From 2020 to 2021 every marker of poverty, from child poverty, to overall poverty, to food insecurity, to homelessness, plummeted in the richest countries.
In 2021, US poverty fell to a record low, as did child poverty, which was almost halved, an achievement without precedent in modern US history. These achievements equated to lifting nearly 5 million children out of poverty.
Just as startling progress was achieved elsewhere. In the UK, for a few precious months, homelessness was all but ended. Britain’s rapid and successful efforts to house people was even more stunning when you consider that the number of homeless people in the UK had increased by 141 percent from 2010 to 2020.
In an interview with the New York Times, formerly homeless people in the UK said covid was the best thing that had happened to them.
“It’s so surreal to wake up in a bed every morning, my own room with my own door and bathroom,” Ryan Anderson, a formerly homeless man in London who was housed at the start of the pandemic, said. “To tell you the truth, corona has been the best thing that has happened to the homeless. No one has benefited as much as us.”
While not as dramatic as declines in the US, poverty also declined in the UK during 2020-2021 due to temporary increases in benefits for working age people.
From the US, to the UK to Canada, food insecurity also plummeted.
From April 2020 to December 2021, the Canadian government spent $330,000,000 to make sure no one went hungry, ending food poverty.
In the US, despite apocalyptic warnings of hunger and starvation (themselves born from the dystopic and not unreasonable assumption that the American government was just going to let people starve), food insecurity fell a massive 40% from December 2020 to April 2021.
It turns out that when you give people money and food and homes, they no longer suffer from a lack of money and food and homes. It turns out that poverty in rich countries is a choice.
It shouldn’t need a pandemic for governments to make the right choices.
It’s what it should mean to live in a society.
So why don’t they?
Because our economies are rigged.
We’re fond of labelling western societies as unequal. But inequality is the condition stemming from the structure. The society sits on and is surrounded by the economy. The economy is the superstructure.
And the economy is rigged.
Forty years of endless tax cuts for the rich have supercharged inequality. Massive corporates including fossil fuel companies get huge government stimulus and tax breaks, which means they keep making massive profits, which means they stay rich. Tax loopholes our governments refuse to close mean these corporations and their super rich owners never have to pay much tax or share their wealth.
Of course governments spent money in bad ways too during the first two years of covid, funnelling funds to their friends who set up shady PPE import-export companies, as in the case of the UK.
But that’s to be expected in a rigged economy.
The broader point is that when the motivation is there, and when the broad cultural-political conditions allow it, governments can spend money on things that help ordinary people too. And help them in transformative ways.
As this transformation was underway in 2020 and 2021, the media was flooded with articles along the lines of: will we learn the lessons from the pandemic? I think we know the answer. Who talks now about the unprecedented reduction in rich world poverty?
No one. Not even the left.
So predictably, all these gains have been lost. Governments that give billions to billionaires decided they couldn’t keep making the lives of ordinary people bearable, and pulled the plug. Child hunger is back in a big way, homelessness in the UK is worse than ever, and child poverty in the US more than doubled in a year.
We have been deliberately steered away from learning any of these lessons by a coordinated right-wing propaganda effort to cloud the covid era in a dizzying array of misinformation and fringe theories.
It’s a favoured tactic of the right. As Steven Bannon said: flood the zone with shit. Because when you flood the zone with shit, nothing sticks. Everything gets lost in the maelstrom of disinformation.
The true legacy of covid could have been the end of poverty and a genuine systemic shift. Instead, distractions came thick and fast, the media played along, and everything got worse.
Only when we realise what could have been can we see that a return to normal was contingent on erasing covid from the collective consciousness.
Normal being poverty, hunger, homelessness. The necessity for a permanent and visible underclass to keep the working and middle classes on their toes. For the machine to keep running, we had to forget that poverty is a policy choice.
We needed those visible examples of who we could be should bad luck strike, or if we stop grifting for the man.
Homelessness and poverty is capitalism’s live stream, broadcast everywhere to ensure you can never fully escape the sense of precarity about what might be.
It’s important to acknowledge at this point that covid did increase poverty in the global south. But only because these countries didn’t have the resources to do what the rich west did, in no small part because of the historical and present plundering of these countries by the global north.
In the rich world, where we do have the resources, the policy response to covid unequivocally and in some cases drastically reduced poverty.
While the erasure of covid was a right wing project, I also reserve a fair amount of disdain for the popular and podcast left who (with a handful of honourable exceptions like the folks at Punch Up Podcast) have been tragically absent on covid.
From forcing us all to catch a virus for the sake of corporate profits, to the rich and famous cleaning their indoor air, to the billionaire funded ‘freedom’ campaigns during lockdowns, the class and power play was obvious.
Covid was a once-in-a-lifetime consciousness raising moment. An opportunity to point out that it really is us vs them. An opportunity to solidify the gains.
It appears to have been lost by a class of popular leftists who, bewilderingly, failed to understand the opportunity. And at times even appeared to support the right-wing narrative that covid was a ruse at worst and an excuse at best to take away our freedoms and make the rich richer.
Has it made the rich richer? Of course it has.
BECAUSE WE LIVE IN CAPITALISM.
The rich are getting richer with or without a pandemic. It is well documented by now that any disaster is seized on by capitalists to boost their earnings. The qualifying condition for rich people getting richer was not - and is not - a pandemic. It is this rigged economy. It is capitalism.
But what we saw for a brief period is how a genuine emergency can pause business-as-usual. And this frightened the right, their billionaires and thinktanks, more than anything has in their lifetimes.
They saw that when societies agree on what constitutes an emergency, it activates the necessary cultural-political conditions for an unprecedented policy response.
This is why for a long time politicians, especially on the right, denied covid was a big deal. Trump said it would go away, it was no big deal. Boris Johnson said we had to push through, we had to stand up for free markets regardless of the human cost.
They understood if a consensus position emerged that covid was an emergency, it would create irresistible pressure for the type of policy interventions we subsequently saw.
Once this emergency and these measures had been initiated, right wing think-tanks, charlatans and credentialed grifters spent all their time arguing it wasn’t really an emergency. They understood that the sooner the emergency ended, the sooner the interventions would stop.
And to do this they flooded the zone with shit: deaths are due to vaccines, excess death is only average, covid deaths just replaced flu deaths, etc. The goal of this propaganda was to convince people covid was not really an emergency.
The motivation of the right on climate change is exactly the same.
As soon as a cultural-political consensus emerges that climate change is an emergency, it will create the same irresistible pressure for the types of interventions they are ideologically and materially opposed to.
The goal of the right, therefore, is to deny that our crumbling ecosystems constitute an emergency. They would rather watch millions die, would rather watch everything collapse, than give an inch in their ideological beliefs or a penny from their pockets.
Covid was a test bed for these tactics. It has worked like a dream.
Expect it to be repeated. Again and again and again.
In the meantime, educate, advocate, organise and prepare.
Their victory is not inevitable.
Really good article except that the economy is the base upon which stand the superstructure (laws, ideas, assumptions, common sense, etc). Since our base is a capitalist economy, the superstructure is the entirety of the ideology that fits with that economic system.
Covid indeed gave us a brief view that other things were possible
The Superstructure that society sits on is nature. Economies break down or go into overdrive based on natural disasters, mineral deposits, and available energy. The economy is just a proxy. Otherwise great article.