Die for the economy?

On March 24, Dan Patrick, the 69-year-old Lieutenant Governor of Texas told Tucker Carlson of Fox News, “You know, Tucker, no one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick continued, “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in… That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that,” he added. “I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.”

Patrick and others claim that allowing people to go back to their physical place of work and opening restaurants, bars and retail shops would enable the economy to ‘return to normal’. However, at the time of Patrick’s interview, the pandemic in the U.S. was still not at its peak anywhere in the country. Those who made this argument around that time and in early April, principally on the right of politics, must have known that relaxing social distancing prematurely and without necessary safeguards such as extensive testing, effective contact tracing and isolation would result in more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. Potentially, a lot more deaths.

However, if social distancing measures were to be relaxed immediately and the US “opened up”, would people really be likely to dine in restaurants, gather in bars or indulge in retail shopping? Perhaps at first, yes, but as media reports of illness increased and more and more people had first-hand experience of knowing someone who had become seriously ill or died from COVID-19, would people be inclined to stay home and avoid high-risk places? Very probably.

Evidence from Japan shows that the government has been slow to encourage social distancing, did not conduct widespread testing and has not closed workplaces, shops or restaurants. Instead, it opted for a policy of “cluster response”. However, writing in Science magazine, Denis Normile explains that as COVID-19 case numbers in Japan began to skyrocket in mid-April, “Most movie theaters, museums, and department stores have shut their doors. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government reports that morning rush hour ridership on city subway lines last week was down 60% from precrisis levels. Many restaurants and bars have closed or are open for takeout only.” Even with the economy remaining ‘open’, on April 20, The Japan Times reported: “Taro Saito, Executive Research Fellow at the NLI Research Institute, said even at more than ¥100 trillion ($1 trillion), the government’s economic support package is insufficient. Saito said it was likely unemployment rate would rise to 3.9 percent from 2.4 percent in February, with the fallout from the pandemic not yet factored into the official data. He also estimates the number of unemployed will hit 2.72 million in the fourth quarter, up from 1.56 million at the same time last year.”

Therefore, were any economy to be ‘opened up’ prematurely with insufficient safeguards and pandemic numbers increased as a result, unemployment figures would likely still be staggering. This would certainly appear to be so for the United States. According to the Pew Research Center citing the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 157 million Americans were in the workforce in 2019 with 71% of non-farm employees working in the services sector; 16.7 million Americans were employed in leisure and hospitality. A further 12.9 million Americans worked in manufacturing, which would also be affected detrimentally with falling retail sales. In the past month or so, around 26 million Americans have lost their job. These job losses might have been delayed if there were no lockdown but would probably not have been avoided, and the delay would have been at the cost of thousands more dead.

So, one way or the other, the economy was going to take a hit. Why then would politicians, corporate figures and media commentators on the popular right want to send many more citizens to their death for dubious, unsustainable economic benefit? What is going on? Were these entreaties nothing more than short-sighted, ill-considered grasps in panic for a return to normality? Are they just manifest stupidity?

Or is the agenda for premature, ill-prepared opening of the economy more callous and deeply rooted in ideology than mere concern over economic numbers of the day?

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Without doubt, had US states followed the advice of Governor Dan Patrick one month ago, there would now be a good many less grandparents out there like him. Patrick argued, “As the president said, the mortality rate is so low. Do we have to shut down the entire country for this? I think we can get back to work.” At the time he spoke, Johns Hopkins University had reported 417,582 confirmed COVID-19 cases globally and 18,612 deaths. On May 03, following weeks of strict social distancing with about one-third of the world population in lockdown, the number of reported cases globally approached 3.4 million and there had been almost 245,000 reported coronavirus deaths, over 64,000 of which were in the United States. At one point, the number of deaths in New York alone increased by more than 600 each day, falling below 500 deaths on April 20 for the first time in over two weeks. The BBC has reported that on 24 April alone the United States had over 3,000 COVID-19 deaths. Disturbingly, the actual number of cases and deaths in the US and elsewhere are believed to be even higher because of limited capacity for testing and difficulties in counting the dead.

Nevertheless, just over one week earlier on Wednesday April 15, people in the US states of Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia and Michigan defied social distancing recommendations and stay-at-home orders to protest against “infringements on their freedoms”. The ABC reported that, “Some carried signs claiming the coronavirus is a hoax, while others held signs with slogans like, ‘All workers are essential’ and ‘Freedom not fear’.” Since then, anti-quarantine and anti-lockdown protests have occurred in other US states. On April 29, Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian newspaper reported, “What is interesting is who is orchestrating the protests. So, actually, behind the scenes they are being organised in some cases by people with links to the Trump administration or existing right-wing groups, and really now they’re the ones who are promoting the protests… Donald Trump has offered tacit support for the protests, ‘These are people expressing their views… They seem to be very responsible people to me’… A majority of Americans support the lockdowns and in fact are concerned that the lockdowns might be lifted too soon… Another thing is that because people are at the protests… milling about – they’re not social distancing – some epidemiologists are now warning that we could see a spike in cases in some of these states in about 3 or 4 weeks’ time.” These protesters have not been arguing that some people should be sacrificed for the economy; they just do not believe that the risk to health is real or that it is important enough to warrant disrupting economic activity. Such behaviour in the context of available data on COVID-19 death rates in the United States and elsewhere validates one of my favourite gems of Biblical wisdom: stultorum infinitus est numerus, (‘the number of fools is infinite’, Vulgate, Ecclesiasticus 1:15); however, others apparently agree with them.

Two days after the initial protests, on Friday April 17, The New York Times summarised Republican sentiment in Congress, “Republicans… are urging an end to the freeze. ’It should have happened yesterday,’ Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, chairman of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, told Politico. Representative Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana acknowledged the chance of ‘loss of life’ from an early end to social distancing but asserted, nonetheless, that it was better than the alternative. ‘It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils,’ he said to a local radio station. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was even more blunt during an interview on Fox News on Wednesday. ‘We gotta reopen, and when we do, the coronavirus is going to spread faster, and we got to be ready for it.’”

