Blithe destruction

From New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveal How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class While Leaving Elites Unscathed by Brad Polumbo.

Click to enlarge.

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later. 

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Employment for lower-wage workers, defined as earning less than $27,000 annually, declined by a whopping 23.6 percent over the time period. Employment for middle-wage workers, defined as earning from $27,000 to $60,000, declined by a modest 4.5 percent. However, employment for high-wage workers, defined as earning more than $60,000, actually increased 2.4 percent over the measured time period despite the country’s economic turmoil.

The data are damning. They offer yet another reminder that government lockdowns hurt most those who could least afford it. 

I agree.  One of my indictments of the Mandarin Class is that, highly educationally credentialed, usually high income, living in cities with enormous range of choices, they simply have no basis of understanding real life for most Americans.  

The above graphic is an example.  For the Mandarin Class and professional services people, the pandemic and associated lockdowns have been inconvenient.  For the lower middle class and poor, it has been catastrophic.  

Despite that, there has been relatively little reporting on the plight of easily half of Americans, no exploration of how misguided public health policy has been so profoundly destructive.  Often, it feels not a matter of reluctance to report, but more fundamentally an incapacity to even conceptualize a world outside of their shriveled cognitive and experiential domains.