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Life Disrupted (3/3): Work & Economy

11 min readApr 10, 2020

This essay is part of a series that reflects on how COVID-19 has been disrupting life as usual on big and small scales.

In part 1 we looked at what is the impact of social distancing and home isolation on mental health.
Part 2 explored the impact on education worldwide and the opportunities for blended learning in the future.
This piece looks at the impact of this crisis on the global economy, the way the concept of growth might change and the implication on how we work.

We live in a world where everything is about growth. We are centering our economies around a number going up every year.

The current global health crisis, without doubt, will trigger a global recession. With significant drops in international trade and the standstill or bankruptcy of many businesses, the holy number, the GDP, is going to drop everywhere on the planet.

So what does that mean, for our economies? And what are the subtleties behind an economic recession? What are the implications for the job market? For small businesses? For informal workers for whom work from home is not an option?

What is wrong with the current economic system worldwide and why we should think twice before we rush back into it after Corona

If I would ask you what is essential in life, what would you say? For most people, it is about spending quality time with loved ones. But if we look at how we measure success in our economies, what is essential in life is more war, more inequality, and more poverty.

How can this be you would ask? To explain how we came to the modern economic system, we need to first look back over 2000 years ago.

The word “economics” comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning household management. What we mean by economics today, however, is actually closer to another Greek word, khrēmatizein (chrematistics), which means the study of wealth as measured in money. Aristotle in Ancient Greece warned that these two are antipodes.

Although we tend to believe that the free market world we live in today has always been around; although it is hard to imagine a modern world with no corporations, nor private banks, today’s reality came to be as it is, only in the last 50 years.

In 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay that changed the world. His work kick-started a movement of maximizing shareholder value: “the social responsibility of a firm is to maximize its profits” he said. The promise of neoliberal economic policies and a free-market ideology that followed was efficiency and justice. Efficiency because homo economicus knows best how to utilize his/her resources, and more just because fair competition would fairly distribute rewards according to productivity (Ha-Joong Chang, 2010).

Economics as described in mainstream textbooks however, simply does not reflect reality. The fact that there is fair competition is an illusion. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market has the face of monopolies, transnational corporations, and private banks. In our modern world, we experience as Katasonov coined, a “casino economics” characterized by speculations, financial pyramids, and bankruptcies. Small and medium businesses have to play by the rule of the giants.

Neo-liberal economic policies created a very toxic business culture of favoring short-termism while downplaying a long term view and interpretation of whom a corporation should benefit (Mariana Mazzucato, 2018).

We came to praise and admire entrepreneurs and investors who are capable of making a return in the least amount of time, instead of investing in long term projects and research that would benefit society as a whole. The most aggressive manifestation of this mindset can be found within the financial sector.

Financial industry was never as powerful as it is today. It is one of the main drivers of progress and development because it contributes the most to a country’s GDP.

Since the 1970s, profits globally derive less from manufacturing and commerce, and more from speculation and manipulation of different kinds of debt. We saw and felt the consequences of such abstractions in 2008. In the aftermath of the financial crisis characterized by a very slow recovery, unemployment, poverty and disruption of social stability, we started questioning the financial system.

Today’s crisis should also make us question how we measure success in our economies and what matters in our societies.

Putting what matters into perspective

‘Every society clings to a myth by which it lives.’ (Tim Jackson, 2009)

Today, this myth is called economic growth, as measured by the GDP.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) measures the monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. If you would like to see how well a country is doing, you would look at the growth of its GDP from one year to another.

Here comes the trick though: it measures how much money is spent, but it does not measure what or how it is being spent. In the “eyes” of the GDP spending $1000 on guns and drugs is the same as spending $1000 on a family vacation. In the “eyes” of the GDP, the illegal black market is contributing more to the world (an astounding $10 trillion) than research on cancer does. If the black market were a nation, it would be the second-largest in the world (Business Insider, 2012).

Our society, however, is so much more complex than just money changing hands. There are so many aspects of human life that do not contribute to an economy’s growth as measured by GDP, but that brings us fulfillment and happiness. Bringing up a child, volunteering for a project, and the many caring aspects of any job are not perceived as work and disappear from the accounts of the economy (Mariana Mazzucato, 2018).

“GDP measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” (Bobby Kennedy)

The current way we measure the success of a country does not tell the whole story. Professor Muhammad Yunus proposes that we should start thinking of a net GDP: GDP minus all the negative activities that cause unemployment, racism, violence, oppression, and poverty (Muhammad Yunus, 2017).

When there is a shock to the economic system, like the one we are experiencing now, it always leads to asking ourselves some important questions:

Do we really want to come back to a system that puts financial maximization above all else? Do we really want to continue to support a very cruel system, one that favors cheap labor exploitation and perverts the essence of value? With GDP, we are looking at only one dimension of the socio-economic environment and we are undermining what is really important in our society.

Re-thinking how we measure growth

Within GDP we have been measuring the things that are the easiest to measure, not the things that really contribute to the well-being of society.

