The problems of maintaining a private yacht, having too little or nothing to eat, maintaining multiple properties, ability to go to a doctor when you are sick, finding eccentric loopholes to avoid paying taxes, or just not being able to save any money at all are situations that you might have faced depending on your position in the economic and geographical axis. However no matter your position in this grid, the goal for most of us remains the same, which is to go up that peak of the economic ladder which leads to more wealth and abundance. That goal has to change collectively, when we emerge out of the COVID pandemic situation and we need to start thinking now about what the new order would look like.
The problems of poverty are well known and understood. According to the UN, there has been a 36% reduction in extreme poverty (under $1.90/day) since 1990 and 16% since 2010. However, due to the on-going COVID crisis, some economists including the World Bank estimate that this trend will be reversed and projects that 40-60 million more people around the world will fall back into the extreme poverty bucket in 2020. So if we are to do right by the people who live on the margins or amidst extreme poverty, data tells us that it is imperative that we focus more on growth for them. But growth cannot mean a one-size fits all solution that has been used all the time, that one box usually focused on education or retraining people to work in tech sectors. If small American farmers are facing a debt crisis because of a reversal of government policies, the growth idea here is to not retrain them and send them into a tech sector. The right thing to do would be to go back to the policies that were working before.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Abigail Disney, granddaughter of one of the founders of the Disney company reflects on the luxuries that her family enjoyed like chartering private planes and mentions that she didn’t know what she had done to deserve that and noticed that it was her family’s way to wall off real problems present in the world. Monetary wealth also directly influences political outcomes. In this paper, the author essentially lays out the straight-forward idea that spending 100 dollars on trying to acquire political influence would be insignificant to an affluent person, where as poor people would need every cent of that money towards essential expenses. In such a world, the affluent person and the poor person don’t necessarily see eye to eye on the pressing issues facing us and those with the influence to bring out change will focus on incentives to increase the bottom line. The ugly underside of this income inequality expresses itself even in the midst of a pandemic. The larger companies which have more political influence got the bulk of the public bailout money compared to small businesses. After giving one round of stimulus checks for 1200 dollars, the administration is debating whether a second round of stimulus checks are still needed as the unemployment numbers keep skyrocketing.
This pandemic has shown me what’s really important. I fell sick at the end of February, the same weekend that the Kirkland nursing home became an epicenter for coronavirus. I had extreme shortness of breath. It took me a month to recover and all I could think about was me not being able to be there for my son. We need to start thinking of sustainable development and make it an integral part of our lives and businesses, both large and small. That means at the very least, paying employees their worth, personal vacation time up to 4 weeks, paid sick leave, comprehensive maternity and paternity leave and increasing taxes on high income earners and large corporations.
