The Great Humbling – Can we afford an economic recovery?

In the early weeks of the Coronavirus crisis and the extraordinary rupture of the everyday that it represents, Ed Gillespie and Dougald Hine set out to explore what it means to be humbled.

You can hear the rising chatter: the bubbling of ‘back to normal’, the stimulus packages, the business resurrection plans, the recovery that everyone is longing for, and at the heart of it the sense that economic growth is the answer. But is it? Perhaps the biggest sacred cow, so deeply embedded culturally as to be unquestionable, is ready to be de-pedestalled?

 

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  1. Iain Miller says:

    People before profit!

  2. Craig Binns says:

    Depedestal the embedded sacred cow. Our slogan for the future.

  3. john w shaw says:

    This pandemic has shown once and for all that Capitalism economics can not and will not sustain the human race. Global organisations need now to seriously start looking for new models for humans to live by?

    1. Wul says:

      I’ve noticed a trend in recent news broadcasts where examples of “business” producing innovative technology has created solutions that might save us. (e.g. Mercedes producing a new type of ventilator)

      There’s a narrative being built that ” it’s business wot won it”. We should be alert to this and be producing and promoting a counter narrative that explains that it’s compassion, love, empathy and the willingness to strive to help each other that protect us.

  4. Sandy Watson says:

    It’s no secret that private corporate interests collaborate in a way that society’s broader social interests could only dream of.

    That alone is an indicator of how things will be shaped once this infernal virus thing is being dealt with (whether it ‘goes away’ os is with us for the foreseeable future.

    Numerous small organisations, think tanks, pressure groups, activists and small political parties want something very different, but it’s hard to see how that can even get close to not being overwhelmed by the forces of greed and exploitation, and the resources that they can bring to the matter.

    And that’s to deal with a public that has demonstrated a desire not to to change too much, not to have their quiet little wage-slave lives upset – even it meant we’d all be the better for it.

    And then there’s the general malaises of apathy and lethargy.

    You’d think a massive global catastrophe might get people moving, eh. I don’t see it.

  5. Josef Ó Luain says:

    Given the fact that nobody has the inside-track on the pandemic and that gloomy opinions abound, here’s mine:
    The outcomes of C19 will have everything to do with it’s duration, I feel. Everyone would welcome a “golden-bullet” vaccine, for example, but the fragmentation of the global research-effort thus far doesn’t bode well for such a thing in the coming weeks.

    Copyright and property considerations along with the interests of rentier capitalists and relative national wealth might also, by the logic of markets, lead to a privileged distribution amongst those in a position to pay for the “wonder-drug”, excluding, by default, the vast majority of souls on the planet. The possible weaponisation of such a drug/drugs shouldn’t be dismissed, either.

    Capitalism, in any prolonged state of lock-down which seriously curtails its activities, must inevitably enter a period of stasis wherein its survival will depend entirely on an ability to mutate. Whether or not Big Pharma, Wall Street or the City of London possess the collective ability to mutate, remains to be seen, of course. The demise of capitalism would be mourned by some, whilst many others would rejoice in it’s passing. With both feet firmly planted in the latter camp, I would be grateful, nonetheless, of the technological bequeathment that the system would leave to the world. An unintentionally, ironically gifted “bag-of-seeds” with which to plant and grow the new future in its absence.

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