Mr. Bernstein’s article does great service in framing a longstanding issue in a topical way. As I write this comment more than six months after the article was posted there is hope with the arrival of vaccines (though still a long roll-out process), but also increasing evidence of the types of economic stresses of which the author writes.

In his comment above, Daniel McGrath notes that Bernstein offers no recommendations or solutions, and rightly calls out a financial system that looks after its own needs first even as a small but well trained body of investment professionals looks to work “for the ultimate benefit of society”. I don’t think the point of the article is to offer solutions, but rather to provoke exactly the type of discussion that McGrath and (previous commenter) Cornwell offer. Bernstein highlights an issue famously re-invigorated by Thomas Picketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century - that the system naturally favours capital over labour. The power of Bernstein’s article is that it combines this with the salient point that - as Cornwell points out - necessity and behavioural finance combine as an “accelerant” in the current health and economic crisis.

To non-Americans like me, the debate in the United States about how systems should be designed to address structural health and welfare issues emphasizes a long-standing frontier spirit and a suspicion of government’s efficacy that differs from the discourse in other countries. To outsiders the US debate seems tilted towards ‘if’ the system should address social and economic inequity, whereas in many other OECD countries the debate drifts towards ‘how’ or ‘how much’.

The Harvard economic historian Norman Gras (ironically a Canadian transplant (though writing about 20 years before Canada’s ‘socialized system of healthcare’ started under Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather) highlighted the perils of ‘socialism’ in a his 1942 essay “Capitalism - Concepts and History”. Gras’ conceptualization of socialism almost a century ago is different than today (he was really addressing Marxism), but his charged word unhelpfully endures in political discourse as shorthand for any government intervention. This lexical quick of history points even more strongly to the importance of Mr. Bernstein’s central aim - to re-invigorate debate about ways to nudge or (re)structure the system to more equitable outcomes.