Looking to the future: where do we go from here?

Pandemics have happened in the past, most notably in 1919, but the differences between this one and previous events are marked. The population in 1919 is estimated to be way under two billion; and the climate engine wasn’t broken. Coming out of WWI, no one had to contend with global warming, El Nino, vast overpopulation, crashing fish populations, oceans full of garbage, dangerous air quality, persistent drought, wildfires, unpredictable super-storms, imminent famine, the constant threat of nuclear escalation … and a deep suspicion that the so-called “leader of the free world” isn’t on the same page of the same script as the rest of us.

In 2020, people have been contending with all of the above, and a lot more, for decades. We’re cynical, weary, and many people (one wants to hazard, most?) are ready for wide-scale change. The question is, what kind of change?

It’s not news (and certainly no surprise) that the culprit in this current debacle is actually capitalism. This is well documented: too little was done till much too late, because government and industry were loath to compromise cash flow. This much is also predictable. A pivot point of social change in our era is social media: the culprits have been found out, information went viral. No one is left in much doubt as to where blame lies ― but the middle of the pandemic isn’t the time to be pointing fingers and dragging down governments. That’s the royal road to anarchy, and no one can cope with anarchy added to the pandemic itself.

But like all things, “this too shall pass.” Even without a vaccine, in two to three years, the virus will burn itself out. The death toll will be a very small percentage of the global population, which unfortunately equals an extremely large number of fatalities due to our global population of 7.8 billion. And in fact, a vaccine is likely to be along in 2021, stemming the tide, and raising the question ... where do we go from here?

That will be the time to point fingers, question individuals, government, and methods. Capitalism itself should be under the lens. Only in countries where democracy has failed utterly and the people have no voice, no power, will social change be modest or even absent. Several countries are in this sad predicament; we know which they are. No need to name them.  However, those countries are not the whole world; and in the zone known as “rest of world,” one can expect social change.

The biggest and most prompt changes will need to be in emergency health care. While elective surgery (that facelift, that liposuction) will always be on your buck, ER services should be free, no ifs, ands or buts. Medical care should never be a cause of financial ruin for anyone, no matter their income, or lack of it. Nations may organize the means to this end however they want (and there are many ways), but health care is a right, not a privilege. This has been demonstrated ad nauseam by the pandemic, to the point where no sane person can argue it any further. Denying people prompt, free emergency care will only usher in the next pandemic (and there will be one; they've been happening since humanity clambered down out of the trees).

Transparency and accountability at government and industry level will be a major change. Simply stated: corruption and self-interest at every level are too dangerous. So we made it through the 2020 pandemic ― but this crisis is far from unique or unknown. Since February, the system itself is visibly unraveling. Like a ship steadily sinking under us, it must be shored up if it (and we) are to survive and prosper. 

Capitalism can, and should, protect itself: rich folk desire to remain rich, and they can … though perhaps not quite as rich as they once were. To date the super-wealthy class have shown little or no acknowledgment of a “responsibility of compassion” to the poorer citizens from whom their wealth was sourced. It’s time to give back ― or “pay forward.” Like health care, nations may organize the means to this end however it suits them (and there are just as many ways). But it begins with transparency and accountability. A clear acknowledgment of a “responsibility of compassion,” plus regulations ensuring that a minute fraction of the great wealth of such individuals and industries is, indeed, “paid forward.” A minute fraction is all that’s needed: after centuries of runaway capitalism, in 2020 their wealth is so immense, it’s almost unimaginable.

The Universal Income experiment has been run, past tense; and it works. Its per capita payments seem paltry, but if it’s paid fairly ― to every individual below a certain income threshold, including aged, disabled, children, unemployed ― then people can make the smart decisions. The single person trying to eek out a living alone is, frankly, in trouble. But what of the extended family (related by blood or not) sharing a large property, all caring for each other? All members behaving like decent human beings, no one permitted to be abusive ... predators and abusers quickly identified and dealt with either within the caring family unit or by the law. In this model, even a paltry per capita Universal Income is cumulative. A domestic collective can do very well indeed.

