Aufhebunga Bunga
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/322/ Covid Dissensus (II) ft. Toby Green & Thomas Fazi
🕑 Added 2023-02-14 07:02:00 +0000 UTCOn The Covid Consensus.
[Patreon Exclusive]
In the second part of the interview, we discuss the devastating impact of lockdowns on poor and middle-income countries where the informal economy is the norm. How did the consensus go global?
And we discuss those few countries that bucked the trend in different ways: Sweden, Mexico, Brazil. Is there a risk of the opposite extreme to lockdowns – social neglect?
In the After Party, the boys debate how important global coordination really was; the idea of "living on thin air"; and what the pandemic's legacy is, now that most measures have been withdrawn.
Links:
- The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left, Toby Green & Thomas Fazi
- /213/ The Leopard Lockdown ft. Adam Tooze
- /38/ The Economics of Exit ft. Thomas Fazi
Comments
Elias Braun
Phil hit the nail on the head on the causes of uniformity imo. I'd add the universal destruction of state capacity which Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri emphasise in their paper (which both reduces the options available to the state and increases its vulnerability to global technocrats whether from the WTO or McKinsey). I don't think it's a coincidence that the only state in Europe that had a different response is one of the least hollowed out.
Szilárd
I wouldn't be able to claim any kind of "clairvoyance" on the issue of lockdowns, at the height of the pandemic was not seriously questioning the basic premises of the covid consensus. But even back then, I found it weird how the media was producing en masse these short newsbits on how this country locked down, how that country reacted, what this or that government did. It was a cacophony of decontextualized bits of information, and I kept asking myself: how is this relevant? what does a different social, economic, political context is relevant for my society? And I think in this we have witnessed an incipient and perverse imagination of a global community in which the globe is flat and uniform and whatever happens at the other side of the world is presupposed to be directly applicable to our own situation. This global imagining of course is tied to certain segments of the educated upper/middle classes, but the cacophony also pushed everyone's imagination towards the most extreme, most clickbaity solutions. I haven't yet thought further the political implications of this vulgar theory of mine, but I wonder if you guys have any thoughts on this?
