RESET - the great

COVID-19: THE GREAT RESET by klaus schwab

Quotes:

“In early July 2020, we are at a crossroads, the authors of COVID-19: The Great Reset argue. One path will take us to a better world: more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature. The other will take us to a world that resembles the one we just left behind – but worse and constantly dogged by nasty surprises. We must therefore get it right.

[...]

It is our defining moment – we will be dealing with its fallout for years, and many things will change forever. It is bringing economic disruption of monumental proportions, creating a dangerous and volatile period on multiple fronts – politically, socially, geopolitically – raising deep concerns about the environment and also extending the reach (pernicious or otherwise) of technology into our lives. No industry or business will be spared from the impact of these changes. Millions of companies risk disappearing and many industries face an uncertain future; a few will thrive. On an individual basis, for many, life as they’ve always known it is unravelling at alarming speed. But deep, existential crises also favour introspection and can harbour the potential for transformation. The fault lines of the world – most notably social divides, lack of fairness, absence of cooperation, failure of global governance and leadership – now lie exposed as never before, and people feel the time for reinvention has come. A new world will emerge (...)

 

Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. Nothing will ever return to the “broken” sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory. Some analysts call it a major bifurcation, others refer to a deep crisis of “biblical” proportions, but the essence remains the same: the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more, dissolved in the context of the pandemic. Radical changes of such consequence are coming that some pundits have referred to a “before coronavirus” (BC) and “after coronavirus” (AC) era. We will continue to be surprised by both the rapidity and unexpected nature of these changes – as they conflate with each other, they will provoke second-, third-, fourth- and more-order consequences, cascading effects and unforeseen outcomes. In so doing, they will shape a “new normal” radically different from the one we will be progressively leaving behind. Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.

 

... The changes were so diverse and widespread that it led to “the end of an age of submission”, bringing feudalism and serfdom to an end and ushering in the era of Enlightenment. Put simply: “The Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”

 

... In reality, the pandemic is dramatically exacerbating pre-existing dangers that we’ve failed to confront adequately for too long.

 

... World War II was the quintessential transformational war, triggering not only fundamental changes to the global order and the global economy, but also entailing radical shifts in social attitudes and beliefs that eventually paved the way for radically new policies and social contract provisions... There are obviously fundamental dissimilarities between a pandemic and a war (...), but the magnitude of their transformative power is comparable. Both have the potential to be a transformative crisis of previously unimaginable proportions (...) the impact of the pandemic will go well beyond the (already staggering) statistics relating “simply” to death, unemployment and bankruptcies.

 

... The objective of this book is to offer some coherent and conceptually sound guidelines about what might lie ahead ... The broader point is this: the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse. Societies could be poised to become either more egalitarian or more authoritarian, or geared towards more solidarity or more individualism, favouring the interests of the few or the many; economies, when they recover, could take the path of more inclusivity and be more attuned to the needs of our global commons, or they could return to functioning as they did before. You get the point: we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world, in a bid to make it a better and more resilient one as it emerges on the other side of this crisis.

 

... If just one word had to distil the essence of the 21st century, it would have to be “interdependence”. A by-product of globalization and technological progress,(...) The fact that globalization and technological progress have advanced so much (...) that the world is now

“hyperconnected” – a variant of interdependence on steroids!

 

... In an interdependent world, risks amplify each other and, in so doing, have cascading effects. That is why isolation or containment cannot rhyme with interdependence and interconnectedness.

 

The chart below, extracted from the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2020, makes this plain (...) As the chart makes clear, an “infectious diseases” risk is bound to have a direct effect on “global governance failure”, “social instability”, “unemployment”, “fiscal crises” and “involuntary migration” (to name just a few). Each of these in turn will influence other individual risks, meaning that the individual risk from which the chain of effects started (in this particular case “infectious diseases”) ends up amplifying many other risks not only in its own macro category (societal risks), but also in the other four macro categories.

... This new culture of immediacy, obsessed with speed, is apparent in all aspects of our lives, from “just-in-time” supply chains to “high-frequency” trading, from speed dating to fast food...

 

... Exponential growth is so baffling to our cognitive functions that we often deal with it by developing exponential “myopia”... In a famous experiment conducted in 1975, two psychologists found that when we have to predict an exponential process, we often underestimate it by factor of 10 [...] things tend to change gradually at first and then all at once. Expect the same for the macro reset.

 

For years, international organizations like the World

Health Organization (WHO), institutions like the World Economic

Forum and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations

(CEPI – launched at the Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos), and individuals like Bill Gates have been warning us about the next pandemic risk, even specifying that it: 1) would emerge in a highly populated place where economic development forces people and wildlife together; 2) would spread quickly and silently by exploiting networks of human travel and trade; and 3) would reach multiple countries by thwarting containment... Many Asian countries reacted quickly because they were prepared logistically and organizationally (due to SARS) and thus were able to lessen the impact of the pandemic. By contrast, many Western countries were unprepared and were ravaged by the pandemic... To sum up, the pandemic is not a black-swan event, but some of its consequences will be.

 

A theoretical physicist turned head of state made this point when he coined the expression “quantum politics”, outlining how the classical world of post-Newtonian physics (linear) had given way to the quantum world: highly interconnected and uncertain, incredibly complex and also changing depending on the position of the observer... The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare this quantum world. <...>

 

History shows that epidemics have been the great resetter of countries economy and social fabric. Why should it be different with COVID-19? A seminal paper on the long-term economic consequences of major pandemics throughout history shows that significant macroeconomic after-effects can persist for as long as 40 years, substantially depressing real rates of return. This is in contrast to wars that have the opposite effect: they destroy capital while pandemics do not – wars trigger higher real interest rates, implying greater economic activity, while pandemics trigger lower real rates, implying sluggish economic activity. In addition, consumers tend to react to the shock by increasing their savings, either because of new precautionary concerns, or simply to replace the wealth lost during the epidemic...

Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix...

 

In the face of uncertainty, it makes sense to resort to (3) scenarios... are based on the core assumption that the pandemic could go on affecting us until 2022... Whichever of the three the pandemic follows policy-makers must be prepared to deal with “at least another 18 to 24 months of significant COVID-19 activity, with hotspots popping up periodically in diverse geographic areas”. As we will argue next, a full-fledged economic recovery cannot take place until the virus is defeated or behind us.   

