The coronavirus crisis is profoundly disturbing, in the sense that I am quite sure that nothing will ever be the same again. Events like this always leave an impression, if only as a scar.
My hope is that we can make improvements in society as we come out of this crisis. So, I am working with academic colleagues on ideas to improve the resilience and sustainability of companies so that they will not fail in the future as many are right now. We hope to publish on that within a month.
I am working with the Green New Deal Group on a series of briefings that might start quite soon on how the Green New Deal is the answer to the needs of recreating real wealth after this crisis is over.
I am working with the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency on a programme on how tax transparency can be improved, which is a big project.
And I am also hoping to start work very soon indeed on a project I am calling Tax After Coronavirus (TACs). Quite literally, this is about the reforms in the UK (and maybe other) tax systems that will be needed to rebuild our society. There will be more on this project very soon.
I am going to be busy. Three of these ideas are heading to be short book-length, and all are running simultaneously. Thankfully, at least one should appear in instalments here first: blogging and book writing might overlap.
And, of course, some of the projects overlap to some degree too, but that's just fine: messages need to be delivered in different ways right now. Saying broadly similar things more than once will not be a problem at this moment.
But the key point of this post is how important it is that we react quickly now. As the FT said at the weekend:
The leaders who won the war did not wait for victory to plan for what would follow. Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, setting the course for the United Nations, in 1941. The UK published the Beveridge Report, its commitment to a universal welfare state, in 1942. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference forged the postwar financial architecture. That same kind of foresight is needed today. Beyond the public health war, true leaders will mobilise now to win the peace.
Before anyone jumps up and down, I am not claiming to be a leader. Nor am I claiming to be writing the equivalent of the Beveridge Report. I'm just trying to ensure ideas are created that might influence outcomes. And I think that's important.
And before anyone asks why that is, I think it fair to say that the evidence is very apparent. For example, the Guardian reported this morning that:
The world may be racked by the coronavirus, but Donald Trump has less earthly concerns on his mind, too, after signing an executive order encouraging the US to mine the moon for minerals.
The executive order makes clear that the US doesn't view space as a “global commons”, opening the way for the mining of the moon without any sort of international treaty.
“Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space,” the order states, noting that the US had never signed a 1979 agreement known as the moon treaty. This agreement stipulates that any activities in space should conform to international law. In 2015, the US Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies to use resources from the moon and asteroids.
The old order has not given up its claims on the world, or even what is beyond it, as yet. The idea that all is available to be exploited is still prevalent. But in the AC (after-coronavirus) world this cannot be the case.
We will still have to fight climate change, and there are many that will resist that, and even more so now, claiming that we cannot afford to do so.
We will have to fight for the wellbeing of those who will have suffered. A social safety net will be needed, more than ever.
The essential workers who have not been valued will need to be a priority: never again must they be undervalued.
Wealth and income will need to be redistributed: there is a massive role for tax in doing that.
A more just world is required.
Resielnce is neessary.
And so too is an accountable and transparently fair tax system that fits properly into a well-planned programme of economic management for the benefit of all.
There are those, like Trump, who will want none of those things. The fight for a new world order will be a fight. And it's one we have to win, starting with the ideas.
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Wow! With such an impressive programme you’ll certainly be busy! I’m sure you are right though – producing and promoting as widely as possible ideas for a new order post-Covid needs to start now if the moment is not to be lost.
All power to your elbow. I look forward to further blogs as the work progresses.
I am working around the clock
But am quite happy about that
I gather your with Naomi’s group, (nice). But the only way to have any type of system which truly functions in a natural world that we have, is to return to the qualitative size of use— that is more balanced (in proportion to what the earth can handle/survive).
That would mean that initially to secure any physical oversight/control our taxpaying system would have to be streamlined and directed by –those that actually pay—taxpayers.
It is an obnoxious mistake to constantly refer to ‘government (s) as paying or doing any action that costs. All costs are paid by taxpayers/buyers.
To that end, it should always have been a ‘seller beware’ never a ‘buyer beware’ consuming system. That is in essence what has skewed all decisions. The philosophy is great, we want sustainable progress, but it disconnects and is in imbalance with accumulation and entropy which has/is clearly destroying the earth’s capacity to renew or withstand such non-returnable demands. So here’s to taxpayers finally being given the power of their earnings to have the ‘main say’ in all decisions.
