Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the…

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of controls like the Glass-Steagall Act. /1 https://t.co/FQlki76QCY

This picture shows the Glass-Steagall Act being signed into existence in the early 1930s, with its variety of measures to regulate banking/finance, after the terrible experiences of the Great Depression. Over the next 60 years it and related controls on banks were… /2 https://t.co/zOdgcErVsY

…stripped away. I Tweeted yesterday what happened next. Two millennia of distrust and outright hostility towards money-lending, usury, swept away in a few short decades. For the first time in 2 thousand years, ‘economic growth’ became a thing, and in celebration society…/3 https://t.co/KBT1guO2KL

…was re-labelled an ‘economy’. Much of what we call the ‘modern’ era in history after 1950 is the euphoria this finance-enabled release from the constraints of history produced. And so, back to Covid. This economy, really just an old society saturated with debt,…/4

…requires continuous exponential growth to function. And as we’ve seen, we couldn’t keep fighting a pandemic apparently, because exponential infection was destroying exponential economic growth. ‘Lockdowns’ really mean that, the flattening of the exponential curve. Except…/5

…it actually didn’t. As you can see here, even while we were in the middle of our lockdown period, economic growth took off at a rate we hadn’t seen in years. Investment does that, big government stimulus. But for modern conservatives, public investment bad, private good,…/6 https://t.co/CjwMVO8fWt

…so the burden was thrown back upon the rest of us to recharge our private debt, which as you can see (private debt to GDP ratio) dipped when the government reversed decades of bugger-all public investment, during the earlier pandemic. Even though it’s all our money, whether…/7 https://t.co/o2ykW11YJC

…public or private, individuals will now have to carry the burden, to keep the exponential growth machine running. No economies of scale by doing it at the government level, our collective instrument, each family will have to take on more personal debt. This is ‘getting the…/8

…government out of peoples’ lives’. And getting the banks back into them. But just as we’ve seen with Covid, the problem with anything powered by exponential growth is, it cycles endlessly in waves until you stop the exponential engine. Infections and economies are exactly…/9

…the same, in how they behave, because they’re both exponential processes. In fact they’re the same process, they’re both just people, in debt or infected, at the same time. The same people who need to take on personal debt to keep the economy going also have to be infected…/10

…to keep Covid going. Their debt-funded work is what gets them infected. There’s no ‘balance’ between economy and public health here, debt and infection drive each other. There are two ways this can end. We cycle endlessly up and down epidemic and economic booms and bust. /11 https://t.co/2UuQOD0TJR

As you can see in the S&P stock data, 95% of the time a ‘market’ is just making up for lost earnings, often decades between peaks. With increasing debt raising the baseline over time, of the peaks. Epidemics and pandemics do the same, if left unchecked, they can cycle for…/12 https://t.co/8B3ycAAuqE

…centuries in waves of infection. The point I want to make here though is that these aren’t 2 separate process that are analogous. It’s the economic behaviour that drives the epidemic behaviour, the enslaving of society to debt-funded exponential growth is what makes it…/13

…unaffordable to fight a pandemic. You have to keep dislocating people, making them mobile and gathering them in large groups in workplaces, to keep the economy going, to keep feeding the exponential growth curve. The sad thing is that this is a zero-sum game. Despite our…/14

…euphoria during the up part of waves, over time you go nowhere. Look at the long-term performance of stocks on the S&P 500. Converging to no performance at all. It’s what exponential curves do, they suck the life out of things until nothing is left. To end the pandemic, we…/15 https://t.co/680UKNuji6

…need to end a society infected with exponential growth, in everything it does. Give up our delusional dreams of double-digit super growth, of endless increases in prosperity. Will it happen? I doubt it. The exponential curve is the ultimate drug. /end