My new story on pandemics and inequality
This week Science published my feature about how various kinds of inequality affected the course of past pandemics, and how (sometimes) those pandemics affected inequality. I’ve been working on this story for all of quarantine, so having it out in the world is a relief but also kind of disorienting. It grew out of interviews with anthropologists and bioarchaeologists who, based on their work on everything from the Black Death to the 1918 flu, as well as what they knew about the modern world, were predicting that the worst effects of COVID-19 would fall disproportionately on people who were already the most marginalized. When I started reporting this story, we were still waiting to see if they were right. Now we know that of course they were.
The story covers mainly the Black Death, colonial epidemics in the Americas (of which COVID-19 is one, I would argue), and the 1918 flu. Each of these diseases struck societies that were already profoundly unequal, and in most cases, they reinforced that inequality or made it worse. The exception to that is the Black Death, which killed 30% to 60% of all people in Europe in just four years. The coronavirus pandemic has expanded our imaginations in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to thinking about infectious diseases in the past, but that level of devastation remains quite simply unimaginable. So many people died that labor was in short supply afterward, and workers’ wages went up along with their bargaining power. There was also glut of property for sale, its previous owners having died, and more people than before were able to buy land, which increased their families’ wealth for generations. The Black Death was the only time economic inequality fell in Europe between 1300 and 1900.
A similar spontaneous drop in economic inequality is not going to happen after the coronavirus pandemic (whatever “after” means), and overall that’s a good thing. The kind of mass death and devastation it would take to single-handedly shatter our existing societal structures is something we will hopefully never have to experience. The Black Death is the exception that proves the rule: Inequality only goes down because we want it to. We can’t count on an outside force sweeping in and doing the work for us.
At the beginning of this pandemic and quarantine, I was floored by how many truths it was exposing. It felt like after this we would no longer be able to ignore the intersecting inequalities that led to health disparities, the assumed disposability of so many workers, the dangers of encroaching upon nature in an uncritical quest for profit, and so many other injustices. It doesn’t feel that way any more. If the world as a whole could manage to mostly ignore the lessons of the 1918 flu and then repress those memories until it was almost like it had never happened, we are perfectly capable of doing that again. We are, in fact, already doing it. Working on this story taught me that it is easier to let pandemics reinforce injustice rather than overturn it. Easier, but not inevitable. We always have a choice.