The world after coronavirus will be different from that before, obviously enough. The world next month is always, has always been, different from that last anyway. We are asking you how, in precisely what manner, it will be different too. Even, how you would change things for the better as a result.
One point that caught our eye:
The boss of Dixons Carphone has warned that some sales that have shifted online during the lockdown will never return to bricks and mortar stores, as he prepares to reopen with “extreme care”.
The world does change, day by day. But one of the things that a crisis does is change the current coordination. Parts of the world operate as they do simply because that’s what most to near all other people do. It may even be sensible that they should already have changed as a result of new tech or whatever. But they haven’t simply because there’s a hurdle to overcome, everyone else needs to change at around the same time to make that new coordination work.
No real point in designing one’s social life around the coffee bar if everyone’s still in the pub - but if the crowd abandon the alehouse then every reason to use the caff as an individual.
That the old order has been broken - or even just paused - clears the space for the adoption of a new coordination. Well, maybe, if we like it.
As to what might happen some ideas. This thought that we should all be poorer for the sake of the environment. Sure, the air in cities is cleaner and so on. But we’re also being exposed to the costs of that, current estimates are that we’ll all be 25% poorer - that being what a 25% fall in GDP means. A reasonable thought is that having had the bargain so brutally explained we’ll reject it. On the plus side many are praising the new found communal mucking in and cooperation. As people realise that this is Burke and the little platoons, not the State organising or directing, we might well get more of that voluntary communalism free of that state.
It is true that the world after coronavirus will be a different one. Given the exposure we’ve all just had to the efficiency of government we can even hope that it will be a better one. About which, as we say, we’d like your suggestions.