The New World

At the moment, we are battling the coronavirus. It looks like that battle will last at least 18 months. But, when the battle is over, we will face a new world -- a world which will be riddled with the harvest of our past mistakes. Glen Pearson writes:

In his Sunday television program, Fareed Zakaria spoke about life in the next few years: “We are in the early stages of what is going to become a series of cascading events, reverberating throughout the world.  Economic paralysis is sure to follow … these problems demand global coordination.”

We can be forgiven for fixating on our own domestic travails, but what is about to hit the developing world will be far worse.  Venezuela, India, Brazil and a score of African nations will be ill-prepared for the economic chaos about to hit them and richer developed nations will be hard-pressed to find the resources to assist the world’s poorest when they are attempting to restart their own economies.  Regardless of the coronavirus effects on such poorer regions, the economic aftershock will have devastating consequences on them and millions could perish.

It should be clear by now that the global lack of public investment in both rich and poor nations has left us deeply vulnerable.  We have always known that pandemics were possible, as were escalating climate disasters, the loss of good jobs, decline in public services, and an increasingly ineffective politics, but little was done to avert any of these.  In some cases, they grew worse.

Instability will be the hallmark of this new world:

Increasingly unequal societies are also increasingly unstable.  And since we’ve been underfunding the public sectors for years, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many lie vulnerable to the corona crisis.  The governments that are suddenly there with crisis funding weren’t sufficiently diligent in the years preceding this pandemic.  While economies raged ahead on corporate partnerships and stock market records, the reality was that they were ironically cutting back on the very public services we now require and which have remained in a deficit predicament for years.  That lack of investment has now caught up with us, leaving governments embarrassed at their own lack of capacity to adapt.

And you can bet that the pressure to claw back the money that governments have spent during this crisis will be extreme:

One thing is certain: there will be massive pressure on governments and regulatory agencies to plow funds back into the financial sector as opposed to the public one.  We know all too well what happened when that transpired following the Great Recession of 2008 – the public cupboard was stripped bare in order that the private markets could be stocked.  And not much changed in the years following, leaving many to observe that little was learned in the process.

Should we go down that same route, then societies will go down as well.  If we pump up the financial sector in hopes of bringing the economy back to normal, we will only repeat the fallacies of the past.  Climate change will continue its destructive force.  The labour market will remain volatile.  Poverty will continue to be endemic, made obvious by more vulnerable citizens on the streets.  Public health and education will increasingly rise in cost.  Programs will be cut back or done away with altogether.

Unless the public educates itself on the nature of this crisis, we face our own destruction. At the beginning of the last century, H.G. Wells wrote, "Civilization is a race between education and disaster."

That statement is as true today as when Wells wrote it.

Image: fivebooks.com