There are already alternatives around the world, such as the Gross National Happiness developed in Bhutan, or The Good Country Index that measures how much each country is contributing to the planet and the human race through its policies and behaviors. Maybe within the current crisis, we can look more towards those qualitative ways of assessing the well being of a country.

A non-growing economy does not mean that there will be no progress or improvement. There can still be the development of skills, expression, and technology. There can still be and should be a healthy competition.

What we can do is make the shift from “more” to “better”, from increasing economic activity to increase the quality of life.

And this last point is crucial to bring forward in the light of today’s crisis. The global pandemic forced governments worldwide to shut down and if not impose, at least recommend social distancing. For a lucky few, whose work requires a computer and an internet connection, this has been a blessing in disguise. But how about the billions of people living paycheck to paycheck for whom no work means no food?

Universal Basic Income could be the answer to a crisis like this

Universal Basic Income has been discussed and debated for the last few years, but it’s time we actually start to take it seriously.

By divorcing work from monetary gain, in a crisis like this, Universal Basic Income would ensure that people will not drop under the poverty line if they cannot go to work. In the grander scheme of things, it would give workers the power to say NO to exploitative, humiliating jobs and walk away with little economic consequences.

How would Universal Basic Income be financed?

We have grown with a false assumption about what money really is, how it is produced and what its purpose should be. Money in itself has no value. You cannot eat it, you cannot wear it. It is human labor that creates value. Wealth production is collective and then it is privately appropriated.

In our society we like stand-alone heroes like Steve Jobs. The man was indeed brilliant, but it would be an exaggeration to give him all the credit for what Apple came to be. lf you look at an iPhone, its parts were produced by government grants, funded with taxpayers’ money. It was possible because of collective efforts.

“Think of universal basic income as a trust fund for all our children to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which after all has been created collectively“ (Yanis Varoufakis, 2016).

If we implemented UBI, then other questions come to mind: How would the notion of work change and what would be the meaning of work?

An opportunity to rethink the meaning of work

Already in 1939 Keynes was saying that by the end of the 20th century, technology should have advanced sufficiently to allow everyone to work 15 hours a week. And look at us, we are working more than ever before. This is again because money is attached to livelihood.

Employment and job creation are present in all political narratives, from left to right. We have come to perceive our jobs as such an integral part of our identity, that it is hard to imagine a world where you wouldn’t have to worry about work to survive.

Logistically we could live in a world where we would work only 15 h a week. But, “it’s as if the ruling class has figured that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger” (David Graeber, 2018).

The argument of employment opens up a moral question: Is it ethical to keep people employed in exploitative industries, exposed to toxic substances, working in terrible conditions for long shifts to justify employment? People stay in these jobs because they don’t have freedom of choice. With the universal basic income, they would.

Will we still need our offices after the pandemic?

Constraints are a catalyst for innovation and creativity. People always find a way, because we are a resilient species.

When it comes to the home office, some businesses were fearful to try such an extreme thing, but now it’s the new normal.

If people want to slack, then don’t need to be at home, they can still be on Facebook all day long in an office. So hopefully the stigma of being in an office for x amount of hours will be challenged.

In our modern times, it is believed that work can be measured by time, and time itself is not yours to spend. An employer buys your time, hence the obsession with 9 to 5. All employers complain about employees being idle, but I still need to meet an employer that complains about people working overtime.

This is such an outdated way of attaching money to time spent in an office. This may work in a factory, where people need to work with their hands, where more time spent indeed equals more productivity.

But in today’s office environment, spending more time does not equal better work. First, because a lot of work requires intellectual effort, not physical dexterity. And second, because people have different working rhythms. Depending on your mood, one day you could achieve a task in 1 hour, and another day in 5 hours.

So what this current situation with work from home proves, is that the same work gets done without constant surveillance and people logging in at the exact same times. It’s an opportunity to be progressive in the way we organize work: giving people more independence and flexibility to organize their work around their lives, not their lives around their work. It is a chance to start measuring productivity based on outcomes rather than time spent in an office.

Final Thoughts

Crises accelerate change. After the COVID crisis, we will have a choice to either play by the same rules of growth and GDP or change the game altogether.

This is an opportunity to question the way things are and think of better alternatives and more progressive systems. Whether it is a welfare system or basic income or something completely different, this is an opportunity to think where do we want to see humanity in 50 or 100 years from now.

It is a chance to decide what kind of society we want to be part of, what kind of economic system would be just and fair for all, and what gives meaning to our lives.

This essay was possible with the contribution and reflections of Sadia Afrin and Tom Marshall. Thank you guys for a very insightful online discussion.

If you liked this essay, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, I would love to engage in further discussion on the topic or be challenged with some fresh arguments.

If you are interested in social innovation, education, and economics, check out the new project that I am co-founding with Sadia Afrin, WETHNK.

WETHNK is a social innovation organization aimed to build the next generation of leaders who are fundamentally different in terms of how they think and act.