
What Will the World Be Like After Coronavirus? Four Possible Futures - freediver
https://theconversation.com/what-will-the-world-be-like-after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures-134085
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tomatotomato37
All these people predicting cataclysmic change because of the Coronavirus are
missing the fact that this all happened multiple times already, including
barely a century before. The Spanish Flu went and wiped ~4% of the world
population, including the young, right after civilization spent the last 4
years shooting at each other in trenches. The result of all this? America and
Europe experienced an age of economic prosperity known as the Roaring
Twenties, with any radical government changes attributed to war debt over
anything the flu did

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PoachedSausage
I'm not sure that you can compare the global economic system of 100 years ago
to today. Everything is much more tightly interconnected and we have
consistently optimised for efficiency at the expense of resilience. We
apparently did not learn from the 2008 financial crisis and are probably even
less resilient. We are still represented by Figure 2, graph B of [0].

[0] Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis
[https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/747](https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/747)

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mdoroo93
Financial truth is merely ideology

Past societies have legislated it away, soberly realizing the literal agency
of people matters more than conformity to emotional gamesmanship of men with
little imagination but “watch me trick people into idolatry with appeals to
authoritative knowledge they can’t verify cause we won’t educate them!”

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NotSammyHagar
We are really failing at this right now.

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eezurr
This is a lot to take in, especially not coming from any related discipline
background.

Since I dont have the prerequisite background, I can only ask questions. I
also believe that there are not right answers. Every decision benefits someone
at the expense of someone else.

1\. This article does not cover the positive sides of an "exchange value"
economy. Isn't this type of economy responsible for bringing once 3rd world
countries out of poverty?

2\. Side note: I think the choice being made here is environment vs present
suffering. For every person in a 3rd country on its way to 1st world, they
need a fridge, fresh water, oven, more space (thus transportation beyond
walking/biking), safety codes (more materials), etc. The environmental impact
on providing these modern facilities must be huge, no?

3\. If a national-level economy values "exchanging value", wouldn't that
culture prioritize making their lives better? Better is subjective, and
alludes to the rat race, but at least in the USA, if you're okay not living in
the coastal areas, you can live very comfortably for cheap.

4\. The international balance of power. If one country focuses on "exchanging
value" thus enriching themselves, wouldn't that give that country a lot of
international leverage? I personally believe we've had (generally) global
peace for so long because there's been only one super power in the world for
that time period (the USA). If we shrunk our economy (based on your 4 possible
options), how would that impact the military budget? I personally think if
there are multiple competing super powers, then war is more likely to happen

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lonelappde
Is China not a super power? Europe?

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vharuck
They are superpowers, but the US is a hyperpower.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpower)

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NotSammyHagar
I think it's only likely the US has been losing power past few years. Our
long-term potential for the US economy should have been reduced by our
lifespans reducing educational and infrastructure spending reducing
centralizing wealth in the wealthy, more in the 0.1%.

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dchyrdvh
First we pretend to care about global warming and make bold promises about how
in some distant future we'll cut emissions to a more reasonable level.
Everybody understands that the emissions come from the growing economy and
that the only real solution is to slow down the economy.

So the virus slows down the economy for us. Exactly what we wanted, right?
Emissions are down, folks in India can even see Himalayan mountains. Everybody
should celebrate this, but no, our only concern is how to restart the economy
and get to the new heights of pollution asap.

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satyrnein
We're supposed to be celebrating a global pandemic, because (if we weren't
forced to shelter in place) we might see the mountains? Hardly.

Hopefully, technology will offer other options to decrease emissions than
simply slowing economic growth, because that has real human costs.

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dchyrdvh
I think you illustrate my point well: people are bought into the climate
change talk, but when it comes to actions, they do what they really believe
in.

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cthalupa
Many of us are bought in to actions that don’t include the death of millions
of people.

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dchyrdvh
Actions like switching to paper straws?

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yetihehe
Yeah, people don't want to be inconvenienced. "Yeah, I've driven several miles
today with my gas gurgling vehicle to see some nice view and destress a
little, I would do it in electric car, but it's too expensive to buy, I'd
rather do some small damage to environment". Avoiding small inconceniences
multiplied by millions of people is what gives us the situation we have now.
People want change but don't want to change. I see I am part of this problem
too, but the big problem is that I'm only a very small part of a problem. If
only I change, I make my life worse for negligible benefit of others.

How to change this? I still have no idea, but I believe this is THE source of
our problems with environment. Every other problem loops back to tragedy of
commons.

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rayhendricks
I’ll be happy if we get Medicare for all out of this. Insurance companies are
not going to get people who have been laid off for 6mo to pay their crazy
bills for Covid treatment.

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dang
Url changed from [https://singularityhub.com/2020/04/03/what-will-the-world-
be...](https://singularityhub.com/2020/04/03/what-will-the-world-be-like-
after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures/), which points to this.