In the past, people have been reluctant to share their personal spare with others, preferring to be alone at home, going out to work and socialize. Lockdown is teaching people how lonely they really are. Many who recently wouldn’t have even considered living as part of a collective might probably soon welcome the opportunity to join a group, make new family among like-minded folk. Abusers, those domestic predators, may soon be identified and rooted out. Their days should be numbered (and candidly, about time).

Technology is ramping up as 2020 plays out. More people are relying on the internet more of the time, not merely for entertainment. Technology is stepping up to plug the gaps in the workplace and at such disparate gatherings as weddings and funerals. It’s technology’s opportunity to shine, to prove it can be an indispensable tool for all in the future. Working from home will likely continue long after the word “lockdown” becomes a memory. It benefits employers, who can save on overhead, and those savings might be invested in a larger workforce, greater productivity … ironically, capitalism can benefit by not having workers in the workplace. Fewer people commuting also means less smog, less fuel consumed, less requirement for fume-belching public transport ―

 Over many of the world’s major cities, we’re already seeing the sky turn blue for the first time in decades. People may value this enough for them to want it every day, not just during the pandemic; and there’s a way to do it. Out of this desire for clear skies comes a readiness to accept electric cars, which translates into enough sales to broaden the marketplace. Increased sales volumes should drive down at-market prices, assuming the industry is subject to that transparency and accountability, and immoral profit-taking is no longer acceptable. (Profitability ― sure. But not robbery. Healthy capitalism, under control. Who decides profit margins? How about the people? Open forum, referendum. Try using technology to negotiate with people en masse rather than robbing them.) 

This is technology’s next opportunity to take the spotlight: when every car, truck, bus and train is electric and charging on solar, air quality will visibly improve. The next step is thorium power for ships (possibly also for aircraft; but shipping is the most critical goal, since marine engines are generators of unconscionable pollution). Bottom line: if we want blue skies, we can have them, with a shift in attitude at the level of public, industry and government. The pandemic can prepare the ground for this to happen.

Income is a major concern, and it’s safe to say that some jobs will go away permanently. For example, once people grow accustomed to shopping online for almost everything, they might not flock back to physical stores, especially since prices tend to be higher there. Traditional retail could be a casualty. On the other hand, as I write this, aged care is actively recruiting, and as tech becomes a boom sector, IT could enjoy another golden age, as it did in the 1990s. Certain jobs are simply due to dwindle away, pandemic or no, but the virus will certainly hasten their end. 

The biggest issue lies at government level: the days when government could blame the unemployed for being unemployed are gone. In fact, they’ve been gone for some considerable time, but our obsolete politico-economic system has lumbered on, assigning blame where none actually existed.

Employment (or the lack of it) is an area where social change must surely occur. If one is jobless in a time and place where there are no jobs, one must be supported, not vilified. Certain people might never work again, since, technology has rendered them superfluous. Not only have their industries declined, there is no requirement for workers in the kind of numbers seen in the past. Population growth plus tech equals a permanent predicament where there are too many jobseekers, not enough jobs … which only underscores the need for support, Universal Income, free medicine, free education. The pandemic won’t have caused this situation, but it will have hastened it. 

We’ll see, in 2021, a job market we wouldn’t have expected to see for quite some time (though it was, in fact, always inevitable: robots are looming on the horizon; manual workers are due to be replaced, like it or not). One easy short-term remedy for job creation is to lower ― not raise! ― retirement age. Encourage people to take retirement at 55-60; clear the way for younger job seekers. However, the age pension must be much more generous, to allow mature-age people to step aside and make jobs for youth. The funding for better age pensions is part of the greater question of what to do with, and for, the countless people who will be surplus to the workforce’s requirement in the years directly following the pandemic.

