Two months ago, this seemed like a pretty normal year, and few could even imagine what has now really happened in the last few weeks. A large part of the world is now in a lock-down, where even the most democratic countries are taking steps to limit the movements of its people to proportions unheard of.
The effects of this has quickly become almost devastating to a large part of society. The stock market has fallen in numbers that are in level with the depression in the 1930:s if not even worse. The crypto market has followed suit, and economists are talking about a loss of money that counts in billions and trillions; insane numbers that make me think about Onkel Scrooge in Donald Duck.
However, we know that the stock market can rise and fall, as was parodied in the comedy movie "Changing places". But now there is so much more that is being affected. In Sweden, the pensions are to a large extent connected to the stock market through funds. These are now diving steeply, quickly reducing the pensions for l who will retire in the coming years. The question is whether the pension should really be based on the gambling, that is inherent in the stock market.
Even more problematic is the situation when it comes to that we don't have the resources necessary to act rapidly and with the great effect. During the cold war we had a large number of field hospitals in store by the military, ready to be used within a week or so. These are no more, and 600 fully working respirators were discarded of before you could say Stop!
Actually, when we look at the society as a whole, we can see that the emergency buffers are way to low. One important cause of this is the JIT (just in time) paradigm. Instead of storage rooms, products should arrive just before they are needed. When there is a shortage now, the shelves will be gaping empty. This results in a view we have only seen in the Soviet union, empty shelves when people start hoarding (even cheese dip tins are gone). Although they are fairly quickly refilled again this sight is disturbing.
Even the impossible can happen...
Even with only a few examples like this I can see a number of lessons we need to learn for the future, and the most important of these is, I believe, that even the impossible can happen. Sure, we cannot foresee everything, but even taking a small number of precautions could have made the crisis less critical.
We know that people definitely always need:
- Food!
- Health care
- Medicine
- Social activities
- Contact with others
- Communication
- Money, enough to live
And, I think it seems that the provision of many of these actually has already failed in many of our countries, causing both stress and worries among people. Now we know that our societies are not designed to handle this kind of extreme situations without a lot of suffering among its citizens. This is probably the price we have to pay when we maximize and slim all processes - such as, for example JUST-IN-TIME, and NOT-MORE-THAN-NECESSARY. When we have very small or no margins and no serious plan B, a situation as the current Corona-virus epidemic will have devastating effects throughout the society and its citizens.
The Corona virus may therefore become a wake-up call, which might be useful if we are to prepare for similar situations in the future, which may or not be even worse. We just need to learn our lessons thoroughly and analyse what has happened on various frontiers...
Will that happen though, or will we just keep walking (or running) straight ahead and hope that this was the first and only global concern. I wish, but I remain doubtful...
(Edit: crossposted to the Moomindad blog and Uptrennd).
