Any of you who know me personally know, and many of the rest of you may suspect, that my personal life is as complicated as Neoclassical economics is simplistic.
I am an Australian citizen and UK resident with a flat and partner in Amsterdam. I am with her using the visa waiver scheme; she is a Netherlands resident but not yet a citizen. If I stay here then I will certainly breach the “no more than 90 out of the last 180 days” provisions of the Schengen visa. If things get really tough—and I expect that they will—neither of us speak the local language, me at all and my partner not fluently (everyone you meet here speaks English better than the English). But if there are police/army on the street, and you don’t have a residency card (I don’t) or get a non-English speaking “grunt”, we’re both in trouble.
The Netherlands has also recently joined the rest of Europe in an explosion of cases. I was watching this data (using the John Hopkins site: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6) while in Australia, and couldn’t fathom why the Netherlands, a major tourist destination, was showing no cases at all.
That changed abruptly last week, a few days before I left Sydney to come here for my partner: it was 1 one morning when I woke, 2 when I went to bed, 6 when I woke up… and now it is 1136.
On the opposite end of this scale lie Australia and (even more so) Thailand, my partner’s country of birth and citizenship:
Certainly in Australia’s case, that is not due to good management. Thailand may be taking it more seriously, or underreporting numbers, but the data seems to indicate that the pandemic is growing linearly there rather than exponentially. I have seen some academic research arguing that the virus lives for longer on surfaces in cold climates than warm ones, and that may explain both country’s relative out-performance.
Below is a screenshot of a new commercial program I’ve been working on with Russell Standish for some time, using Minsky as a base. Called Ravel, though it is in a pre-alpha stage right now (ie, before we’re ready to release it to beta-testers, let alone the general public). But even in its primitive state it lets you compare trends in selected countries easily, something no other existing Dashboard that I’ve seen does. These trends were a major factor in my decision: we can’t stay here, because we lack citizenship rights that I expect; I will breach the visa if I do, and if I’m stopped on the streets while shopping and asked to show ID, I could find myself forcibly deported (yes I expect it to get that bad—or at least to be interred in a foreigner’s quanrantine).
So we had to go to one of the countries we are citizens, either together or apart. For obvious reasons, we chose the together option, which means Thailand (my partner’s tourist visa there has lapsed, and it’s a lot more expensive to live in Australia anyway). We are flying there this Wednesday, arriving Thursday, and moving to a beachside non-tourist town where we can easily and cheaply rent a standalone bungalow for a year, which I intend to be our quarantine period.
I’ll use the quarantine productively of course. I’m 1 chapter in to the revised and final 3rd edition of Debunking Economics, I have a book contract with Polity on “Economics Matters Because” which is due in August, Russell, Wynand and I are working on both Minsky and Ravel… Boredom will not be an issue (it may be tougher on my partner). And I will keep actively posting here, and commenting in whatever media outlets enable me—and that includes Russia Today, despite some people thinking
I won’t be posting or replying to comments for the next couple of days for obvious reasons: everything has to be thrown into preparing for the trip and locking up my flat here for a year or more.
Keep safe everyone. I’ll do my best to argue for the sane and extraordinary policies that are needed to cope with this threat: the Modern Jubilee and the Coronabonds that I’ve already posted about, and done an interview on with Ross Ashcroft of Renegade Inc. I’ll post that here shortly, after I put this one up.
Finally, a personal word of thanks to you all. The fact that I am able to be this flexible is due to you. The fact that I can devote myself to this issue 100%—after I do the best to secure my own safety—is thanks to you. Hopefully I can delay catching this thing—I don’t think there’s any chance to avoid getting it, in the end—and when I get it, I get either a low effect infection, or anti-virals are available.
If not? Well, I’ll let you know first. I hope it doesn’t come to that, for any of us. But these are such dangerous times for the over-65s amongst us, and for all of us, given how this systemic threat will overwhelm our episodic (and austere!) medical systems.
The one good thing that might come of this is that the deluded morons (looking at you William Nordhaus and Richard Tol and Bjorn Lomborg and the many politicians who’ve fallen for their bullshit) who’ve led us into this maelstrom might finally lose influence and power. But I won’t hold my breath.
I wish you all the very, very best of luck.