Even with Universal Income and “domestic collective” lifestyles (groups of three or more, blood kin or not, sharing a home), money is likely to be short at street level, where the vast majority of people live. Luxury goods will be the first off the shopping list, and purveyors of these will be stranded. Certain industries which rely on floods of dollars from poorer pockets, will suffer. Short of much more generous Universal Income, there’s nothing to be done about this. If government desires the arts to flourish, it will be compelled to offer semi-regular stimulus payments to people under a certain income threshold. A twice-yearly infusion of cash would go a long way to keeping publishers, musicians, indie filmmakers and so forth, afloat … alas, a share of those stimulus dollars will definitely go right to retailers of tobacco, alcohol and drugs ― but tobacconists and publicans also read books, listen to music, watch movies. If the incentive dollars filter through extra hands before the arts feel their benefit, so be it. (Eventually, inevitably, the government gets the whole amount back in endlessly layered taxes … and pays it out again in the next round of incentives. The machine chugs along. Fluid dollars. Embrace the concept.)

In this post-pandemic economic picture, uppermost on every mind save those of the ultra-rich, will be the issue of waste. The First World wastes everything. Water, food, power, time … lives. In good years, and affluent places, this waste is invisible; or at least no one cares to notice. When supermarket shelves are empty, and stories of wartime rationing begin to circulate, “waste” as a concept is suddenly a tangible thing. If the unemployment rate is indeed set to climb radically, and permanently, Universal Income and “domestic collective” lifestyles can save wide swathes of the public from hardship ― and ways to curb waste will be paramount.

Australians are painfully aware of water restrictions in drought years. We’ve grown accustomed to being frugal with power (turn if off when you’re not using it!), and poor households have always budgeted tightly for food, while wasting little. The major social change here is that far more people will have to learn thrift … and a visible lack of thrift ought to be scorned. This should also apply to politicians and local government staff, who have a shocking record for wasting taxpayer and ratepayer funds on restaurants, booze, overseas trips. 

Governments, now subject to the new transparency and accountability, won’t be able to award themselves untenable pay rises and bonuses. It’s plausible that politicians’ wages will come under scrutiny. Many (most, all?) might well take an overdue pay cut, those funds being channeled into community coffers, to help fuel the stimulus packages which keep alive the arts, and such luxury sectors as our beloved café culture.

Food will be high on the “waste not” list. Far too many people were reliant on food banks and food stamps even before the pandemic, but the virus has forced so many additional people into this situation, “food poverty” is rapidly become a major issue. With ongoing high-level unemployment, the problem won’t go away. Social change here isn't a "la-la-land" luxury, it's a necessity. It was once said that any country was “three meals away from anarchy.” In certain places, this line has come and gone; anarchy didn’t ensue. But … twelve meals from anarchy? Twenty meals? What level of starvation is needed to trigger civil unrest? We don’t know. Sane, sensible people don’t want to find out. Compassionate, intelligent government doesn’t blunder down that road; it rides to the rescue by providing for its poor ― and poor people make their own contribution by adopting a “zero waste” policy.

 Use everything. Recycle and share. Do not “throw away” what you don’t want or need … sell it on, donate it, recycle it. Got spare perishable food? Forget yourself for a change and feed someone else. Got spare blankets or clothes? Donate them. The crass “throw it away” doctrine of Japan’s “Queen of Decluttering,” Marie Kondo, won’t fly in future. A world in which any object more than a few months old, which one personally hasn’t read, watched or used in that time, is consigned to landfill, needs to become anathema. One must acknowledge our own “responsibility of compassion” … as well as the possibility of simply not being able to replace chucked-away items (if only because we can’t afford to buy something over and over, when we want/need it again). Lower income, plus reduced supply of luxury goods equals profound uncertainty … caution becomes one of our watchwords, on a personal level.

On a national level, the watchwords should be “self reliance.” Take the so-called Toilet Paper Apocalypse. Without a doubt, local panic buying was triggered by the bogus information that our toilet paper comes from China, and since the entire of China would be “shut down” for years, our supply would soon run out. Wrong on every count. Chinese factories reopened in a matter of weeks (the time taken for industrial cleaning, plus quarantine and workforce testing); most of China never shut down at all, and never all of it at the same time. Besides which, our TP is supplied by our own, in-state factory! Panic got such a grip on people, over-buying idiots, hoarders and black-marketeers were not to be stopped. They drove demand up by 560%, and weeks later the shelves remain empty even though our own factory is working flat out to resupply the folk who ran out entirely while others hoarded hundreds of jumbo-size packs.

