'We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene'

Every April, Washington DC plays host to the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank. But last month, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva addressed her colleagues on video. The world was facing, she declared, a “crisis like no other”. For the first time since records began, the entire world economy is contracting, rich and poor countries alike.

But it is not just the immediate impact that makes this economic crisis unprecedented. It is its genesis. This isn’t 2008, which was triggered by a meltdown of North Atlantic banking. And it isn’t the 1930s; an earthquake that originated in the fault lines left by the first world war. The Covid-19 economic emergency of 2020 is the result of a massive global effort to contain an unknown and lethal disease. It is both a surprising demonstration of our collective power to stop the economy and a shocking reminder that our control of nature, on which modern life rests, is more fragile than we like to think. What we are living through is the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene.

This is the era in which humanity’s impact on nature has begun to blow back on us in unpredictable and disastrous ways. The great acceleration that defined the Anthropocene may have begun in 1945, but in 2020 we are facing the first crisis in which the blowback destabilises our entire economy. It is a reminder of how encompassing and immediate that challenge is. While the timeline of the climate emergency tends to be measured in years, Covid-19 circled the globe in a matter of weeks. And the shock goes deep. By calling into question our mastery over life and death the disease shakes the psychological basis of our social and economic order. It poses fundamental questions about priorities; it upends the terms of debate. Neither in the 1930s nor after 2008 was there any question that getting people back to work was the right thing to do.

Stressing the unprecedented nature of the Covid-19 shock is not to say that the problems exposed by the financial crisis of 2008 are not still with us today. As the pandemic surged in March 2020, the fragility of financial markets was only too apparent. If the lockdowns are followed by a prolonged recession, as is more than likely, the banks will suffer severe damage. Nor does a stress on the uniqueness of the Covid shock imply that geopolitical tensions between China and the US do not matter. They do. The Sino-American conflict puts the future of the world economy in question and this is all the more alarming as tensions over the politics of the virus mount every day.

But the crucial point is that financial stability and geopolitics are now entwined with a challenge, which, as the French president Emmanuel Macron has put it, is anthropological: what is at stake is the trade-off between economic activity and death. A chance mutation in the environmental pressure cooker of central China has put in jeopardy all our ability to go about our daily business. It is a malign version of the butterfly effect. Call it the bat effect.

As it has circulated around the world, Covid-19 has scrambled the timeline of progress. Sophisticated hospitals in China, Italy and the US have been reduced to chaotic, impotent despair. Nurses in New York resorted to swaddling themselves in rubbish bags. Face masks were hand-fabricated on sewing machines. We stack the dead in refrigerator trucks.

We have to face the possibility that we have been living in a charmed interval. In the century since the Spanish flu of 1918-19, the intertwined rise of globalisation and national welfare states took place against the background of relatively benign disease conditions. Thanks to improved nutrition, sanitation and housing, public health, pharmacology and high-tech medicine we have seen remarkable progress in human life expectancy. The conquest of smallpox in 1977 was emblematic. The sense that infectious diseases were a thing of the past underwrote a promise of protection. With Covid-19 the cost of that protection has gone way up. In a horrific mind-warp, advanced economies suddenly find themselves facing the kinds of dilemma habitually faced by poor countries. We don’t have the tools. In the poor world, the everyday result is that children are stunted and families are impoverished. Millions die for lack of treatment. Covid-19 has delivered a taste of that to the rich world.

We cannot say we were not warned. Since the famous Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome thinktank in 1972, experts have been highlighting the natural forces that could interrupt the triumphant path of economic growth. In the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, resource depletion was a big concern. In the 1980s the climate crisis took over. But at the same moment, the shock of HIV/Aids sparked awareness of a different type of blowback from nature: the threat of “emerging infectious diseases” and specifically those generated by zoonotic mutation.

Starting from a famous conference at Rockefeller University in 1989, it has been argued again and again that this is no coincidence. It is the result of humanity’s relentless incorporation of animal life into our food chain. HIV/Aids, Sars, avian flu, swine flu and Mers could all be attributed to that dangerous appetite. Like the climate crisis, epidemics are not merely accidents of nature. They have anthropogenic drivers.

The implications of this analysis are radical. But the doctors and epidemiologists who make it are not revolutionaries. What they have insistently called for is a global public health infrastructure commensurate with the risks that globalisation entails. If we are going to keep huge stocks of domesticated animals and intrude ever more deeply into the last remaining reservoirs of wildlife; if we are going to concentrate in giant cities and travel in ever larger numbers, this comes with viral risks. If we wish to avoid disasters we should invest in research, in monitoring, in basic public health, in the production and stockpiling of vaccines and essential equipment for our hospitals. Of course, that would require considerable political coordination and some investment. But it has always been clear that the payoff would be huge. The flu pandemic of 1918 which is thought to have killed 50 million people sets a high bar. If a pandemic erupted and had to be contained by quarantine it was always obvious that the costs would run into the trillions of dollars.

