From the beginning of January 2020, it was becoming more and more clear to the world that we were about to face the hardest year of the century so far. Every day we found new evidence that in many senses, our lives are being challenged: a pandemic, an unprecedented economic recession and chaotic politics in Europe and the United States. Every single day brought up a new tragedy, and every single night millions of people had insomnia. However, there is enough evidence to start to believe that we lost much of the economic, political and social achievements of the last decade. A negative rate for economic growth is not “normal” or even “occasional”. At least 600,000 thousands of deaths due to a virus is not normal anymore in the 21st century. Our vaccinated children will ask us how it felt to see humanity literally fail. We failed, but there is still time to come back and change the tie, but not possibly by the governments.
What are the crucial steps of humanity to rise again from its ruins? Well, there are more necessary steps than we can mention here. At the very beginning, we should learn how to adapt to a crisis: environmental-related disasters are on their way, and for long, we had underestimated the feeling of fear, uncertainty and insecurity. Western society has forgotten the lives of Jew community during World War II. A feeling that something hatred comes after you and potentially kills you We have forgotten the loss of lives of humans in WWII, just because Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans are far from London, New York and Paris. I do not discuss whether the crisis in the middle east is somehow the sandwich that George Bush, Putin and people like them prepared for the middle eastern people. Still, I stress the point that the European and American societies have zero scenarios for the times of health crisis, simply because it has not been a major issue in recent decades. Therefore, the first step must be to define a few scenarios for the times of health, security and political crises.
The next step to take is to invest in education and technology. There is not even one economic shock that performs better than human knowledge. Both education and technology help the process of constant learning, adapting and progress. The next generations will suffer from the current crisis: in poorer regions such as Africa, Asia and South America it will even go up to nutritional facts. In Europe and North America, it will be about the initial endowment, education and welfare. Governments cannot propose many policies regarding these shortages: whatever they will touch, they will worsen it. The only thing they can do is to reduce taxes on education and investment and provide more subsidiaries for the poorer regions. That is all. If they do more, they will do harm.
Governments are not expected to be able to solve the current crisis; science and medicine are supposed to solve it. It is becoming more and more evident that even democratic governments are inefficient. Take the case of the USA, Italy, France, Sweden, China and other countries that faced the COVID19 crisis: almost every government messed it up. As it seems, for decades and even centuries, we have overestimated these fat giants of bureaucracy. However, some of the leaders have done a better job: they talked less and actually did less. But it was more helpful: quick actions, clear messages and transparent information were the key elements of flattening the curves in Canada and New Zealand.
Siavash Mohades 