Monthly Archives: May 2020

How do you make a grown man cry?

Answer: Give him £20.

You look baffled — like you missed the punchline to a joke. There was no joke and you didn’t miss anything. Although I have a perniciously dark sense of humour, this is not an example of it.

Outside a supermarket, in South London, there was a man begging. I had a £5 note amongst a couple of twenties and I fished it out and gave it to him. He looked grateful for this small windfall and tucked it away in one of the many folds in his layers of clothes.

COVID-19 has pushed people out of their jobs and out of their homes. The lockdown has reduced pedestrian traffic on the streets, closed public toilets, and made life even harder for the homeless than it was before.

He and I did not catch up on the state of business, but I imagine there were not many people giving him £5 notes. By the time I’d finished my shopping, he had already bundled his belongings together and headed off — I surmised, for food — and in his place was a new face.

I saw the new guy and my immediate thought was, “Yeah, Nah”. I did what anyone would do in these circumstances. I ignored him. I made no eye contact. I pretended I had not heard his polite request for help, and I headed down the street.

Before you judge me, let me remind you, I had already given away my £5 note and all I had left were the twenties. There were also other prospective givers, who felt no compulsion. If they weren’t giving, maybe they knew something about him that I didn’t — some mark or taint that made him less deserving of charity. I felt OK about the decision. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “because there are many in necessity, and they cannot all be helped from the same source, it is left to the initiative of individuals to make provision from their own wealth, for the assistance of those who are in need.” And I had already done my provisioning for the day.

Two hundred meters down the road, I thought to myself, “you arsehole”. And I walked back. I retrieved a £20 note from my wallet and I folded it so it could be passed to him more discreetly. As I got closer I was struck by how lifeless he looked. Huddled, still, and head bowed. He was not looking about anymore. He was not begging. He was spent.

I put my hand out with the money and he reached for it mechanically. Head up to say, thank you. Looked at his hand. Looked again. Started to say, thank you, and burst into tears. There is something profoundly wrong with a grown man being that grateful for £20 — a breach of protocol — so I joined him.

What is the optimal number of broken jaws?

I was chatting with a friend recently about the COVID-19 response in different countries. Reflecting on her own country, she said, “It is so hard to know what is right!”; that is, it is so hard to know what the right response to COVID-19 should be.

The variation, for instance, in countries’ lockdown responses is substantial, but which country is doing the right thing? In some countries, there has been no lockdown. The government asked the people to be sensible. In other countries, the government legally confined people to their homes — only one person was allowed out at very specific (restricted) times to buy essentials. Given these two policy extremes (be sensible and house arrest), which one is the right one, and how do you know?

An economist, I have forgotten who once asked tongue-in-cheek, what is the optimal number of dead babies? The very purpose of such a crass question is to make you stop and think. What tradeoffs are you prepared to make to save the lives of babies? Sure, you could be lazy, condemn the questioner as immoral (for even asking you to think), and declare zero dead babies to be the right number. As a simple policy proposition, if zero dead babies is the right number, then all the resources of society should be aimed at preventing neonatal deaths. ALL RESOURCES! Until the policy goal has been achieved, there is more work to be done to reduce the number. One dead baby is too many!!! Farmers may farm, but only to produce the food that supports the workforce that is striving to reduce baby deaths to zero. Teachers may teach, but only to educate the people to fill the jobs to support the policy goal to reduce baby deaths to zero. There is very limited use for art, music, cinema, sport, fashion, restaurants, etc. They will all have to go! If five-year-old deaths increase, that is something to live with, just as long as we can save another baby.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, well that’s stupid. That’s not what I meant when I said the optimal number of dead babies is zero. What I meant was something more along the lines of, “In an ideal world there would be zero dead babies”. Equally, if you were asked about poverty or crime, or amazing works of art, you presumably would have stated the ideals in terms of zero poverty, zero crime, and lots more wonderful art. And this is quite a different proposition. An ideal world is not ideal in virtue of its achievement of a single goal. It is ideal in having achieved all sorts of different outcomes. And that is why the real and the ideal do not intersect. In the real world, we do not achieve the ideal anything. We seek to achieve many ideals, and realistically, we hope to make progress against them, knowing that there is always more to be done. In striving to improve the societal position against a basket of goals, we allocate limited resources and make trade-offs.

