Covid-19 has widened the cracks in society. Will they light the way to a new social order?
The year which many hoped might be better than the last was not a week old before it confounded us.
A pandemic that many hoped we were getting the better of through science and innovation proved its own devastating capacity to evolve and adapt, to become more threatening than it was even in 2020. A troubling new variant emerged in Britain just as the country left the legal frameworks of the European Union, to be blown around like a plastic bag in the wind. The outgoing US President urged his angry supporters to invade Congress to prevent the due democratic process installing the winner of the election. This could yet mark the start of a more troubling phase of the culture wars with a significant minority in the US now determined to believe a lie, avenge a betrayal and undermine the world’s leading democracy from within.
Yet if radical uncertainty makes the future unknowable, it also makes creativity all the more vital: we have no option but to make things up as we go along. The cracks in the social order created by Covid-19 have let the light in so we can see how the world could be reordered: our eyes have been opened to more potential futures than we believed were available to us. As well as imposing unprecedented constraints upon us we have been released from other restrictions which limited our imaginations. The case for radical change across several interconnected fields has acquired not just urgency but credibility. In the 1980s all the ideas seemed to be coming from the right, inspired inspired by a combination of the free market and the strong state. In the last few years ethno nationalists and populists have made the running on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet now there seems a much richer stock of alternative ideas for a more inclusive, stable, sustainable future than for perhaps several decades.
“The cracks in the social order created by Covid-19 have let the light in so we can see how the world could be reordered”
A makings of a new synthesis of ideas is emerging. The Doughnut Economics espoused by Kate Raworth provides a map of the destination, augmented by new ideas to remake welfare and work, provide care and tackle inequality. Modern Monetary Theory set out by Stephanie Kelton provides a critical piece of the jigsaw: the means to finance transformative change. Mission-oriented innovation set out by Mariana Mazzucato provides a version of the methods for bringing about system-wide change. The world’s leading radical traditionalist, Pope Francis, has given all of this economics a moral depth. What is sorely lacking is the political leadership to turn ideas not just into policies but an simple, animating, compelling narrative which invites people to be part of sweeping social change. As even the left has plenty of policies; what it needs are metaphors and stories which engage people’s feelings as well. Yet as this essay concludes perhaps too that may be emerging.
Goals
The pandemic has forced us to adopt a different framework of values to guide the economy. There was already growing acceptance, even in business and finance, that the financial and economic imperatives which created the 2008 crash, such as shareholder value, were too narrow, rigid and short sighted. In the pandemic the economy has been run largely to maintain health, support well being and provide care. As consumption has been reduced so the market has been curtailed, while the reciprocity of social solidarity and gift giving has become more important. We have had a holiday from a life ruled by exchange value. Mark Carney’s Reith Lectures echo the arguments first advanced by Mariana Mazuccato that we need an economy which promotes a plurality of social and environmental values based on care and empathy, interdependence and well being, over much longer time frames. In such an economy profits and markets are not ends but two means among many to sustain a good way to live.
That will require us to live within what environmental economist Kate Raworth calls the doughnut, a zone between what the planet needs to sustain itself and what society needs to reproduce itself. Adherence to Doughnut Economics is spreading rapidly, especially among cities such as Amsterdam. The Green New Deal is moving from the margins to themainstream. The principles of circularity long advocated by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation among others are starting to become conventional wisdom in leading firms. People are starting to imagine and plan for systems capable of regenerating both themselves and nature.
The recovery from the 2008 crash had been job rich and wage poor, with the creation of hundreds of thousands of non-standard, quasi-self employed, low productivity gig economy jobs. Stagnant real wages fuelled in-work poverty just as artificial intelligence was widely expected to hollow out repetitive jobs from in manufacturing and services. Those most likely to be displaced were least well prepared to make the transition to more secure work in other fields.
The lack of good work — stable, reasonably paid jobs which give people a sense of pride and recognition — was a source of insecurity long before the pandemic underlined the stark inequalities: essential frontline workers doing physical, face to face work are the least well paid but the most likely to catch the virus.
Yet the pandemic has shown that work too can be fundamentally reorganised, with the growth of home-based working and the state playing a much more active, comprehensive role in managing the labour market to sustain people and jobs. We have taken a big step away from the flexible labour markets of the 1980s. In places such as Canada and even Pakistan reformers believe they have taken a step towards a basic universal income which can sustain people in flexible work.
That in turn is opening up the question of what kind of welfare state we need to support modern families. Through the pandemic more people have been directly exposed to how threadbare the British welfare state now is. In the UK the number of people on the most basic benefit — universal credit — has doubled to more than 5.8m. The hostility baked into that system means that successful applicants have to wait five weeks before their first payment comes through. Many are in a debt spiral even if they manage to feed their families. Food banks have become a part of our communal welfare infrastructure, just as homeschooling has exposed the extent of digital poverty.
Yet the pandemic has also propelled radical innovation which may yet outlive the crisis such as the inspirational way that societies such as Pakistan and Bangladesh have improvised welfare safety nets to dispense micro payments to tens of millions of people using the mobile phone infrastructure. The crisis could provide the spur to create new kinds of welfare states in societies with combined populations of almost half a billion.
