The
cholera epidemic has given way to the corona pandemic. The virus has hit our
planet like a meteor, threatening to disrupt life, and one of the major human
activities that it is reshaping is work. For years now, there’s been talk about
the “future of work" (FoW), or how technology, demographic changes and
lifestyle choices will transform the way we work. We have been slowly but
inexorably heading towards a new construct of work. However, sometimes
life-changing events greatly accelerate the future to suddenly make it the
present: work in the time of Covid-19. The current pandemic will turn the
future into the present. To understand that, let us look at the nine key tenets
of FoW, and how Covid-19 is fast-forwarding them to the present.
Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I
lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My
vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my work, even
though I’m luckier than many: I've got work and can work remotely. I am writing
this from India, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down
the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The
contract that pays 80% of their salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is
hitting the economy badly. Will anyone be hiring when I need work?I think we
can understand our situation – and what might lie in our future – by looking at
the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals
of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages,
and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to
challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical
health among workers. I have argued that we need a very different kind of
economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures.
In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.
The
responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic
that drives other social and ecological crises: the prioritisation of one type
of value over others. This dynamic has played a large part in driving global
responses to COVID-19. So as responses to the virus evolve, how might our
economic futures develop?
From an
economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into
barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a
transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these
futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable.
Small
changes don’t cut it
Coronavirus,
like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although
both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially
driven.
Yes,
climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very
shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand
the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with
COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires
us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context.
Tackling
both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential
economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less
stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology
of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People
mix together and spread infections. This happens in households, and in
workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to
reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.
Reducing
contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One
common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and
isolation, where an infected person’s contacts are identified, then isolated to
prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace
a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer
you have to trace to get to that higher percentage.
We can
see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are
effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they
weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.
A fragile economy
Lockdown
is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This
pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.
Even as
19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for roll backs in mitigation
measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three
weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained
for much longer). Bolsonaro said: “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept …
We must, yes, get back to normal.”
In the UK
meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister
Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could
turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the
case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at
the next sign of pandemic.
The
economics of collapse are fairly straightforward. Businesses exist to make a
profit. If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t
make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and
do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need
immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up
again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more
people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the
whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.
In a normal crisis the prescription for solving
this is simple. The government spends, and it spends until people start
consuming and working again. (This prescription is what the economist John
Maynard Keynes is famous for).
But normal
interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at
least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people
going to work, where they spread the disease. One recent study suggested
that lifting lockdown measures in Wuhan (including workplace closures) too soon
could see China experience a second peak of cases later in 2020.
As the
economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn’t a
wartime economy – with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an
“anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want
to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of
climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way
that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.
So what we
need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the
way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an
economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our
resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this
way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow
us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.
I and other
ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you
produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is
also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce
the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of
stuff you make while keeping people in work?
Proposals
include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my
recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and
with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where
the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals
is the same. You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to
live.
10.25pm March 20, 2020 Jaipur, RJ It’s raining like god is crying, what have you done my children. Yes there is lockdown in some places. Yes there is curfews without riots or war. Yes, There is fear. Yes, There is isolations. People have cut from friends, relatives, couples, co-workers. Yes, there is Panic buying. Yes, there is sickness, people are dying. Yes, there is even death, which may have no actual count in days to come. But they say that, in Wuhan after so many years of noise, you can hear the birds again. They say that after just a few weeks of quiet, the sky is no longer thick with fumes, but blue and grey and clear. They say that in the streets of Assisi people are singing to each other across the empty squares, keeping the windows open, so those who are alone me hear the sounds of family around them. They say that a hotel in west of Ireland is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound. Today a young lady i know is busy spreading flyers with her numbe
The Chinese president at Wuhan Hospital without muzzle .. China officially announces victory over the Corona virus Did the Chinese deceive the world with the Corona Virus? And they saved their economy ?! This is what the Americans and Europeans think, after they sold their shares in high-value-added technology companies for a minimal price to the Chinese government. According to them, the Chinese leadership used an "economic tactic" that made everyone swallow the bait easily, before they asserted that China did not resort to implementing a high political strategy to get rid of European investors, in support of China's economy, which would bypass the US economy with this step ..! And because it teaches the science of certainty that Europeans and Americans are looking for excuses to slow and bankrupt the Chinese economy, China has sacrificed some hundreds of its citizens, instead of sacrificing an entire people ..! Through this tactic, China succeeded in
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