Why Covid 19 is a Wake UP Call for All of Us.
By: Frank Parker
Tags: Economics, Leisure Industries, Environmental Issues, Covid 19, Politics

Why Covid 19 is a Wake UP Call for All of Us.

It’s time to re-evaluate our priorities for the economy of the future.

Even in paradise work is inevitable. Image from Alexis Antonio at Unsplash

It is a while since I wrote that the Covid 19 pandemic should be seen as a wake up call for the travel and hospitality industries. Four and a half months on, and the stuttering attempts to revive the sector are demonstrating the truth of my assertion.

I believe that the importance attached to this business sector, and the wider sports and leisure industry, is symptomatic of the extent to which we in the developed world have lost touch with what matters. Maybe the pandemic is providing a wake up call for all of us.

Perhaps a return to the basics of ‘Economics 101’ will help readers to understand how I have arrived at this conclusion.

Imagine yourself alone in some mythical Eden, a deserted island. You need food and water. Fortunately there are abundant fruiting plants and a sparkling stream. Everything you need. Except, in order to benefit from this abundance, you have to do some work. The water has to be collected, the fruits gathered.

In time, the fruiting season for the plants will pass. Lack of rain may cause the stream to dry up. You have to work harder to find essential food and water. And you realise that you need protection from the sun, from predators, or from storms that arise from time to time. Life is no longer quite so idyllic. Your survival depends on the exertion of a great deal of effort.

You have learned the first rule of basic economics: nothing of use to mankind’s existence can be procured without the expenditure of human effort.

Expand this metaphor from the single individual to a family. There are family members who are not able to perform every task that needs to be undertaken to ensure their continuing survival. They are too old or too young. You have to shoulder the burden of carrying out all of the work required to meet their basic needs. You have to produce a surplus over and above what is needed for your own personal survival.

The good thing is that there are family members who can take on at least some of the burden. Between you, by working together, you can ensure the survival of the group.

As time passes you realise that there are occasions when the materials you need are in abundant supply and others when they not available. The fruit rots on the trees, changes in the weather, over the course of a year, mean that your need for shelter and clothing is greater at some times of the year than at others.

You are starting to learn rule two of basic economic survival: the need to preserve any temporary surplus to provide for the hard times.

Now expand the number of people involved to a community. For the sake of argument assume that the island is large enough to provide for the needs of all members of the community. Each family, acting independently, produces what they need. Some families occupy a space that is close to all of the materials they require.

Some are further from those resources. In order to meet their needs, they find it necessary to encroach on the space occupied by one of the other families. There ensues a dispute about who should have access to the resource that both need. If the community does not act to resolve the dispute peacefully, the disagreement will escalate to the ultimate disadvantage of the whole community.

Rule three of basic economics: there are practical limits to how many people can survive on a small island.

Rule four: competition leads to the demise of the weakest; co-operation ensures the survival of all, so long as proper regard is paid to rule three.

Enough, then, about the realities of life on an imaginary paradise island. We have a whole planet at our disposal. We have evolved a range of technologies and working methods that ensure each of us who is able bodied can produce far more than he or she needs. In fact, we regularly produce enormous surpluses.

We have organised ourselves into nation states centred around areas of land and the resources on and under that land. For some such nation states the volume of resources available is insufficient to meet the needs of all of their population. They strive to obtain access to the abundance available in other lands. As in the basic case of a few families struggling to survive on a small island, such disputes can be resolved by co-operation and by sharing. If not, war ensues.

Throughout what we choose to call the civilised world, we debate, through the exercise of democracy, the most desirable way of distributing the surpluses that we have created. Or we do in theory.

In practice, there is a cacophony of voices telling us that, rather than use our surplus for the benefit of the young, old, sick and disabled citizens of our nation states, we should use it for our own pleasure.

We should indulge our addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling, not use some of our surplus to help those whose lands are not as blessed as ours with natural resources.

In stead of setting some of the surplus aside for the time when the resources available to us are depleted, we should use the surplus to increase our pleasure.

Rule five: there will always be droughts. There will always be storms, hurricanes, earthquakes. Plagues of voracious insects or disease causing microbes are inevitable.

We have entered a period when all of the leisure pursuits listed above place us in danger, beyond those dangers we already know yet ignore.

A new danger, related to the fact that most of these indulgences are performed in the presence of large crowds. And crowds, we have learned, are beloved by the virus which happily skips from one body to another unless appropriate precautions are taken.

The usual objection to this analysis is that all of these leisure activities provide employment, especially so in those places where natural resources are less readily available.

My answer to that is to point out that we are able to permit people to ‘work’ at providing us with entertainment, and all the other leisure pursuits we so love to indulge in, because most of us are doing work far in excess of what we need to do to satisfy our basic needs.

Those of us whose work is deemed essential could reduce the number of hours we work, so that the entertainers, the chefs, the waiters, the barristas and bar tenders, the airline pilots and stewards, can be redeployed into important work.

Sure, some form of retraining will be required.

Sure, there is room, still, for entertainment. Just not in crowded places.

We can, too, reduce some of those surpluses. Doing so might help avert the environmental disasters looming ahead, disasters that will make the pandemic pale into insignificance.