Reflections on Why I Wrote The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus
The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks officially hit bookshelves last week! Given the milestone, I want to take a moment to share some reflections on why I wrote the book.
During the past four years we lost our focus on how to combat a pandemic. Somehow, someway, our fight against Covid-19 became an individual battle about my safety, my finances, my health, and my freedom. We cannot solve the difficult problems that we face amidst a pandemic with statements focused on the word my. Pandemics are never an individual issue. Instead, pandemics concern our collective behavior and our collective safety.
We failed to recognize that in the midst of the past four years. However, ours is not a unique mistake. The same mistake has occurred for centuries.
In the opening chapter of the book, I make a comparison between pandemics and pollution. If a firm chooses to dump toxins into a river, it becomes the problem of those who live downstream. We don’t allow firms to do this even if it hurts their profits. If we did allow them to do so, they would earn those extras profits on the backs of those who play no part in the choice–the same people who suffer the downstream consequences.
While it is less recognized, a pandemic or any infectious disease outbreak holds this same conflict. When we make choices for ourselves that create a little extra risk in our lives, this extra risk ricochets throughout society. We share the extra risk with others around us. If I become infected then I may infect you. You may pay for my choice just as much, or perhaps even more, than I pay for my choice. Just like a firm shares its pollution with its downstream neighbors, we each share our pandemic risk with each other whenever we act with a lack of care.
The most devastating costs of this extra risk flow downstream toward disadvantaged people who face financial and health circumstances that limit their avenues of protection. The rivers of pandemic pollution flow directly toward them. This isn’t because of their own choices. Instead, they pay the largest costs because of their circumstances, their lack of choice, and the choices that the privileged make before and during pandemic times. In large part, I wrote this book because I want people to understand the role that each and every one of us plays in creating pandemic outcomes for society and who the consequences of our actions fall upon.
A multitude of factors lead disadvantaged people to pay larger pandemic costs. Many of the reasons are not as simple as identifying essential workers who are not able to shelter themselves at home or noting that some people have medical vulnerabilities. The more complicated reasons arise because of complex and entangled choices that each and every one of us make in our daily lives. Each of us is complicit. In living day to day, our choices create a tapestry of interpersonal interactions and these interactions are the pathways along which pandemics spread.
These pathways lead to disadvantaged people paying the largest physical and financial costs within an epidemic outbreak. Sure, sometimes people with more advantage are harmed along the way; it isn’t an all or nothing scenario where some are completely safe and some are not. It is a question of percentages and rolls of the dice. Many have read that people of color died at rates around twice as large as the white population for most of the early waves of the pandemic. However, this far understates the issue. How many know that impoverished neighborhoods of New York City (in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens) had rates of Covid-19 mortality five to six times greater than the neighborhoods with the least poverty (mostly in southern Manhattan) during the first year of Covid-19? (See this map on page 59.)
Think about that discrepancy for a moment. Imagine rolling a die to determine who falls to the pandemic. Every time a number one through five comes up the person to die comes from an impoverished neighborhood. Every time a six comes up the person to die comes from an affluent neighborhood. Those were the odds faced by people across New York City during 2020. We saw similar discrepancies roll across the heartland of America in later months of the pandemic.
It’s the 21st century. How can we allow our world to be that unequal and that unjust? It wasn’t that underprivileged people purposely chose more risk than more affluent members of society. These people suffered because of how we organize our society. They suffered because of the way we choose to implement labor markets and provide healthcare. Because of the choices of politicians and voters. Because of the injustice of overt and structural discrimination. Because of growing financial inequality. Because we organize health care for maximizing corporate profit instead of for maximizing health. Because we allow people to make their own choices and judge their own risk without consideration of the risk that they create for others.
I wrote this book because I want people to understand these many pathways that lead to these unjust outcomes and how these pathways arise. I want people to understand this for today and I want them to understand this for the future because this will not be the last pandemic. I want people to be more bothered by what has happened and to choose not to accept it. I want people to remember that it was, indeed, a choice. We did this to ourselves. We can make better choices in the future if we understand how we caused the calamity of the past four years.
It is with this mindset that I wrote this book. For some I hope that it will be a reference and provide a language that will allow them to help others to understand our past mistakes and how to avoid them in the future. For others I hope that it will provide an awakening to recognize our past sins of neglect so that they will not allow our current mindset to take hold the next time. For all, I hope that it will provide yet another reason why we need to work to provide a more just society today and in the future.
Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.