COVID19: Resetting Our Priorities

Towards the end of 2019, which feels a decade ago, I wrote a post on growth. It was an attempt to get away from the blanket term “growth” and its counterpart “degrowth,” which have become stand-ins for entire philosophies and move the discussion to specific categories such as knowledge (need more) and consumption (can do with less).

The COVID19 crisis, while causing immense pain, also provides a unique opportunity to reflect on what we need in our lives and what we can do without. And that examination should guide how we rebuild our economy and society.

The lockdown has resulted in the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression. In one shocking statistic, it appears that almost 40% of people earning under $40K have lost their job. This is a massive disruption to what in my book World After Capital I call the job-loop: the vast majority of people spend most of their waking hours in a job and much of the rest on consumption of goods and services, which in turn are produced by other people having jobs.

Now lots of people are asking how will we bring these jobs back? But the more fundamental question to ask is: what can people spend their time and attention on if they don’t need to have that specific job? Or possibly any paid job? Or if they are empowered to start their own business? So far the government stimulus amounts to $3 trillion, which could easily pay for more than 1 year of Universal Basic Income (UBI).

What about the other side of the job loop, consumption? We are seeing more clearly than ever right now that health and freedom of movement are deep human needs. Having dozens of pairs of sneakers, by contrast, is not. It may be cool, hip or even constitute a valuable collection, but is clearly a want. If you are sick from COVID19 or locked up in a tiny apartment, this distinction between needs and wants will be crystal clear.

Way too many of our productive resources are aimed at making and selling stuff to people that they do not need. And we are seeing how hard it is and long it takes to retool those resources to instead produce masks and tests and everything else we truly need. The crucial reason for this is that we have become overly reliant on the market for allocation, especially the allocation of human attention. This is deeply problematic because prices do not and cannot exist for crucial needs, such as pandemic preparedness and finding purpose in life.

So here too our question shouldn’t be, how can we bail out all the businesses and keep making more stuff, but rather what is it that we need and won’t get from the market? We know some of these areas already and the crucial one of course is solving the climate crisis. But there is a lot more, such as the opioid crisis, which in turn is just part of the larger crisis of individual purpose. There is no shortage of issues and people deserving more of our attention than we are giving.

Susan and I have been incredibly fortunate (so far) to be healthy and have our loved ones be healthy. We are financially secure and can do our work remotely. And on top of that we are in a place with good internet connectivity where we can just walk outside whenever we want to and be in the woods.  But we know many others who are not nearly this lucky and much of our time has been focused on helping where we can. Being able to do so has been fulfilling and has made us shift our priorities towards doing more of that faster.

If ever there was a time to reset personal and collective priorities, this is it.