With the climate crisis we know what stands in the way of an adequate reaction. Fossil fuels are essential to our way of life. Powerful business interests have a huge stake in climate denial. The strategic interests of the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia are all invested in oil. Decarbonising is expensive, technically complicated and the benefits are diffuse and longterm.

In regard to global health policy there are bureaucratic rivalries between different national and global agencies. There are differences in approach between hawkish experts in global health security and biomedical humanitarians. The pharmaceutical industry will not invest in drugs unless it sees a profit. Cost-conscious hospitals want to minimise spending on beds. But all this seems small beer compared to the risks involved. Whereas one can reasonably say that giant structures such as capitalism and geopolitics stand in the way of addressing the climate crisis, the same is not true of Covid-19. The cost of vaccinating the entire world is estimated at around $20bn. That is the equivalent of roughly two hours of global GDP, a tiny fraction of the trillions that the crisis is costing. The fact that this virus was allowed to become a global crisis is not explicable in terms of massive opposed interests. It is first and foremost a failure of government.

Because they are relatively cheap and the scale of the risk is huge, all major countries in fact had pandemic preparations in place. None were as ample as we might now wish. But in places including South Korea, Taiwan and Germany they have worked. Making good plans, following through on them and doing the basic things right turns out to matter. Addressing the climate crisis poses the daunting challenge of slowing the entire system down. What Covid-19 teaches is that it is not just the big picture that matters. So tightly knit is our global system that small failures of governance in a few crucial nodes can affect everyone on the planet.

The remarkable thing about Covid-19 is that it brings the risks of the Anthropocene home to each and every one one of us individually. The lockdowns have not simply been a top-down government measure. It has been people themselves who have en masse decided on their own response to the threat, often ahead of their governments. That was most dramatically reflected in the financial markets, which began a global run to safety. It was that which triggered first the central banks and then parliaments and governments into action. It turns out that we are capable of pausing the world economy. But we now face the awesome responsibility of reopening. If Georgieva is right that this is a crisis like no other, so too is the problem of the restart. The stakes could hardly be higher. On the one hand are the huge medical risks; on the other is a disastrous economic crisis. How can we make the trade-off? It is tempting to reject the choice as impossible or false. Not only is that not true, it also denies the fact that, under normal circumstances, we routinely engage in life and death trade-offs. Even in the most affluent societies, financially motivated decisions are made every day that decide the chances of death due to workplace accidents, pollution, car crashes, hospital funding, drug procurement and health insurance.

But never before has the question been put in such direct terms for entire nations. The result is predictably divisive. The US is currently embarked on a crash test, with southern Republican states such as Georgia ploughing ahead despite inadequate testing or medical backup. Incited by the president himself, armed militia occupied the Michigan state capitol demanding “liberation” from the lockdown. Meanwhile in Germany Angela Merkel reprised her role in the eurozone crisis by trying to stifle any discussion. This was not a moment for “orgies of debate about reopening”, she insisted. Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” was, once again, the order of the day.

The magic bullet would be a medical solution – antibody tests, effective treatments, a vaccine. It took five years to develop a vaccine for Ebola, though vastly greater resources are being thrown at this problem. But what we are counting on should not be confused with business as usual. We have never successfully developed a corona vaccine. We are betting not on normal science, but on a modern wonder, a “scientific miracle”. And, even in the best case, if a vaccine is rolled out in 2021, we cannot escape the logic of risk society. We now know what this kind of threat can do. We know we lost a big chunk of 2020. How do we move on from here?

The obvious solution is to make the investments in global public health that experts have been calling for since the 1990s. There will be political and commercial obstacles to overcome. China and the US are at odds and seem determined to politicise the pandemic. On top of that the vast financial cost of the crisis will hang over us. Huge debts are likely to encourage talk of austerity. Since the 1990s, market-focused politics of economy in the public sector have weakened health systems around the world. Ultimately politics will be decisive, and the last six months have brought crushing defeats for the left on both sides of the Atlantic. The prevailing political tenor of the crisis, so far, has been conservative and nationalist.

Faced with the crisis, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump have cut ludicrous figures. But they express a deep desire to deny the significance of the shock. Who would not rather think that this was simply the flu? Given this temptation, what we should guard against is not open displays of denial but the soft alternative. Covid-19, like the unprecedented hurricanes and devastating fires of 2019, will be dismissed as a freak of nature. That is comforting. It will be good for business in the short run. But it sets us up for another crisis. If it is right that Covid-19 is a crisis like no other, what is to be feared is that there will be more like it to come •