The social risk premium
The risk premium became an obsession in 2008 and the infected/dead curve in 2020, two different attitudes on the part of policy makers and by referral. National risk and citizen risk; it could be said that they are basically the same thing, but experience has shown that the approach conditions the outcome and the final recipients do not coincide.
As for the response to the 2008/2018 crisis, there are no laboratory tests that have confirmed that financial clean-up at the cost of huge public debt has flooded corporate income statements to benefit the common people.
Just over a decade ago, two Spanish prime ministers had a mobile phone application that indicated the state of mind of the financial markets in real time; perhaps today Pedro Sánchez has something similar for the curve of deaths or hospital admissions.
The differences between the two crises can also be detected in other public policies. Traditional safety has defined the scope of action to State borders, its own and those of its neighbours. In other words, organized physical safety continues to be state-run, when the threats are global. For this and other reasons, with the crisis caused by the COVID-19 disease, NATO's Secretary General encourages us not to cease increasing defence budgets, some clouds are gathering on the horizon. Within the framework of this Alliance, Spain has asked for help and has received it from Turkey and the Czech Republic, up to now the multinational nature of the response, while waiting for national governments to decide to join forces under the umbrella of the EU (in financial matters the ECB, the Commission and the European Parliament have approved initiatives).
Three new developments can be highlighted from this health crisis that will evolve into economic, social and of course political ones. The first development is the one mentioned above: the first concern of this crisis is human, unlike the Great Recession, and that is why the mobilisation of those who defend their economic interests with strength, players with a great capacity for pressure, dialogue and media presence, squeals and is understood.
The second development, from the safety point of view, is that the enemy is not human. After a decade of uncertainty with the end of the Cold War, terrorism has taken over the first five years of the 21st century as an all-powerful and omnipresent threat, a resource that has already been exhausted - not in terms of number of victims or military justification - and which has been replaced by cyber threats in the last five years.
In both cases there are people behind it, even States in some cases, security could aim its weapons at something physical and at human perpetrators; this is not the case today with viruses. In this crisis we have many heroes and victims, but we lack a human or State villain to match the consequences. As for the cyber, let us recognize that the real virus is more dangerous than the virus of disinformation, with evident exaggerations regarding diagnosis that seem to pretend that this novel pandemic resembles the usual geopolitics.
Thirdly, national safety strategies have included pandemics and health crises, but not as a direct threat, but as an undetermined risk in the company of others that we do not know very well how to gauge (“challenge” is the Spanish term for 2017); they were wrong, it is not one of the challenges (a sort of catch-all), but a direct threat. What is relevant is that the response to this threat cannot rely on traditional means.
Of course, the Armed Forces have extremely useful capabilities to face a health crisis like the one we are experiencing: you only have to look at the action of the Military Emergency Unit; also the supervision of critical infrastructure; military health is probably underfunded, but we have a large Defence hospital that, although it does not have the capacity to house friendly dictators, it does serve an important neighbourhood of Madrid, and it is very useful as an emergency backup, just like the military pharmacy, which will have to be strengthened in some way.
A different thing is the use of the military in tasks of citizen safety, as has been announced, very debatable in a country with 250,000 police agents (half of them quite well trained) and until now fortunately not put into practice due to the imposition of reason, more than due to jealousy among public bodies, we hope.
The crisis caused by coronavirus disease is therefore a triple new development: people are in the front line of concern; the adversary is not human; and the medium to long term threat has no military or police response, but requires a strengthening of public health and social protection services.
All of the above points to a concept that has been abandoned and emerges with the force of logic in an intermittent manner and now appears in the foreground: human safety. It is a broad framework that includes physical safety, but also personal, labour and health safety, beyond a balance in the number of tanks or nuclear deterrence; it aims to guarantee acceptable living conditions, so that citizens feel they have some control over what happens.
Examples abound of how the priority in recent crises has been the financial economy, territorial waters, defined state sovereignty, and then in the end it is assumed people within that economy and those geographical boundaries; but in the response there are also cases of cutting back on individual freedoms in the interests of greater security, of disconnection between citizen and safety.
The COVID-19 crisis has turned the equation on its head: there is no safety without people. We have moved from national risk to the well-being of the citizen in the broadest sense, which begins with health and continues with work. The circumstances at the start of 2020 will, in any case, force us to rethink social, safety, defence, business and labour strategies and, above all, to resolve a fundamental question: is the sum of the public's resources capable today of keeping the social risk premium under control?