 

...there has been a perennial debate about “saving lives versus saving the economy”– lives versus livelihoods. This is a false trade-off. From an economic standpoint, the myth of having to choose between public health and a hit to GDP growth can easily be debunked. Leaving aside the (not insignificant) ethical issue of whether sacrificing some lives to save the economy is a social Darwinian proposition (or not), deciding not to save lives will not improve economic welfare...

... “Only saving lives will save livelihoods”, making it clear that only policy measures that place people’s health at their core will enable an economic recovery, adding: “If governments fail to save lives, people afraid of the virus will not resume shopping, traveling, or dining out. This will hinder economic recovery, lockdown or no lockdown.”

 

The shock that the pandemic has inflicted on the global economy has been more severe and has occurred much faster than anything else in recorded economic history (...) As the economist Kenneth Rogoff warned: “Everything depends on how long it lasts, but if this goes on for a long time, It’s certainly going to be the mother of all financial crises.”

 

At different moments between February and May 2020, in a bid to contain the pandemic, governments worldwide made the deliberate decision to shut down much of their respective

economies... The impact of these decisions seemed all the more dramatic because they concerned first and foremost service industries, a sector traditionally more immune than other industries... Consequently, the service sector that represents by far the largest component of economic activity in any developed economy (about 70% of GDP and more than 80% of employment in the US) was hit the hardest by the pandemic.

 

Several months into the pandemic, it looks like even a semblance of a return to “business as usual” for most service companies is inconceivable as long as COVID-19 remains a threat to our health. This in turn suggests that a full return to “normal” cannot be envisaged before a vaccine is available. When might that be? According to most experts, it is unlikely to be before the first quarter of 2021 at the earliest. In mid-June 2020, already more than 135 trials were under way, proceeding at a remarkable pace considering that in the past it could take up to 10 years to develop a vaccine (five in the case of Ebola), so the reason is not science, but production. Manufacturing billions of doses constitutes the real challenge that will require a massive expansion and diversion of existing capacity. The next hurdle is the political challenge of vaccinating enough people worldwide (we are collectively as strong as the weakest link) with a high enough compliance rate despite the rise of anti-vaxxers.

 

In the coming months, the unemployment situation is bound to deteriorate further for the simple reason that it cannot improve significantly until a sustainable economic recovery begins. This

Won’t happen before a vaccine... In a slightly more distant time (from a few months to a few years), two categories of people will face a particularly bleak employment situation: young people entering for the first time a job market devastated by the pandemic and workers susceptible to be replaced by robots... physical labour will be replaced by robots and “intelligent” machines... there is already ample evidence that it is accelerating the pace of transformation. The call centre sector epitomizes this situation.

In the pre-pandemic era, new artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies were being gradually introduced to automate some of the tasks performed by human employees. The COVID-19 crisis, and its accompanying measures of social distancing, has suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses...

The process of automation is never linear; it tends to happen in waves and often in harsh economic times... This is when employers replace less-skilled workers with automation to increase labour productivity. Low-income workers in routine jobs (in manufacturing and services like food and transportation) are those most likely to be affected...

 

In the post-pandemic era, according to current projections, the new economic “normal” may be characterized by much lower growth than in past decades. As the recovery begins, quarter-toquarter GDP growth may look impressive (because it will start from a very low basis), but it may take years before the overall size of most nations’ economy returns to their pre-pandemic level. This is also due to the fact that the severity of the economic shock inflicted by the coronavirus will conflate with a long-term trend: declining populations in many countries and ageing (demographics is “destiny” and a crucial driver of GDP growth). Under such conditions, when lower economic growth seems almost certain, many people may wonder whether “obsessing” about growth is even useful, concluding that it doesn’t make sense to chase a target of ever-higher GDP growth.

 

The deep disruption caused by COVID-19 globally has offered societies an enforced pause to reflect on what is truly of value... the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future. The history of radical rethinking in the years following World War II, which included the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, the EU and the expansion of welfare states, shows the magnitude of the shifts possible.

 

Recent academic efforts are beginning to tackle the measurement challenge by bringing public- and privatesector data sources together.

 

We do not know yet whether the “tyranny of GDP growth” will come to an end, but different signals suggest that the pandemic may accelerate changes in many of our well-entrenched social norms.

 

Some have called for “degrowth”, a movement that embraces zero or even negative GDP growth... By triggering a period of enforced degrowth, the pandemic has spurred renewed interest in this movement that wants to reverse the pace of economic growth... Their open letter calls for the adoption of a democratically “planned yet adaptive, sustainable, and equitable downscaling of the economy, leading to a future where we can live better with less”.

 

The technology to do more with less already exists There is no fundamental trade-off between economic, social and environmental factors if we adopt this more holistic and longer-term approach to defining progress and incentivizing investment in green and social frontier markets.

 

For quite some time, some analysts and policy-makers have been considering a possible and progressive end to the dominance of the dollar. They now think that the pandemic might be the catalyst that proves them right.

 

... US remains a formidable global financial hegemon... many countries would like to challenge the dollar’s global dominance. In the short term, there are no alternatives. The Chinese renminbi (RMB) could be an option, but not until strict capital controls are eliminated and the RMB turns into a market-determined currency, which is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. The same goes for the euro; it could be an option, but not until doubts about a possible implosion of the eurozone dissipate for good, which again is an unlikely prospect in the next few years. As for a global virtual currency, there is none in sight yet, but there are attempts to launch national digital currencies that may eventually dethrone the US dollar supremacy. The most significant one took place in China at the end of April 2020 with a test of a national digital currency in four large cities. The country is years ahead of the rest of the world in developing a digital currency combined with powerful electronic payment platforms; this experiment clearly shows that there are monetary systems that are trying to become independent from US intermediaries while moving towards greater digitization.

...

To a large extent, US global credibility also depends on geopolitics and the appeal of its social model. The “exorbitant privilege” is intricately intertwined with global power, the perception of the US as a reliable partner and its role in the working of multilateral institutions.

[...]

