The state of Utah is currently under a gubernatorial “directive” – rather than a mandatory order – to stay at home, and all schools and universities have closed their physical facilities to students, while restaurants are limited to carry-out and drive-by food service, and non-essential businesses are supposed to be closed. But the mayors of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have issued mandatory stay-at-home orders, as has Summit County (essentially Park City).

In our part of the state, what’s an essential business seems rather loosely defined. Gun shops are open, as are dollar stores and at least one or two furniture emporiums, and a significant percentage of university faculty are still using their offices daily. I don’t see large groups in public places, but there’s a feeling that I can only call surreal, because it seems to me that, with the exception of the lack of toilet paper, flour, and pasta in the grocery stores, most people here are acting as if nothing really bad is going to happen.

Maybe, in a state with a great deal of open space, matters won’t get as bad as in New York and all the larger cities – except that the Wasatch Front, a hundred miles of suburban and urban sprawl sandwiched between two mountain ranges containing two million people, doesn’t exactly qualify as open space, as the two Salt Lake area mayors seem to realize, unlike the suburban municipalities surrounding Salt Lake. With a 1,000 known cases and only seven deaths in Utah at the moment, matters don’t seem that bad. Except, only 20,000 people have been tested.

Cedar City and its principal suburb contain roughly 45,000 people, plus whatever college students are remaining here out of 11,000, but St. George, 50 miles south, contains over 150,000 people, and I have my doubts that this part of Utah will remain unscathed, although at present there have only been less than 50 known cases and two covid-19 deaths in the two counties. The first testing locations became available in this area just today.

One aspect of this that I find troubling is that all too many people here have no idea how bad things are elsewhere, as evidenced by something like fifteen commissioners of rural counties here who wrote the governor demanding that he remove the directive and prohibitions because there was no danger of a pandemic here and those prohibitions were strangling the local economies. Or by the university student who couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be able to attend a summer program in Berlin. Or some friends who continue to live “normal” lives.

And most people don’t seem to realize that, while we have a very new and modern small hospital, it only has 48 beds… and it’s 250 miles to Salt Lake or 50 miles to St. George, a small city with a population containing large numbers of retirees.

It could be that southwestern Utah will escape relatively unscathed, but I’m not betting on it… especially since too many people here seem to think it won’t happen.

The lack of adequate personal protective equipment for medical personnel dealing with the covid-19 pandemic, the lack of adequate numbers of respirators, and the lack of advance planning in the United States is an unfortunate and yet inevitable outgrowth of the “instant internet” and “just-in-time” mindset that has become prevalent in the United States, particularly in the last twenty years. Unhappily, major crises aren’t susceptible to “instant” solutions. Solutions require time and advance allocation of resources, and extreme capitalist societies like the U.S. don’t like setting aside resources that could be “better” used for making more money now.

Unfortunately, that mindset isn’t totally new. It’s just worse, aided by a society addicted to instant satisfaction. The United States has always had a habit of trying to avoid looking at and dealing with unpleasant truths… and not wanting to spend thought and resources on preparation and understanding. I won’t go into all of the examples, but World War II and the Vietnam War were two more recent examples, as was the financial melt-down of 2008. For six years before Germany actually invaded Poland, Hitler broke treaties, annexed other countries, demonized, persecuted and killed Jews and others the Nazis found “undesirable.” By the mid-thirties the Japanese were taking over large sections of China. The U.S. reaction? Zilch. The U.S. Army was at one of the lowest levels ever, and the isolationist America First movement was the predominant political view.

The Vietnam War was largely fought by the U.S., until the very end, on the WW II assumption that massive numbers of men, bombs, high tech and costly weapons, and defoliants could defeat a popular movement using asymmetrical warfare tactics, even though the Vietnamese had driven out the French. Over more than a thousand years, China had attempted to conquer the Vietnam area, but the Vietnamese never gave up and always pushed the Chinese out, and the Chinese always had more men and better weapons. Until the very end, the military and the Washington establishment never looked at that history, or, when they did, they disregarded it.

The 2008 financial meltdown came about the same way. Even though more than a few experts and analysts questioned the over-mortgaging of American and the securitization of subprime mortgages, few policymakers wanted to look at the underlying weaknesses of the system, and no one planned for the future, because everything was about making more money “now.”

Every reputable epidemiologist knows that pandemics happen. They’ve happened throughout history, always with high body counts, economic havoc, and political instability. So what did the Trump administration do? They eliminated the very office created to deal with pandemics, and the result was the loss of at least a month of time for preparation. There also weren’t enough back-up supplies, and it turns out – not to my surprise – that it takes time to retool factories to produce surgical masks and respirators… time, it turns out, that cities like New York don’t have. The just-in-time economy and instant internet aren’t very good at dealing with crises like covid-19. We will muddle through, but more people will die who didn’t have to, and many of them will be medical professionals in the front line… and, also, in the process, a great many workers and their families will suffer unnecessary financial hardship.

There are reasons to know history and to have enough equipment of the right kind ready on standby, even though it’s not “instantly” profitable… but somehow it seems every generation has to learn that truth the hard way… and some politicians and people never do.

