The School Thing

OK, the school thing. It seems to come down to this: Unless it turns out that it's perfectly safe to run public schools like they've always been run, any alternative is going to have a really substantial long term impact on the new world.

You know how I feel about running schools like they've always been run, but let's for a moment pretend that we won't make fundamental changes based on what we now know about learning and children that we didn't know in 1900, when the current system was new. We're going to pretend that because that's the way it'll probably happen.

They way we run schools is to get as many children in a room as we can, up to the limit that the union enforces. Sometimes that's ten, sometimes – too often – that's 30. Almost every one of the hundreds and hundreds of classrooms I've ever been in have been the same size, regardless of what they're being used for. So: lots of bodies in close proximity. Lots of activities, movement, contact, talking, shouting, laughing (nearly all of which, in normal times, is a good thing). Often a non-trivial number of runny noses and kids who are sick but came to school anyway, for any one of a number of reasonably good reasons. And all these students moving around the school quite a bit during a typical day, coming into contact with a large proportion of the adults who work there.

We are told that we will defeat the coronavirus with masks, personal distance, hand-washing, testing and contact tracing, and anything less will not be enough. So unless the virus is pretty much completely defeated, we can't start school in the fall and still pretend that we're keeping everyone safe.

So – unless the virus is defeated by September 1, there will be millions of children out of school – at home, we assume – who would normally be in school. “Normally” will be a fond memory. We haven't heard much about how the new normal will be achieved, although it will no doubt involve online classes, split sessions and other systems, none of which include all children being in school all the time.

How long will the new normal last? Long enough to leave a lasting impression on the new world? Some folks have written about the permanent impacts that this spring's endless recess will have, but none of them offer any evidence that suggests they're doing anything more than speculating for clicks.

Kids at home mean supervision. Parents? Someone said today we could retreat from the two-job family. That would leave a mark. Older siblings? Or will they be out looking for the jobs that their friends' parents had to give up? Reimagined and vastly expanded daycare?

Virtual classes and split sessions probably mean less learning each day. This wouldn't be a really big deal for children of upscale and well-educated families, who already supplement their children's education, or send their children to private schools which could easily double tuition and halve enrollment. Who wouldn't put off buying that second yacht in order to send their children to a safe place like that? But generally, less learning, less direction, would have to lead to bigger gaps between the haves and have-nots.

Would we be forced to pare down our teaching and learning to what is most important? This would require the education world to figure out what education is for and what the best possible outcomes are, something that's never really been done. Pressure to teach more in less time might result in a new paradigm for public schools, leading to a system that actually prepares children for the real world. Sure it would.

I just remembered that my original thought about this post was that it would be short and simple: less school time, more home time for kids, big impact. That's still the point, and it's still going to be a very big deal. The more you think about it, the more extensive and complex it gets.

Big impact. Stay tuned.

Real Estate in PJs

We live in a small city of around 7,000 in a large rural region of our state (that population will double if the students ever come back to our two colleges). Lots of small local businesses. Our son works at the tiny digital services company that will, among other things, build and maintain your website if you're one of those small businesses that wants one.

A completely unexpected boom is occurring, apparently, in 3-D tours. This is the feature you find in online real estate listings (Zillow calls it a “3D Home Tour”); it allows you to do a virtual walk-through of the house with 360 degree views of each room. It requires a set of digital 3D photo equipment which is, apparently, very expensive.

The firm's owner took a lot of good-natured heat a few years ago when he bought the equipment to do these tours. There was sporadic demand, but it just didn't seem like a cost-efficient investment (but what a cool toy!).

But now that we're all working, learning, and shopping from home, suddenly everyone wants customers to walk through their homes without having to take a chance on infection. Buyers love to shop for real estate in their PJs. There's a half-time intern who is, apparently, doing nothing but digitizing real estate in 3D.

The interesting thing is that our son – and, I assume, the rest of the staff – is convinced that this is the future – through the pandemic and out the other side. People have already gotten used to it, and will continue to expect it.

This is purely secondhand and anecdotal. The world is finding ways to make an astounding number of processes and activities virtual, because it has to. There's no reason to think, in any of these cases, that we won't revert to the in-person option as soon as this is all over.

But here are some folks who are involved in the business, using real-time evidence, to predict that at least one of these processes will be a part of the new world. Not speculation, or wish-fulfillment, but real customer demand and feedback in the real world.  

It's the only one I've found so far. We are so far from understanding anything about the new world.

UPDATE - 7/11/20:  We are members of Historic New England, a collection of a few dozen remarkable historic houses located throughout the northeast.  They just received a CARES Act grant to do the same kind of 3-D tour of a few of their houses that the real estate people are doing here (and everywhere, I assume).  I'm pretty sure that these online tours will not go away in the new world.

Wouldn't It Be Great?

Man, there is a lot of writing about the new world. Everyone (including, as usual, me) has something to say. But, as noted below, “there are none – so far - that lay out a vision of the new world, or any part of it, with any clarity or insight.”*

So far, they seem to fall into a few broad categories:

• Here's how we've adapted to the quarantine environment. Wouldn't it be cool if we continued doing this kind of thing when it was over? (WFH, virtual everything)
• Something big is gone for now; we have a chance to build it back up from scratch. Wouldn't it be great if we took our time and did that thoughtfully, with input from everyone? (Tourism, restaurants, cooperation in general)
• We've gotten away with shutting down for now, but the ideas we have for opening up are never going to work. Wouldn't it be great if we could just ignore reality? (public schools, professional sports)
• Nothing will change and everything will revert to the way it always was, because [insert preferred psychological and/or economic theory here]. Wouldn't it be great if somehow it could be different? But it won't be.
• Here's what I have wanted to happen in the world for a long time. Wouldn't it be great if the pandemic, in some unexplained way, somehow brought this dream to fruition?