... societal upheaval unleashed by COVID-19 will last for years, and possibly generations...

 

the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour. Second, COVID-19 is likely to sound the death knell of neoliberalism... It is no coincidence that the two countries that over the past few years embraced the policies of neoliberalism with most fervour – the US and the UK – are among those that suffered the most casualties during the pandemic...

The pandemic is in reality a “great unequalizer"... virus acted as an amplifier...

 

Countless studies, articles and warnings have highlighting this particular risk, based on the obvious observation that when people have no jobs, no income and no prospects for a better life, they often resort to violence.

 

...acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case and there is no reason why it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic... the responses to major crises have always further consolidated the power of the state, starting with taxation... As in the past, the social rationale and political justification underlying the increases will be based upon the narrative of “countries at war” (only this time against an invisible enemy)...

 

France’s top rate of income tax was zero in 1914; a year after the end of World War I, it was 50%. Canada introduced income tax in 1917 as a “temporary” measure to finance the war, and then expanded it dramatically during World War II with a flat 20% surtax imposed on all income tax payable by persons other than corporations and the introduction of high marginal tax rates (69%). Rates came down after the war but remained substantially higher than they had been before. Similarly, during World War II, income tax in America turned from a “class tax” to a “mass tax”, with the number of payers rising from 7 million in 1940 to 42 million in 1945. The most progressive tax years in US history were 1944 and 1945, with a 94% rate applied to any income above $200,000 (the equivalent in 2009 of $2.4 million). Such top rates, often denounced as confiscatory by those who had to pay them, would not drop below 80% for another 20 years. At the end of World War II, many other countries adopted similar and often extreme tax measures. In the UK during the war, the top income tax rate rose to an extraordinarily stunning 99.25%!

At times, the sovereign power of the state to tax translated into tangible societal gains in different domains, such as the creation of a welfare system. However, these massive transitions to something entirely “new”were always defined in terms of a response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come. World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-tograve state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s.

Today the situation is fundamentally different... This is a situation that is set to change (because of covid19)... the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the complex and delicate balance between the private and public realms in favour of the latter... On the dial that measures the continuum between the government and the markets, the needle has decisively moved towards the left... Everything that comes in the post-pandemic era will lead us to rethink governments’ role...    

How will this expanded role of governments manifest itself? A significant element of new “bigger” government is already in place...

the role of the state will increase and, in doing so, will materially affect the way business is conducted...

...Today, the fundamental reasons underpinning the loss of faith in our social contracts coalesce around issues of inequality, the ineffectiveness of most redistribution policies, a sense of exclusion and marginalization, and a general sentiment of unfairness. This is why many citizens have begun to denounce a breakdown of the social contract, expressing more and more forcefully a general loss of trust in institutions and leaders. In some countries, this widespread exasperation has taken the form of peaceful or violent demonstrations; in others, it has led to electoral victories for populist and extremist parties. Whichever form it takes, in almost all cases, the establishment’s response has been left wanting – illprepared for the rebellion and out of ideas and policy levers to address the problem... the policy solutions do exist and broadly consist in adapting the welfare state to today’s world by empowering people and by responding to the demands for a fairer social contract...

... As Henry Kissinger reminded us: “The historic challenge for leaders is to manage the crisis while building the future. Failure could set the world on fire”...

...This is made all the more significant by the fact that the younger generation is likely to be more radical than the older one in refashioning our social contract. The pandemic has upended their lives, and a whole generation across the globe will be defined by economic and often social insecurity, with millions due to enter the work force in the midst of a profound recession... Already the millennials are worse off than their parents in terms of earnings, assets and wealth. They are less likely to own a home or have children than their parents were. Now, another generation (Gen Z) is entering a system that it sees as failing and that will be beset by longstanding problems revealed and exacerbated by the pandemic. As a college junior, quoted in ‘The New York Time’s, put it: “Young people have a deep desire for radical change because we see the broken path ahead.”

[...]

...structural stress that inevitably occurs when a rising power like China rivals a ruling power like the US. This confrontation will be a source of global messiness, disorder and uncertainty for years to come. Irrespective of whether one “likes” the US or not, its progressive disengagement... from the international scene is bound to increase international volatility. More and more, countries that tended to rely on global public goods provided by the US “hegemon”... will now have to tend their own backyards themselves. The 21st century will most likely be an era devoid of an absolute hegemon during which no one power gains absolute dominance – as a result, power and influence will be redistributed chaotically and in some cases grudgingly...

... If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a “global order deficit”. Unless individual nations and international organizations succeed in finding solutions to better collaborate at the global level...

...the possible unravelling of the EU, a breakdown between China and the US that leads to war: all these and many more have now become plausible (...) scenarios...

[...]

Globalization – an all-purpose word – is a broad and vague notion that refers to the global exchange between nations of goods, services, people, capital and now even data... today’s world is more interconnected than it has ever been... The global economy is so intricately intertwined that it is impossible to bring globalization to an end...

 

The trilemma suggests that the three notions of economic globalization, political democracy and the nation state are mutually irreconcilable, based on the logic that only two can effectively co-exist at any given time. Democracy and national sovereignty are only compatible if globalization is contained. By contrast, if both the nation state and globalization flourish, then democracy becomes untenable. And then, if both democracy and globalization expand, there is no place for the nation state. Therefore, one can only ever choose two out of the three – this is the essence of the trilemma. The European Union has often been used as an example to illustrate the pertinence of the conceptual framework offered by the trilemma... The vote for Brexit and the election of President Trump on a protectionist platform are two momentous markers of the Western backlash against globalization. Subsequent studies not only validate Rodrik’s trilemma, but also show that the rejection of globalization by voters is a rational response when the economy is strong and inequality is high.

... Since 2008, the drive towards greater localization has been firmly on the political agenda in many countries (particularly in the West), but it will now be accelerated in the post-pandemic era. On the right, the pushback against globalization is driven by protectionists and national-security hawks who were already gathering force before the pandemic started. Now, they will create alliances and sometimes merge with other political forces that will see the benefit of embracing an antiglobalization agenda. On the left, activists and green parties that were already stigmatizing air travel and asking for a rollback against globalization will be emboldened by the positive effect the pandemic had on our environment (far fewer carbon emissions, much less air and water pollution). Even without pressure from the far right and the green activists, many governments will realize that some situations of trade dependency are no longer politically acceptable. How can the US administration, for example, accept that 97% of antibiotics supplied in the country come from China?