This is one part of the COVID-19 problem, and, as my friend observed, why it is so hard to know what is right. What is the right number of COVID-19 deaths? There are lots of important, rational debates to be had around this topic because it is about the tradeoffs we are prepared to make against a basket of societal goals against the myopic achievement of one. Muscular public health responses — effective house arrest — are very good at reducing the number of new COVID-19 cases. They are also very effective at increasing domestic violence, increasing depression, lowering child immunisation rates, degrading child education, increasing poverty and increasing unemployment. If the societal goal should be zero COVID-19 deaths, what is the optimal number of broken jaws, suicide attempts, measles encephalitis cases, illiterate and enumerate children, beggars, and soup kitchens?

All these issues, under normal circumstances, are things of concern to Public Health and maybe, one day, they will be again.

Another part of the COVID-19 problem is that, whether a government “did the right thing” will be determined in hindsight, and by making (inadequate) historical comparisons between the outcomes across countries’. In democracies, at least in the short-term, “did the government do the right thing?” will often be decided at the ballot box. This will surely get the answer wrong. In less-than-democracies, astute rulers will write the history books themselves ensuring that, without regard to the outcome, the government did the right thing.

One of the main reasons that “it is so hard to know what is right!” is that we rarely have a societal view about the long term goals we wish to achieve and the tradeoffs we are prepared to make. Furthermore, we are reluctant to accept the fact that one can do the right thing and still fail. We assume that the right course of action will, by definition, result in success. We are prospective Kantians and retrospective Utilitarians.

Relativity in a pandemic

A busy McDonalds is like a well-greased machine. A coordinated team of short-order cooks; staff behind the counter ready to take your order. Queues of people waiting impatiently to pick up their triple burger, hold the onions, no cheese and a flurry of fries. A Manager hovers. Joel, someone’s vomited in the toilets. Sarah, supersize the “meal”. Dinesh, where’s the lady’s McMac?

Time is money. The faster people move through, the greater turnover. The greater the turnover, the greater the profit. It is not just time that is money, space is money too. The more space you have, the more seats you can fit; the more customers you can welcome; the more deep-fryers you can install; the more fries you can produce. Space is money on both sides of the ledger. You have to pay for space, so the space you have needs to be efficiently packed with people.

This is the space-time continuum of business profits. To increase profits, increase trades per unit time and increase customers per unit space.

And then came lockdown! Sand was poured into the cogs of the well-greased machine.

Fortunately, governments have promised a return to “the new normal”. It will be like coming back to a restaurant you have never visited before. When you do return, the McDonalds has changed. Behind the counter, there are fewer people. There are half the numbers of Dineshs to take your order, and fewer short order cooks called Sarah. (The unemployment queues are a little longer. Joel is there.)

No more walking through the front door – there is a limit on the number of people allowed in – but I’m sure it will be worth the wait. Once in, the restaurant feels familiar but somehow more spacious. The bustle and the impatience at the counter are gone. People are standing a prescribed two meters apart. Everything moves a little slower. When you pick up your order and turn to find a table, there is a “wow!” moment. Tables are no longer packed together. There are fewer people seated, and the seating is further apart. You were surprised, however, when you paid – those prices had really gone up. It was no longer a cheap, thoughtless bite-to-eat.

The whole thing takes much longer than you expected, which means you will be late back to the office. Maybe you will think twice, or three times, before coming back, and as you leave, you notice the “To Let” sign in the window.

The neighbourhood has also changed. The cheap but cheerful family restaurant is gone. It survived on volume trade. A well-spaced, sit-down service on melamine plates is too incongruous and too expensive to survive. The “all you can eat” buffets of carbs and fat have also disappeared – too many opportunities for “a Covey” to lick all the serving spoons or sneeze on the mac and cheese.

Fortunately, the internet will save us. Thank you, Google!

Without ever having to see or talk to another human being, you can do it all. You can sit, safe and alone in your bed-sit enjoying a lukewarm meal delivered in takeaway containers. There is an obligatory under-growth of warm, wilted lettuce nestling the spring-rolls; the fries have a flaccidity reminiscent of a moment you’d rather forget; the oils have begun to congeal. The whole experience is perfumed with cardboard and polystyrene. Delicious!