Of course, right-wing Republican lawmakers in the US are not alone in arguing that the economy must be given priority over combatting the coronavirus pandemic. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said, “Life must go on, employments should be kept, people’s income should be preserved, so all Brazilians should go back to normal.” Ignoring evidence from around the world, he mistakenly argues that COVID-19 kills only the elderly and those with underlying conditions, and that if he were infected – aged 65 – he would only feel “a little flu”. He has opposed the social-distancing recommendations of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and on April 16 sacked the Minister of Health, Luiz Henrique Mandetta. Officially, Brazil has admitted to only around 6,750 deaths from COVID-19 in a population of over 200 million; however, as noted by Professor Dupeyron at the University of Regina and reported in the National Post, “Brazil likely has 12 times more cases of the new coronavirus than are being officially reported by the government.”  On April 23, The Times UK ran an article claiming that people are being buried in mass graves in the Brazilian city of Manaus. This follows earlier reports of mass graves also in Sao Paulo.

Sweden eschewed a comprehensive lockdown that would involve restrictions and fines – with attendant economic impacts – in favour of strong messaging around social distancing. The Swedish head epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, argues, "It is important to have a policy that can be sustained over a longer period, meaning staying home if you are sick, which is our message." The policy has allowed bars, restaurants and shops to remain open. However, a comparison of COVID-19 cases and deaths with Sweden’s near neighbours Norway (population 5.37 million) and Denmark (population 5.79 million) both of which implemented comprehensive lockdowns reveals a human cost to that decision. On April 21, Sweden (population 10.2 million) suffered its deadliest day with 185 COVID-19 deaths, nearly as many in a single day as Norway had recorded up until then in total. To date, Sweden has reported more than 2,669 deaths; whereas Norway has had 211 deaths, and Denmark 475 deaths. Reuters notes that Sweden has an export-dependent economy that nevertheless has still been affected negatively by the pandemic. On March 31, Reuters quoted Sweden’s Finance Minister as saying that the nation’s economy is expected to shrink by 4% this year, “We see growth falling and unemployment rising in a way we have not seen since the financial crisis”. Annika Winsth, Chief Economist at regional bank Nordea, called Sweden’s decision to remain open “brave”.

In Pakistan, the pressure for relaxation of social distancing has come from religious leaders. On Wednesday April 22, with the holy month of Ramadan imminent, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) District President, Mufti Kifayatullah, said, “we would never allow this government to keep people away from mosques in such an alarming situation where one should seek Allah’s mercy and forgiveness to come out of this deadly pandemic.”

Let’s be clear, no reasonable person would take issue with the proposition that group worship be allowed and economic activity be done to the maximum extent possible consistent with minimising pandemic-related illness and deaths. Indeed, in some places, the perilous state of the economy cannot easily accommodate a lockdown at all. For example, on Friday April 17 in Malawi, Africa, an organisation called the Human Rights Defenders Coalition obtained an initial seven-day court injunction to prevent lockdowns on the grounds that the people of Malawi work hand-to-mouth on a daily basis and that a lockdown would cause tremendous hardship and hunger, even starvation. That court injunction has since been extended indefinitely over questions relating to constitutional law. But recent calls – primarily from the right – to “open the economy” immediately have not been couched with caveats requiring the best possible health outcomes.

A callously sinister although patently dubious argument is that an increased loss of life is just the price that must be paid for keeping the economy strong. On March 23, the U.S. National Economic Council Chairman, Larry Kudlow, declared that “we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs.” Vanity Fair interpreted these remarks to mean “we’re going to have to let some people die so the stock market can live”.

In Australia, writing in Quadrant on April 15, Roger Kimball, quoting a former New York Times writer argued, “right now the best current projection is for 61,000 US deaths. That was the 2017 flu season. Why have we shut the country? I am glad to see that President Trump is at last convening a commission charged with restarting the economy. That should be the signal to retire the task force on the coronavirus and get the country back to work.”

Great for the economy! What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, the COVID-19 death projections cited by Kimball were wildly optimistic – noting nearly 65,000 US COVID-19 deaths at May 03, rising at roughly 2,000 per day – and made in the context of comprehensive lockdowns across the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did indeed conclude that 61,000 people in the US died from influenza in the 2017-18 season, but that was on an estimation that 45 million people were sick with the flu that season. Dr Norman Swan of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation explains that, "COVID-19 has two or three times the transmission rate [compared with the flu] … and the case fatality rate for COVID-19 is around 30 times higher than the flu." Therefore, if the US did “retire the coronavirus task force and get the country back to work”, there is a high probability that the contagion numbers would equal those of the flu and that more than a million people would die. At present, COVID-19 in the United States does not appear to be on that trajectory but that is because much of the country continues to be in lockdown and enforcing social distancing. What happens if these measures are relaxed prematurely or without necessary test-based monitoring, effective contact tracing and outbreak response?

Japan has tried to fight both the virus and keep the economy running at the same time. There have been many critics of Japan’s low level of testing and some suggest that this was done deliberately in early March to present an optimistic picture that might avoid having to postpone the 2020 Olympics. In mid-March, the UK Daily Mail observed that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remained adamant that Japan “will overcome the spread of the infection and host the Olympics without problem, as planned”; one Tokyo 2020 executive board member “hastily backtracked and apologised after suggesting a delay”.

On Tuesday March 24 the Tokyo Olympics were indeed postponed until 2021; however, only one day before that announcement Time magazine reports, “the country was celebrating its annual cherry blossom festival, the time of year when Tokyo residents pack into parks to picnic under the fluttering blooms. The government issued mild warnings and advised people to practice ‘social distancing’ but many parks were nearly as crowded as ever.”