 

The most likely outcome along the globalization–no globalization continuum lies in an in-between solution: regionalization. The success of the European Union as a free trade area or the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia (a proposed free trade agreement among the 10 countries that compose ASEAN) are important illustrative cases of how regionalization may well become a new watereddown version of globalization.

... The establishment of a much more inclusive and equitable form of globalization that makes it sustainable, both socially and environmentally, is the only viable way to manage retreat... This requires (...) some form of effective global governance... Progress is indeed possible in those global areas that have traditionally benefited from international cooperation, like environmental agreements, public health and tax havens... There is no time to waste. If we do not improve the functioning and legitimacy of our global institutions, the world will soon become unmanageable and very dangerous. There cannot be a lasting recovery without a global strategic framework of governance.

[<....>]

Global governance is commonly defined as the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems (those that affect more than one state or region). It encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges.

 

...without appropriate global governance, we will become paralysed in our attempts to address

and respond to global challenges...

 

...In the case of the pandemic, in contrast with other recent global crises like 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008, the global governance system failed, proving either non-existent or dysfunctional. The US went on to withdraw funding from the WHO but, no matter the underlying rationale of this decision, the fact remains that it is the only organization capable of coordinating a global response to the pandemic, which means that an albeit far from perfect WHO is infinitely preferable to a non-existent one, an argument that Bill Gates compellingly and succinctly made in a tweet: “Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.”

This failure is not the WHO’s fault. The UN agency is merely the symptom, not the cause, of global governance failure. The WHO’s deferential posture towards donor countries reflects its complete dependence on states agreeing to cooperate with it. The UN organization has no power to compel information sharing or enforce pandemic preparedness. Like other similar UN agencies, for example on human rights or climate change, the WHO is saddled with limited and dwindling resources: in 2018, it had an annual budget of $4.2 billion, miniscule in comparison to any health budget around the world. In addition, it is at the perpetual mercy of member states and has effectively no tools at its disposal to directly monitor outbreaks, coordinate pandemic planning or ensure effective preparedness implementation at the country level, let alone allocate resources to those countries most in need. This dysfunctionality is symptomatic of a broken global governance system, and the jury is out as to whether existing global governance configurations like the UN and the WHO can be repurposed to address today’s global risks. For the time being, the bottom line is this: in the face of such a vacuum in global governance, only nation states are cohesive enough to be capable of taking collective decisions, but this model doesn’t work in the case of world risks that require concerted global decisions.

The world will be a very dangerous place if we do not fix multilateral institutions. Global coordination will be even more necessary in the aftermath of the epidemiological crisis, for it is inconceivable that the global economy could “restart” without sustained international cooperation. Without it, we’ll be heading towards “a poorer, meaner and smaller world”.

[...]

Today, it is estimated that around 1.8-2 billion people lived in fragile states, a number that will certainly increase in the post-pandemic era because fragile countries are particularly vulnerable to an outbreak of COVID-19.

(...) Wealthier countries ignore the tragedy unfolding in fragile and failing countries at their peril. In one way or another, risks will reverberate through greater instability or even chaos. One of the most obvious knock-on effects for the richer parts of the world of economic misery, discontent and hunger in the most fragile and poorest states will consist in a new wave of mass migration in its direction, like those that occurred in Europe in 2016.

[...]

At first glance, the pandemic and the environment might seem to be only distantly related cousins; but they are much closer and more intertwined than we think... they are global in nature and therefore can only be properly addressed in a globally coordinated fashion...

 

In the case of the pandemic, the causation link between the virus and the disease is obvious: SARS-CoV- 2 causes COVID-19. Apart from a handful of conspiracy theorists, nobody will dispute that...

 

Zoonotic diseases are those that spread from animals to humans. Most experts and conservationists agree that they have drastically increased in recent years, particularly because of deforestation (a phenomenon also linked to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions), which augments the risk of close human– animal interaction and contamination. For many years, researchers thought that natural environments like tropical forests and their rich wildlife represented a threat to humans because this is where the pathogens and viruses at the origin of new diseases in humans such as dengue, Ebola and HIV could be found. Today, we know this is wrong because the causation goes the other way... “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.” By now, an increasing number of scientists have shown that it is in fact the destruction of biodiversity caused by humans that is the source of new viruses like COVID-19. These researchers have coalesced around the new discipline of “planetary health” that studies the subtle and complex connections that exist between the well-being of humans, other living species and entire ecosystems, and their findings have made it clear that the destruction of biodiversity will increase the number of pandemics.

In a recent letter to the US Congress, 100 wildlife and environmental groups estimate that zoonotic diseases have quadrupled over the past 50 years... As human activities like agriculture (with many others like mining, logging or tourism) encroach on natural ecosystems, they break down the barriers between human populations and animals, creating the conditions for infectious diseases to emerge by spilling from animals to humans... Nowadays, most scientists would agree that the greater population growth is, the more we disturb the environment, the more intensive farming becomes without adequate biosecurity, the higher the risk of new epidemics. To do this effectively, it will be incumbent on us all to rethink our relationship with nature and question why we have become so alienated from it...

 

As early as 2003, a study published in the midst of the SARS epidemic suggested that air pollution might explain the variation in the level of lethality, making it clear for the first time that the greater the level of air pollution, the greater the likelihood of death from the disease caused by a coronavirus... In the US, a recent medical paper concluded that those regions with more polluted air will experience higher risks of death from COVID-19, showing that US counties with higher pollution levels will suffer higher numbers of hospitalizations and numbers of deaths... This may explain why people in Lombardy (one of Europe’s most polluted regions) who had contracted the virus were shown to be twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than people almost anywhere else in Italy.

 

It is too early to define the amount by which global carbon dioxide emissions will fall in 2020, but the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates in its Global Energy Review 2020 that they will fall by 8%. Even though this figure would correspond to the largest annual reduction on record, it is still miniscule compared to the size of the problem and it remains inferior to the annual reduction in emissions of 7.6% over the next decade that the UN thinks is necessary to hold the global rise in temperatures below 1.5°C.

