COVID-19 and the Trust Economy

Who takes responsibility when somebody drops their COVID-positive child at daycare or school? I’ve heard two basic answers. Libertarian individualism holds that we, individually, take responsibility for our choices, and when faced with a situation like this, responsible parents will take one on the chin, socially and economically, by staying home with the invalided child. Yes, that’s two weeks or more, but we’re all responsible for our actions and circumstances.

The more communitarian response shifts blame off the individual. Parents, especially poor and working-class parents, need to make rent and buy groceries, and our economy, organized around strict regulation of ownership, won’t let them survive on trust. Parents need to work, and therefore schools and daycare centers absorb the economic uncertainty which children create. Maybe, if parents weren’t penalized financially, they wouldn’t offload responsibility onto others.

Months ago, I would’ve fallen into the second camp. (There are other positions, more subtle and nuanced, but these two dominate.) It seems obvious that, if parents are forced to choose between threatening other families with Coronavirus, or finding their own family homeless, they’ll choose protecting their family. After all, our economy functions by threatening swift, life-altering consequences on non-conformists. Even libertarians will admit this.

Watching the economic consequences of COVID-19 unfold, I’ve come to question many of my existing beliefs. Both libertarian individualism, and soft-Marxist collectivism, leave me dissatisfied now. Because I’ve come to believe both subsume an important point: all social and economic systems depend on people to trust one another, and we can only trust other people if their future actions are reasonably predictable. Put another way, individual freedom is an illusion.

American values extol individuals who exist entirely as they are. Our movies and TV shows praise men of action and women of spontaneity, from Jason Statham-style action heroes, to romantic women who beg to be portrayed by Jennifer Anniston. But notice how these characters consistently disrupt and inconvenience others. The movies never hang around to watch cleaning crews rectify the messes Statham and Anniston leave behind, because stability is boring.

That level of individuality absolutely requires other people willing to behave in consistent and reliable ways. Somebody has to stay behind, cooking meals and extinguishing fires. Even the free spirits we romanticize, necessarily assume everyone else will behave in reliable ways, that bankers won’t pocket our deposits, that cooks won’t spit in our rigatoni, that farmers will plant every spring and harvest every fall. We rely upon everyone else to be reliable.

And everyone else relies upon us likewise. We often chafe at impositions made upon us by work: to show up at regular intervals and do nitty-gritty tasks that seem beneath our dignity. Or is that just me? Yet we cannot accomplish anything larger than ourselves without the ability to collaborate productively: from Amish barn-raisings to multinational corporations, we need to divide labor so we can act cooperatively. That means we need reciprocal trust.

Old-fashioned liberalism tells people to simply unionize, that workers increase their dignity by joining forces to resist overweening management. And indeed, unions can provide protections. But as the Soviets discovered, if we overthrow one network of oppressive socioeconomic roles, we’ll have to adopt another one, because we still need to trust others, and they need to trust us. Living together makes us reliant, at least somewhat, on repetitive, robotic actions.

I realize it appears I’ve gotten off-topic. This isn’t about schools and COVID-19 anymore. But respectfully, it is. Because we’ve structurally abandoned the idea that one person’s income should support a household, we’ve necessitated outside childcare. Since we cannot return to pre-1972 economic conditions, somebody needs to take responsibility for our children, whether it’s private professional daycare, state-funded schools, or unpaid grandparents. Childcare becomes another trust-based role.

COVID-19 hasn’t revealed that childcare workers are superheroes, as our memes in April implied, or work-shy cowards, as our July memes say. Instead, it reveals our trusted social roles, in a massive technological society, have become so interconnected that our façade of civilization is brittle, shattering under the slightest pressure of predictability. We absolutely trust others to behave in reliable ways, which is impossible in unreliable times.

As Slavoj Žižek writes, COVID demonstrates our globalized society’s vulnerability to nature. I’d go further: it shows how vulnerable trust makes us. I rely upon my neighbors, colleagues, and strangers around the globe to behave in consistent, reliable ways, regardless of their individual circumstances; they rely upon me likewise. Now we have to re-learn our own, and everyone else’s, roles.