Published May 14, 2020 as part of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Covid-19 Series: Resources, Data, and Analysis for California. The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been severe: at least 30 million people have lost their jobs and millions of others have seen their incomes decline. Governments are spending billions of dollars on public health and the safety net….
Blog
How is this recession different from all other recessions?
I spoke with an sfgate.com reporter recently about how the COVID-19 crisis could impact Bay Area local governments. As always, there is a lot I said that didn’t make it into the article so here’s a bit longer ramble. I’m working on updating the numbers and data underlying these thoughts, so this is just some…
SFGate: ‘San Francisco is particularly vulnerable’: Expert explains how COVID-19 may hurt city budgets
“In every recession, it’s true that you’re losing revenue at the same time as you want to be able to spend more money,” Hinkley says. “Counties and cities have to be spending more on public health, on housing people, on emergency equipment, on ensuring that people are staying at home. It’s difficult to manage spending…
Beyond austerity
I started this blog—and chose the name—several years ago while finishing my dissertation. My intent was to write about my research on the shrinking public sphere and the persistent narrative of scarcity that characterizes governance in the U.S. I called it “beyond austerity” because I thought most scholarship on austerity was simplistic and that we needed to think about austerity more broadly. How do communities, and societies, decide what is enough? What constitutes plenty, or luxury? What do we each really need to thrive as individuals? How does it happen that music or art become seen as frivolous, rather than necessities? How do discussions about taxes reflect profound differences in how people think about security and relationships? How do we each normalize the amount of eduction, or money, or clothing, or healthcare, that we are entitled to, or that we resent others having?
I began with an academic interest in how austerity is produced: who makes decisions about how to make do with less. Today, these questions are more pressing for me personally (being on a school board these days is all about implementing austerity). I decided to resurrect this site a few weeks ago because a job change gave me more time to write about how much our society reflects the weird combination of scarcity and plenty, and my own experiences observing how society is made up of so many invisible individual contributions—the “public” is so much more than government. And then the coronavirus pandemic took hold here in California.
The Bay Area is less than a week into a full-scale shutdown, and every public entity is bleeding revenue: bus systems, BART, bridges, and soon local and state tax systems as incomes drop and the impact of reduced consumption decimates sales taxes. The importance and fragility of our public sector have been thrown into stark relief, as have the web of individual actions that keep our private sector—our restaurants, bookstores, volunteer programs—alive.
How will this crisis make us think differently about what we each need to survive? About what, and who, is vital to a functioning society? About what is not necessary to keep our bodies alive, but is necessary for our spirit? And so for day one of this resurrection, I offer a possible answer to the latter:
School closures
Albany schools are closed until at least April 13, and the Bay Area is on a shelter in place order until April 7. Here are some resources (I’ll update this post as more resources are compiled): Educational Resources I’m compiling this page of resources for things you can do at home. If you are an AUSD family…