The Phoenix Ecomomy

 

Felix Salmon, “The Phoenix Economy: Work, Life, and Money in the New Not Normal,”Harper, 2023, 309 pp.

We are living in a strange world—Salmon calls it “the New Not Normal.” The Phoenix Economy explores the ramifications of the pandemic years, many of which are surprisingly positive. In doing so, Salmon makes sense of one of the most disorienting and devastating events of our lifetimes. He examines the critical aspects of our lives that have been transformed in three parts: Time and Space, Mind and Body, and Business and Pleasure.

My Notes:

Pg. 8:  This book is a look at the lasting ways in which the SARS-CoV-2 virus changed the world.  Covid is not the all-purpose causal agent behind any effect you might be looking at, but if you’re reading this in the 2020s, there’s a very good chance that its influence is being felt in a lot of the ways that today’s world has changed from pre-pandemic days. 

Pg. 11:  During the first two years of the COVID pandemic it killed about six million people worldwide, roughly one million of whom were in the US. 

Pg. 13:  The idea behind this book is that the unexpected isn’t over.  The shock and trauma of the pandemic, its long-term downsides as well as its unexpected upsides, are not entirely in the past.  They will continue to emerge for decades to come, just like the shock and trauma of WWII shaped personal and geopolitical behavior for half a century after the war.

Pg. 17:  At the beginning of 2021, a new purity ritual, in the form of getting vaccinated, would show just how divisive different attitudes to the pandemic could be.  Getting vaxxed or not getting vaxxed from the beginning was much more than a simple public-health intervention—it had political and indeed almost quasi-religious overtones.

Pg. 136f:  People began moving out of large cities, many as they could now work from home.  The New York metropolitan area lost a net 378,000 inhabitants in a single year, while San Francisco lost 182,000, Locs Angeles lost 174,000, and Chicago lost 107,00.  All those numbers were unprecedented in recent history. 

Pg. 154:  Yet, the great shake-out has made many US regional economies much more productive than they were pre-pandemic, and that in turn makes the entire country more competitive on an international stage that was badly fractured by Covid.

Pg. 182f:  The 2020 BLM protest changed minds in the way the 2014 protests didn’t.  In 2017, US net public support for Black Lives Matter was negative—more people opposed it than supported it, by a margin of about 5 percentage points.  By June 2020, support for BLM was 28 points larger than the opposition, a massive swing of 33 points.  For the first time ever, a majority of white Americans agreed that systemic racism existed.  White Americans noticed that COVID was killing a higher percentage of the Black population.  However, the pro-BLM polling soon fell back to pre-pandemic levels.

Pg. 228:  In 1930, John Maynard Keynes prophetically and accurately predicted a huge rise in living standards over the following century—that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.”  He was right on the nose, US per capita GDP in 1930 was $8,200, as measured in 2012 dollars, by 2021 it had risen sevenfold to $59,000.

Pg. 288:  The best estimate for the number of people who were living in extreme poverty is 2020 is 732 million.  The single-year increase in poverty more than wiped out all the gains since 2016, and the cohort in extreme poverty in 2020 is roughly 100 million people larger than it was going to be, absent the pandemic.

Pg. 302:  One of the more surprising effects of the pandemic is that in the US the poor actually did better than the rich overall.  In January 2020, the average disposable income for an American in the top 10 percent was $268, 900 per year, while the bottom 30 percent had just $24,200 of spending money on average; a ratio of 11.1. 

By December 2021, the top 10 percent had seen their income rise to $280,600, while for the bottom 50 percent it had gone up to $26,300.  The ratio of the former to the latter had decreased to 10.7.  A lot of that increase came in the form of Covid relief checks that were always designed to be temporary.