In the UK the pandemic has bred a counter narrative around poverty and welfare articulated most powerfully by the footballer Marcus Rashford. The dominant narrative has been that the fickle, undeserving poor should be treated with caution, if not outright hostility, as they are most likely the architects of their own problems. The pandemic has allowed what Raymond Williams called a new structure of feeling to emerge, one which is less judgemental and understanding of just how much harder poor people have to work. That combined with the groundswell of support for a more relational welfare state which builds on people’s capabilities to create together better ways to live, could yet pave the way for a reimagined welfare system.
The pandemic has exposed the near crisis in thousands of care homes, many of them privately owned, some by venture capitalists, in which often poorly paid and trained staff try to look after people in desperate need. The excess deaths in care homes where the virus was allowed to spread in order to protect hospitals has brought pledges from across the political spectrum to properly fund the future system. Those pledges may quickly be forgotten in the wake the crisis; the politics of funding care are notoriously treacherous.
However there are signs of that changing. Care has the potential to create coalitions which cut across class and race, as the US Senate races in Georgia showed. The Biden presidency will start with an impressively detailed and ambitious care programme, worth $775bn over ten years, which starts from the recognition that it has become increasingly difficult for people to set aside time to care for others and still make ends meet. Caregivers are underpaid, unseen and undervalued. The Biden plan includes creating a community infrastructure for caregiving; tax credits for informal carers; more, better paid care jobs to prevent hospitalisation and provide care at home; expanding access to pre school child care and for support for veterans.
Care has the potential to go wide and deep to reorder how we think the world should be organised. Ai-jen Poo, the inspirational director of the US National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of the Caring Across Generations project reflected on the pandemic: “I think that this is a once-in-several-generations opportunity to transform and update how we care for one another in this country.” To do that the idea care needs to be more than a set of policies and funding agreements for the care sector and also become an ethic that could reorder priorities across society.
“We were told we were all in it together. Yet we have found, time and again, in systematic ways that we are not all in it together.”
Finally, the pandemic has driven home how excessive and self-reinforcing inequality is at the heart of most of our problems. We were told we were all in it together. Yet we have found, time and again, in systematic ways that we are not all in it together. And that leaves a sour taste morally and emotionally for most people.
Inequality is structural, multi-dimensional and self-reinforcing. We have experienced the pandemic very differently depending on how we came into it. We will emerge even more unequal. The pandemic has amplified existing, long standing health inequalities; people in front line face-to-face jobs, who cannot work from home and who may live with many others are much more at risk of catching the virus; while the rich have got richer, in part thanks to booming stock markets and being able to save, the poor have been sucked further into debt. Women have borne much of the brunt of this, taking on more care responsibilities and doing more home schooling while also trying to continue to earn a living in trying conditions. In the US African-Americans were being hospitalised with Covid 19 at four times the rate of white people, while Black unemployment is more than 10% higher than among whites.
What will be done with this recognition that inequality has reached levels which will now constantly threaten social stability? Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter in her book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart puts the agenda this way: “When we declare that our future is Black, what we mean is that addressing the needs, concerns, hopes and aspirations of Black people will bring about a better future for all of us.” Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister spoke for many when she said: “Economic growth which brings with it widening inequality is not success, it’s failure.” A democratic political system, which says power should be distributed according to the principle “one-person-one- vote”, cannot sustain itself when its economy distributes power and influence according to the principle “one-million-dollars-one-vote”.
Means and Methods
Covid-19 has shown that governments can mobilise a society-wide response to a crisis; they can find the money to finance radical changes to the way we live and work and invest in technical innovation to provide a solution, precisely the kind of bold, collaborative approach needed to arrest climate change and create a more socially sustainable economy.
Since the 1980s governments have cowered in the face of bond markets for fear of risking their disapproval. Yet the crisis has shown that governments can borrow when they need to. They should be able to carry on being able to do so thanks to low interest rates and subdued inflation. Modern Monetary Theory, which even three years was an esoteric idea advanced by economists regarded as renegades, has become mainstream practice in Finance Ministries. Capable, well run, activist governments should be able to borrow to finance vital programmes. This is not an ideological shift so much as a practical one. But it is a crack that helps to open up the possibility of wider change, that the state could play a more active role in tackling big social challenges.
Mariana Mazzucato’s new book, Mission Economy, is the most cogent account yet of how governments can create the conditions in which public and private, entrepreneurs and social activists, civic leaders and investors, can be brought together to enact system wide changes. Disruptive innovation, driven by venture capital and technology, with the goal of creating stock market unicorns, has been in the ascendant since the publication of Clayton Christensen’s landmark book in 1997. We are witnessing a shift towards more systemic innovation resting on public and private collaboration to achieve big social missions.
So we could emerge from the pandemic with a clearer, sharpened sense of the social and environmental goals for public policy, and a more confident sense of the means and methods needed to achieve such accelerated and ambitious transitions. The question is who will get a voice in rewriting the rules and reordering priorities?
