The nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk by 32.9% in the second quarter of last year, the sharpest drop on record. The suffering was concentrated, but the economic damage was widespread. 1 Between February and April 2020, employment declined by more than a third for low-wage workers, compared to a decline of nine percent for upper-middle-wage workers. The COVID death rate for Black and Latino New Yorkers by April 2020 was twice the rate for whites. People of color, poor people, hourly workers, and people in rural communities were hit hardest.
We learned this, tragically, during the pandemic. The fact is, when some of our human capital-some of our people-are ill, when they’re hungry, when they’re enmeshed in their own financial worries, our whole economy suffers. But we also measure it with data that may seem far removed from the economy of dairy plants and warehouses: data on mortalities, hospitalizations, asthma rates, and high school dropouts.Įach of those measures of individual and community health has economic implications. We measure the health of our human capital in jobs numbers and consumer debt. And what happens at those tables determines the wealth of nations.Įconomists talk about human capital, by which they mean everyone from a toddler spooning applesauce in a house down a gravel driveway to a neurosurgeon finishing her coffee in a brownstone.
When you think of the economy, you may think of terabytes of data crisscrossing the cloud, farmers plowing a field, trucks on a tangle of freeways, and snaking lines of conveyor belts-a humming network whose health is measured in acronyms like GDP or CPI.īut the economy is also a web of kitchen tables.
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