<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="css-ov1ktg">
      <div class=" css-qlfk3j">
        <div class="rail-wrapper css-a6hloe">
          <div class=" css-ac4z6z"><br>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div id="root">
      <div class="css-wp58sy">
        <div class="css-fmnleb">
          <div class="css-ov1ktg">
            <div width="718" class="css-1jllois">
              <header class="css-d92687">
                <h1 class="css-19v093x">The Coronavirus War Economy Will
                  Change the World</h1>
                <div class="css-1x1jxeu">
                  <div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
                  <div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Nicholas
                      Mulder</span></div>
                  <div class="css-8rl9b7">foreignpolicy.com</div>
                  <div class="css-zskk6u">13 min</div>
                </div>
                <div class="css-1890bmp"><a
href="https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2F2020%2F03%2F26%2Fthe-coronavirus-war-economy-will-change-the-world%2F"
                    target="_blank" class="css-1neb7j1">View Original</a></div>
              </header>
              <div class="css-429vn2">
                <div role="main" class="css-yt2q7e">
                  <div id="RIL_container">
                    <div id="RIL_body">
                      <div id="RIL_less">
                        <div lang="en">
                          <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_1">
                            <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fwwii-economy-wartime-GettyImages-163381665.jpg%3Fw%3D1024%26h%3D683%26quality%3D90"
                                alt="An American propaganda poster from
                                World War II. Jean Carlu/Office for
                                Emergency Management, Division of
                                Information/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty
                                Images" width="632" height="421"> <figcaption>An
                                American propaganda poster from World
                                War II. Jean Carlu/Office for Emergency
                                Management, Division of
                                Information/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty
                                Images</figcaption> </figure>
                          </div>
                          <p>Is the world at war with the coronavirus?
                            Last month, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/world/asia/xi-china-coronavirus.html">Xi
                              Jinping</a> called the Chinese suppression
                            effort a “people’s war”; in the past week, <a
href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/18/trump-administration-self-swab-coronavirus-tests-135590">Donald
                              Trump</a> labeled himself a “wartime
                            president,” while <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/europe/coronavirus-france-macron-travel-ban.html">Emmanuel
                              Macron</a> declared that France is “at
                            war” with COVID-19. As the global response
                            to the pandemic gathers steam, the rhetoric
                            of wartime mobilization is everywhere. In
                            Italy, the worst-affected country in Europe,
                            the government’s anti-virus czar has <a
href="https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/17/coronavirus-la-diretta-i-contagi-sono-31-506-le-vittime-2-503-il-commissario-arcuri-attrezzarci-per-economia-di-guerra-mattarella-clima-di-difficolta-cittadini-siano-uniti-intorn/5739109/">called</a>
                            for the country to “equip itself with a war
                            economy” to confront the disease.</p>
                          <div><a
href="https://foreignpolicy.com/projects/coronavirus-wuhan-china-pandemic-outbreak-guide-2020/">
                              <span> </span> </a></div>
                          <p>During the <a
href="mailto:https://books.google.com/books?id=om2mDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA169&dq=%22big+bazookas%22+%22shock+and+awe%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiA2K3XgaroAhWRlHIEHUUDDUoQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=%22big%20bazookas%22%20%22shock%20and%20awe">2008
                              global financial crisis</a>, policymakers
                            became fond of using warlike language to
                            describe their stabilization efforts,
                            invoking “big bazookas” and “shock and awe.”
                            But the total nature of the global response
                            to the coronavirus makes the metaphor of
                            wartime economics even more relevant today.
                            Governments currently have to manage a
                            public health emergency at the same time as
                            central banks act to calm financial markets,
                            armed forces are deployed to build
                            hospitals, and citizens’ movements are
                            restricted by social distancing.</p>
                          <p>But in what ways is the war economy a
                            useful way to understand the fight against
                            the coronavirus? The idea has been invoked
                            to mean a variety of things: productivity,
                            sacrifice, reform, solidarity, and
                            resourcefulness. In some of these areas, war
                            isn’t an appropriate way to think about the
                            global pandemic. In other respects, however,
                            it’s time for Western governments to go
                            beyond merely using wartime rhetoric. The
                            history of 20th-century war economies offers
                            important lessons that policymakers should
                            already be drawing on today.</p>
                          <hr>
                          <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_2">
                            <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fwwii-economy-wartime-GettyImages-576827168.jpg"
                                alt="A World War II poster urges women
                                to find a job to aid in the war effort.
