Our Caring, Compassionate, Empathetic Economy

Helen Andrews recently published a fine book on the Boomer generation. It is entitled Boomers, and I recommend it highly.

More recently, she wrote an essay on Dr. Who, that would be Dr. Anthony Fauci. Among the salient and intriguing points she makes is this: America has now morphed from a manufacturing economy to a health care economy. The shift is momentous. It's so momentous that most people ignore it. Surely, it is one reason why the Covid pandemic worked so well for the Democratic Party. After all, what I have called the Girl Party is all-in for caring, compassion and empathy. 

The problem is, Andrews explains, that health care is suffocating the American economy:

Today health care sits atop the American economy like Fuseli’s incubus. In 1990, manufacturing was the leading source of employment in most states. Thirty years later, in thirty-three states out of fifty, it is “health care and social assistance.” A country whose dominant industry produces nothing and hardly even creates value in the traditional sense is headed for trouble. The fact that its prices are centrally planned by a committee of doctors in the bowels of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, based on a “Resource-Based Relative Value Scale” that boffins at the Harvard School of Public Health came up with in 1988, is even more redolent of the late Soviet era.

In one sense we underwent this shift because of the advent of highly effective medications. Antibiotics, Andrews notes, only became widely distributed after World War II. Given that we believe in One Nation, under Medicine, we have become avid consumers for the latest medications and the latest health care nostrums. Good consumers that we are, we are so filled with different pills that we are no longer suitable test subjects for new medications. 

One notes, in passing, that our tireless work ensuring our good health has numbed our moral sense. We no longer care about doing the right thing. We no longer distinguish between right and wrong. We know that if we feel badly for doing the wrong thing, if we feel shame, there's a pill for that.

As you might have guessed, Americans’ favorite medications are anti-depressants. You might consider this to be a reflection of the inadequacy of most talk therapy, but that would not be very nice:

Within the lifetimes of the oldest Americans, medicine had barely any drugs worth the name and couldn’t treat a simple infection (penicillin didn’t come into use until World War II). Today, medical trials have moved to Eastern Europe and Brazil because Americans no longer make suitable test subjects; everyone over forty is taking too many pills already. Young women are put on birth control to treat acne, nuking their natural hormones as casually as popping an aspirin. Half the prescription drugs in the world are consumed by Americans, and the most prescribed class, ahead of statins, is antidepressants.

So, I leave it to you to study Andrews’ analysis of the work of one Dr. Fauci, but most importantly, she sees his rise to saintly status to be a symptom of a nation that no longer manufactures very much of anything, but that is hellbent on curing disease, both real and imaginary. 

Making a hero of Dr. Fauci meant the opposite of what people thought it did. Instead of the triumph of facts, it signaled the triumph of a class. These are the people who made health care one-sixth of our economy, because they can think of no better use for the money than to avert death, their greatest fear. One-sixth of the economy is already more than a tithe. Looking at the bizarre fanaticism that Fauci presided over, it may be that they are willing to sacrifice more.