In the face of rising COVID-19 case numbers in Japan, on April 08 a month-long ‘state of emergency’ was finally declared for seven regions, and one week later this was extended to cover the whole nation until May 06. The state of emergency allows regional governments to urge people to stay at home but has no punitive or legal force compelling them to do so. On May 03, the number of cases reported for Japan had declined from an average of around 500 per day over a 10 day period in mid-April to under 300 per day with the total number of cases at 14,571 and 474 deaths. On April 16, the BBC reported, “One poll shows 75% of people think the prime minister took too long to declare a state of emergency in Tokyo. After a recent spike in cases in the capital Tokyo, experts warned that the city’s emergency medical facilities could collapse under the pressure.”

Nevertheless, as Kimball notes, “nobody says that COVID-19 is not real and can’t tax hospitals or kill people” – except perhaps the MAGA-cap-adorned protesters thrusting signs stating that it is a hoax – “especially if they are over 75 or have co-morbidities”. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick argues, ““My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” Charles Mudede of The Stranger in Seattle, poignantly reflects, “If we have learned anything about the politics of gun control, it is this: the GOP can stomach a whole lot of death.”

Utilitarian Logic

When the U.S. National Economic Council Chairman, Larry Kudlow, acknowledged that there would be a need for “trade-offs” he was talking about the sacrifice of some lives for improvement of the economy. The rationale of this thinking is that on balance the greatest good for the greatest number of people would be achieved by allowing some, mostly seniors, to die. The casual acceptance of this idea was starkly on display with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s egregious observation that restrictions on social contact should not be put in place because, “we all have to die someday… “. On March 27, he argued that the economy must remain open saying, “I’m sorry, some people will die. They will die—that’s life.”

This way of thinking reflects certain ideas first articulated by the classical utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes this philosophy: “utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good… that is, (actions that) bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’.” Bentham’s ideas were shocking to people in the late 18^th Century and have been controversial ever since because they suggest that the moral standing of any decision is to be judged only on assessment of its consequences, “It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong. This cut against the view that there are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their effects… Some may be wrong because they violate liberty, or autonomy. Again, Bentham would view liberty and autonomy as good — but good instrumentally, not intrinsically.”

Edgar Allen Poe illustrates the utilitarian moral dilemma in his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). In this story, the protagonist and his fellow ship-wreck survivors have been adrift with insufficient food and water for an extended period and matters have become critical. The narrator recounts a disturbing turning point that reveals the dilemma of choosing between a morally repugnant act at the expense of a minority and an important benefit for the majority, “Parker turned suddenly towards me with an expression of countenance which made me shudder… before he opened his lips my heart told me what he would say. He proposed, in a few words, that one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others.” Sadly for the character Richard Parker, he draws the short straw and is promptly killed and eaten by his crewmates.

As an aside, amazingly, in 1884 – 46 years after publication of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel – four hapless surviving crew of the wrecked yacht Mignonette faced the same terrible ordeal in real life as Poe’s fictional characters. They felt themselves confronted with the choice of cannibalism or starvation. In a macabre twist of coincidence, the young crew member they eventually chose to slaughter and eat shared the exact same name as Poe’s sacrificed fictional character, Richard Parker.

It is indeed this very fear of taking human judgement away from decisions on whether acts are inherently vicious or evil that underpins concern over handing aspects of social policy to computer algorithms. With regard to recent calls for premature relaxing of coronavirus social distancing in the name of the economy, perhaps predictably, those most opposed to such consequence-based utilitarian logic are senior citizens over the age of 65 who would be the most likely to be sacrificed for the greater good.

Republican Senator John Kennedy said, "When we end the shutdown, the virus is going to spread faster… That's just a fact. And the American people understand that." Recent opinion polls show that Kennedy is correct, the American people do understand that, especially older Americans. The approval rating of President Trump has fallen dramatically in recent weeks with seniors over the age of 65 years. On April 30, The Boston Globe reported, “Trump’s approval among people over 65 dropped 19 points between March and the end of April, according to Morning Consult polling. In another poll this week, from YouGov, his approval among older voters dropped to 46 percent, down five points from the week before.”

This trend has seemingly been noticed by Donald Trump who changed his emphasis late April in commenting on the plans of Governor Brian Kemp to open the Georgia State economy: “‘It's just too soon,’ Trump said Wednesday at the daily White House news briefing on coronavirus when asked about Kemp's timetable. ‘The spas and the beauty parlors and the barber shops ... I love them but they can wait a little bit longer, just a little bit, not much, because safety has to predominate.’ Trump said that he told Kemp ‘very simply that I disagree with his decision, but he has to do what he thinks is right.’”

So what is the ‘Greater Good’?

All of which leaves the casual observer in somewhat of a fog. If appeals to weaken the fight against COVID-19 by prematurely relaxing restrictions on social distancing deliver questionable sustainable economic benefit and at the same time are harmful to public approval of those making such appeals, what is the greater good that is being pursued at the expense of people’s lives?

Writing in The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie offers an answer to this question. The thrust of his argument is that, “Congress has had to contemplate policies that would be criticized as unacceptably radical under any other circumstances. At $2.2 trillion, the initial relief package was a bill that was more than twice the size of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009… including universal basic income for the duration of the crisis, a COBRA expansion that would cover 100 percent of health care costs for laid-off and furloughed workers and a proposal to cover payrolls for nearly every business in America.” He continues, “But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low… the ideological danger is that it undermines the ideological project that captured the state with President Ronald Reagan and is on the path to victory under Donald Trump.”

Bouie concludes, “In which case, it makes all the sense in the world for Trump, the Republican Party and the conservative movement to push for the end of the lockdown, public health be damned. After years of single-minded devotion, the conservative movement is achingly close to dismantling the New Deal political order and turning the clock back to when capital could act without limits or restraints.”