                                Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis via
                                Getty Images" width="646" height="473">
                              <figcaption>A World War II poster urges
                                women to find a job to aid in the war
                                effort. Minnesota Historical
                                Society/Corbis via Getty Images</figcaption>
                            </figure>
                          </div>
                          <div>
                            <p>Our campaign against the disease most
                              clearly recalls wartime emergencies in the
                              urgent need to expand production and care.
                              As COVID-19 cases overwhelm intensive care
                              units around the world, we need more test
                              kits, hospital beds, ventilator machines,
                              masks, and protective clothing—lots of
                              them, fast. Expanded emergency care
                              capacity is encountering supply
                              bottlenecks, for instance of the chemical
                              reagents used in testing, and the looming
                              shortage of trained medical personnel. The
                              U.S. government’s <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-will-invoke-defense-production-act-to-marshal-private-sector-in-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/2020/03/18/617bff5e-6933-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html">invocation</a>
                              last week of the Defense Production Act
                              (DPA), a Cold War law allowing it to <a
href="mailto:https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2020/03/a-coronavirus-contractors-guide-to-the-defense-production-act/">prioritize
                                and allocate resources</a> to help
                              expand private industries in strategic
                              sectors, is a step on this road to
                              constructing a larger medical
                              mass-production base.</p>
                          </div>
                          <p>But as historian Tim Barker <a
href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/coronavirus-defense-production-act-industrial-policy">points
                              out</a>, the DPA is not the only model for
                            such resource mobilization, or even the most
                            effective one. There are models less reliant
                            on the private sector than the DPA; one
                            important peacetime predecessor is the New
                            Deal-era Works Progress Administration. This
                            sort of public scheme would be able to put
                            to work the large numbers of workers who are
                            facing unemployment in the coming weeks and
                            months. Besides having positive economic
                            side effects, such public employment expands
                            state capacity and removes the need to rely
                            on improvised exploitative labor practices,
                            such as New York State’s use of <a
href="https://qz.com/1815496/ny-forces-prisoners-to-make-hand-sanitizer-to-fight-coronavirus/">prison
                              labor</a> to mass-produce hand sanitizer.</p>
                          <p>War-economic production is often conceived
                            of as a national enterprise. But most war
                            economies in the 20th century were deeply
                            international in their supply lines. The
                            medical mobilization against COVID-19 will
                            have to be similarly global. There are
                            currently about <a
href="mailto:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/health/ventilator-shortage-coronavirus-solution.html">173,000
                              ventilators</a> in the United States. In
                            the short term, the increase in American
                            needs alone will probably exceed the entire
                            <a
href="mailto:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coronavirus-ventilators-supply-manufacture_n_5e6dc4f7c5b6747ef11e8134">global
                              annual production</a> of 40,000 to 50,000
                            machines. Given the <a
href="mailto:https://qz.com/1820705/the-challenges-of-non-medical-companies-making-coronavirus-supplies/">complex
                              nature and high sanitary requirements</a>
                            of ventilator assembly, even the DPA will
                            only allow a small conversion of
                            manufacturing plants for medical machine
                            production. The shortage cannot be solved
                            within national borders. East Asia, where
                            the virus is under relative control, is
                            where ventilators can be produced on a
                            serious scale. Just as Lend-Lease and the
                            Berlin airlift provided U.S.-produced war
                            material for the rest of the world in the
                            1940s, so the realities of the global
                            manufacturing base in 2020 suggest that mass
                            airlifts of ventilators and machine parts
                            from China will be needed to support
                            adequate Western emergency care.</p>
                          <p><em>[</em><a
href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/04/mapping-coronavirus-outbreak-infographic/"><em>Mapping
                                the Coronavirus Outbreak:</em></a><em>
                              Get daily updates on the pandemic and
                              learn how it’s affecting countries around
                              the world.]</em></p>
                          <p>Beyond the immediate treatment of those
                            infected with coronavirus, however, Western
                            governments have almost universally shut
                            down rather than ramped up production. As
                            one financial analyst <a
href="https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/chief-investment-office/about-us/meet-the-experts/paul-donovan/2020/lockdown-economics.html">pointed
                              out</a>, “lockdown economics” is in many
                            ways the exact opposite of the wartime
                            economics of total mobilization. During both
                            world wars, economic mobilization enrolled
                            unprecedentedly large groups of male and
                            female workers in mass production. The
                            coronavirus’s disruption of supply chains
                            and the social distancing measures of today,
                            however, are currently putting millions of
                            employees in the manufacturing and service
                            sectors <a
href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-layoffs-likely-surged-to-unprecedented-level-this-past-week-11584728237">out
                              of work</a>.</p>
                          <p>Despite the atomized nature of life under
                            quarantine, it’s clear that the coronavirus
                            resembles war in one crucial aspect: As a
                            highly infectious virus with a significant
                            mortality rate, it has the potential to
                            cause mass death on a scale unseen in
                            European societies since the 1940s. Facing
                            up to this reality is politically difficult
                            but unavoidable. Italian Prime Minister
                            Giuseppe Conte has <a
                              href="https://twitter.com/GiuseppeConteIT/status/1237863027254243333">asked</a>
                            his compatriots for “60 million small great
                            sacrifices” as they weather the pandemic.
