The New York Times
My colleague David WallaceWells, in his New York Times newsletter last week, described the Covid era as a time machine a time machine that has undone years or decades of progress and thrown us back in time. The rise in mortality, the rise in violent crime, the loss of children’s education all have returned us to the conditions of an earlier time: the higher murder rate in the late 1990s, the higher mortality rates in the early 2000s, the lowest National Assessment test scores of Educational Progress of the 2000s.
As WallaceWells suggests, there are different ways to interpret this regression. It’s kind of grim news no matter what happens. But you can see it as a really worrying sign of the fragility of progress, or you can emphasize the good news that even after a global plague that has killed millions of people, we are still in a largely familiar landscape, a world that looks more with the era of George W. Bush than with postapocalyptic desolation.
However, I was particularly interested in your time machine picture because I also wrote a column about Covid as a time machine in the early days of the pandemic. But I had a different kind of DeLorean ride in mind: In that article, I argued that the pandemic was an accelerator, accelerating social, political and technological changes that could have occurred more slowly, propelling us into the 2030s, not back to the 2030s 2030s. Past.
Which time machine analysis makes the most sense? I think there is no need to choose. Synergies are possible. Both capture something real about our postpandemic situation, which has combined acceleration with regression in interesting, if mostly unfortunate, ways.
The regressive trends that WallaceWells describes are developments that appear to be very specific to the conditions of the pandemic, disruptions and discontinuities that we would probably not have foreseen even on a slower timescale, looking only at the world around 2018 .
The sudden change in mortality rate is the most obvious example; Before Covid, life expectancy in the US was stagnant, but even in the shadow of the opioid epidemic, there was no reason to expect such a steep decline. But the same could be said of murder rates: one might expect fluctuations as a result of the wave of protests or layoff policies, but before 2020 I would have bet that an aging society with an everexpanding surveillance apparatus would return to the same rate. Murders during Bill Clinton’s second term.
I would also put inflation in this category. Our long era of low interest rates appeared to be linked to deep socioeconomic characteristics of the developed world, particularly an aging population (as older societies grow more slowly and older people save more and spend less). And it took extraordinary fiscal waste and spending on a scale that would have been unimaginable outside of an emergency to get inflation back on track—along with all the supply chain problems unique to the pandemic.
In contrast, the aspects of the Covid era that I discussed or tried to predict in my column were accelerations, not discontinuities. Declining church attendance, for example, was a feature of 2010s America before pandemicrelated closures drove larger numbers of people from their places of worship. This distancing was the same tendency, only experienced more quickly. The increase in home working and virtual commuting was also an upward leap, following “continuous growth” in the decades before Corona. The leftward shift among elite institutions in the era of George Floyd, purges and ideological upheaval was also an example of an existing trend the “Great Awakening” that began somewhere in Barack Obama’s second term and which was reflected in an acceleration of the pandemic. And the decline in the birth rate in 2020 was, of course, an acceleration of the fertility decline that began with the Great Recession more than a decade earlier.
Some trends didn’t happen exactly as I predicted three years ago: the decline of newspapers, for example, continued to follow the trend but didn’t really accelerate. In other cases, the acceleration has been so intense and rapid that there has been a backlash, sometimes slight (the modest increase in the birth rate in 2021) and sometimes more significant: just as the Wokeness wave went beyond what it would have been without the pandemic Politically and culturally, antiwokeness also had more success than if the leftwing movement among the elite had progressed more slowly.
In other cases, acceleration exceeded fundamentals and triggered a crisis or at least confusion. That’s basically the story in Hollywood, where the shift to streaming was bigger and faster than it would have been without Covid confining everyone to their couches or screens, but ended up being so big and fast that it created a new, not A sustainable status quo emerged that was no longer sustainable. Neither the studios nor the striking writers and actors seem to know how to stabilize or reverse it.
“It will be the same, just a little worse,” Michel Houellebecq caustically predicted about the postpandemic world. So far, the interplay between the accelerating progress I have observed and the declining trends described by WallaceWells falls largely into the “worse” category. Essentially, this brings more difficulties: we will deal with many of the problems of the mid21st century a little sooner because of Covid, but we also have to deal with problems that we thought we had left behind in 1999 or even 1982 .
Before 2020, it was possible to look at the 2030s and say: well, growth will be slow due to falling birth rates and an aging population, but we can at least deal with large deficits and enjoy safer cities as we go approaching dusk. But now we look to the future and say instead: Well, the birth rate has gotten worse and threatens an older, more stagnant future, but now we also have the crime and inflation problems of a much younger society. Thanks to the Covidaccelerated time machine, some aspects of our decline have deepened; Thanks to the backlash, it has also become more unpleasant, chaotic and dangerous.
To find counteroptimism, one must focus primarily on technology. Whether or not Covid played a major causal role, there appears to have been a technological acceleration over the past five years, a move away from the relative stagnation (or purely digital innovation) of previous decades. How far all this will take us is uncertain: the economic boom driven by artificial intelligence remains as hypothetical as the Skynet apocalypse, and as Benjamin Breen notes in an essay on Substack, the true nature of scientific revolutions often only becomes clear in retrospect. and the connection between technological progress and social improvement is always complicated and contingent.
But if we are hopeful, the hope must be that any possible technologydriven boom could help reverse the 1990slike 2030s momentum we have now and bring back the best of the 1990s, not the one high crime rates. , but rising productivity, social optimism and more robust marriage and birth rates (perhaps driven by more home working), but all this against a more futuristic backdrop of cheap, abundant energy and rapid biomedical advances.
A form of time travel, a collision of eras, a fondly remembered past and a longedfor future converging on our timeline it all sounds pretty good to me. Not just this clash, this combination, this expected beginning of a disappointing future, further darkened by the return of the problems of the past.