I keep reading this stuff so you don't have to. If any clarity or insight shows up, I'll be right on it. In the meantime, keep thinking creatively. There's a whole continent out there, ready to be created. Let's get on it.

* - I've always wanted to quote myself.

Shambles

I assume that everyone understands that the virus – or, more accurately, the various responses to it around the world – are having a huge impact on everything. With minor odd exceptions, none of these impacts are good. The economy is in a shambles;* massive numbers of people are still out of work and unable to pay for stuff they need; countries are going into untenable debt; the educational process for students from preschool to grad school is disrupted; months have gone by since any of us properly socialized, and there's no baseball. And so on.

What will the long term effect of each of these, and all of them in concert, be on the new world?

I find it incredible that no one seems to know, or even wants to speculate. I understand that part of this is the fact that we're still in the middle of it, and don't know how long all this will last. Guesses even regarding the duration of any of this are wildly divergent.

There are plenty of articles that are happy to list all these terrible things that are affecting everyone in the world differently. There are none – so far - that lay out a vision of the new world, or any part of it, with any clarity or insight.

I don't know about you, but I find this a bit chilling.

* - A long time ago, a “shambles” referred to a slaughterhouse.

The Old New World

In 1918, public health was a system largely designed to shield the middle and upper classes from the ravages of disease epidemics suffered by the lower classes – which the still-popular pseudoscience of eugenics told them were “inferior categories of human being.” Typhus, cholera and even bubonic plague were significant problems, and viruses were poorly understood. Influenza was not monitored; public health systems did not track or count it, so no one had any idea who had it or where it they lived. The pandemic hit them like the proverbial Mack truck.

Although the 1918 flu pandemic – which killed more than World War I – had little effect on economics or culture, it had a big effect on public health. No one wanted to go through that again. European countries began developing systems of universal healthcare, which grew into the national health systems we see in Europe today.* Public health achieved ministry status and began, for the first time, to complete with other aspects of government on an equal level. And, understanding that the disease doesn't recognize borders of any kind, and therefore international coordination seemed wise, they created the forerunner of the WHO right away, in 1919.

So we lived through a health emergency so awful and devastating that whole countries made monumental efforts to protect all their citizens, maintain vigilance through government agency, and coordinate efforts after a brutal and demoralizing World War. Imagine that.

The new world. Will it include universal healthcare? Even more importantly, will it include some kind of actual guarantee that we will all stand together, united, to defeat the next global threat?

Remember climate change? It's still out there. So are racism and income inequality.  We'll see.

* - It took the US more than a decade more to respond in this arena, and then it came up with today's employer-based healthcare – far from universal.

Let's Get Paleolithic

Two studies with European subjects suggest that we (or at least the Europeans) are/were getting more sleep during lockdown (fifteen to thirty more minutes per night), but one of the studies looked at sleep quality and that - contrary to most situation when sleep time increases - was significantly poorer.

Apparently, we all suffer from social jetlag. Who knew? Social jetlag is the discrepancy between our natural sleep cycles and our actual sleep schedules. Our social activity (including work) pushes the edges of our natural cycles. Not something we worried about when we were hunting and gathering. The more relaxed from-home work and school schedules, it seems, allow us to return – just a little – to those idyllic prehistoric days.

The decreased quality of sleep, the authors note, may come from, well, worry. “We think that the self-perceived burden, which substantially increased during this unprecedented COVID-19 lockdown, may have outweighed the otherwise beneficial effects of a reduced social jetlag." I, for one, can testify that, even though the virus has not appeared in any of my friends or relatives, and even though the more relaxed life under lockdown seems to agree with me, I worry. A lot. So there's that.

In the new world, if we can maintain a little (or more than a little) of that relaxed scheduling, without the worry of a global pandemic outside our door, that can be a particularly good thing. If you'd like to encourage this outcome, read the list of “major health and safety problems” that social jetlag can lead to, toward the end of the article.

There are those who say that a paleolithic diet will make us healthier; it seems that paleolithic sleep will certainly do the same.

The Baby Bust

Looks like the new world will contain fewer children.

The Brookings Institute predicts that around 300,000 to 500,000 fewer babies will be born next year. “Economics matters,” they note; births decline as the result of a damaged economy, and the numbers were arrived at after considering a variety of economic factors. They also looked at the data from the (inaccurately named) Spainsh Flu of 1918. That pandemic, as we know, had three distinct spikes in the death rate – and there were three distinct drops in the death rate nine months after each. The total drop was about 12%; during the more recent Great Recession, it was 9%. The Brookings numbers suggest we'll see a 10% drop.

So – no baby boom. CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains:

“Basically, the bottom line is this: when there's a storm warning, there's some data that suggests that the rate of pregnancies increase, but actually when destruction happens, like a tsunami, then actually your births go down,” Gupta said.
So there's a difference in what the impact on society is of any natural calamity or a pandemic – and the forecast suggests that this is much more serious than a tropical storm. It's a tsunami.”

A tsunami, indeed. Many people feel they cannot afford to have children in the best of times; when the bottom drops out... And with the strong possibility of a second wave in six months, who wants to be pregnant and sick?

What effect will the lower birth rate have? It will probably depend on whether the drop will affect some groups more than others. Will it be concentrated in some demographic, or distributed evenly? America's birth rate is already declining, as are the rates in many developed countries. The economic impact of these trends will be substantial – especially their effect on economic growth.

Something to look forward to.