THE `ROARING-BACK TWENTIES'.

In its year-end issue the editors of The Economist magazine say 2020 was “the year when everything changed.”

Everything? Really? I'm sure that how The Economist was produced changed, just as how this newspaper was produced did. But both we and The Economist maintained our respective schedules and, I hope, provided our readers with news and commentary at the level they'd come to expect (even if The Economist clearly drifted into uncharacteristic exaggeration!).

The Economist's editors believe the 2020s will be like the Roaring 1920s, which were “a ferment of forward-looking, risk-taking social, industrial and artistic novelty.” Partly, they argue, this was because the widespread death wrought by the Great War, as it was called, and then the Spanish flu “left survivors with an appetite to live the 1920s at speed.”

That the “Lost Generation” had different, more nihilistic values than their Edwardian parents, or even their Edwardian selves, is widely agreed. But most people would argue it had more to do with the horror of trench warfare than the devastation in flu wards, even if the flu may have killed 50 million people while the war took “only” 20 million. More great novels and silent movies emerged from the war than the pandemic.

But look at those numbers: 70 million people dead, not counting another 20 million physically wounded in the war. Out of a world population of under two billion, that's a death rate of about 4.5 per cent. By contrast, COVID-related deaths so far are 1.3 million out of a world population of around eight billion, for a toll of about 0.2 per cent. And vaccines are on the way. No, vaccines won't get to everyone in time. And the virus is already mutating in worrisome ways, though mutation is what viruses do. But in 2018, 58 million people died around the world. It's hard to believe

OF COURSE, THEY DIDN'T HAVE INTERNET IN THE TRENCHES OR INFLUENZA WARDS OF A CENTURY AGO.

a 2.2 per cent increase in that number in 2020 will change “everything.”

Of course, they didn't have internet in the trenches or influenza wards of a century ago. Their main social media were conversation and letter-writing, which meant their problems were not as immediately public as ours. So, change everything? We shall see, or at least some of us will.

If The Economist is right and, coming out of the pandemic, people generally do have a live-for- the-moment attitude — “eat, drink, be merry, go to a restaurant, book a flight and stay in a hotel, for tomorrow we may die” — that at least suggests we won't have a problem with deficient aggregate demand, especially not in this country, since our federal government has thoughtfully “pre-loaded” enough income to finance a Flapper-and-Speakeasy-II spending binge. If the 2020s are a repeat of the rapid technological diffusion and rising living standards of the “Roaring Twenties,” that would be a very good thing, provided we can avoid the policy mistakes that turned a decade-closing stock market disturbance into the economic nightmare of the 1930s.

In his year-end interview with CTV's Evan Solomon, the prime minister said that to get this replay of the 1920s: “There's lots of things that we're going to need to do to give that economy a boost so we can come roaring back as quickly as possible.”

If I were Solomon, Evan Solomon but perhaps also that other one, I would have followed up: “But how do you know, prime minister? We're in an unprecedented (for anyone not 100 years old) economic situation. The country is collectively stir crazy. And, thanks to CERB and other programs that provided more income than people lost to the pandemic, many Canadians are flush with savings. How do you know the economy won't come roaring back all on its own, just as soon as people feel comfortable enough to — and their governments let them — return to all the activities they're dying to get back to?”

The PM must stand on very high stilts to have such a great view of the future. The same stilts that enable him to see a balanced budget — “Absolutely!” — once the “contextual spending” of the COVID era is past us. I'd never actually heard government spending called “contextual” before. Literacy criticism reaches everywhere now: next we'll have “subtextual” spending. But it's not a bad phrase for getting the idea across that COVID spending was temporary (and, who knows? maybe more people took LitCrit in college than PubFi).

Just two problems with that: The prime minister's history suggests he sees all contexts as justifying contextual spending. Coming out of what may have been the country's mildest recession ever — if it was a recession — in 2015, he felt justified in breaking a campaign promise to keep the federal deficit at $10 billion. And as unemployment rates ran at 50-year lows, just before the pandemic, he still saw no compelling reason to balance the federal budget.

Plus: much of the $70-$100 billion he plans to spend on stimulus seems like pretty permanent spending, especially the daycare and pharmacare parts of it. That's not a return to pre-contextual spending. It's a continuation of his government's long-term increase in the role of government in Canadians' lives.

In that sense, at least, the pandemic will have changed nothing.