 

Considering the severity of the lockdowns, the 8% figure looks rather disappointing. It seems to suggest that small individual actions (consuming much less, not using our cars and not flying)

are of little significance when compared to the size of emissions generated by electricity, agriculture and industry, the “big-ticket emitters” that continued to operate during the lockdowns (with the

partial exception of some industries). What it also reveals is that the biggest “offenders” in terms of carbon emissions aren’t always those often perceived as the obvious culprits. A recent sustainability report shows that the total carbon emissions generated by the electricity production required to power our electronic devices and transmit their data are roughly equivalent to that of the global airline industry. The conclusion? Even unprecedented and draconian lockdowns with a third of the world population confined to their homes for more than a month came nowhere near to being a viable decarbonization strategy because, even so, the world economy kept emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide. What then might such a strategy look like? The considerable size and scope of the challenge can only be addressed by a combination of: 1) a radical and major systemic change in how we produce the energy we need to function; and 2) structural changes in our consumption behaviour. If, in the postpandemic era, we decide to resume our lives just as before (by driving the same cars, by flying to the same destinations, by eating the same things, by heating our house the same way, and so on), the COVID-19 crisis will have gone to waste as far as climate policies are concerned. Conversely, if some of the habits we were forced to adopt during the pandemic translate into structural changes in behaviour, the climate outcome might be different. Commuting less, working remotely a bit more, bicycling and walking instead of driving to keep the air of our cities as clean as it was during the lockdowns, vacationing nearer to home: all these, if aggregated at scale, could lead to a sustained reduction in carbon emissions...

 

... Governments led by enlightened leaders will make their stimulus packages conditional upon green commitments. They will, for example, provide more generous financial conditions for companies with low-carbon business models...

... Having worried for months about the pandemic and its effect on our lungs, we’ll become obsessed about clean air; during the lockdowns, a significant number of us saw and smelled for ourselves the benefits of reduced air pollution, possibly prompting a collective realization that we just have a few years to address the worst consequences of global warming and climate change. If this is the case, societal (collective and individual) changes will follow...

... Change in behaviour.  As a consequence of the point above, societal attitudes and demands may evolve towards greater sustainability to a greater degree than commonly assumed. Our consumption patterns changed dramatically during the lockdowns by forcing us to focus on the essential and giving us no choice but to adopt “greener living”. This may last, prompting us to disregard everything that we do not really need, and putting into motion a virtuous circle for the environment. Likewise, we may decide that working from home (when possible) is good for both the environment and our individual well-being (commuting is a “destroyer” of well-being – the longer it is, the more detrimental it becomes to our physical and mental health). These structural changes in how we work, consume and invest may take a little while before they become widespread enough to make a real difference but, as we argued before, what matters is the direction and the strength of the trend. The poet and philosopher Lao Tzu was right in saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” We are just at the beginning of a long and painful recovery and, for many of us, thinking about sustainability may seem like a luxury but when things start to improve we’ll collectively remember that a relation of causality exists between air pollution and COVID-19...

 

... Many governments are starting to act, but much more is needed to tip the system towards a nature-positive new norm and make a majority of people all over the world realize this is not only an imperious necessity but also a considerable opportunity...

 

...Hopefully, the threat from COVID-19 won’t last. One day, it will be behind us. By contrast, the threat from climate change and its associated extreme weather events will be with us for the foreseeable future and beyond. The climate risk is unfolding more slowly than the pandemic did, but it will have even more severe consequences. To a great extent, its severity will depend on the policy response to the pandemic. Every measure destined to revive economic activity will have an immediate effect on how we live, but will also have an impact on carbon emissions that will in turn have an environmental impact across the globe and measured across generations...

 

 

Technological reset.

 

When it was published in 2016, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”... In the four short years since, technological progress has moved impressively fast. AI is now all around us, from drones and voice recognition to virtual assistants and translation software. Our mobile devices have become a permanent and integral part of our personal and professional lives, helping us on many different fronts, anticipating our needs,listening to us and locating us, even when not asked to do so...

Automation and robots are reconfiguring the way businesses operate with staggering speed and returns on scale inconceivable just a few years ago. Innovation in genetics, with synthetic biology now on the horizon, is also exciting, paving the way for developments in healthcare that are groundbreaking. Biotechnology still falls short of stopping, let alone preventing, a disease outbreak, but recent innovations have allowed the identification and sequencing of the coronavirus’ genome much faster than in the past, as well as the elaboration of more effective diagnostics. In addition, the most recent biotechnology techniques using RNA and DNA platforms make it possible to develop vaccines faster than ever...

...It will also accentuate one of the greatest societal and individual challenges posed by tech: privacy. We will see how contact tracing has an unequalled capacity and a quasi essential place in the armoury needed to combat COVID-19, while at the same time being positioned to become an enabler of mass surveillance.

 

... almost instantly, most things became “e-things”: e-learning, e-commerce, egaming, e-books, e-attendance. Some of the old habits will certainly return (the joy and pleasure of personal contacts can’t be matched – we are social animals after all!)... If health considerations become paramount, we may decide, for example, that a cycling class in front of a screen at home doesn’t match the conviviality and fun of doing it with a group in a live class but is in fact safer (and cheaper!). The same reasoning applies to many different domains like flying to a meeting (Zoom is safer, cheaper, greener and much more convenient), driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend (the WhatsApp family group is not as fun but, again, safer, cheaper and greener) or even attending an academic course (not as fulfilling, but cheaper and more convenient).

 

This transition towards more digital “of everything” in our professional and personal lives will also be supported and accelerated by regulators... What was until recently unthinkable suddenly became possible...  new regulations will stay in place... there are no holds barred...