In her ground-breaking book, The Shock Doctrine, economist Naomi Klein furnishes examples from around the world, executed over several decades, of how a right-wing, neo-conservative agenda of laissez faire capitalism and small government has been pushed during times of disaster upon societies that would in normal times have resisted such policies. She identifies the economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago as the primary architect of this idea, which she argues is “contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum”. In his book, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman writes, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”.

Klein argues that, “For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the ‘reforms’ permanent”.

Of course, the ‘existing policies’ that Friedman found so odious in the 1960s – when he originally published his doctrine advocating disruptive change during times of crisis – generally entailed a healthy, functioning public sector paid for by society through taxes. However, those ‘existing policies’ no longer exist as they did; the role of the state has been systematically diminished in many countries around the world since then, and especially in the United States since the era of Ronald Reagan who was a staunch supporter of Friedman’s ideas. Bouie argues, “But in trying to destroy the administrative state — in trying to make government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — conservatives left the country vulnerable to a deadly disease that has undermined that project and galvanized its opponents. And all of this is happening as one of the most progressive generations in history begins to take its place in our politics, its views informed by two decades of war and economic crisis.” In other words, paraphrasing Friedman himself, there are new ideas “lying around” and they are progressive rather than neo-conservative.

Essentially, what Bouie is arguing is that progressive forces – perhaps conscious of the irony – now have an opportunity to adopt Friedman’s tactic to roll back decades of reduction in the size, role and effectiveness of the public sector and to re-establish social welfare conditions that benefit the less wealthy. Klein offers multiple examples to show that the laissez faire capitalist philosophy of the Chicago School of Economics has permeated the political-economy of many societies around the world. The current coronavirus pandemic is happening in every country more or less at the same time, and as such in Bouie’s words is creating “a dynamic beyond partisanship that explains why much of the conservative political ecosystem, from politicians and donors to activists and media personalities, has joined the fight to end the lockdown.” Ultimately, we are left to ponder whether people are being asked to die for the economy or for neo-conservative ideology?

WHO – Trump closes another door on multilateral relations

Remarkably, President Donald Trump has cut US funds to the World Health Organisation (WHO) at the very nadir of our struggle with a global pandemic. On 14 April, Trump announced, "Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the WHO's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."

Who is WHO?

The WHO was founded in 1948 as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health work”. It has staff of around 7,000 people deployed globally, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Article One of the WHO Constitution states, “The objective of the World Health Organization shall be the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”

In recent years, the WHO has deployed millions of yellow fever vaccinations to Brazil; millions of polio and measles vaccinations for children up to 15 years old in war-torn Yemen, together with polio vaccinations across Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Benin; community health services in South Sudan; fully equipped ambulances into conflict areas in Iraq; mental health care in Syria; technical assistance to Somalia to help with the Bay area cholera outbreak and more, especially in the fight against tuberculosis and HIV. In Asia, the WHO has also worked with partner countries to fight infectious diseases including dengue and malaria, and non-communicable diseases like diabetes and heart disease. On Wednesday 15 April, Professor Trudie Lang, a researcher on world health at Oxford University, told Global News, “The reason we’re making such fast progress on (COVID-19) diagnostics, vaccines and drugs is because of WHO’s role as a neutral broker… It’s their role to bring together the best science.”

A total of 194 WHO member States each pay assessment fees based on wealth and population. In addition, they make additional voluntary contributions, along with the United Nations, non-governmental organizations and philanthropic foundations. 

The US has contributed about 15% of the WHO's funding in ‘voluntary contributions’, supporting specific initiatives, and 22% of the $1 billion of annual ‘assessed contributions’ from member nations. For 2020-21, the WHO budget is $4.8 billion, or $2.4 billion per year. Overall, in 2018-19, the US contributed around 20% of the WHO budget. According to the WHO statement of account, as at 31 March 2020, the US “is behind in its payment of assessed fees. It currently owes $198.3 million in membership dues, including some amounts owed for previous cycles.”

On 15 April, Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, was quoted by NPR to have said, "The WHO has a budget around the size of a large U.S. hospital. It's about one quarter of the budget of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

Reactions to the Funding Cut

Donald Trump’s announcement has been almost universally condemned around the world. On Wednesday 15^th April, the head of EU Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, tweeted, “Deeply regret US decision to suspend funding to WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.” Predictably, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, "We regret the decision of the president of the United States." And Bill Gates tweeted, “Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.”

Also on Wednesday, the Financial Times quoted global leaders including Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, the German Foreign Minister, Ireland’s Foreign Minister and the EU Commission President all expressing dismay at the decision.

Non-government reaction is possibly best summed up by Associate Professor Stephen Griffin at the School of Medicine, University of Leeds, who reportedly said that the decision was “one of the least productive, most short-sighted, self-motivated and hypocritical acts I have ever witnessed”.

Closing another door

On 05 February 2020, Jeffrey Sachs told the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences that “The US is a problem. It became a far more significant problem with Donald Trump… The US has blocked every multilateral initiative of recent years. It is the only country pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement; it is the only country that pulled out of the (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) JCPOA Agreement with Iran... The US is attacking digital taxation; it has taken tremendous, disastrous cuts to corporate taxation which is blowing up the world-wide taxation on companies. It has dismembered the WTO, there is no appellate process now. It now claims that it’s going to adjudicate exchange rates and put unilateral tariffs against countries that the US alone deems to be manipulating the exchange rate… we can’t have the United States adjudicate exchange rates, that’s the job of the IMF… There is a US relentless, daily pressure on multilateralism.”

