”
At the time I thought the comparison was apt. It captured the biblical sense of shock that many of us felt in the face of such a sudden, extreme, and swiftly accelerating crisis.
We “have been coasting along for more than half a century,” he remarked, and all at once “we are facing the fragility and vulnerability of the human situation.
”
Now, a few months on, Rabbi Sacks’ comparison with revelation still seems fitting, but for a different reason, and one that matters for thinking about a world after COVID-19.
This crisis is alarming, in part, because it has several new and unfamiliar features. A global medical emergency caused by a virus we still do not fully understand. A self-inflicted economic catastrophe as a necessary policy response to contain its spread.
And yet as time has passed, it has also become clear that much of what is most distressing about this crisis is not new at all. Striking variations in COVID-19 infections and outcomes appear to reflect existing economic inequalities.
Remarkable mismatches between the social value of what “key workers” do and the low wages they receive follow from the familiar failure of the market to value adequately what really matters.
The happy embrace of disinformation and misinformation about the virus was to be expected, given a decade of rising populism and declining faith in experts.
And the absence of a properly coordinated international response ought to have come as no surprise, given the celebration of “my country first” global politics in recent years.
The crisis then is a revelation in a far more literal sense—it is focusing our collective attention on the many injustices and weaknesses that already exist in how we live together. If people were blind to these faults before, it is hard not to see them now.
What will the world look like after COVID-19?
Many of the problems we will face in the next decade will simply be more extreme versions of those that we already confront today. The world will only look significantly different this time if, as we emerge from this crisis, we decide to take action to resolve these problems and bring about fundamental change.
DANIEL SUSSKIND is a fellow in economics at Balliol College, Oxford University, and author of A World Without Work.
(Allen Lane, 2020)https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2020/06/how-will-the-world-be-different-after-COVID-19.htm
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