                            Even those who would rightly avoid the
                            language of war, such as German Chancellor
                            Angela Merkel, <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=F9ei40nxKDc&feature=emb_logo">acknowledge</a>
                            that the coronavirus demands a level of
                            collective action unseen since World War II.</p>
                          <p>Beyond the sick, wounded, and dead, war
                            economies are based on other sacrifices,
                            too. Under capitalist conditions, war
                            economics raises the question of how many
                            resources society is willing to set aside
                            from profit-seeking ventures to protect
                            itself. Both military power and health care
                            fall into the category of expenditures that
                            are essentially protective rather than
                            productive in nature.</p>
                          <p>But beyond this, the analogy falters.
                            Emergencies often present economies with
                            real resource constraints. In
                            early-20th-century war economics, the key
                            dilemma was usually a choice between
                            prioritizing defense or civilian
                            production—guns or butter. The coronavirus
                            forces us to think hard about how public
                            health measures can be reconciled with
                            economic production. But this is not a
                            problem of prioritizing expenditures or
                            limited resources. The issue is sustaining
                            circulation. In the short run, the demands
                            of disease prevention (quarantine measures)
                            and care (hospitalization) will put the
                            livelihood of those dependent on other forms
                            of capitalist production at risk. Only
                            massive government intervention to protect
                            the channels of economic circulation can
                            resolve this tension in a way that does not
                            sacrifice the former for the latter. We
                            might call this the “ventilation or butter”
                            dilemma.</p>
                          <p>The inescapable need for state involvement
                            helps explain why the war economy is a
                            favorite metaphor of the technocratic
                            imagination. Crises have always granted
                            reformist policymakers powers to bypass
                            legislative gridlock and entrenched
                            interests. The coronavirus crisis is already
                            allowing the implementation of ideas that
                            would have been considered very radical just
                            months ago. The speed with which U.S.
                            legislators have embraced <a
href="https://www.ft.com/content/e23b57f8-6a2c-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3?shareType=nongift">interventionist
                              ideas</a> such as direct cash transfers,
                            freezes on mortgage foreclosures, and
                            government nationalization of distressed
                            firms is a major intellectual vindication of
                            the left. For a long time, the progressive
                            left has highlighted the very problems that
                            the virus has now exposed so starkly:
                            precarious employment; galloping income and
                            wealth inequality; the unaffordable cost of
                            health care, housing and education for many;
                            and the peril of personal indebtedness.</p>
                          <hr>
                          <div>
                            <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_3">
                              <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fwwii-economy-wartime-GettyImages-90741420.jpg"
                                  alt="A poster produced by British
                                  Railways during World War II to remind
                                  passengers of the company’s services
                                  to the war effort." width="679"
                                  height="539"> <figcaption>A poster
                                  produced by British Railways during
                                  World War II to remind passengers of
                                  the company’s services to the war
                                  effort.</figcaption> </figure>
                            </div>
                          </div>
                          <div>
                            <p>But successful crisis management is no
                              guarantee of durable reform. War economies
                              can be powerful incubators of political
                              change. But technocracy cannot make its
                              offspring survive through its own power
                              alone. What renders these innovations
                              durable is the emergence of political and
                              electoral alliances.</p>
                          </div>
                          <p>In the case of the European welfare state,
                            the real fruits of wartime crisis management
                            were only reaped after the end of conflict.