Especially when comes to mindless destructive acts such as war. Currently we pay and suffer while those in power (corporations/banks/those who affect/direct laws) squander/profit. The now familiar adage of socializing the costs of everything while capitalizing the profits for a very few—who currently refuse to share, even if it means the total destruction of our financial and environmental systems.
I have to be honest and say that your style makes what you are writing virtually incomprehensible
And who is Naomi? Klein? She copied our work….
You are a leader of ideas.
You have spoken for years about an impending crisis, and the tools that could be used to tackle it, and suddenly here it is.
Many of the ideas that you have been exploring for years have been derided and ignored by the mainstream, and now they’re acting as if they were always conventional logic. (paraphrasing another poster on here about the process of activism and change).
You might not get the credit for all of it, but at the very least this blog serves as a very useful transcript of your formulation of these ideas. I do hope it’s being appropriately/securely archived for posterity.
The British Library archive it….
Well, good luck persuading the governments of China, Russia, India, etc, and indeed the EU and the UN and their member states, to accept your new world order. Or perhaps good luck in persuading their populations to depose their leaders.
The US may be falling off its geopolitical hegemonic pedestal (and it will be a slow and painful process, like it was for the retreating UK in the decades before, during and after the world wars) but it is not at all clear that the future will be any better than the past, for individuals and for larger social groups. The seeds of inward looking populist authoritarian surveillance states are there, as much as a global egalitarian socialist utopia.
When things are in such a state of flux, this is when inspirational thought leadership is required.
I have no expectation that anything will necessarily happen
But I have to try….
As GBS said, all progress is dependent on the existence of the unreasonable person, and I am bloody unreasonable
whilst I think it’s admirable to already be thinking about how to manage our affairs in the post corona world I think it’s also important to come to terms with quite how long we might well be within the crisis before we truly emerge on the other side,
the starting point of our emergence from the crisis will be the arrangements that we’ve chosen to adopt to weather the storm,
I rather suspect our current arrangements are as yet still insufficient to carry everyone for the length of storm this may well turn out to be.
this Imperial College report is rather sobering if you fully come to terms with it’s implications,
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
we may be heading into the eye of the storm now but on the way out we may receive repeated return waves and not see genuinely blue sky until 2022
the Donald is claiming he can now see light at the end of the tunnel, I think it might be a freight train headlamp.
I am sure you are right….but we will come out of this….eventually and as the FT has noted, we do need to think about that
I’m quite intrigued by Trump’s “executive” order about mining moons and planets. This might chime in with his “I must kick-ass or die” mental make-up which has now become more or less a standing joke in the United States. But if access to rare minerals is the true underlying motive I don’t understand the economics of it nor the environmental sanity of it but can see some sort of plausibility that it avoids wars on Earth.
Those that know anything about the US constitution will know that this executive order (thankfully) carries no significant weight and is just another piece of B.S. “America First” theatre on Trump’s part.
Bozo the Tangerine Man is probably disappointed that the virus crisis has resulted in a tiny bump in his approval rating (especially tiny compared to other world leaders). As usual he is responding to that sort of disappointment by playing to his base and as usual that will make no difference.
The US has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty. But then only a handful of countries have ratified it – only 18 including Armenia, Chile, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Turkey, no well known for their active space programmes. Another four (including France and India) have signed but not ratified. Not the UK, not Russia, not China, not Japan, and only a few ESA members. Many more have ratified the Outer Space Treaty, but it is not clear it will make sense any time soon, even on economic grounds, to mine the moon or the asteroids, however exciting it may sound.
I agree: mining the moon is exceptionally unlikely
I wa drawing attention to the belief that exploitation remains fair game
It isn’t
Trump is full of meaningless bluster, and this is just another example.
If we want to indulge in a little science fiction fantasy, to survive as a species long term (and I mean millennia, not decades or centuries) we will need to escape from the earth and create communities elsewhere. They will need to be self-sustaining, because they will be so far away that help is not coming any time soon. The moon may be a good place to start, as it is nearby, although the lack of air, water, etc makes it hardly ideal, and Mars is much further away and only marginally better. And then it takes a long time to get to any other stars…
We might sort out fusion power first. It would be a game-changer. But I am not holding my breath for that either.
Meanwhile, we have 7.5 billion people on this small planet…
Unfortunately the democrats are intent on losing to Trump again. It has done wonders for their fundraising and they have a ready excuse for not accomplishing anything.