Great Reset

The Great Reset: How The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Re-Shaped Our Collective Future

The Ambidextrous Economist has been like you’ve been over the past year or so: sheltered inside, stuggling, trying to come to grips with this ‘new abnormal’. But there are now ample vaccines available in the United States, some states are even lowering the number of vaccines they require .

But in the world at large, there are hotspots such as India and Brazil that are currently undergoing blights of infection that represent another wave of suffering and death. There’s no telling when we’ll be back to ‘normal’, and the notion that some normalcy is going to return is cause for reconsideration. The world may never go back to the normal we once took for granted, where communicable disease isn’t omnipresent as a salient threat to our mortality.

But it’s also worth thinking about the few changes in the way we go about our daily life and how that might allow us to better cope with our surroundings. Somewhere someone came up with the idea that the pandemic has been a hard reboot if not a complete reconfiguration of the way things just are; the Great Reset, as it were. And that’s an exciting after-effect of the death and destruction that has swept the world over. You are, after all, a survivor.

Economics teaches us about financial ramifications, to be sure, but it also teaches us of the social ramifications of our actions and our lifestyles. Some of us needed to rethink the way we generally go about ourselves. In the U.S., we were fat, unhappy, and generally going through a thing that had lasted about as long as the last administration (small ‘a’) lasted.

We know that pain and suffering is a part of life. It’s unfortunate. But as Curtis Jackson aptly pointed out, “Sunny days wouldn’t be so special if it wasn’t for rain.” And like a cleansing spring shower, some figments of normalcy have returned. Yes, we’re still wearing masks (hopefully). And we’re learning to give each other the personal space that we probably already should’ve been giving each other. But seasonal flu was curbed as a result of masks, leaving us with just pause for reflection about the way we were living.

In America, work was the end-all, be-all of everything. That’s wrong. No one is put here to increase the GDP of their nation. Nations are a construct, much like social norms, and they exist to both the betterment and detriment of our world community. There are lines in the sand, to be sure, but there are also those same imaginary lines that human beings have been killing each other over since the beginning of time. That’s not to say we should be all peace and love and flower children (counterpoint), but we should give these mechanizations their due consideration. We are more alike than we are different. At least in origin and organically.

The development of things like currency and material wealth should not be our guiding principle. Ultimately, we’re here to help each other. The Ambidextrous Economist believes this. If you help someone, you help yourself. You feel better. Some would argue on a philosophical level that ‘altruism’ in its purest form does not exist for this very reason. The fact of the matter is that doing things for the betterment of society are not an either-or, subject to a black-and-white fallacy, or some zero-sum game that needs to be ‘won’. And the simple truth is utility is a bountiful power that transcends earthly bounds and begins to get all gushy and emotionally laden stuff that veers into the realm of the spiritual. You don’t have to make a bunch of widgets to enjoy those utils. You can kind of just absorb the beautiful things that nature offers and use that energy to lead a fulfilling life.

Economics is “the dismal science” for a reason. It’s fundamental assumption, flawed as it may be, says we live in a world of scarcity. It has a bunch of charts and graphs and has a depersonalizing way of reducing real, living folks into numbers. But it’s also about the decisions humans make, as individuals, as groups, and society at-large, that can lead to the kind of scientific advances that alleviate the suffering and pain we all encounter at times.

The pandemic is already revealing itself to show how numbers move on a broad scale, from the levels of carbon emissions reduced from large-scale lockdowns, to the improvements in medicine and science, and yes, the markets. We’re learning lots, but most of these things we already knew. The WAY we were living was unsustainable.

The earth is not here to pillage. The earth is our mother. So, this Mother’s Day, see if you can’t learn from her. Remember back to when you were a teenager and thought you knew everything. Mother knows best.

For those in the workforce, think about talking to your employer seriously about how we’ve been able to maintain work-from-home in a great many different occupations through these trying times. The resilience of the human spirit is unbounded with the tools we’ve been given. It’s high time we started acting like we live in a world of abundance.

— AE 5.9.2021