I enjoyed M.T. Anderson’s opinion piece in the New York Times. The basic idea is that in the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe during the 14th-Century, the survivors suffered from both inflation and a massive manpower shortage. The workers and farmhands couldn’t afford necessities, but they suddenly had a lot of bargaining power since their labor was in high demand. As a result, they started agitating for better pay and working conditions.

The result was an outbreak of real savagery on both sides. Nobles were slaughtered; they’re estates burned to the ground, while the nobles responded in kind with wanton slaughter and a spate of new laws tying laborers to the land. The point being that sometimes you can’t go back to the past. Things had changed after the Black Death and perhaps they’ll change after the COVID-19 crisis subsides, too. There are real dangers involved if we don’t anticipate these changes and handle them in the right way.

Naturally, you can try to fit any square peg into a round hole, and complaining about income inequality is a perennial endeavor. But there are similarities here. We do have very high inflation, and companies really are having difficulty with staffing. A lot of people are dropping out of the traditional job market and refusing to play by the old rules. Things are also badly out of whack, and nowhere is this more clear than in the real estate market where mortgages and rents are simply unaffordable.

We’re also seeing a lot more division and populism than we’re used to, and our institutions are struggling to fulfill their basic responsibilities. Under the circumstances, we could see some very insistent demands for change that our met with equally determined efforts to keep things largely as they were before the pandemic hit. In a way, we’ve been fighting this kind of battle in the culture wars for decades now, but it could take on a more financial flavor.

Looking back, the nobles had some difficult problems to solve with their fields lying fallow. There was no magic trick that would create missing manpower or restore the profitability of their estates. They were going to suffer one way or the other, and they chose violence as the solution. It didn’t work out, but I’m not sure there was a way to avoid it. The changes that needed to happen involved too much disruption of the status quo and with no centralized government to carry out such a program, the nobles were stuck trying to compete with their neighbors and find any way to bring in the harvest.

And, of course, everyone, regardless of status, was ultimately reliant on the success of those harvests.

The social safety net is really about assuring that we’re not reliant on the profitability of our employers. A good system severs this relationship in both directions. The employers aren’t reliant on low wages (or serfdom) to make a buck, and aren’t hit with wage costs so high that inflation is the result.

It’s really about making sure people’s needs are met, and that’s not happening right now because elites aren’t taking the problems seriously enough and aren’t willing to entertain changes that might be disruptive.

The good thing is we have enough centralized power to actually make changes that will take effect and stick. But I’m afraid basic human nature hasn’t changed much since the 14th-Century. All I know is if someone doesn’t take a leadership role with the elites and get them to think outside the box, we could be headed to some perilous times.