Sachs is correct to recognise that the United States has retreated from multilateral engagement under the Trump Administration. The US has abandoned the leading role it once played in APEC. Trump has criticized NATO and was reported by The New York Times as privately discussing in 2018 pulling out of the alliance. In 2017, he destroyed the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement by withdrawing the United States leaving the remaining 11 countries to form a new trade agreement called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And now, the US has halted payment to the WHO just when the world needs that organisation to be at its strongest. There may be some merit in accusations that the WHO was too trusting of information coming out of China and that it made errors of judgement during the early days of this unfolding crisis, but could these matters have been examined and discussed while continuing to recognise and support the critical role that the WHO plays in combating the COVID-19 pandemic? President Trump’s decision to halt funding of the WHO is consistent with a steady retreat from multilateralism, which might play well with his supporters at home but has not generally enjoyed support elsewhere. 

Prepare for a Rip Van Winkle economy!

Just over a week ago, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, said that he wants small businesses in Australia suffering from the impact of COVID-19 to go to sleep, possibly for six months or longer, until the pandemic has passed. Pundits and the media immediately picked up on the term ‘hibernation’ and comparisons were made with bears in winter, of course.

Officials almost everywhere have affirmed their desire to protect employment so that the economy can swing back to normal after the pandemic is over. On Monday 06 April, Singapore’s Finance Minister, Heng Swee Keat, said that their latest round of financial stimulus “would help workers keep their jobs and enable businesses to resume operations quickly after the pandemic subsides.” On Tuesday, the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in unveiling almost a trillion dollars of stimulus – equal to 20% of Japan’s economic output – declared, “We will protect the employment and life at all costs.” Indeed, there are almost as many expressions of this sentiment as there are countries on the planet.

With steely resolve, President Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Tuesday night, “We’re looking at the concept where we open sections of the country and we’re also looking at the concept where you open up everything.” Earlier that evening, Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council, declared, “Once we can reopen this thing, I think it’s going to be very successful.”

However, one of the problems in going to sleep for a protracted period is that the world can be a different place when you come back down from the mountain. Remember Irving Washington’s story of poor old Rip Van Winkle? He wandered off in New York’s Catskill Mountains to escape from his nagging wife.

As an aside, this story was very likely on the minds of the Malaysian Ministry of Women and Family Development last week when they advised that in order to preserve harmony with their husband during the COVID-19 lockdown women should wear makeup, speak in a coquettish voice and avoid nagging! Perhaps unsurprisingly they later apologised to enraged Malaysian women.

Nevertheless, as one does when avoiding a termagant partner, Rip met up with some ghostly fellows and had a few too many ales. He crawled away to sleep it off for a while and woke up 20 years later. When he returned to the village, he discovered that he had completely missed the American Revolutionary War and more than a few things had changed, “everything was strange”.

A Rip Van Winkle economy is one that changes significantly, both in scale and nature, while businesses are dormant. It’s never happened before and hopefully will never again, but it is happening now all around the world.

The Australian Prime Minister elaborated, saying, “We want these businesses to effectively go into a hibernation, which means on the other side, the employees come back, the opportunities come back, the economy comes back.” Such reassurance helps to calm markets and the citizenry but is it likely to be the way this unfolds? Will everything just pick up from where we were, or should we prepare for the possibility that a revolution takes place in the economy while businesses sleep? The economist Larry Summers reminds us that, “economic time has stopped, but financial time has not been stopped.”

There are fuels for revolutionary change in our economy and, as a consequence, our society. I will talk about three of them.

Firstly, it’s been a while since almost every aspect of the global economy shut down for several months and we lost more than three trillion dollars of global GDP in a matter of weeks. That hasn’t happened at this pace since, well… never. As noted in The Guardian, “Not even during the Great Depression and the second world war did the bulk of economic activity literally shut down, as it has in China, the US and Europe today.” At a WHO press conference last week, the Chairwoman and Managing Director of IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, warned that, “This is a crisis like no other… Never in the history of the IMF have we witnessed the world economy coming to a standstill. It is way worse than the global financial crisis.” On 02 April, Bank of America Global Research reported that it expects the COVID-19 recession in the U.S. to be the “deepest recession on record,” nearly five times worse than the postwar average with U.S. jobless claims already rising by 6.6 million in the last week, bringing total job losses in the last three weeks to around 16 million. Is it possible that this crash in economic activity might detrimentally affect those opportunities that are expected to be there when business wakes up again?

Secondly, this is happening when we were already in the midst of revolutionary change brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. For some years, around the world, relative silence in public policy on how to respond to the disruptive impact of this particular revolution has been remarkable and eerie.

And finally, the demonstrable need for expertise, competence, resilience, capacity and strength in government and the public sector during this time of crisis will render past clarion calls for the privatization of all social services including public health; an unfettered private financial sector; laissez faire, free-market dominance in economic management and a conception of ‘value’ determined solely by price, to all look rather silly.

At this point, I am reminded of Sir Ken Robinson quoting the comedian George Carlin who said, “Just when I found out the meaning of life, they changed it.”

Storm Damage

A popular analogy for the economic impact of this pandemic is that it is like a storm. It will blow over and life for most will return to normal. This belief underpins the Australian Prime Minister’s six-month hibernation theory. On 01 April, The New York Times summarised this view as, “Once the virus is contained, enabling people to return to offices and shopping malls, life will snap back to normal. Jets will fill with families going on merely deferred vacations. Factories will resume, fulfilling saved up orders.” We hope that this is correct, how wonderful that would be for so many people, but the odds are not favourable. Disconcertingly, that summary of the optimistic perspective was published on April Fools’ Day.

Let’s recall again what Rip Van Winkle experienced when he woke and returned to his village, “He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges… It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned.” The New York Times continues, “But even after the virus is tamed — and no one really knows when that will be — the world that emerges is likely to be choked with trouble, challenging the recovery. Mass joblessness exacts societal costs. Widespread bankruptcy could leave industry in a weakened state, depleted of investment and innovation. Households may remain agitated and risk averse, making them prone to thrift. Some social distancing measures could remain indefinitely. Consumer spending amounts to roughly two-thirds of economic activity worldwide. If anxiety endures and people are reluctant to spend, expansion will be limited — especially as continued vigilance against the coronavirus may be required for years.”

