2020-04-27 Restoring the Economy

Everyone wants to know when we’re going to get the economy started up again, and just how many lives we’re willing to surrender before we do. We’ve all been made to understand the dilemma: The sooner we “open up” American and get back to our jobs, the more likely we spread Covid-19, further overwhelming hospitals and killing more people. Yet the longer we wait, the more people will suffer and die in other ways.

In reality, the sooner and more completely we restore the old economy, the faster we simply recreate the conditions that got us sick in the first place and rendered us incapable of mounting an effective response. The economy we’re committed to restoring is no more the victim of the Covid-19 crisis than it is the cause. We have to stop asking when will things get back to normal. They won’t. There is no going back. And that’s actually good news.

The innovations we’re seeing emerge are digital in spirit, but local in their execution. The temporary paralysis of globally scaled financial and business institutions is creating the need and room for alternatives to just-in-time global supply chains and centralized, debt-based monetary monopoly. The longer the crisis continues, the more experience, success, and faith people will gain in the possibility of the more locally balanced, bottom-up economics

Instead of figuring out how to extract money from the marketplace, which only increases its fragility, we must explore business practices that circulate money throughout the system. This was the original, distributive promise of a digital economy — and one we must embrace if we want to restore our collective economic immune response before the next shock to our system, whatever it may be.