Not long ago, America was the workshop of the world. We were world leader is all sorts of thing: clocks, appliances, firearms, cars, computers until we drove the cost so low and wages so high that the only way to go lower was to move production to places where labor was cheap and regulation minimal. We let our manufacturing skills go offshore in pursuit of lower prices that made more merchandise available to more people. That’s not all bad until you lose the ability to produce your own. That happened with memory chips, but we caught on just in time to not be totally dependent on Japan. Then, we made the same mistake with micro-processors, and you can’t buy a car.
Not long ago, America was the workshop of the world. We were world leader is all sorts of thing: clocks, appliances, firearms, cars, computers until we drove the cost so low and wages so high that the only way to go lower was to move production to places where labor was cheap and regulation minimal. We let our manufacturing skills go offshore in pursuit of lower prices that made more merchandise available to more people. That’s not all bad until you lose the ability to produce your own. That happened with memory chips, but we caught on just in time to not be totally dependent on Japan. Then, we made the same mistake with micro-processors, and you can’t buy a car.
Fortunately, services cannot be imported. The majority of Americans are now in service-jobs. Some pay very well, like surgeon, but some pay very little, like weeding. We are paying for our complacency. That alone did not get us into this mess but it contributes. If you have not made something like a mask, computer chip, or submarine for 20 years, you may not have the talent or facilities to do so. A business that depends on a single source is at a high risk of having no source.
Most of us knew, subconsciously that a pandemic was a risk that could happen, but like volcanoes or hurricanes, nobody could predict when. Experts saw it coming, but they were ignored or ridiculed for being unpatriotic. Many things that should have been done in 2019 waited until summer of 2020.
Many factors affected the severity of the outbreak. Population density is a big one. Most weeks on Hawaii I might interact with a dozen people. Once in a while 50. A New Yorker might interact with 50 — before they get to work. The outbreak seems to hit harder where buildings are older. In Italian movies, many buildings look like pre-Renaissance ruins. Many are the first ever on the site, in American cities typically the fourth, Los Angeles is relatively newer than New York. Almost everything in Korea was built since the war in the 1950s.
Many countries that had low infection rates are ethnically homogeneous. Almost every language on Earth is spoken in America. Mobility is a factor; we are the most mobile society in history and mostly in the privacy of our own car. Europeans are more dependent on crowded mass transit, but so is authoritarian China. Big cities are plagued with air pollution.
Our medical system, or lack of one. We have a multitude of private, government and public-private systems that on some levels barely communicate with one another and millions of people left out. Nobody knew how many ventilators we had or where. Sick people had to guess where they could get and afford care. Perhaps we could have suspended co-pay, or any pay for COVID. That would encourage people to get care sooner and save the time wasted figuring out whom to bill for how much. Best estimate is that 40% of our medical dollars go to insurance one way or another. China has universal care but of questionable quality. Italy has a single-payer program, but it failed them. Mussolini may have been right that to govern Italy was useless.
Fortunately, two legs of our state economy are safe for now: pensions, and military payrolls. Our county took advantage of reduced traffic to do road repairs and that kept some people earning.
Churchill said you can trust Americans to do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives. This is where we were for too long. We knew in January 2020 that this was coming, but did not invoke the defense production act — that could have produced a billion masks — until late March. We were late instituting quarantine that could have saved half the people we lost. Too many people still refuse masks and vaccination; preferring it seems the death lottery. Critical decisions were based on partisanship not experience or science. Both major political parties failed to vet their potential presidential candidates and allowed interlopers who were not committed to the party’s ideals to obfuscate.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com