                            Policies meant to deal with the damage of
                            the Great Depression and the world wars
                            created new constituencies. Despite being
                            framed as exceptional wartime or postwar
                            measures, many provisions rapidly became
                            entrenched. In interwar Britain, France, and
                            Germany, it was financial support for “<a
href="mailto:https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/post-war_welfare_policies">war
                              victims</a>”—veterans and those left
                            widowed, orphaned, and disabled by the
                            war—that created the foundations for later
                            universal pensions and child care. If the
                            emergency response measures to COVID-19 grow
                            to encompass a large enough group—for
                            example, the millions of service workers
                            being laid off—this, too, may coagulate into
                            a new semi-organized group with a future
                            political role.</p>
                          <p>Precisely because of their reliance on
                            state action, war economies are deeply
                            political systems. War economies do not
                            suspend politics; they raise the stakes. As
                            opportunities for empowerment and enrichment
                            abound, novel distributions of benefits and
                            burdens arise in which some groups acquire
                            power and resources not just in excess but
                            at the expense of others. Short-lived
                            emergencies can temporarily bracket
                            distributional questions from political
                            debate, for instance over wages. But the
                            longer warlike exceptions last, the greater
                            the opportunities for subordinate groups to
                            leverage their power. In the early 20th
                            century, war production made labor unions
                            more powerful in Britain, France, Germany,
                            Italy, Japan, the United States, and
                            elsewhere. Even when organized labor
                            negotiated pacts of national unity with
                            government and business interests, it put
                            its power on display in the immediate
                            postwar periods of 1918-1921 and 1945-1948,
                            which witnessed the largest strike waves of
                            the 20th century.</p>
                          <p>In this respect, the coronavirus lockdowns
                            present a deeply lopsided situation. After
                            decades of falling unionization, Western
                            economies are confining much of their
                            workforce to their homes while enormously
                            increasing their reliance on a vital set of
                            workers in the care, logistics, and retail
                            sectors. Doctors, nurses, delivery people,
                            postal and transport workers, grocery store
                            employees, shelf stockers, sanitation
                            workers and janitors, mechanics and tech
                            employees, and farm hands are now, very
                            clearly, the indispensable foundation of a
                            functioning society. There is no precedent
                            for the asymmetric mix of mobilization and
                            demobilization of labor that we are
                            witnessing right now. And as anyone
                            currently working from home with children
                            knows, the realms of office work, child
                            care, and other forms of domestic labor are
                            colliding as never before.</p>
                          <div>
                            <div> </div>
                            <div>
                              <h3>Listen Now: <span>Don't Touch Your
                                  Face</span></h3>
                              <p>A new podcast from <em>Foreign Policy</em>
                                covering all aspects of the coronavirus
                                pandemic</p>
                              <div> <a
href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dont-touch-your-face/id1501774973">
                                  <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_4">
                                    <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fapple-podcasts-logo.png"
                                        alt=""> </figure>
                                  </div>
                                </a> <a
href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7vyK6lbw1ydDJJjVR5SOe0?si=I53MaKqERtyuuwK3PC1A-A">
                                  <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_5">
                                    <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fspotify-logo.png"
                                        alt=""> </figure>
                                  </div>
                                </a> <a title="Learn more"
href="https://foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/dont-touch-your-face-coronavirus-podcast/">Learn
                                  More</a> </div>
                            </div>
                          </div>
                          <p>Invoking warlike sacrifice heightens the
                            need for governments to balance rewards
                            across boundaries of class, race, region,
                            and age. The history of war economies offers
                            lessons in the management of solidarity
                            under such circumstances. Beyond pioneering
                            forms of economic planning, resource
                            mobilization, and industrial policy, war
                            economies spearheaded many initiatives that
                            directly promoted solidarity in the face of
                            sacrifice. As millions volunteered to fight
                            while civilians on “the homefront” manned
                            factories, schools, and hospitals, states
                            were able to create a new moral economy. Its
                            central object of contempt was the figure of
                            the war profiteer. Every society at war
                            between 1914 and 1945 reserved a special
                            hatred for individuals who reaped massive
                            profits while others risked their lives and
                            offered their labor.</p>
                          <p>The first tool against war-induced
                            rent-seeking was excess profits taxation.
