Resiliency — Reclaiming This Missing Public Good in the Post-Pandemic Reset
Stephen Luoni, University of Arkansas
May 20, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored structural vulnerabilities in public life before the pandemic. Coherence in both our public and private lives is shaped by public goods, those essential non-market benefits derived from law, governance, security, clean water and air, public health, roads, social care, education, public space, ecosystem health, and others. Public goods entail cooperation based on equity, access or nonreciprocal and inexhaustible use, meaning the consumption of goods does not deprive another of the right to do the same. While the market on its own does not deliver public goods, its commercial functioning is based on fair competition. Competition, in turn, requires a social stability underwritten by public goods. When the balance between cooperative structures in public goods and financial processes in markets becomes heavily skewed to one side, we risk threats to health, security, justice, equity, and prosperity.
Inarguably, such an imbalance grips the political economies of the West now dominated by a totalizing market ethos, or neoliberalism. Even the life-affirming aspects of public goods have not escaped financialization. Everything, from public health to education, shelter, social care, city planning, and even religion, has been submitted to the extractive demands of a rent-seeking investor class. This pandemic exposes the shocking neglect of our public health infrastructure by a thoroughly market-oriented healthcare system, one driven by “elective procedures” and “just-in-time” supply chains. Parallel to the medical community’s struggle to reassert public health imperatives in mitigating COVID-19 impacts, we need the design professions’ leadership in reconstructing collapsed public goods associated with community design and planning.
Resiliency is a public good. A concept originating in the social and natural sciences, resiliency is the capacity of complex systems to absorb chronic stresses or shocks from black swan events. The ability of complex systems like organisms, cities, ecologies, societies, or supply chains to withstand, even grow stronger from, disruption is what probability expert, Nassim Taleb, calls the anti-fragile, in a best-selling book of that title. Fragile systems die; they manage without buffers, standby or redundancy. In a recent The New Yorker magazine interview Taleb reminds us that the coronavirus pandemic — as disruptive and shocking as it is — was not an unforeseen or black swan event.[1] He emphasizes that the black swan concept cannot be used as “a cliché for every bad thing that surprises us.”[2] Not only had the public health community been predicting an infectious disease pandemic (notably a respiratory virus), their calls to manage epidemiological risk through improved international disease monitoring, scenario modeling, diagnostics policy, hospital infection control, medical equipment supply chain redundancy, staff and facility emergency preparedness, testing and contact tracing programs, and public education campaigns[3] went unheeded in the U.S. Now, rather than mitigate we adapt. Thinking like a market is fragile when answering to complex social needs like risk management, keeping in mind that risk management is a core function of government. Information feedback loops in markets to optimize efficiency and profits are very different from information feedback loops necessary to secure public wellness. By substituting smooth market logic for complexity, Taleb reckons that governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”[4]
Health and education, for example, are not the natural state of affairs; they must be constructed. Public goods traditionally issue from the professions — law, medicine, teaching, engineering, and architecture (including landscape architecture and urban design). Currently, the design professions are focused on building-scaled adaptations to the pandemic involving development of re-occupancy programs, contactless technologies, and environmental retrofits to facilitate social distancing. But as with public health, recovery needs long-term visioning from the design professions to address pressing pre-and-post-pandemic foundational community needs. Together with public health, human support systems in housing, food, transportation, social care, and community infrastructure are experiencing cascading failures in an economic reset that may eclipse the Great Depression. In a time when one-third of the population is unable to pay its food and utility bills, visioning must address design of communities that deliver universal minimums among human support systems.
Universal basic income, however, will not yield more resilient communities — investments in foundational infrastructure that institutionalize anti-fragility through public goods will. In their ten-point platform for recovery, the Foundational Economy Collective proposes just such a thing.[5] In summary, they argue that foundational services in public health, housing, energy, food, education, and social care underpin livability and sustainability and should be subjected to greater community governance. Housing was a source of chronic social stress even before the pandemic and now is the time to reconnect development of affordable housing with local governance. Markets no longer deliver much middle-class housing, let alone affordable housing. Likewise, with food. At a time when tens of millions are food insecure farmers are destroying tons of food daily because there are no community-scaled food hubs and distribution alternatives to monopoly supermarket supply chains. On the energy front, municipal-owned power companies can readily transition to low-carbon communities by greening their microgrids, while using their standby to suspend rate-payer disconnections especially during recessions. And communities can retool their transportation systems towards development-oriented transit where land use, mobility, and housing are integrated to create mixed use, walkable, and ultimately resilient neighborhoods.
Connecting local governance closer to the design of cities entails the retooling of public administration, financially supported by income tax and pension reform favoring investment in foundational infrastructure. Foundational economies shift the public sector’s focus on debt management to fiduciary management of its public assets. Improved wealth management halts the neoliberal transfer of public wealth to the commercial sector through unfavorable financial engineering in public-private partnerships, and requires “social licensing which imposes social and environmental obligations for all corporate providers of foundational services”.[6] Corporate financial engineering schemas deplete public coffers through privatization, outsourcing, investment rationing, tax avoidance, asset cherry-picking, and public enterprise debt-loading.[7] Value capture by resourceful public administration is key to generating revenues that underwrite the foundational economy and sustain public goods. The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of what we should expect from markets and what we should expect from public goods, as well as the dangers in conflating the value proposition governing each sector.
[1] Bernard Avishai. “The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System”. The New Yorker, April 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker. Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
[4] Taleb.
[5] Foundational Economy Collective. “What Comes After the Pandemic: A Ten-Point Platform for Foundation Renewal”, https://foundationaleconomycom.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/what-comes-after-the-pandemic-fe-manifesto-005.pdf, March 2020.
[6] Ibid, p 8.
[7] Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Michael Moran, Angelo Salento, and Karel Williams. Foundational Economy: The Infrastructure of Everyday Life, Manchester University Press, 2018, p 5.
