Imagining the world after COVID-19
ABCOur collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised by two vast failures of imagination: 1) Many people and most governments —particularly those of the United States and the UK — have failed to imagine exponential growth and how bad it can get. We need to dare to imagine a better future — a future with much less commuting, much less air travel, much less noise and pollution, much less unnecessary economic activity, much more care and love; much more localisation of our economy; much more preparedness for future “swans” of various hues; much more attention to root causes of our troubles; much more restoration of nature. If it seems hard to imagine all this, or hard to stay hopeful about it, because of the downsides of the post-pandemic world — such as the further rise of the digital behemoths, threatening to centralise economic activity — then we need to dare to imagine ways in which those things could change, too. We need to be able to imagine a world without them — not least because a number of the scenarios I’ve sketched out would require our agency in order to be realised. 2) We need to imagine what was once dismissed as politically “impossible.” Every time we are tempted to retreat into smallness, we need to remember that before COVID-19 so much of what has happened was thought impossible: impossible that the global reputation of the United States and UK could plummet so far so fast; impossible that so many could come to value care and love over economic growth; impossible that the “magic money tree” could be discovered; impossible that some countries would respond as imaginatively as they did once the virus hit.