 

In one form or another, social- and physical-distancing measures are likely to persist after the pandemic itself subsides, justifying the decision in many companies from different industries to accelerate automation... Indeed, automation technologies are particularly well suited to a world in which human beings can’t get too close to each other or are willing to reduce their interactions. Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus (COVID-19 or another) will thus speed the relentless march of automation, particularly in the fields most susceptible to automation. In 2016, two academics from Oxford University came to the conclusion that up to 86% of jobs in restaurants, 75% of jobs in retail and 59% of jobs in entertainment could be automatized by 2035. These three industries are among those the hardest hit by the pandemic and in which automating for reasons of hygiene and cleanliness will be a necessity that in turn will further accelerate the transition towards more tech and more digital. There is an additional phenomenon set to support the expansion of automation: when “economic distancing” might follow social distancing. As countries turn inward and global companies shorten their super-efficient but highly fragile supply chains, automation and robots that enable more local production, while keeping costs down, will be in great demand.

The process of automation was set in motion many years ago, but the critical issue once again relates to the accelerating pace of change and transition: the pandemic will fast-forward the adoption of automation in the workplace and the introduction of more robots in our personal and professional lives. From the onset of the lockdowns, it became apparent that robots and AI were a “natural” alternative when human labour was not available. Furthermore, they were used whenever possible to reduce the health risks to human employees. At a time when physical distancing became an obligation, robots were deployed in places as different as warehouses, supermarkets and hospitals in a broad range of activities, from shelf scanning (an area in which AI has made tremendous forays) to cleaning and of course robotic delivery – a soon-to-be important component of healthcare supply chains that will in turn lead to the “contactless” delivery of groceries and other essentials. As for many other technologies that were on the distant horizon in terms of adoption (like telemedicine), businesses, consumers and public authorities are now rushing to turbocharge the speed of adoption. In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programmes to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air. Chinese e-commerce giants like Alibaba and jd.com are confident that, in the coming 12-18 months, autonomous delivery could become widespread in China – much earlier than anticipated prior to the pandemic.

 

An important lesson can be learned from the countries that were more effective in dealing with the pandemic (in particular Asian nations): technology in general and digital in particular help. Successful contact tracing proved to be a key component of a successful strategy against COVID-19... A tracking app gains insights in real time by, for example, determining a person’s current location through geodata via GPS coordinates or radio cell location. By contrast, tracing consists in gaining insights in retrospect, like identifying physical contacts between people using Bluetooth...

 

It comes as no surprise that digital tracing has become one of the most sensitive issues in terms of public health, raising acute concerns about privacy around the world. In the early phases of the pandemic, many countries (mostly in East Asia but also others like Israel) decided to implement digital tracing under different forms. They shifted from the retroactive tracing of chains of past contagion to the real-time tracking of movements in order to confine a person infected by COVID-19 and to enforce subsequent quarantines or partial lockdowns. From the outset, China, Hong Kong SAR and South Korea implemented coercive and intrusive measures of digital tracing. They took the decision to track individuals without their consent, through their mobile and credit card data, and even employed video surveillance (in South Korea). In addition, some economies required the mandatory wearing of electronic bracelets for travel arrivals and people in quarantine (in Hong Kong SAR) to alert those individuals susceptible of being infected...

 

... No voluntary contract-tracing app will work if people are unwilling to provide their own personal data to the governmental agency that monitors the system...

 

Today, about 5.2 billion smartphones exist in the world, each with the potential to help identify who is infected, where and often by whom...

 

As the coronavirus crisis recedes and people start returning to the workplace, the corporate move will be towards greater surveillance; for better or for worse, companies will be watching and sometimes recording what their workforce does. The trend could take many different forms, from measuring body temperatures with thermal cameras to monitoring via an app how employees comply with social distancing... simply because employers don’t have any incentive to remove a surveillance system once it’s been installed, particularly if one of the indirect benefits of surveillance is to check on employees’ productivity.

This is what happened after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. All around the world, new security measures like employing widespread cameras, requiring electronic ID cards and logging employees or visitors in and out became the norm. At that time, these measures were deemed extreme, but today they are used everywhere and considered “normal”. An increasing number of analysts, policy-makers and security specialists fear the same will now happen with the tech solutions put into place to contain the pandemic. They foresee a dystopian world ahead of us.

 

Surveillance technology is developing at breakneck speed, and what seemed science-fiction 10 years ago is today old news. As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analysed by government algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been, and who you have met. The chains of infection could be drastically shortened, and even cut altogether. Such a system could arguably stop the epidemic in its tracks within days. Sounds wonderful, right? The downside is, of course, that this would give legitimacy to a terrifying new surveillance system. If you know, for example, that I clicked on a Fox News link rather than a CNN link, that can teach you something about my political views and perhaps even my personality. But if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heartrate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry. It is crucial to remember that anger, joy, boredom and love are biological phenomena just like fever and a cough. The same technology that identifies coughs could also identify laughs. If corporations and governments start harvesting our biometric data en masse, they can get to know us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not just predict our feelings but also manipulate our feelings and sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician. Biometric monitoring would make Cambridge Analytica’s data hacking tactics look like something from the Stone Age. Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day. If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for.

 

...the Great Reset will entail a long and complex series of changes and adaptation... a return to business as usual. This won’t happen because it can’t happen...

 

In the pre-pandemic era, the buzz of ”digital transformation” was the mantra of most boards and executive committees. Digital was “key”, it had to be “resolutely” implemented and was seen as a “precondition to success”! Since then, in the space of just a few months, the mantra has become a must – even, in the case of some companies, a question of life or death. This is explicable and understandable. During confinement, we depended entirely on the Net for most things: from work and education to socialization. It is the online services that allowed us to keep a semblance of normalcy, and it is only natural that “online” should be the largest beneficiary of the pandemic, giving a tremendous boost to technologies and processes that enable us to do things remotely: universal broadband internet, mobile and remote payments, and workable e-government services, among others. As a direct consequence, businesses that were already operating online are bound to benefit from a lasting competitive advantage. As more and diverse things and services are brought to us via our mobiles and computers, companies in sectors as disparate as ecommerce, contactless operations, digital content, robots and drone deliveries (to name just a few) will thrive. It is not by accident that firms like Alibaba, Amazon, Netflix or Zoom emerged as “winners” from the lockdowns.

