Showman Walt Disney pulled out all the stops in 1964 when he introduced a ride where customers would float by dancing robotic dolls that wore traditional costumes from different cultures while singing “It’s A Small World.”
The ride has become a feature at all Disney parks, making “It’s a Small World” the most performed song in history. Coincidentally, the ride was introduced just around the last time the Chinese economy got smaller.
For more than a half century, China has experienced explosive uninterrupted growth, becoming the world’s second largest economy with investment and manufacturing interests that reach around the globe. But the novel coronavirus has done what other global financial crises could not do – and that is record a quarter in which the Chinese economy shrank 6.8 percent. China’s economic woes will be felt as far away as Maine if declining consumer confidence there reduces demand for imported lobster.
The coronavirus pandemic struck the United States at a time when Americans showed little interest in international news. Unlike the Cold War period, when Disney built his ride, polls show that Americans have been turning inward, not wanting to hear about problems in other places. But the COVID crisis has shown us how little distance can matter.
A virus that was spreading in only one place in China in January circled the globe by March. A slow response to its spread in Italy, with catastrophic results, provided lessons to public health officials around the world, probably saving many lives. The economic fallout from this crisis is being felt in virtually every country, and will likely have social and political consequences that won’t be fully understood for decades.
This is a statewide newspaper, and we usually reserve this space to comment on Maine issues. But in a global pandemic, it’s not so easy to sort out the local news from the international.
Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, has come under fire for her decision to order stay-in-place rules designed to limit the spread of the virus in order to prevent the state’s hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. In the wake of the economic shocks that have swept through Maine, she is being criticized for a cautious plan of phased reopening of different business sectors.
Some are demanding that Mills reopen the economy without restriction, but they are missing a key point: She didn’t shut the economy down, coronavirus did.
This is a global crisis, and Maine is not the only place that’s suffering. From January through March, the U.S. economy had its first quarter of negative growth since the Great Recession of 2008, with 3.8 million new unemployment claims. Consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the national economy, declined by 7.6 percent in the first quarter of 2020. It was the largest such drop since 1980.
Even if Maine decides to open all of its hotels, bars and beaches to every tourist from every COVID hot spot in America, there will be fewer of them who will be able to afford the trip.
And the economic shocks are going to come from even farther away.
The World Bank reports that global poverty rates are forecast to rise for the first time since 1998. As reported by The New York Times, 8 percent of the world’s population – half a billion people – may be pushed into destitution, largely because of the pandemic.
As we have should have learned from the coronavirus, faraway problems don’t stay faraway forever. A cycle of poverty and disease could keep this virus spreading long after COVID becomes manageable here, and the political instability and refugee crises that such widespread poverty will spawn will continue to affect us in ways that we cannot fully foresee.
Maine did not get into this mess on its own, and it’s not going to get out of it that way, either. It really is a small world, after all.
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