There are always people who go around missing the main story of their times. No doubt some thought leaders in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in early 1917 were getting all fired up about sideshows. Something similar is happening now: an obsession with “wokeism” and culture wars at a moment of economic transformation.
If you find yourself overexcited about Meghan Markle versus the royals, Churchill’s statue or the withdrawal of six Dr Seuss titles, then you probably remain trapped in the global shouting match about identity encouraged by a defunct US president. The transformative issue worldwide is now, in the immortal words of former Democratic political consultant James Carville, “the economy, stupid”.
This is most visible in the US. Joe Biden has passed a fiscal stimulus package worth $1.9tn. He hopes to add another longer-term investment package — mostly for infrastructure — of $3tn. Put together, this amounts to approaching a quarter of gross domestic product, far more than Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programmes and military spending in the 1960s. As Republican senator Ted Cruz has observed, Biden’s newfound radicalism is partly obscured by his personal dullness.
The battlefield for limiting climate change and delivering American racial justice is now government spending. The trial of former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is more emotive but less consequential. The main reason why African-Americans die an average of six years before their compatriots isn’t police violence but poverty, which Biden’s stimulus bill will slash. His infrastructure bill aims to bring about both a greener economy and racial justice. Look at the proposals to remove lead from drinking water in heavily African-American towns like Flint, Michigan, or the extra pay and benefits for home healthcare workers, most of them women of colour.
You can oppose Biden’s bills and argue that they won’t achieve their aims or will cause inflation. But that’s the debate that matters. To obsess about tweets and culture wars now is intellectually dishonest.
In other rich countries, the health crisis will soon morph into an economic crisis. Within months, the EU will have vaccinated the bulk of its population. Then it will somehow have to recover from its worst recession since the 1930s. Here, too, there’s potential for transformative change: the US proposals for a minimum corporate tax, the IMF’s advice to soak the rich and the EU’s planned €750bn recovery fund.
In low-income countries, Covid-19 will probably kill far more people through economic collapse than through infection. The pandemic raised the numbers living in poverty by a “truly unprecedented” figure: as many as 124 million people last year, mostly in South Asia, estimate World Bank economists. It’s the first rise in global poverty since 1998. Bigger increases are forecast this year.
The impact will be devastating even beyond the very poorest. The average Brazilian family’s hopes have dissolved in a decade.
Yet even now, many people still prefer arguing about identity issues. Americans last week made almost as many Google searches for “woke” as for “economy” and more for “woke” than for “infrastructure”. This obsession with identity is partly narcissistic. Everyone has an identity, and supporting or opposing a statue in some faraway city solidifies yours. No matter that none of it makes the slightest difference to the wellbeing of the cleaning lady on the 5.30am bus.
Treating the world as a team game in which your identity plays the other identity has an additional benefit: it’s easy to understand. Economics is not. In a study last year for the UK’s Office for National Statistics, only 47 per cent of 1,600 British respondents could even define gross domestic product.
I know what economic illiteracy feels like, because until my early twenties I suffered from it. I sensed that economics made the world go round but I had no idea how, and so I thought about other things instead. I read newspapers that defined “news” as rows between politicians or as “gaffes” by famous people. Eventually I found a newspaper that taught me about mysterious concepts like “GDP” and “bonds”. After a few months of reading the FT, I decided that the best way to learn how the world worked was to get a job there. I’m still confused, but I hope I’m now confused about things that matter.
Today’s identity-based point-missing is often deliberate. Every morning, nativist politicians scour the news for a wokeist outrage — in a big world, there’s always one — and then spend the day banging on about it. This is an old phenomenon, explained by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972: a conservative attempt to drum up a moral panic about a group of young people defined as “folk devils”. The “woke brigade” is only the latest in a lineage of folk devils that stretches back through Islamist terrorists, “superpredators” and hippies to early 1960s Mods and Rockers. Rightwingers exaggerated the dangers of all these groups.
Trying to make sense of our times requires choosing the right battlefield. For now, that’s economics.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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The Link LonkApril 15, 2021 at 05:00PM
https://www.ft.com/content/dcf76e59-8f8e-4445-b92a-b9fb77a89226
Forget identity politics: economics is what matters now - Financial Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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