The economist Satyajit Das notes that a barber without customers for three months has lost revenue that is gone forever, it doesn’t come back. The barber’s income for that year is potentially less by around a quarter. Das also recalls that a study by the U.S. Federal Reserve undertaken before the pandemic identified that most Americans would struggle to raise $400 in the case of an emergency. And if that sounds dire, he notes that research by the Grattan Institute reveals that 10% of Australian households have less than $90 to cater to an emergency and less than 50% have access to $7,000. The Khazanah Research Institute has published a report on ‘The State of Households’ in Malaysia in which they note, “Findings from the latest UNDP Human Development Report for Malaysia suggest that many Malaysian households have limited savings. Their low levels of precautionary savings mean that most families would be in trouble in the event of a shock – such as a reduction in income, unemployment, or other emergencies.”

So, how much damage is this storm likely to cause?

In February, the New York Federal Reserve announced that 2019 saw the largest surge in U.S. household debt since 2007, which of course was just before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Total household debt balances increased by $601 billion in 2019 exceeding $14 trillion for the first time ever. Most of that growth, $433 billion, was in household mortgage debt, again the largest rise since 2007. In that context, with U.S. unemployment now already at 16% or more, there is strong likelihood of increased mortgage and other credit stress, leading to foreclosures. Exacerbating this, rising stock prices in recent years have spurred spending but this source of funds disappeared with stock markets plummeting over the past six weeks. Even in good times, such trends in the United States have potentially detrimental consequences for the global economy.

And are global finances positioned well to cope with severe disruption? 

Although there have been some important regulatory reforms since the GFC especially to improve transparency in over-the-counter (OTC) derivative trades, in November 2019, the Bank for International Settlements reported that the notional amounts of OTC derivatives – which determine contractual payments - rose to $640 trillion in June 2019 marking continuation of an upward trend evident since the end of 2016 and taking the total higher than it was at the end of 2007. The value of global GDP at present is around $88 trillion, which means that the notional amount of OTC derivatives is 7.25 times larger than the total of all the world’s economies combined. If the downturn caused by social distancing and lockdowns extends for several months, as mooted by numerous governments, ‘working from home’ for many will become ‘being unemployed at home’. Such a trend if continued even remotely near the scale already seen will inevitably place strain on the financial sector. 

Already, on Friday 03 April, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced that West Virginia's First State Bank had failed. This bank was 115 years old and although it did have long-standing financial woes, it was the first to fail in the United States since outbreak of the pandemic. Nevertheless, there is high probability of a large increase in U.S. loan defaults and these will place increased demands on the FDIC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to minimize bank failures.

Just to make sure that humanity maximises the challenge, because nobody likes to do things by half measure, last month, in response to falling global demand resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, Saudi Arabia and Russia decided not to agree on oil production cuts. On 08 March, Saudi Arabia unilaterally offered price discounts of up to $8 per barrel to certain customers and announced that it would increase production to 12.3 million barrels a day in April. As demand continued to fall dramatically, the price of Brent crude oil reached its lowest level in 18 years on 30 March at $22.58 barrel and West Texas Intermediate below $20 barrel. The price bounced back somewhat in the first days of April after early signs of a cut in production but even so, markets have taken advantage of the low prices and are probably going to be oversupplied for several months at least. Recently, a Citibank research report said that any potential agreement by Saudi Arabia, Russia and America “looks like it is too little too late.”

Why? Estimates are that global daily consumption of oil in April will fall by 15 million to 20 million barrels a day against what it is was a year ago. On Monday last week, Goldman Sachs Group analysts were quoted in The Straits Times to observe, "It is impossible to shut down that much demand without large and persistent ramifications to supply." Although China is reported to be buying oil for its national reserve, this is unlikely to diminish global over-supply. Citing a forecast by the Paris-based International Energy Agency, Morgan Stanley cautions, "Oil prices failed to keep pace, with growing (coronavirus) lock-down measures and reports that this could drive global demand down 20%, potentially pushing the world to run out of storage capacity."  Russia needs a Brent crude price of around $40 to balance its budget but by 02 April Brent crude was only $26 barrel. On 20 March Russia had $551 billion in foreign-currency reserves; within one week that had fallen by $30 billion. Radio Free Europe has reported that Saudi Arabia needs a Brent crude price of $80 to balance its budget and that it has already spent $13 billion of its $480 billion of foreign-currency reserves.

All of this matters to every country because in the 1970s, the world abandoned the Bretton Woods gold standard. The United States and Saudi Arabia agreed to standardize the price of oil in U.S. dollar terms. Saudi Arabia pressured OPEC countries to agree to this arrangement, which created the ‘petrodollar’.  The petrodollar system underpins the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, which benefits United States’ financial markets as a source of liquidity and foreign capital inflows. Essentially, dollars from oil exports are ‘recycled’ back to buy investments in the United States, which has allowed the U.S. to issue dollar denominated assets – including Treasury Bills – at low rates of interest and thus promote growth without inflationary pressure. In 2018, the U.S. Energy Information Association reported that the global net export revenue from OPEC members was $710 billion.

If the flow of recycled petrodollars evaporates for sustained duration in the face of depressed prices caused by extremely low demand, coupled with the drying up of a Chinese surplus of dollars caused by depressed exports, there could be a sharp reduction of liquidity for American capital markets just when the United States needs to spend in order to prop up its economy. Note that all this is potentially coming off of an already exploding U.S. fiscal deficit that exceeded one trillion dollars in 2019, and a national debt of $23.2 trillion before any coronavirus stimulus package. Is it any wonder that President Trump is Tweeting up the oil price and declaring improbably that the economy will “re-open” in a matter of weeks?

Faced with insuperable economic problems and crises of unprecedented nature and scale, we can perhaps be forgiven in doubting Morrison’s plan that businesses will wake in a few months from now to discover that “the employees come back, the opportunities come back,(and) the economy comes back.”

