In February 2016, Peggy Noonan wrote a prescient column in The Wall Street Journal in which she made the distinction between two classes of people: The “protected” – that is, the well-off, the connected, the comfortably insulated – and the “unprotected” – everyone else.
“The protected make public policy,” she wrote. “The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.” Her larger point, unfathomable to so many people at the time, was that Donald Trump was going to win.
Updated for the pandemic, another word for protected might be “Remote.” A recent study by Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago found that 37% of jobs in the U.S. can be performed from home. The Remote are, disproportionately, knowledge workers, mostly well-educated, generally well-paid. Their professional networks, and many of their personal ones, too, are with people who also work remotely.
That leaves the other roughly two-thirds. Call them “Exposed.” They include everyone – shop owner, waiter, cab driver, sales associate, factory worker, nanny, flight attendant, and so on – for whom physical presence is a job requirement. They are, typically, less well-educated, less well-paid.
For the Remote, the lockdowns of the past two months have been stressful. For the Exposed, they have been catastrophic. For the Remote, another few weeks of lockdown is an irritant. For the Exposed, whose jobs are disappearing by the millions every week, it is a terror. For the Remote, COVID-19 is the grave new risk. For the Exposed, it’s one of several.