 

... During the peak of the pandemic, O2O – online to offline – gained major traction, highlighting the importance of having both an online and offline presence... This new reality is captured in the market capitalization of Zoom (the videoconferencing company) that skyrocketed to $70 billion in June 2020, higher (at that time) than that of any US airline. Concurrently, large online companies like Amazon and Alibaba expanded decisively in the O2O business, particularly in food retailing and logistics.

 

In the post-pandemic era, business will be subject to much greater government interference than in the past... Better alignment between public policy and corporate planning will be a particular focus of attention in terms of greater government interference...

 

stakeholder capitalism and environmental, social and governance (ESG)...

 

The conviction that ESG strategies benefited from the pandemic and are most likely to benefit further is corroborated by various surveys and reports. Early data shows that the sustainability sector outperformed conventional funds during the first quarter of 2020. According to Morningstar, which compared first-quarter returns for more than 200 sustainability equity funds and exchange traded funds, the sustainable funds performed better by one percentage point or two, on a relative basis. A report from BlackRock offers further evidence that companies with strong ESG ratings outperformed their peers during the pandemic. Several analysts suggested that this outperformance might simply have reflected the reduced exposure to fossil fuels of ESG funds and strategies, but BlackRock asserts that ESG compliant companies (another way to say that they adhere to the principle of stakeholder capitalism) tend to be more resilient because of their holistic understanding of risk management. It seems that the more susceptible the world becomes to a broad set of macro risks and issues, the greater the necessity to embrace stakeholder capitalism and ESG strategies.

The debate between those who believe that stakeholder capitalism will be sacrificed on the altar of the recovery and those who argue that it is now time to “build back better” is far from resolved. For every Michael O’Leary (the CEO of Ryanair) who thinks that COVID-19 will put ESG considerations “on the back burner for a few years”, there is a Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) who is committed to transforming his business into a “stakeholder company”.  However, irrespective of anybody’s opinion about the merits of stakeholder capitalism and ESG strategies and their future role in the post-pandemic era, activism will make a difference by reinforcing the trend. Social activists and many activist investors will scrutinize closely how companies behaved during the pandemic crisis. It is likely that the markets or the consumers, or both, will punish those companies that performed poorly on social issues.

 

...In France and the UK, several industry voices estimate that up to 75% of independent restaurants might not survive the lockdowns and subsequent social-distancing measures. The large chains and fast-food giants will. This in turn suggests that big businesses will get bigger while the smallest shrink or disappear. A large restaurant chain, for example, has a better chance of staying operational as it benefits from more resources and, ultimately, less competition in the wake of bankruptcies among smaller outfits. The small restaurants that survive the crisis will have to reinvent themselves entirely...

At the other end of the size spectrum, some very large companies will fall victim to the same predicament as the very small ones. Airline companies, in particular, will face similar constraints in terms of consumer demand and social-distancing rules. The three-month shutdown has left carriers around the world with a cataclysmic situation of virtually zero revenues...  consumption habits may change permanently. If many businesses decide to travel less to reduce costs and to replace physical meetings by virtual ones whenever possible, the impact on the recovery and ultimate profitability of airlines may be dramatic and lasting. ..

 

Airports face the same challenges as airlines: the less people fly, the less they transit via airports. This in turn affects the level of consumption in the various shops and restaurants that make up the ecosystem of all international airports throughout the world. Furthermore, the experience of airports in a post-COVID-19 world, involving longer waiting times, highly restricted or even no hand luggage and other potentially inconvenient social-distancing measures, could erode the consumer desire to travel by air for pleasure and leisure...

 

Three industries in particular will flourish (in aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness...  

 

Resilience like all good practice begins at home with us, so we can fairly assume that, in the post-pandemic era, we will become collectively more aware of the importance of our own physical and mental resilience. The desire, driven by greater necessity, to feel physically and mentally well and the need to strengthen our immune system mean that well-being and those sectors of the wellness industry positioned to help deliver them will emerge as strong winners. Also, the role of public health will evolve and expand. Well-being has to be addressed holistically; we cannot be individually well in a world that is unwell. Therefore, planetary care will be as important as personal care, an equivalence that strongly supports the promotion of principles we previously discussed, like stakeholder capitalism, the circular economy and ESG strategies. At the company level where the health effects of environmental degradation are increasingly clear, issues like air pollution, water management and respect for biodiversity will become paramount. Being “clean” will be an industry imperative as well as an imperious necessity imposed by the consumer.

 

If history is any guide, natural disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, bring people together, while pandemics do the opposite: they drive them apart. (...)By contrast, pandemics are longer-lasting, prolonged events that often elicit ongoing feelings of distrust (vis-à-vis others) rooted in a primal fear of dying. Psychologically, the most important consequence of the pandemic is to generate a phenomenal amount of uncertainty that often becomes a source of angst. We do not know what tomorrow will bring (Will there be another wave of COVID-19? Will it affect people I love? Will I keep my job?) and such a lack of surety makes us uneasy and troubled.

As human beings, we crave certainty, hence the need for “cognitive closure”, anything that can help erase the uncertainty and ambiguity that paralyse our ability to function “normally”.

[...]

Will COVID-19 result in people withdrawing into themselves, or will it nourish their innate sense of empathy and collaboration, encouraging them towards greater solidarity? The examples of previous pandemics are not very encouraging, but this time there is a fundamental difference: we are all collectively aware that without greater collaboration, we will be unable to address the global challenges that we collectively face. Put in the simplest possible terms: if, as human beings, we do not collaborate to confront our existential challenges (the environment and the global governance free fall, among others), we are doomed. Thus, we have no choice but to summon up the better angels of our nature.

 

Like all notions of moral philosophy, the idea of common good is elusive and contestable. Since the pandemic started, it has provoked furious debates about whether to use a utilitarian calculus when trying to tame the pandemic or to stick to the sacrosanct principle of sanctity of life.