Come the Revolution

Over the next few years and accelerating into the future, the impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and analytics, the internet-of-things, block-chain technology, and our need to transition to a post-carbon economy and adapt to climate change will present both opportunities and significant challenges for all industries, especially in technologically developed economies. Even without the forced change in work practices arising from the coronavirus pandemic, over the coming decade, many service-sector skills traditionally associated with middle-income positions in engineering, banking, project management, procurement, law, health care, mathematics and accounting etc. were destined to be replaced increasingly by self-learning algorithms.

This transition has already begun but ‘business as usual’ and societal inertia allowed us all to note the wonder of it while plodding along with an understanding that it’s probably all a bit overstated and will work itself out in the long run. Of course, there is also the dismissive mantra that technology never really destroys jobs, it just changes them. For example, we witnessed how agricultural workers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries all moved into manufacturing jobs in the cities, and then how manufacturing workers in the mid-20^th century substantially moved into the services sector. However, this time around, technology is impacting on all these sectors at once; not just for physical work but decision-making, planning, investigating, diagnosing, arguing a legal case, communicating, entertaining and practically anything else we can think of using our slower, lower-data-empowered brain.

The importance to our society of such unprecedented change, commonly called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is reflected in the high percentage of people in advanced economies working as professionals, clerical and administrative workers and managers, many of whom are likely to find their jobs challenged by technology. Moreover, automation of physical processes associated with trades and labour will continue to develop at an accelerating pace. For example, by 2019, over $100 billion had been invested into the autonomous vehicle industry. Volkswagen led the pack with an investment of $54.2 billion in driverless cars, followed in diminishing order by Samsung, Ford, Toyota and others.

The nature of the challenges and extent of opportunities before us cut across all sectors of the economy. For this reason, the past will not be an accurate predictor of the future. And yet, remarkably, this systemic disruption to every aspect of our society and economy has hardly been talked about outside of thought-provoking books and documentaries, TED talks by Ferrari-driving Silicon Valley techno-geeks, the occasional rousing speech by an academic or politician, and corporate planners in behind-closed-door Board meetings.

Nevertheless, sneakily, those companies that were supposed to be asleep over the next six months might just notice whilst dozing that there could be opportunities to deploy smart technology rather than rehiring previous employees. That algorithm that was going to require several thousand redundancies can now be rolled out without all the industrial-relations angst. They might also learn how to undertake processes that used to involve moving people around the country, indeed the world, using far fewer staff working remotely with video-conferencing and SCADA control systems.

As early as 03 Feb, as companies were closing their offices in China in response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, a smiling CEO of ‘Zoom’ the “video remote work tool company” said that their stock price had grown 15% in a day and that demand for the technology was booming, “Ultimately, almost every company, they need to have a tool like this. I think that based on IDC estimates by 2023 that’s a $43 billion market.”

Just think about it for a moment; how often does almost every company in the world, at the same time, stop, send all their employees home for at least a couple of months, step back and take a look at where they are, where they have been, what they have been doing, how they have been doing it, how best to move forward and with what technology and processes? Never before, and perhaps never again but we can be fairly confident that quite a lot of them will implement changes. And those changes will almost certainly maximise the technology now on offer through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has just been put on steroids.

If companies stay in hibernation for months, our Rip Van Winkle economy is most unlikely to look much like it did before the coronavirus pandemic. We might do well to explore further the conditions Rip Van Winkle discovered upon waking and returning to the village, “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity.”

Rather than deluding ourselves that companies will wake up, that employees and opportunities will come back and the economy will tick along just like before, to avoid significant social disruption and continue to grow our economy, governments will need to recognise and get ahead of a process of tumultuous change that will very likely unfold in 2020.

Rediscovering Value

Remember the neo-conservative, laissez faire world of austerity when ‘big government’, ‘economic stimulus’ and ‘bail outs’ were dirty words? You know, about five weeks ago.

The northern States of Europe are showing us now that this thinking has not completely faded as they resist helping southern European countries in critical economic peril, but cracks in the neo-liberal narrative are showing in domestic politics. In many countries citizens look in vain – possibly later to become anger – towards hollowed-out and weakened institutions that too often are failing to respond effectively to the coronavirus pandemic. In many places, incompetent government authorities have been overly slow to impose social-distancing restrictions, and have not anticipated and responded with adequate medical facilities, testing, critical-care equipment and personal protection equipment. Despite some statistical anomalies arising from restricted testing, these failures all too often manifest as COVID-19 case numbers and deaths.

Increasingly over the past 25 years or so, right-wing populism has argued that ‘Deep State’ elites, bureaucrats and technocrats have ‘politically correct’ agendas that hold back hard-working capitalist risk-takers, who in turn deserve to pay less tax, enjoy their riches and eventually benefit us all through trickle-down mechanisms. The problems of widening wealth inequality, environmental pollution, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, mass destruction of biodiversity, poor quality public education, lack of access to public health services, etc. are all ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing’ conspiracies getting in the way of a strong country.

The United States under Republican influence, and especially during the Trump presidency, is a notable example of a country governed by such populist political ideology but it is by no means the only one. Variations of this narrative have been evident in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and in populist political parties throughout Western Europe and elsewhere. In spite of his dogged pursuit of Brexit, the UK under a seemingly more pragmatic – COVID-19 infected – Boris Johnson does not yet consistently fit this mould. Rachel Sylvester in Prospect magazine notes that his ideology resembles that of Groucho Marx, “These are my principles and if you don’t like them… well I have others.” 

However, according to the economist Satyajit Das, “in times of crisis everyone is Keynesian”. He may well be right. In early March, the conservative Australian Government announced a $A17.6 billion stimulus program in response to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It followed ten days later with an increase in the package to $A189 billion, and a week after that with another $A130 billion making the total stimulus to date $A320 billion (approx. USD193 billion), representing 16.4% of GDP!

