Post-Covid19 World May Change Forever

Never the Same Again The Statesman March 31 & April 01 2020 (I) Reflecting on the ‘interregnum’ – the uncertain interval between two regimes in ancient Rome, Antonio Gramsci wrote from a Fascist prison in 1929, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles are yet to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We are also in an interregnum – between an old familiar world that is dying and an uncertain world about to receive us. And we are seeing the dance of death by a monster, only ten-thousandth of a millimetre in size, which has already killed 26000 and claimed 6 lakh victims within a span of little more than two months, with no respite yet in sight. It has brought the entire world to a grinding halt. Its ruthless march is making no distinction between rich and poor, white and black, Asians and Americans. Along with its victims, it has sent the economies in the ICU, turned towns into ghost-towns, grounded airlines and transport systems, throttled life, scuttled businesses and sent the entire world into utter chaos under its vice-like stranglehold - as if Nature is exacting her revenge upon humanity for its greed, cruelty, and selfishness. It has disembodied our present and future and made the past lose perspective. It is forcing us to adapt to new ways of living, working, interacting and forging relationships. It is likely that these changes will become permanent by and large if and when we recover from this crisis, the kind of which the world perhaps has never seen before. Even before the coronavirus, the world we were born into was changing perceptibly. In most countries, the ruling dispensation was unable to rule through consent, and old oligarchies and ideologies were being replaced by new ones. While globalisation was giving way to renationalization, the existing global institutions were unable to forge a consensus on issues like climate change, artificial intelligence or terrorism. The futurist Jamie Metzl, who compares the pandemic to something bigger than the 9/11 that has changed our world, thinks it would be, “a convergence of the worlds of science and biology and the world of geopolitics.” Only a naïve or a diehard optimist would believe that things would be back to normal in a few weeks’ or months’ time and that our lives will resume as usual, as if nothing has happened in the interregnum. Life indeed has already changed a lot in ways that were unthinkable only a few weeks ago. We are in forced quarantine at our homes, scared out of our wits and fearful of touching another fellow human, something that has so far defined human relations. In an uncertain and unpredictable future, the only thing that can possibly be predicted with some certainty is that the world would continue to remain in the grip of severe recession for months, maybe years, that millions of jobs will be lost and the fallout of the economic and social crisis beyond the capacities of most governments to handle will fuel tremendous social and political turmoil and topple regimes across the world. As Gideon Lichfield wrote in the MIT Technology Review, “Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.” Without social distancing, the virus spread won’t slow down and the curve cannot be “flattened”. Without flattening, healthcare systems will crumble as is happening in Italy and Spain now. A report early in March by the researchers at Imperial College, London recommended enforcing extreme social distancing protocols every time 1 admissions to ICUs spike beyond a certain threshold and relax them when they fall below, to keep the pandemic in check and prevent overburdening of hospitals even in USA or UK. Their research shows that only the strictest distancing measures can prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, for which social distancing and institutional closures have to be forced some two-thirds of the time—two months on and one month off—until a vaccine becomes available. A vaccine takes minimum of 12 to 18 months, assuming that the virus does not mutate into a more virulent strain for which the odds at present don’t seem to be too high. Expanding ICU capacity does not mitigate the spread, and the pandemic will come back even if social distancing is imposed for five months at a time before relaxing. Even in the most optimistic scenario, we have to remain shut at least half the time. As Lichfield writes, “This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life.” The poorest and weakest would be the hardest hit from such disruptions. The crisis gives us the opportunity to bridge the yawning social inequities that make the poor so intensely vulnerable to such crises. The social and economic effects of a long shut-in may be devastating and catastrophic and hence unsustainable, but we have no ‘exit strategy’ at this moment of lifting the restrictions and resuming our old life. A strategy the UK Government seemed to have adapted in the beginning was to let enough people develop immunity through infection so that the virus cannot cause massive outbreaks any longer - a concept known as ‘herd immunity’. It is fraught with high risk, and the only viable alternative to the development of a vaccine is permanent behaviour changes adapted to repeated social distancing and lockdown protocols. A prolonged shutdown will force many difficult compromises affecting our socialisation which have hitherto formed the basis for our cooperation, collaboration, interdependence, and social coherence. Integral to our being, physical connectivity and reassurance of human touch are encoded into our DNAs by evolution. It is organic to our existence; deprived of it, we will face emotional, social and