 “Self reliance,” nationally, is something government must nurture, and people must grasp. If a nation, a state or region, can feed itself, and supply its own water and power, it is halfway home. Social change will likely happen on this level, as a result of the chaos we saw during the early stages of the pandemic, where stores were emptied out by selfish, ill-informed buyers. People need to know where their goods are coming from; government needs to encourage local manufacture. There's the end to the need for panic buying, unless one is a complete fool ... in which case, store-driven regulations must be in place immediately, to stop the rot before it runs away. This didn't happen in 2020 till too late. Lesson learned. 

Of course one will always be able to buy something on eBay, AliExpress or Amazon, from the other side of the world … but you need to know that your region is self-sufficient in terms of life’s necessities. Food, water, power, fuel. As for a company like Nestle being permitted to buy a town’s water, denying residents the right to their own rainfall … the insanity of this will soon become apparent, if it hasn’t already; and the government in question (under the new transparency and accountability) should be required by its own people to remedy this situation without delay.

Self reliance is another reason to hurry the influx of electric vehicles, including trucks, which do indeed carry this nation, and every other. Sourcing fuel overseas is any nation’s Achilles’s heel, and most countries don’t have domestic oil resources to provide their own. Even if they did, the fallout from oil production on so wide a scale would only be a lingering death for a population of 7.8 billion people. The pandemic hasn’t caused the need for self-reliance in fuel (yet; it’s still early days), but as the example of toilet paper demonstrates, the potential for chaos is real, dangerous, and avoidable with planning. 

Given the salutary shock it’s receiving at this time, courtesy of the pandemic, government could be expected to respond favorably, take steps toward self-reliance in fuel. A shift toward electric vehicles charged by solar, is arguably a necessity. Critics will raise the question of synthetic substances: we wear them, work and play with them, live and die with them, and they’re petrochemical. We need oil, right? No. One answer lies in recycling. There’s enough plastic in the world. The only decision is to use it ― and fund the factories needed for local manufacture, which brings the issue back around  to local self-reliance. Looking beyond recycling, it turns out that whatever can be made from plastic can also be made from hemp. Plastic is only an issue if industry and government (again, change-resistant, greed-oriented capitalism) insists on making it so. The pandemic has shown clearly, the need for social change is upon us.

• Transparency and accountability at government level. 
• Controls on corruption and self-interest at government level. 
• Acknowledgement of a “responsibility of compassion” at every level from government to citizen. 
• A surcharge on the super-wealthy ― individuals and industry ― who are required to make that acknowledgment and “pay forward.” 
• Review of wage structures in politicians.  
• Free emergency health care. 
• Wider use of reliable technology. 
• Universal income. 
• Changes in how employment and joblessness are viewed. 
• Self-reliance in food, water, power and fuel. 
• More localized manufacture. 
• A shift to electric vehicles, power generation that doesn’t derive from oil or coal. 
• Zero tolerance for waste. 
• Incentives to the arts. 
• A public acceptance of “domestic collective” lifestyles.

These are measures which are simple and yet sweeping. They don't depend on technology we don't possess; they don't require the dismantling of capitalism; they only require the super-rich to "pay forward" a mere fraction of what they've accumulated; they don't require any special new government system, merely a revamp on the existing model, to make it more decent, serving its citizens instead of itself and its corporate and industrial sponsors. 

These measures can be undertaken with a shift in attitude, yet they will have vast results in how the world functions (or even survives), and how ordinary people, and specifically the poorest, live from day to day. And yes, there’s a great deal more that could be done, but it has only a peripheral connection to the pandemic, and that’s a topic for another time.

Images: Ma Google. Circulating at random out there.