Shutdown review – a must-read for anyone wanting an early take on the pandemic

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze (Penguin Book), £25.

Adam Tooze has written an excellent rapid-response book about the Covid-19 crisis, the steps taken globally to counter it as well as the blizzard of economic decisions at national and international levels aimed at keeping the wheels of floundering economies turning.

But the title is wrong. Shutdown sounds like high drama. Probably insisted on by its publishers, Allen Lane, to make copies fly off the shelves. What Tooze has written is no thriller. It is a sober account of how the world fought through the black swan “X” disease (Covid-19) triggered in Wuhan, addressed the consequential worldwide virus wildfire and invented extempore solutions to the many financial crises that followed. 

Winston Churchill’s maxim at times of insurmountable crisis was, “Keep Buggering On”. This book would have been better titled “KBO”, but that hardly implies a juicy crisis to inflate sales.

It is a tribute to Tooze’s academic expertise and diligence that he has produced such a well-researched 400-page opus in such short order. This is far from a “and then the world fell apart” breathless romp. Shutdown explains the genesis of Covid, the reasons for its rapid spread, action taken to counter with vaccines, the potential economic impact region by region – both on individuals and national treasuries – and the widely differing policy actions adopted by states and international organisations to minimise economic damage. 

There is some wandering off course. Why bring in climate change? Then, fire some highly contentious bullets about the Trump regime, Brexit and the EU vaccine initiative? Tooze must feel lonely heralding the EU vaccine cock-up as a success. But it is easy for the reader to separate the occasional hyperbole from the mostly hard-fact narrative.  

The author’s history of published works on complex economic issues should give the reader confidence. Tooze’s early preoccupation was with German economic history:  Weimar’s Statistical Economics, the Reich’s Statistical Office and the Institute for Business-Cycle Research 1922 – 1935; No Room for Miracles – German Industrial Output in WWII Reassessed, were from 2005 to 2012 accompanied by a regular output of similarly themed articles in learned journals. 

Then, 2018 brought a makeover with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Tooze was undergoing a not-so-subtle, publisher induced transmogrification into a doppelganger for the commercially successful historian Niall Ferguson. Snappy titles drive sales. Whatever, if that makes us read Adam Tooze’s books, we are the better for it.

Shutdown is delivered in four parts: “Disease X”; “A Crisis Like No Other”; “A Hot Summer”, and “Interregnum”. The book broadly marches with the calendar of Covid. 

Warning. In the book’s “Introduction”, there are some startling, unsupported assertions. About the 2020 US election: “If Trump was to win, the future of the planet would hang in the balance.” Really? I recollect we had just survived four years of the idiot maverick. While four more would not be a walk in a predictable park, on the available evidence, we were likely to survive.

Then, Tooze describes the West’s victory in the Cold War as “apparent” – ask the Soviets; Covid as “the natural blowback that (climate) campaigners had long warned about” – point me to wunderkind Greta’s pronouncement on that one, please; Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ bat out of hell, becomes “a managerial, centrist type” and, “What did the damage was a plague unleashed by heedless global growth and the massive flywheel of financial accumulation.” Everyone I know thinks it was a virus from Wuhan.

He then comes up with a truly weird summation; “Like so many others, I had become preoccupied with the Anthropocene, a transformation driven by capitalist economic growth that puts in question the very separation between natural and human history.” Perhaps readers have been similarly preoccupied with the Anthropocene. That connection with Covid 19 had passed this writer by. 

So, having swallowed a gaggingly large pinch of salt, onto the substance. Part I, Chapters 1 – “Organised Irresponsibility”; 2 – “Wuhan not Chernobyl”; 3 – February: “Wasting Time” and 4 – “March: Global Lockdown” all cover the early national responses to the outbreak and are comprehensively global. 

The variety of responses – from Covid deniers in Africa, through letting it rip (Sweden), to Trump’s “Pass the hydroxychloroquine, Fauci”- are analysed meticulously, nation by nation and will provide a useful manual for error avoidance in future outbreaks.

Oddly, none of the chapter headings in Part I accurately describes the text. I suspect a drama queen of a sub-editor added some pep to the author’s fascinating but often restrained narrative. 

In Part II, Chapters 5 – “Freefall”; 6 – “Whatever it Takes – Again”; 7 – “Economy on Life Support” and 8 – “The Toolkit”, focus on the global economic impact and early response to the spread of the outbreak. We are drawn into the tensions of World Bank support for developing economies and the reluctance of Western economies to step in with the same gusto abroad as they were pursuing quantitative easing at home.

Of necessity, even avid followers of global events were likely blind-sided by the glare of domestic headlines at the time. Shutdown provides a useful ready reckoner of what went on in the international banking backwoods. There are superbly detailed accounts of how developing countries’ currencies were supported and blow-out borrowing figures coped with. This is less Shutdown, more, Open, No Matter What.

Part III, Chapters 9 – “NextGen EU”; 10 – “China: Momentum”; 11 – “America’s National Crisis”, illuminates a wider political landscape. I’m afraid I don’t buy Tooze’s argument that the EU’s huge vaccine success justifies more unelected centralisation. Nor the hypothesis that China’s authoritarian system is a template to be emulated. The crisis in America is a tangent dealing with the “will he, won’t he” shenanigans of Trump before he grumpily conceded the 2020 election to Biden. An interesting tangent, but not central to the purpose of this book.

That said, there are sound suggestions made about shaping policy to avoid vaccine parsimony in a future pandemic. The economic mayhem caused by a pandemic is easily balanced by the cost of investing significantly less in sensible countermeasures.

Part IV, Chapters 11 – “Vaccine Race”; 12 – “Debt Relief” and 13 – “Advanced Economise – Taps On”, re-treads many of the book’s previous paths and argument occasionally rests on generous wishful thinking. The jury is still out on Tooze’s analysis that the uber-Keynes approach, ignoring eye-watering debt levels, comes with no knock-on consequences. Look at Boris’ impending struggle over increasing National Insurance rates in the UK. And, wishing on a “they will all work together” vaccine star that will make it alright next time is ingenuous. 

I wanted to hear the author’s views on restructuring of the international organisations that underperformed in the crisis – The World Health Organisation, The World Bank, to name only a couple. I was left wanting.

That said, this book is a must-read for anyone requiring an early take on a global crisis that still has some way to run. Agree or disagree with some of Tooze’s tendentious judgements, but enjoy his hard-fact reportage, is my advice.