psychological problems. We are not programmed to live solitary lives within confined spaces, and if this becomes the new normal, we will have to redefine and reengineer our lives and its processes, rediscover and find ways to be at peace with ourselves. In short, we have to learn to go into a retreat within ourselves. One thing is almost certain, much of our life and activities are going to be virtualised, with considerable decentralisation and hence more democratisation of society if we can manage the process well. As activities, events and processes get decentralised through virtualisation, decision processes will tend to get democratised and based on consensus, leading also to political and economic decentralisation. Virtualisation may also bring global communities together and narrow down their differences. Online life, online education, work from home, e-commerce and e-entertainment are going to become the norm rather than exceptions in the posts Covid-19 world. As financial services like banking, insurance and other businesses reckon the cost-saving and other advantages in work from home modes, they will reengineer their systems and processes. In a highly disruptive process, jobs will shift across sectors, with some like tourism, hospitality and entertainment, art and sports, education and training facing the full brunt of such creative destruction which will also force these industries to adapt and adjust to the new realities. Healthcare will get better focus and funding and will hopefully become better. Free and universal healthcare along with a universal basic income to shield against possible job losses may not remain a distant dream any longer in most countries. Once online becomes the new normal for life, faster and affordable broadband may give quality internet access to everyone cutting across social strata, casting aside digital monopolies that have created the divide between digital haves and have-nots and advocated exceptionalism. 2 The response the virus has provoked in most countries and the forces and trends that have already been set in motion are likely to redefine the way of life. It would be welcome if it helps us redeem ourselves for the atrocities we have committed upon Nature by treating the concept of balance and harmony inherent in nature with utter contempt. As the forced lockdowns have gradually decongested the city roads, blue skies opened up in Beijing, Milan and other cities of the world. In Delhi, for the first time in years, particulate pollution dropped below the safe limits. In our country and in distant shores of the world, animals and birds are slowly emerging to reclaim their space hitherto appropriated by the self-seeking humans. (II) Possibly the most disagreeable consequence of the crisis would be the expanding role of the state to the detriment of individual liberties and privacy. Cutting across political ideologies, governments in countries like China, South Korea, Singapore, Italy, Israel, and Mexico, are harnessing surveillancecamera footage, mobile and credit card data to trace the movements of people and establish virus transmission chains. Digital surveillance tools are being used by governments to enforce social control, turning technologies upon their own people. China has forced its citizens to download an app in their mobiles that assigns an automatic colour code indicating their contagion risk and then determines who would be allowed in public places. The social contracts on the balance between public safety and personal privacy are getting altered irrevocably, preparing the ground for invasive institutionalised forms of snooping by the State. In what may become the new normal, the State may increasingly become a surveillance state. A crisis of this magnitude and spread cannot be handled except without the overarching authority of a centralised power, and it has necessarily enhanced the role of governments across all continents and extended their control over the economy. Even before the crisis, the world economies were slowing down, but now, all economies are falling into severe recessions. The US economy has been estimated to contract by 4% in the first quarter of 2020 and as much as 14% in the second, while the economies of the 19 Eurozone countries are predicted to shrink by 15% in the first quarter and 22% in the second. In India, the growth is estimated to plummet to 2.1% in the current fiscal. The global economic meltdown of 2008 may pale into insignificance compared to the present crisis. The time when economic activities will start expanding will depend on when the virus runs out its course, about which there is no light at the end of the tunnel yet. To prevent economic collapse and millions of job losses, governments necessarily have to intervene. The US Government has just announced a $2 trillion stimulus package worth 10% of their GDP, while the UK, France and other EU countries are promising credit guarantees worth 15% of GDP. The stimulus packages are going to boost the overall government spending to well above 40% of the GDP in advanced economies. India has so far announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore aid package for the affected people (less than 1% of GDP), which is a pittance now but likely to be boosted by more stimuli for the corporate sector which are reeling under the crisis. In an effort to thwart government and corporate bankruptcy, Central banks are cutting down interest rates globally and printing money. In India, the RBI has cut the repo rate by 0.75%, highest in a decade, and CRR by 1%, releasing additional liquidity of Rs 3.7 lakh crore. At a time when economic policymaking looks uncertain in every country, it is indeed a