In year of pandemic, inequality bubbled to surface

This year, many Americans left the places where it was still possible to encounter one another.

White-collar workers stopped going downtown, past homeless encampments and to lunch counters with minimum-wage staff.

The well-off stopped riding public transit, where in some cities they once sat alongside commuting students and custodial workers.

Diners stopped eating in restaurants, where their tips formed the wages of the people who served them.

Americans also stopped broadly sharing libraries, movie theaters, train stations and public school classrooms, the spaces that still created common experience in increasingly unequal communities. Even the DMV, with its cross-section of life in a single room, wasn’t that anymore.

Instead, people who could afford it retreated into smaller, more secure worlds during the pandemic. And that has made it harder to see all the inequality that worsened this year: the unemployment that soared even as the stock market did, the eviction threats that grew as home prices hit new highs.

In another way, however, the inequality already present in the economy became more visible than ever this year. With delivery services, restaurant couriers and personal shopping apps, low-wage workers were now — in far larger numbers — coming right to the doorstep of the well-off. Standing there in masks, their economic precarity was exposed.

“What these apps do is force people who live stable lives to confront the instability of working-class lives — very directly and for their own benefit,” said Louis Hyman, an economic historian at Cornell. “Before these apps, it was easy to pretend that wasn’t really happening,” he said of the yawning gaps in the economy. “There were ways to imagine those delivery people were not emblematic of anything.”

Historians are watching this moment with a fraught question: Will there emerge a broader demand for structural reforms to address inequality, or a further retreat by the affluent from its problems? Recessions, they say, can clarify where the economy is heading. The companies and industries that prosper during them often anticipate how society will change in the years to come.

The advertising industry grew during the Great Depression, as companies fought for scarce consumer dollars and sold escapism in alcohol, tobacco and entertainment. The ad industry anticipated the American consumer culture of the postwar era. Accounting firms and banks boomed, too, out of the New Deal-era regulation that came from the Depression. Later, the recession of the early 1990s presaged the downsizing and outsourcing of even middle-class jobs, and the rise of consulting firms to manage that shift. And out of the wreckage of the foreclosure crisis, institutional investors foresaw a new market for single-family rental homes.

Today, the companies that are thriving — some with eye-popping IPOs — have harnessed both the particular circumstances of social distancing and the longer-term trends of a society pulling apart. These companies enable you to hold a meeting without visiting the office, to buy a home without glad-handing a real estate agent, to eat restaurant meals without entering a restaurant, to enjoy entertainment without theaters, to shop without retail. They “remind us of a long historical process of social fragmentation that is now more obvious than ever,” said David Kennedy, a Stanford historian who has written extensively about the Great Depression.