On 27 March, the Republican President of the United States signed into law a $2 trillion stimulus package, the biggest in U.S history. This follows $3 trillion in loans and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve in recent weeks, which some commentators argue will still not be enough. Reuters reports that Scott Minerd, Chief Investment Officer at Guggenheim Partners, has calculated that funds allocated to bolster the Federal Reserve are insufficient , “That is just a fraction of the roughly $9.5 trillion in outstanding U.S. corporate debt, much of which is either in the lowest-tier investment grade rating or already rated as junk, with a higher risk of default. Other areas that need support - such as the commercial paper market where borrowers go for short-term funding or the municipal market that local governments use to raise money for roads and schools – total trillions of dollars more.”

On Monday, 06 April, Singapore announced a third stimulus package of $3.6 billion, taking its total stimulus to $41.7 billion, which is 12% of the country’s GDP. And so we could continue through an ever expanding list of countries.

Eventually, governments will need to raise taxes to pay for all of this, but will they be free to do so without considering wealth inequalities and the importance of maintaining a sound public sector? Will the memory of under-performance by hollowed-out public institutions in many countries allow future governments to again disparage bureaucrats, scientists and technical experts as unnecessary elites? Trust in the ability of laissez-faire capitalism to deliver a just, caring and equitable society is likely to be broken irreparably by images of refrigerator trucks lined up as temporary morgues in New York City.

Be that as it may, Professor Alex Millmow speaking on ABC radio last week provided the ironic anecdote that Melbourne-based Marxists who meet every Easter for a conference to discuss the demise of laissez-faire capitalism are unable to gather this year, not because of ideological differences but because of restrictions on too many people gathering in one place during the coronavirus pandemic. With the evident discrediting of unbridled capitalism flowering all around the world in response to the pandemic, “Their moment has come! But it has been snatched away by regulations put in place by the Government”.

Professor Mariana Mazzucato has long argued that we need to ask questions about the difference between value creation and value extraction, between productive and unproductive activities. We might do well to start listening to her. The economic crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is hitting every country in the world at roughly the same time; every business, every organisation, every government and every person will be impacted upon, mostly negatively. As we move forward into a world in which every government is saddled with enormous debt and technology is changing so many traditional assumptions about the use of employment as a means of wealth distribution, we cannot afford the luxury of lazy thinking and policies based on ‘business as usual’.

To illustrate how the term ‘value’ has been captured in mainstream economics by consideration solely of price, Mazzucato quotes a former CEO of Goldman Sachs investment bank, Lloyd Blankfein. In 2009, just after the GFC of 2008 that was caused primarily by investment bankers – including those at Goldman Sachs – Lloyd Blankfein, with no cheeky wink to the gallery at all, said: “The people at Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.” Mazzucato questions whether the 8.8 million people in the United States who lost their jobs between 2007-2010 and the thousands of people who lost their homes as a result of that crisis – 120,000 in the month of September 2010 alone – would agree. She also notes that Goldman Sachs had to be bailed out in the GFC with $10 billion of taxpayers’ funds.

The problem she argues is that in neo-classical economics, which emerged around the beginning of the 20^th century, the equation shifted from deliberations on the nature of value, how it is determined and what the productive potential of the economy might be, giving rise to a theory of price, to the reverse, “a theory of price and exchange which reveals value.” Obviously, this can lead to perverse outcomes, such as ignoring or under-appreciating value-creating activities that are not priced and, of course, recognising harmful investment banking practices as being productive even if they destroy value.

Mazzucato reminds us that up until 1970, most of the financial sector, specifically net difference in interest, was not even included in GDP. This changed by giving these earnings a name and including them in GDP calculations; however, as the calculation of their ‘value’ increased each year, people began to notice that what they were mostly doing was financing themselves, that is the financing of finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE). She notes that in the UK, only 10-20% of finance goes to industry and the rest into FIRE. “Similarly, in the real economy, in industry itself, what was happening? This focus on prices and particularly share prices has created a huge problem of re-investment… What we have today is an ultra-financialized industrial sector where increasingly a share of the profits and net income are not actually going back into production, into human capital training, into research and development but (are) just being syphoned out in terms of buying back your own shares, which boosts stock options, which is in fact the way that many executives are paid… In the last ten years, 466 S&P 500 companies have spent over $4 trillion just on buying back their shares.”

In the heavily indebted, hesitant and uncertain world we will find ourselves in as we come out of the hibernation of social distancing and lock-downs, will we be able to afford the continued misallocation of resources that has nurtured unprecedented inequalities in wealth simply because we lazily and unquestioningly accept value as defined by price? And in a world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution where the production of material goods will increasingly be less dependent on human labour, will we need to re-think our understanding of value?

Professor Bruno Frey, who heads up the Centre for Research on Economics and Wellbeing at the University of Basel, agrees with Mazzucato that we do need to re-think our understanding of value. He suggests that we do so based on the extent to which activities and resources are directed toward the creation of happiness. He identifies five determinants of societal happiness, most of which are not measured with a focus only on GDP: material wellbeing; friends, acquaintances and family life; physical health; political conditions, such as the absence of tensions and war; and a sense of equality, especially the absence of gross inequalities in wealth and opportunity. Frey eschews the notion of a national indicator of happiness on the grounds that it is too easily manipulated by governments. Instead, he argues the importance of a healthy plurality of organisations assessing and reporting on government and society’s performance against the five determinants that his research has identified are important for happiness.

So, there are good reasons to believe that we need to prepare for a Rip Van Winkle economy when we finally awake. The opportunities, employees and economy as we knew them may no longer be there but this need not be cause for despair; recall again the fate of Rip Van Winkle, “Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war.’ It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor.” Rip Van Winkle may not have understood fully what happened while he was asleep but he went on to live a happy life, as might we all if we prepare for the reality of what lies before us.