Nothing crystallizes the issue of ethical choice more than the debate that raged during the initial lockdowns about the trade-off between public health and the hit to growth. As we said earlier, almost all economists have debunked the myth that sacrificing a few lives will save the economy but, irrespective of these experts’ judgement, the debate and arguments went on. In the US in particular but not exclusively, some policy-makers took the line that it was justifiable to value the economy over life, endorsing a policy choice that would have been unimaginable in Asia or Europe, where such pronouncements would have been tantamount to committing political suicide. (This realization probably explains UK Prime Minister Johnson’s hasty retreat from an initial policy advocating herd immunity, often portrayed by experts and the media as an example of social Darwinism). The prioritization of business over life has a long tradition, running from the merchants of Siena during the Great Plague to those of Hamburg who tried to conceal the cholera outbreak of 1892. However, it seems almost incongruous that it would remain alive today, with all the medical knowledge and scientific data we have at our disposal. The argument put forward by some groups like “Americans for Prosperity” is that recessions kill people. This, while undoubtedly true, is a fact that is itself rooted in policy choices informed by ethical considerations. In the US, recessions do indeed kill a lot of people because the absence or limited nature of any social safety net makes them life-threatening. How? When people lose their jobs with no state support and no health

insurance, they tend to “die of despair” through suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism, as shown and extensively analysed by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Economic recessions also provoke deaths outside of the US, but policy choices in terms of health insurance and worker protection can ensure that there are considerably fewer. This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.

[...]

 

For years now, an epidemic of mental health has engulfed much of the world. The pandemic has already made it worse and will continue to do so.

(...) For many people, traversing the COVID-19 pandemic will be defined as living a personal trauma (...) For months, COVID-19 became almost the only news, news that was inevitably almost exclusively bad. Relentless reports of deaths, infectious cases and all the other things that might go wrong, together with emotionally charged images, allowed our collective imaginations to run riot in terms of worry about ourselves and our closest loved ones. Such an alarming atmosphere had disastrous effects on our mental well-being. Furthermore, media-amplified anxiety can be very contagious. (...)                For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era.

[...]

Much has already been written about the way in which the pandemic might change us –how we think about things and how we do things. (...) COVID-19 may compel us to address our inner problems in ways we would not have previously considered. We may start asking ourselves some fundamental questions that would never have arisen without the crisis and the lockdowns, and by doing so reset our mental map. (...) the pandemic provided an opportunity to think more deeply about who we are, what really matters and what we want, both as individuals and as a society. This period of enforced collective reflection could give rise to a change in behaviour that will in turn trigger a more profound reconsideration of our beliefs and convictions. This could result in a shift in our priorities that would in turn affect our approach to many aspects of our everyday lives: how we socialize, take care of our family members and friends, exercise, manage our health, shop, educate our children, and even how we see our position in the world. Increasingly, obvious questions may come to the fore, like: Do we know what is important? Are we too selfish and overfocused on ourselves? Do we give too great a priority and excessive time to our career? Are we slaves to consumerism? In the post-pandemic era, thanks to the pause for thought it offered some of us, our responses may well have evolved as compared to what our pre-pandemic selves might have answered. (...)The reset: in the

post-pandemic era, we might have a different appreciation of time, pursuing it for greater happiness.

 

Neuroscientists, psychologists, medical doctors, biologists and microbiologists, specialists of physical performance, economists, social scientists: all in their respective fields can now explain why nature makes us feel good, how it eases physical and psychological pain and why it is associated with so many benefits in terms of physical and mental well-being. Conversely, they can also show why being separated from nature in all its richness and variety – wildlife, trees, animals and plants – negatively affects our minds, our bodies, our emotional lives and our mental health.

 

Yet, two other essential factors that are strongly contingent upon our exposure to nature also play a vital role in our physical resilience to the virus: immunity and inflammation. Both contribute to protecting us, but immunity decreases with age, while inflammation increases. To improve our chances of resisting the virus, immunity must be boosted and inflammation suppressed. What part does nature play in this scenario? She is the leading lady, the science now tells us! The low-level of constant inflammation experienced by our bodies leads to all sorts of diseases and disorders, ranging from cardiovascular conditions to depression and reduced immune capabilities. This residual inflammation is more prevalent among people who live in cities, urban environments and industrialized areas. It is now established that a lack of connection with nature is a contributing factor to greater inflammation, with studies showing that just two hours spent in a forest can alleviate inflammation by lowering cytokine levels (a marker of inflammation). (...) Ample research shows that together with nature, diet and physical exercise can slow, even sometimes reverse, our biological decline. There is nothing fatalistic about it! Exercise, nature, unprocessed food...

[...]

 

Could the COVID-19 debacle be the lightning before the thunder? Could it have the force to ignite a series of profound changes? We cannot know what the world will be like in 10 months time, even less what it will resemble in 10 years from now, but what we do know is that unless we do something to reset today’s world, tomorrow’s will be profoundly stricken. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s  Chronicle of a Death Foretold, an entire village foresees a looming catastrophe, and yet none of the villagers seem able or willing to act to prevent it, until it’s too late. We do not want to be that village. To avoid such a fate, without delay we need to set in motion the Great Reset. This is not a “nice-to-have” but an absolute necessity. Failing to address and fix the deep-rooted ills of our societies and economies could heighten the risk that, as throughout history, ultimately a reset will be imposed by violent shocks like conflicts and even revolutions. It is incumbent upon us to take the bull by the horns. The pandemic gives us this chance: it “represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world”.

[...]

A very real risk exists that tomorrow the world will be even more divided, nationalistic and prone to conflicts than it is today. Many of the trends reviewed in the macro section suggest that, moving into the future, our world will be less open and less cooperative than before the pandemic. But an alternative scenario is possible, one in which collective action within communities and greater

collaboration between nations enable a more rapid and peaceful exit from the corona crisis. As economies restart, there is an opportunity to embed greater societal equality and sustainability into the recovery, accelerating rather than delaying progress towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and unleashing a new era of prosperity. What could make this possible and raise the probability odds in favour of such an outcome?

 

These expressions of individual hope are supported by a multitude of surveys concluding that we collectively desire change. They range from a poll in the UK showing that a majority of people want to fundamentally alter the economy as it recovers, in contrast to one-fourth wanting it to return to how it was, to international surveys finding that a large majority of citizens around the world want the economic recovery from the corona crisis to prioritize climate change and to support a green recovery. Worldwide, movements demanding a “better future” and calling for a shift to an economic system that prioritizes our collective well-being over mere GDP growth are proliferating.”