THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 21
was celebrated for it!”) Or perhaps the
government should reward each citizen
who strictly observed the quarantine with
fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would
burn out after four weeks,” he said. The
U.S. had all the food and water and fuel
it would need to survive months, if not
years, of total isolation from the world.
“If you don’t trade with China, they’re
screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war.
Let the rest of the world burn.” The prob-
lem, he said, was that, perhaps more now
than ever, Americans lack what he called
“social cohesion,” and thus the collective
will, to commit to such a path. “Plus, you
have guns. Lots of guns. And all the base
materials for your drugs, like ninety-seven
per cent, come from China.” He pre-
dicted that any less stringent measures—
the slow removal of the Band-Aid that
we are experiencing now—would result
in social unrest bordering on civil war,
and the decimation of our medical ranks.
“So suddenly everyone who’s seen ‘House’
would be a doctor,” he said. Politically,
the Australian considered himself well
right of center, yet he thought it ridicu-
lous that the United States doesn’t have
nationalized health care. He predicted
the cancellation of the Presidential elec-
tion, or Donald Trump’s resignation, or
the creation of an emergency leadership
council, to which, throughout the con-
versation, he nominated Generals Mattis
and Petraeus, Bill Gates, and Gary Cohn,
for whom the Australian had worked at
Goldman Sachs. “You could have either
four weeks of pain and a future boom or
years of this rolling bullshit and a depres-
sion. But people are just selfish. They’re
not thinking. They’re morons.”
I
t was one such moron, an old friend
of mine, who had introduced me to
the Australian. They’d overlapped at
Goldman Sachs. I’d been eavesdropping
for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp
conversation with dozens of his acquain-
tances and colleagues (he called them
the Fokkers, for an acronym involving
his name), all of them men, most of
them expensively educated financial pro-
fessionals, some of them very rich, a few
with connections in high places. The
general disposition of the participants,
with exceptions, was the opposite of the
Australian’s. Between memes, they ex-
pressed the belief, with a conviction that
occasionally tipped into stridency or
mockery, that the media, the modellers,
and the markets were overreacting to
the threat of the coronavirus—that it
was little more than another flu, and
that effectively shutting down the econ-
omy to prevent, or at least slow, the
spread of the virus would turn out to be
far more harmful, in the long run, than
the virus itself. “The biggest own goal
in memory,” one Fokker wrote.
“Suicide due to innumeracy,” another
noted.
They constituted a sample of the-cure-
is-worse-than-the-disease segment of the
population, and, on the day of my con-
versation with the Australian, President
Trump appeared to be steering hard their
way. Defying the dire prognostications
and pleadings of the medical establish-
ment, Trump threw out there that busi-
nesses would soon reopen and that eco-
nomic activity might kick in again by
Easter. (Oh, well.) In the next few days,
it was perhaps this prospect, as well as
the unprecedentedly large two-trillion-
dollar stimulus package passed in the
Senate, that caused the stock market to
rally, after one of the most precipitate
collapses in its history. (As a general rule,
despite the assertions of the financial
media, it is difficult to say with any cer-
tainty which relevant facts or sentiments
may make the market indices go up or
down on any given day.) On March 26th,
when the Labor Department reported
that a record 3.3 million Americans had
filed jobless claims the previous week—
as if every man, woman, and child in
Philadelphia and Phoenix suddenly joined
the breadline—both the Dow Jones In-
dustrial Average and the S. & P. 500 shot
up more than six per cent. The cross-
winds were fierce.
Meanwhile, New York’s health-care
system was sinking into chaos, as Covid-19
cases swamped hospitals. That day, there
were more 911 calls than there had been
on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers,
however, felt that it was important not
to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or
media reports, or to fall for the Chicken
Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the
host of the market program “Mad Money,”
on CNBC, for predicting a great depres-
sion and wondering if anyone would ever
board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hy-
perbole: the talking chuckleheads sow-
ing and selling fear.
As in epidemiology, the basis of the
financial markets, and of arguments about
them, is numbers—data and their de-
ployments. Reliable data about Covid-19
have been scarce, mainly because, in the
shameful absence of widespread testing,
no one knows how many people have or
have had the virus, which would deter-
mine the rate of infection and, most cru-
cially, the fatality rate. The numerator
(how many have died) is known, more
or less, but it’s the denominator (how many
have caught it) that has been the object
of such speculation. If I had a roll of toi-
let paper for every finance guy’s analysis
of the death rate I’ve been asked to read,
I’d have toilet paper. Most of these cal-
culations, it seems, are arguments for why
the rate is likely to be much, much lower
than the medical experts have concluded.
The less lethal it is, the better the com-
parison to the flu, and therefore the eas-
ier it is to chide everyone for getting so
worked up over it. As Lawrence White,
a professor of economics at George Mason
University, tweeted, “Almost everyone
talking about the #coronavirus is display-
ing strong confirmation bias. Which only
goes to prove what I’ve always said.”
Still, it’s hard for a coldhearted capi-
talist to know just how cold the heart
must go. Public-health professionals make
a cost-benefit calculation, too, with differ-
ent weightings. What’s the trade-off?
How many deaths are tolerable? Zero?
Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or
whatever number it is that will keep us
from slipping into a global depression?
The public-health hazards of deepening
unemployment and poverty—mental ill-
ness, suicide, addiction, malnutrition—
are uncounted.
Financial people love to come at you
with numbers, to cluck over the innu-
meracy of the populace and the press, to
cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the
superior risk-assessment calculus of the
guy who has an understanding of sto-
chastic volatility and some skin in the
game—even when that skin is other peo-
ple’s. But while risk and price are inter-
twined, value and values are something
else entirely. It can be hard to find the
right math for those.
I
n the months following the first tid-
ings of Covid-19 from China, Trump
played down its potential impact—at-
tempting to jawbone a virus, or at least
the perception of it. But a virus, unlike