time for the State to act decisively. But, as The Economist points out, if history is any guide, once the crisis is over, the States are unlikely to relinquish the grounds that they have already occupied. Every past crisis had led to an expansion of the States’ capacity and enlarged its role, to 3 discharge which they needed to raise more taxes. Crises always makes States grow, and in the current pandemic, without some coercive power, they won’t be able to enforce lockdowns or prevent an impending economic collapse. Earlier the Government’s drive for compulsory Aadhar-bank account linkage prompted the Supreme Court to intervene, but without such linkage now, it would be impossible to transfer the aid money to the accounts of individual beneficiaries. The more difficult it becomes to arrest the spread of the virus, the more the State’s power increases, which meets with approval and acceptance of the citizens. They won’t mind submitting themselves to the state’s surveillance supposedly for their own good. The possibility of a near-total collapse of the economy in many countries, at least in the short run, will cause severe fiscal strains upon governments and debt crisis for the corporates, which in turn would spread the contagion across the financial sectors, with manifold increases in the non-productive assets of banks and financial institutions. Stock markets will continue to be rattled and remain volatile for a long time before settling at an equilibrium level. All this will make the governments assume more powers and control over the economy with the consent of their citizens. Initially, these powers will be claimed to be temporary, as the US President has assured that government intervention is not a government takeover and that its purpose is not to weaken but preserve the free market. But once it has tasted blood, it will be very difficult to make an almighty State give back the liberties it has appropriated from its citizens in any country. As The Economist rightly observes, “the forces encouraging governments to retain and expand economic control are stronger than the forces encouraging them to relinquish it, meaning that a “temporary” expansion of state power tends to become permanent.” Hysteresis, an effect seen in magnetism, also applies to the economy, making an event persist in the future even after its causes cease to exist. Thus, following a recession, unemployment rate may continue to rise even in a growing economy, and even if State power has been expanded only to tide over the crisis, it may be difficult to rescind such expansion. One consequence of this may be the resurgence of the public sector, reversing the trend of globalisation and destatisation. All over the world, withdrawal of the state from the ownership and distribution of the means of production has now been the norm. Massive programmes of privatisation and strategic disinvestments are driving economic reforms in almost every country, including in India. In response to the growing demands from the public, States will tend to become autarchic and the public sector also will be poised to reassert itself, assuming responsibilities like production of “strategic” commodities like medicines, medical equipment, etc. Once it expands, hysteresis may set in here too, leading to further rollback of globalisation. In their book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argued that for ensuring the liberty and rights of people, a strong state counterbalanced by a strong society is essential. While a strong state is a prerequisite to ensure law and order and deliver public services critical for empowering the citizens to make and pursue their choices in life, a strong, mobilised society is needed to “control and shackle a strong state”. In the process the country often enters a narrow corridor where state and society compete with each other, the state expanding its capacity and trying to control the society, and society in turn mobilising more and wresting more liberties from the state. A powerful state often tends to become despotic and move out of the corridor suppressing individual liberties and repressing society. The danger of this in the post Covid-19 world is very much real, and shackling this monstrous Leviathan would be one of the biggest challenges to civil societies all over the world to reclaim the hard-won individual liberties. 4 Every crisis comes with some opportunities, and Covid-19 is also no exception. The fortunes of alternative plant-based ‘vegetarian’ meat-based industries in Asian countries might surge, where the demand for pork and cattle meat has nosedived after the coronavirus outbreak. Apart from the animals, this will be good news for the planet too, since meat consumption poses a serious environmental threat as methane produced by cattle contributes significantly to global warming. The plummeting demand for oil the world is currently witnessing may usher in a healthier climate. The virus has driven home the point that a society built on greed, cruelty to animals, inequality, conspicuous consumption and waste at the cost of Nature is not sustainable and we must build a society that is based on balance, foresight and compassion before the next crisis hits us. Such a society might also ensure the improvement of workers’ conditions, with higher social protection, sick pay and other benefits, fulfilling the Marxian dream. The world has changed many times before, but the changes have always been gradual. It is changing again now, but this time it is changing abruptly, unrecognisably, in ways that will mostly be unwelcome. Perhaps the worst will still spare us. But it will not be the same world anymore. I pray that I am proved wrong. 5