                            Between 1915 and 1918, every major
                            belligerent in World War I taxed the profits
                            of private individuals and corporations.
                            Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette denounced
                            war profiteers as “the enemies of democracy
                            in the homeland.” Excess profits taxation
                            was even higher in the next war; by 1943,
                            U.S. firms were taxed at a rate of 95
                            percent for every dollar they earned above
                            an 8 percent rate of return on capital.
                            President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it
                            simply: “I don’t want to see a single war
                            millionaire created in the United States as
                            a result of this world disaster.”</p>
                          <p>Wartime economics didn’t only recast what
                            counted as legitimately earned income. As
                            historian Mark Wilson has <a
href="mailto:https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-defense-production-world-war-two-lessons-135814">emphasized</a>,
                            one legal innovation created by wartime arms
                            spending was the U.S. government’s
                            development of the power of “<a
href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25701107%3Fseq=1%23metadata_info_tab_contents">statutory
                              renegotiation</a>.” This allowed the
                            government to revisit fulfilled private
                            contracts, demanding lower prices in cases
                            where it had been overcharged by private
                            suppliers. Although these “clawbacks” were
                            widely despised by industrialists, they
                            allowed the government to avoid wasting
                            public money because of price-gouging by
                            contractors. In urban planning and city
                            politics, landlords came under scrutiny as
                            possible residential war profiteers. World
                            War I did more than anything in the 20th
                            century to make rent control a widespread
                            practice in capitalist democracies. As
                            growing numbers of people worked and lived
                            in cities, the cost of living had to be kept
                            within reach of the average worker’s income.
                            Minimum-wage laws served the same function,
                            ensuring workers got their fair share of the
                            gains of the wartime boon.</p>
                          <p>These war-economic mechanisms of solidarity
                            offer valuable ideas about how to address
                            the current pandemic “world disaster.”
                            Pharmaceutical corporations and health care
                            middlemen can have their excess profits
                            taxed to ensure they do not reap the
                            exclusive benefit of the common fight
                            against the virus. <em>The Economist </em>estimates
                            that U.S. health care providers make <a
href="https://www.economist.com/business/2018/03/15/which-firms-profit-most-from-americas-health-care-system">excess
                              profits</a> of $65 billion a year. This is
                            enough to produce 1.3 million ICU <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/18/ventilator-shortage-hospital-icu-coronavirus/">ventilators</a>
                            at $50,000 a piece or to fund the <a
href="https://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-health-conditions-hospital-costs-2018-2">hospital
                              stays</a> of millions of people who will
                            require urgent treatment for COVID-19.
                            Congress should also investigate <a
                              href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/110/100235.pdf">reinstating</a>
                            the Renegotiation Act of 1951 to revisit
                            medical supply contracts resulting in
                            excessive profits for the private sector.
                            Rent caps and minimum-wage floors should be
                            instituted to ease pressures on the balance
                            sheets of households.</p>
                          <p>Economic and financial measures alone are
                            not enough, and major interventions in
                            housing and utilities are also needed. The <a
href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/03/covid-19-housing-security-eviction-utility-shut-off-mortgage/607951/">initiatives</a>
                            of states like California and New York and
                            such cities as Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando,
                            and Seattle to freeze evictions and postpone
                            utility shut-offs should be expanded
                            nationwide. (Detroit has even <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/12/detroit-water-shutoffs-unpaid-bills-coronavirus">restored
                              water access</a> to those previously cut
                            off.) The U.S. government can use eminent
                            domain law to take over empty private
                            residences, hotels, parks, and other spaces
                            needed to expand the capacity of emergency
                            health care. As James Galbraith has <a
href="https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/economy-mobilization-coronavirus-market/">suggested</a>,
                            large logistical corporations such as
                            Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx can be employed
                            as public utilities, with underemployed Uber
                            drivers filling in as additional delivery
                            staff.</p>
                          <hr>
                          <div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_6">
                            <figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fwwii-economy-wartime-GettyImages-163380489.jpg"
                                alt="A propaganda poster from World War
                                II shows Americans of different national
                                origins assembling a Sherman tank with a
                                quotation against discrimination by
                                President Franklin D. Roosevelt. War
                                Manpower Commission/U.S. Government
                                Printing Office./Galerie
                                Bilderwelt/Getty Images" width="583"
                                height="423"> <figcaption>A propaganda
                                poster from World War II shows Americans
                                of different national origins assembling
                                a Sherman tank with a quotation against
                                discrimination by President Franklin D.