Voice
It should be no surprise that those fearful of losing their power are also seeking to silence voices of offering a counter-narrative, whether that is in Hong Kong, New Delhi or Washington. Going into the pandemic populists, authoritarians and ethno-nationalists were rewriting the rules, from Brexit to the conduct of US elections, exercising power through fictions and lies on social media, sowing chaos to undermine the institutions that might hold them to account. Democracy went into the pandemic in a parlous state with declining trust in its ability to deliver. Despite Biden’s victory it may not emerge much stronger.
While some small democracies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Denmark — have done pretty well, the flagship democracies in the US and Europe, with the UK as a prime case, have not done anywhere near as well as the autocratic, state capitalism in places like China. That will surely encourage a shift towards more authoritarian governance unless democracies can respond.
The trouble is that liberal democracies are caught in their own bind. Power works for the public good only when it is held to account, checked and balanced by independent institutions and the rule of law. Yet all too often that seems to lead to timidity, weak governments and inaction. That is especially troubling when the crises the world throws up require decisive leadership, shared sacrifice and collective mobilisation. Liberal democracies have become cautious when they need to be innovative. No winner of a democratic election will use their power to change the system through which they were elected. Party politics finds it almost impossible to tap into the democratic energy of social movements, campaigning and protest.
“Power works for the public good only when it is held to account, checked and balanced by independent institutions and the rule of law.”
Liberal democracies have to embrace more democratic innovation to encourage more deliberation, participation, direct involvement in decision making at all levels, so that citizens have more opportunities to directly engage with one another and those in power. Democracy only thrives when more power is entrusted in and generated by more people: that’s why David Runciman has proposed a further lowering of the voting age to enfranchise young people. As Ivor Crewe pointed out, adversarial systems organised around near constant campaigning are no good at deliberating complex long term questions which require a mix of political, expert and citizen intelligence.
A structure of feeling
Can all of this be melded together into a compelling and coherent narrative which mobilises a transformative coalition of forces across society?
Elements for those alternative narratives are already emerging through protest and struggle, from Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. Others will come from iconoclastic and visionary public intellectuals, such as Mariana Mazzucato, Kate Raworth and Stephanie Kelton and their ilk. Towns and cities are engaging in deliberate efforts at collective imagination, some under the banner of the transitions towns movement initiated by Rob Hopkins.
The figure who has offered the most compelling and comprehensive global counter narrative is Pope Francis, and his power stems from his liminality: his willingness to cross the thresholds between different worlds. He is an example of the kind of leadership that is needed to create a shared narrative of social change.
Pope Francis is a classic insider-outsider. A priest who worked in the poorest areas of a global mega city in Latin America, he commands a religious hierarchy from its ancient seat in Rome, yet he seeks to deploy this unaccountable and sometimes abusive power for the sake of the poor and marginalised, the forgotten and discarded. From that complicated position he has offered an unflinching counter narrative not just to market fundamentalism but also to tribalism and fear. Pope Francis wants to lead an institution which is global without being imperial; a church which is coherent but many sided; spreading through its embrace of pluralism and diversity. He argued in Evangelii Gaudium that we need to pay attention to the global to avoid narrowness, parochialism and banality of the local; but we need the local to keep our feet on the ground without it becoming a folklore museum, in which we are doomed to do the same things over again.
In a world searching for its bearings, as the US retreats, Europe declines into introversion and China thrusts itself forward, the Pope is urging us to create a new map of possibilities and connections. He offers dialogue and encounter as the antidote to fear and indifference. Joe Biden, the world’s most powerful elected politician, is not just a democrat but a Catholic and it may be that one of his most significant contributions will be to animate power with the the values and feelings espoused by Pope Francis.
Breakdown creates the conditions for breakthrough; when we fall apart it is an opportunity to come together. As the Pope argued in an article for The New York Times: “This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities, what we value, what we want and what we seek and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed.”
Coming out of the pandemic, a sweeping reordering of our economic, social and political systems is possible. It could be a critical juncture which opens up a much wider range of possibilities. The pandemic has shone a light on why fundamental change is needed and also shown in which direction we should head in. Most of the ideas needed are already lying around, waiting to be picked up. In the pandemic, proposals once decried as maverick have been put into mainstream practice: they work. The pandemic has been dreadful. By the end millions will have died. And yet it has also reminded us of our collective agency to create social change.
We cannot go back to normal, even if we crave the familiar pleasures of eating out, mingling and travelling. Too many people have already suffered radical reversals through illness, unemployment, loss of learning and poverty. Going back to normal will mean accepting the false securities of the old rules.
It would be just as much of a mistake to meekly allow ourselves to be ushered into a digital future which has accelerated towards us during the pandemic. Home working, shopping, health care and education have all arrived sooner at a scale than we thought possible. Digital platforms are even more deeply entrenched in our lives; they will provide the framework for how we can imagine the future. China will become the world’s largest economy sooner than predicted before the pandemic.
Instead we need to gather ourselves to imagine a preferable future, the one we want to bend towards. The pandemic has been the breeding ground for new ideas, voices, connections, movements and coalitions. That is where the path to a preferable future lies.
Charles Leadbeater is a visiting professor of practice at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and co-founder of the Systems Innovation Initiative at the Rockwool Foundation in Denmark.
