Other things

“In giving us a glimpse of financial freedom, 2020 also robbed us of pretenses and excuses. If we are not doing a global vaccine plan, it is not for lack of funds. It is because indifference, or selfish calculation — vaccinate America first — or real technical obstacles prevent us from ‘actually’ doing it. It turns out that budget constraints, in all their artificiality, had spared us from facing the all-too-limited willingness and capacity for collective action. Now if you hear someone arguing that we cannot afford to bring billions of people out of poverty or we cannot afford to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, we know how to respond: Either you are invoking technological obstacles, in which case we need a suitably scaled, Warp Speed-style program to overcome them, or it is simply a matter of priorities. There are other things you would rather do.”

What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021

A sting in the tail

This failure [to develop a global vaccination program] is all the more glaring for another lesson that the pandemic revealed: Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.

The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that “anything we can actually do, we can afford.” The sheer scale of the action was intoxicating. … If money was a mere technicality, what else could be done? Action on social justice, climate change, the Green New Deal, all seemed within reach.

[But] Keynes’s bon mot has a sting in its tail: We can afford anything we can actually do. The problem is agreeing on what to do and how to do it.”

What if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Just a Trial Run?, by economic historian Adam Tooze. New York Times, September 1, 2021