                                Roosevelt. War Manpower Commission/U.S.
                                Government Printing Office./Galerie
                                Bilderwelt/Getty Images</figcaption> </figure>
                          </div>
                          <div>
                            <p>War economics emerged around the turn of
                              the 20th century as a field that mixed
                              careful analysis with fearful speculation.
                              Could mass societies based on industrial
                              production and globalized supply routes
                              survive modern wars?</p>
                          </div>
                          <p>The question was pressing, since wars are
                            by their very nature open-ended clashes
                            whose duration cannot be predicted. Early
                            war economists such as Polish businessman
                            Ivan Bloch and Austrian scientist Otto
                            Neurath examined how large and small
                            states—Germany and Russia as well as Japan
                            and Serbia—would fare if they had to wage
                            war for extended periods of time. Bloch
                            predicted that the overburdening of markets
                            would result in major “convulsions in the
                            social order.” Neurath argued that the
                            proper organization of material supply would
                            be a stronger foundation of national
                            survival than financial wealth.</p>
                          <p>What both of them agreed on was that the
                            most resilient war economies were those that
                            did the most with limited resources.
                            Rationing was one way of doing this, but so
                            was technological invention. Being isolated
                            from the rest of the world economy—either by
                            economic crisis or by enemy armies or
                            blockades—was a powerful stimulus to such
                            invention, which brought about the
                            development of synthetic forms of polymer,
                            fabrics, fuel, and fertilizer during the
                            world wars.</p>
                          <p>Such resourcefulness holds an important
                            lesson for the present. It is certainly
                            within the material and financial means of
                            the United States and the European Union to
                            overcome the virus and the social and
                            economic dislocation caused by it. Moreover,
                            although the death toll will likely be high,
                            we know that the pandemic will eventually
                            end. But beyond the resolution of the
                            COVID-19 crisis looms another problem:
                            climate change. Will an emergency response
                            to the disease send us out of the frying pan
                            of the virus, into the fire of climate
                            breakdown? The challenge we currently face
                            is to mobilize unused labor and resources in
                            certain sectors while protecting lives in
                            the rest of the economy—including future
                            lives that depend on winding down the fossil
                            fuel industry. Here the global effects of
                            the virus, which has lowered carbon
                            emissions, saved lives by <a
href="mailto:http://www.g-feed.com/2020/03/covid-19-reduces-economic-activity.html">reducing
                              air pollution</a>, and paused much of our
                            ordinary carbon-intensive lifestyles, create
                            opportunities for a turn to <a
href="mailto:https://medium.com/@green_stimulus_now/a-green-stimulus-to-rebuild-our-economy-1e7030a1d9ee">green
                              policy</a> across the board.</p>
                          <p>The resourcefulness of wartime economies
                            offers a useful template for thinking about
                            the broader context of the coronavirus
                            crisis. Mounting a serious campaign to
                            mitigate climate change demands a response
                            so large that many of the virus response
                            measures are just a start. Despite calls for
                            a return to normality, it is difficult to
                            imagine the post-pandemic world economy,
                            whatever it looks like, as a restoration of
                            any sort. Even if the virus subsides in
                            several months or years from now, the larger
                            state of exception in policymaking and
                            collective action to which it already
                            belongs is unlikely to end.</p>
                          <p>Twentieth-century war economies played an
                            important role in allowing the peacetime
                            economies that followed them to flourish.
                            The key now will be to draw on their lessons
                            of solidarity and inventiveness as the
                            coronavirus confronts the 21st-century world
                            economy with a new kind of warlike hazard.</p>
                        </div>
                        <div id="PKT_footer_message"><span
                            class="PKT_message_wrapper">
                            <div>Support <a
href="https://getpocket.com/redirect?_pktpp=1&l=2301&m=2037&t=1">Foreign
                                Policy</a> and <a
href="https://getpocket.com/redirect?_pktpp=1&l=2302&m=2037&t=1">subscribe
                                today</a>.</div>
                          </span></div>
                      </div>
                    </div>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div class="css-10y0cgg"><br>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>