Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/opinion/coronavirus-economy-history.html

Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics
The coronavirus, like other plagues before it, could shift the balance between rich and poor.
By Walter Scheidel
Mr. Scheidel is a professor of classics and history at Stanford University.
April 9, 2020

In the fall of 1347, rat fleas carrying bubonic plague entered Italy on a few ships from the Black Sea. Over the next four years, a pandemic tore through Europe and the Middle East. Panic spread, as the lymph nodes in victims’ armpits and groins swelled into buboes, black blisters covered their bodies, fevers soared and organs failed. Perhaps a third of Europe’s people perished.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” offers an eyewitness account: “When all the graves were full, huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards, into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stowed tier upon tier like ships’ cargo.” According to Agnolo di Tura of Siena, “so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

And yet this was only the beginning. The plague returned a mere decade later and periodic flare-ups continued for a century and a half, thinning out several generations in a row. Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.”

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrunk the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades. According to tax records that have survived in the archives of many Italian towns, wealth inequality in most of these places plummeted. In England, workers ate and drank better than they did before the plague and even wore fancy furs that used to be reserved for their betters. At the same time, higher wages and lower rents squeezed landlords, many of whom failed to hold on to their inherited privilege. Before long, there were fewer lords and knights, endowed with smaller fortunes, than there had been when the plague first struck.

(more at link)

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Even without that kind of death toll,

there are going to be profound changes at the end of this.

[PoliticAverse]

2. Then they probably should do more to prevent them. n/t

[Cha]

3. Exactly.

[smirkymonkey]

4. They never think that far ahead.

The problem with them is that they are so short-sighted. It has always been their problem, which is why they always court disaster.

[ananda]

8. Exactly!

!!!

[Crabby Appleton]

5. idiotic premise

unlike the lower income masses who cheerfully accept their place in the funeral home

What a pants-load

[gab13by13]

6. I was about to post the same thing,

We can't get a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage when the economy is supposedly booming. It's going to take deflation to move wages.

[Boomer]

7. Way to miss the point

These historical pandemics changed society because of the extreme de-population, possibly as much as 50-60%. COVID-19 is not lethal enough to create the same economic pressure in favor of labor as the plague did.

Instead, COVID-19 is culling out the oldest members of society, those who have left the workforce. And even there, the numbers are huge from a humanitarian perspective, but not from a societal one.

Perhaps the author is trying to find some silver lining in the midst of our current crisis, but this seemed an especially flimsy connection to make.

[Quemado]

9. Employers and the wealthy see this pandemic as an opportunity to cut labor costs.

I'm pretty sure that the wealthy and employers in general are going to use the current situation as an opportunity to cut labor costs.

Employees are vulnerable to pandemics.

They will try to automate as many tasks, currently performed by humans, as they can.