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Macro Models, the Grapes of Wrath, and COVID-19
With the COVID-19 pandemic in the background, I have been trying to think of how all the social orders have been upset and what the post pandemic world will look like. In parallel, I have been revisiting some fiction I read when I was younger. The whole thing has made me more distractible and narrowed my bandwidth, but I started Piketty’s new book the week it came out, but the problem was that it coincided with the rise of the pandemic into full blow consciousness of something that was happening here. All of the pre-pandemic economic texts will also have to be evaluated with the lens of the pandemic. And we still are in the process of whatever it might be. It looked initially that there might be a sense of solidarity that grew out of this, but it soon has devolved that the best we can do is survive in spite of all those who would want us to not survive. We have to hope that the institutions are not too degraded.
It has made me more melancholy, and this is most likely not helped by my choices of fiction to get through all time at home. I started with Camus’s the Plague and have been reading the Grapes of Wrath. Camus brought to mind the need for survival, and how capricious and random that survival is. We can do what we can to limit our exposure, but the plague comes for us all. Steinbeck has in many ways felt more relevant than our Algerian friend since what the…
