take lessons from the last three years they would be cleaning air in schools, work places (as apparently the military in US and UK are) and still advising some minimal mitigations in healthcare settings.

      Instead they have stopped monitoring and measuring – against WHO advice, andthere are still possibilities that people getting infected multiple times is gradually accumulating shortened life expectancy etc. Still thousands of excess deaths. Vaccines wearing off and not boosted.

      Indie Sage, Zoe etc better than nothing.