In trying to gauge the coronavirus crisis, we are all struggling for historical reference points. Which is the historical example to choose?
The turmoil in the financial markets and the talk of bailouts reminds us of 2008. But though the shock comes at the end of a long economic upswing, it is not organically related to that long period of growth. Some overstretched businesses are getting their comeuppance, no doubt. But even the airlines, the firms everyone loves to hate, are not to blame.
It isn’t a black swan event, either. A pandemic risk was well-mapped by experts. We just chose to ignore them, all of us. And now we are making an unprecedented public policy choice to shut down the economy.
So, is it like a war? References to World War II encourage feelings of patriotic mobilization. But mobilization is precisely not our goal. Nonessential sectors would be furloughed in a war effort, too, but their workers and plants would likely be rapidly reallocated to war duty. If covid-19 were the kind of disease that required a broad-front medical mobilization, the military analogy might work better. After all, in 2020, health care, at 18 percent, already accounts for a far larger share of the U.S. economy than defense did at the time of Pearl Harbor.
But, except for the overstretched intensive- and respiratory-care units, the health-care system is shutting down, too. Even as medical staff are working to exhaustion and braving risks of infection, their employers, both hospitals and private practices, are facing financial catastrophe.
There are historical analogies to this kind of collective shutdown, but they are not attractive.
In 1914, when Europeans deluded themselves into thinking that the war would be over by Christmas, there was, at first, little mobilization and a rise in unemployment. The disruption was limited in scope and duration. No one dreamed of shutting shops or restaurants.
Grimmer analogies are to wars not won, but lost. The former Soviet Union in the early 1990s comes to mind. But that implosion reflected the disintegration of a failed economic system and stretched over decades.
Sometimes a useful thing for historians to do is to point out when something seems radically new. That is our situation today.