The Day the World Slowed Down
Deep thoughts while social distancing
This moment is a unique one in history. It is a time for all of humanity to behave in solidarity to subdue the threat of a viral contagion. In that respect, it is a beautiful thing to watch people around the globe working together in an effort to slow movements and to pause, collectively, acting as a unit in order to slow a contagion that threatens everyone. The Polyanna spirit in me is swooning at the thought of this collective effort, this decision to cooperate against a common enemy that — for once — is not another group of humans. I love the stories of people in Italy singing together from their balconies, people in Spain applauding health care workers as they walk to visit patients in quarantine, and I love seeing people in my own neighborhood who are riding bikes with their kids and going for family walks around the block. The power of community solidarity is a heartening thing, and it is wonderful to see. I have even found myself daydreaming of us all coming together in a collective global OM, prayer, or song, and that makes my peace-loving inner eight-year-old squee with joy.
Why quarantine is bad for the economy…and why that’s actually okay.
Pollyanna aside, death and disease is an obvious horror that we want to minimize however we can, and social distancing is the smart way to handle a virus that has already spread widely. Still, getting everyone to just go home and stay there for a couple of weeks or months is extremely difficult because of…money.
If we all stop moving, then we stop making many, many financial transactions, and that slows the economy from top to bottom. To the extent that we quarantine ourselves, we quarantine our money, and many cannot afford to go 2 days without a paycheck or a sale, let alone 3 months.
Because here we face the choice of the ages: We can either keep the economy moving at the cost to millions of lives or allow the economy to come to a grinding halt to save human life. No-one is immune to our collective response today. No person and no economic entity.
It isn’t the stock market that we need to be concerned about right now. Honestly. The market will return to stability sooner or later because for most companies, nothing has changed about their fundamental value overall. The market for goods and services has changed dramatically, but that is temporary, and will return to a new normal once this virus has been subdued. What’s more important right now is not what’s happening in the stock market but in our local economies.
By slowing our financial transactions, a ripple effect moves through our financial systems as it spreads through the various levels of our communities, from top to bottom. The homeless, the hourly workers, those relying on tips, and small-business owners; these are the first and most obvious lines of the economically vulnerable. We are all concerned for our friends and neighbors who operate small businesses, and this is a time to support them as much as we can — as neighbors and friends, not as customers. We can lend, trade, barter, and give while still limiting our movements and taking precautions. These options are still available to us, and we can — and should — use them now.
And, while our vulnerabilities are exposed, we can see the places where the current systems are brittle. A community that demands people work while they are sick will not remain healthy for long, and an economy that demands the same exposes itself to disease. Literally.
With this in mind, I want to talk about how I think we can use this moment of collective economic pause to rethink some of the basic assumptions we have about our human and natural systems, and what constitutes a healthy, thriving economy.
How the rebuilt economy could be better than ever — if we learn from this
At the moment, the solid ground of assuming reliable growth into the foreseeable future has been broken apart and turned over. This is a time when we have an opportunity to introduce better ideas into the system before we rebuild it back just as it was. This is a time to learn from our best minds and take the best of what we’ve learned since the last reconstruction began. What do we know now that we didn’t know then? What ideas have emerged since 2008, for example, that have some real promise of making our economies a little less brittle, and a little less susceptible to this type of disease?
To my mind THIS is the time to talk with policymakers and civic leaders about ways to incorporate these smarter measures of economic health into our public discourse and accounting practices. I tell my friends I believe in practicing ‘subversive economics’ because I think that the smartest thing we can do to change our world from top to bottom and from the inside out, is to change the equations we use to measure success. GDP is wrong-headed, but it’s what people know, and understand.
We have better thinking already. We have Elinor Ostrom’s work on political economics and Social-Ecological Systems. We Kate Raworth’s work on Doughnut Economics. We have Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and others who have already stress-tested many ways of measuring economic health in terms of quality of life, resiliency to disease, and we know how to measure and calculate these things. Let’s seize this moment and gather these great minds and legacies to build a system where human life can thrive sustainably within the confines of planetary and natural bounds. Our national leaders need to hear from these minds now. We have to raise the call to listen.