According to the CDC, the fatality rate for influenza has historically run roughly at a rate of 1/10th of one percent, that is to say, that for every thousand people infected, one person died. The highest known fatality rate for a form of influenza was the 1918 Spanish Flu, estimated to have had a fatality rate around two percent. Presently, it appears that the fatality rate for Covid-19 runs from 1.4% to as high as 3.0%

Seasonal flu has averaged a contagion rate of roughly 1.3, meaning each infected flu victim infects on average 1.3 others. The contagion rate for the 1918 Flu is estimated to have been around 2.5, but that was before more modern treatments were available. Currently, it appears that Covid-19 – without measures such as social distancing – has a contagion rate of 2.3, very close to that of the 1918 flu.

So far this “flu year,” there have been at least 34 million cases of flu in the United States, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 flu deaths, according to the C.D.C. By comparison, if 34 million Americans were exposed to Covid-19, even at the lowest fatality rate, there would be close to half a million deaths, and over five million people requiring hospitalization.

And remember, 34 million people amount to only about ten percent of the U.S. population.

There are novels that wear well over time, but not all that many, because too often authors are locked into their “present,” whether through social conventions, marketing requirements, or reader expectations.

Jane Austen has enjoyed a revival because women, in particular, have enjoyed her accurate, trenchant, and well-written observations of social maneuvering in a particular time period, an analysis which is transferable in ways to current society, which illustrates how, at times, the “simple” approach of good writing can, in itself, be timeless – but only if it also somehow speaks to readers. And in a strange way, Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, also has a sense of timelessness, at least in the original French.

Strangely, it seems to me, timelessness is harder to come by in science fiction. A number of once-popular SF novels of the 1950s and early 1960s are also hopelessly dated by technology. Venus the green planet has been supplanted by Venus the lead-melting hellhole. We now know that the Barsoom of John Carter never could have existed on Mars … and there’s also less enthusiasm for honorable but clearly patriarchal heroes of that mold. That, of course, doesn’t stop intrepid “SF” authors, for whom the latest authorial trick has been to invent an alternative universe or history conducive to the pulp-style tales they want to tell.

I obviously have no problem with inventing alternative universes, but I do wonder why such authors would want to create a pseudo-pulp solar system based on concepts popular in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Then, again, I suppose that’s a form of timelessness, where modern science has been excluded. At the same time, calling the stories in such universes “science fiction” is a bit of a stretch, but SF has seen survived such stretches and will continue to do so, especially since the limits of hard science are increasingly inimical to space-operatic swashbuckling.

Still, despite the limits of hard science… some science fiction novels, such as LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, or Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, have a certain timelessness, but such books are comparatively rare. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, while dated in the sense that we still can’t do what he theorized, has its own sense of timelessness.

Fantasy is much more suited to timelessness, especially with such works as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but it’s a bit early to tell how time will treat The Wheel of Time or any of my fantasy series or those of other best-selling or acclaimed authors. We may turn out to be timeless… but it’s more likely we’ll merely be authors forgotten in time, which is the fate of the majority of authors.

“So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised us these beautiful things…

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew…”

Kipling – “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings”

So… in less than two weeks, countries, corporations, small businesses, and huge numbers of individuals are facing economic ruin, not to mention the fact that virtually everyone’s retirement and portfolio have been trashed… and potentially a great deal more.

Why?

Covid-19 didn’t cause this. What caused this mess was the leveraging of greed at every possible level in human society.

Leverage is a great idea, in perspective. Who doesn’t want to get more for less effort, less investment, fewer employees?

Take just-in-time supply chains. They cut inventory costs because a firm doesn’t pay for components almost until needed [and the way some companies handle payment probably until after the components are already in a product on its way to be sold, if not already sold]. The company doesn’t maintain inventory for the government to tax [taxing inventory may prove to be one of the worst a decisions ever made in modern economic history]. There’s no cost for additional warehousing space. Ideally, that means a cheaper product [practically, it means higher profits and executive compensation].

Automation is another form of leverage. Improvements in technology mean that AI-guided systems replace human guided systems. That results in greater precision at lower cost and a smaller human workforce. Computerization is drastically reducing administrative jobs, which also has resulted in increasingly high workloads on reduced numbers of lower-level “executive” employees.

Outsourcing and off-shoring are other forms of leveraging capital, often essentially human capital, although they’re seldom described that way.

And, of course, raising money in the stock-market so that others pay for much of the capital in a company is also leverage. Again, I’ve never seen it described that way, but that’s what it is.

Then, add in specialization, where a few firms, perhaps only one or two, produce just one component vital to a number of firms…and spread this across not only the U.S. economy, but the world economy, and have an economic system the like of which the world has never seen. The only problem is that while all this specialization and leverage has enormous benefits, it also has enormous fragility, something that “the smooth-tongued wizards” of the Gods of the Market have ignored and downplayed. That’s a failure that the smooth-tongued wizards never pay for.

Unfortunately, we, as a society, will pay mightily for being seduced by the siren song of pure and over-leveraged capitalism, and for failing to recognize that we needed to master and restrain capitalism, rather than allowing ourselves to be mastered by it.