We are not going back to normal
Where we need to go instead
“When will life go back to normal?” asked Business Insider, before offering this answer: “[I]n some places, we will be able to begin to safely relax some restrictions in May or June. But life may not return to ‘normal normal’ until 2021.”
BBC, same question. Their answer: anywhere from 12 months to “no clear endpoint.”
The Atlantic offered four possible timelines for life returning to normal: one to two months (which they themselves describe as “highly unlikely”), three to four months, four to 12 months, and 12 to 18 months or longer.
They are all wrong.
We will not return to normal.
We cannot return to normal.
We are heading somewhere else.
The Myth
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how we will get through the pandemic: with gritty facts and gritty faith, combining the conviction that we will prevail in the end with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of our current reality, whatever they may be.
It’s time to explore what “prevailing in the end” may look like — and to understand that it doesn’t mean a return to life as we knew it.
We have this idea that — at a societal level — life looks like this:
Things stay largely normal, with a few bigger ups and downs for bigger events: GFC, 1987 stock market crash, etc.
The idea here is that, despite the ups and downs, our systems, structures and institutions remain largely stable.
And then along comes COVID-19. It’s a HUGE shock, to be sure, but lots of us still imagine that, on the other side, we’ll get back to that wavy baseline of normality.
But we are underestimating the degree to which our systems, structures and institutions are impacted by this.
More importantly, we are underestimating the degree to which we are all interconnected, and how this crisis will ripple and amplify, creating global feedback loops that undermine everything we have understood as “normal.”
Let me show you what I mean.
I have a friend who writes movies. He’s supposed to be filming in London right now, but that’s on pause.
They obviously can’t start up again until their lockdown is over and they’re allowed to congregate in groups: making a movie is a group activity.
But not only can they not film, they can’t get the doors for the stage set that were being made in Romania, or the props that were being crafted in Germany, or the costumes that were being sewn in Vietnam, from fabric that was woven in India, or any of the other myriad elements of the movie that rely on the free movement of things and people.
If and when the UK opens up again for filming, they will have to solve for all of the elements of their supply chain before they can begin filming again.
This also includes the downstream elements: the post-production and VFX shops have to be up and running, as do the distributors, the marketers, the media outlets through which the films get marketed, etc.
For big-budget films, we need enough theaters worldwide to be up and running to create a return on the investment. Which means theaters have to survive the crisis.
Here’s what the movie theater business looks like right now:
And this supply chain problem is replicated in every industry, in every country in the world.
We have grown a blood supply to each other, and it is not so simple to cut off the flow.
We have not even begun to contemplate the scale of the impact on our global economy. We have never shut down the entire machine before.
The below chart is new jobless claims in the United States, by week, since 1967. Shaded areas are recessions.
In over 50 years, we have never had more than a million new jobless claims in a week. Three weeks ago, the number was 3.3 million. For each of the past two weeks it’s been over 6.6 million. Nothing compares to what we’re going through. Nothing even begins to come close.
KPMG has issued an Economic Impact Report that says, “We anticipate unprecedented U.S. job losses of nearly 20 million in Q2,” going on to compare this figure to 8.6 million jobs lost over 23 months during the financial crisis.
The global machine has shut down to the point that the normal “hum” of the Earth’s crust — caused by industrial activity, which seismologists measure so as to distinguish earthquakes from background noise — has gone down by around one-third.
As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
A Call to Imagination
So if we shouldn’t focus on getting back to normal, what do we focus on?
A few days ago, Azeem Azhar wrote about the third dimension of the recovery:
The graphs shared by analysts ignore the dimensionality of the recovery. What new behaviours will emerge? …Where geographically will recovery happen? At what scale, local vs regional vs national? We aren’t skipping a beat or two, we’re changing the record.
He went on to illustrate this as follows:
Now is the time to be thinking about the structural shift of the recovery. And, like all great changes, that structural shift comes with opportunity and peril.
A window of opportunity has opened.
It’s a window for us to take actions that are profoundly good for society as a whole, and which would have been untenable in a pre-COVID-19 world.
What has the pandemic revealed?
That money is available, in obscene amounts, for things we really need.
That it’s not enough for you to have healthcare. For a society to be healthy, everyone needs to have healthcare.
That it is possible to quickly and dramatically reduce our emissions.
We should be acting now to imagine a new structure that embeds these lessons, that pivots from the crisis into a healthier, stronger, more collaborative, more just, more resilient global ecosystem.
We should be acting now to provide for everyone’s basic needs, including access to the Internet. If trillions of dollars can be pulled out of the air for stimulus packages and corporate bailouts, there is no reason for any person on the planet to not have access to food, water, shelter and sanitation. And the pandemic has made it clear that connectivity is a fundamental human right.
We should be acting now to ensure that healthcare for everyone is not just a good idea during a pandemic, but a good idea always.
We should be acting now to address structural and systemic inequities. Black people, indigenous people, and people of color are most likely to feel the pain from COVID-19. In America, as Nikole Hannah Jones explained, black people are far less likely to get access to COVID-19 tests or see a doctor with early symptoms, and far more likely to die if infected. In New Zealand, as Patrick Thomsen wrote, Māori are both more susceptible to catching the virus and more likely to suffer dire consequences as a result.
We should be acting now to re-imagine our economy so that increased activity isn’t driven by increased emissions. So much of the reason it’s been difficult to address climate change is that it’s too costly to shut down the machine. But now, the machine is shut down. Let’s not start it back up in identical fashion.
These are not hippie concepts. The iconically conservative Financial Times, in an article called, “Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract,” said:
Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.
Again, these are not hippie concepts. They are concepts that are essential to us being able to emerge from the pandemic with some semblance of a functioning society.
The peril is equally present.
The peril is that — because we are trying to get back to the illusion of normal — we use only the tools we know.
Which means we are plunged into a depression for which we have no precedent. Tens of millions of people lose their jobs. Hundreds of millions.
The peril is that, instead of taking the opportunity to address structural and systemic inequities, we allow the pandemic to enhance them.
The peril is that, in our rush to return to normal, we become less concerned with our emissions, rather than more.
But those perils are not inevitable. And we have already seen that we are not limited to the tools we know.
The cash portion of the recent US government stimulus package was $2 trillion, of which $350 billion was for small business loans and $250 billion was for direct payments to individuals. That might seem like a lot of money. But the US is a big country. As Umair Haque wrote, the package represents barely enough to keep individuals and small businesses going for one week: stunningly insufficient in the face of a crisis that has already been going for months and will continue for months.
We need to use different tools. Different rules.
Umair again:
[M]oney at this scale is just a social fiction. The government can and should support the economy for as long as it takes, guaranteeing both business and personal incomes, as well as writing checks every single month. That doesn’t plunge a society into “debt.” It’s not money we are “borrowing” from anyone else, like say China. We are just lending it to ourselves, which means that we can cancel the debt afterwards with no ill consequences, either. The central bank can literally write off whatever debt is accrued the day after the crisis subsides.
So this is a call to our collective imagination.
It is a call to challenge those who are arguing for us to return to normal as quickly as possible.
It is a call for us to ask ourselves, “What is possible? What is desirable? And what is in our power to influence?”
Being able to ask these questions is a mark of privilege. For many, simply surviving is a success to be heralded.
But if you have that privilege, now is the time to wield it for good. This window of opportunity has been painful to open, and things will remain painful for some time.
Working to imagine a better world does not negate the experience of those who are suffering now or those who will suffer in the days to come.
But it does mean that their suffering will not be squandered.
We have a once-in-a-century opportunity to imagine the world as it could be and make profound structural change to bring it about.
Let’s not squander it.
