Guest Column: Growth of what for what?

While it does feel like spring and a new beginning is right around the corner, it’s important to note that the COVID-19 experience is a culture-changing event. We won’t have the same normal on the other side. There’s no getting around the pain of a new normal for those who lost loved ones. However, from a societal perspective, there is much to be embraced because in many ways, our old, familiar normal wasn’t good enough. Consider the economic model considered normal which says we must have constant economic growth for well-being.

Even before the pandemic, more than 50% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. More than half of us were already living below or near the poverty line (and bear in mind, the arbitrarily-delegated U.S. poverty line is a measly $26,200 annually for a family of four). Most at that marginal level were working long hours and multiple jobs just to pay monthly expenses, stay slightly above water and do their part to keep the economy growing. You could make the argument the economy wasn’t working for them but rather they were working to feed the growth economy.

At the same time, income inequality in the U.S. was off the charts, higher than any other G-7 country including the U.K., Japan, Italy, Canada, Germany and France. More than ever before, achieving the American Dream depends upon your ZIP code. Due to imbedded biases in financial systems and economic structures, upward mobility in this country is constrained, as never before, by income, race and neighborhood. We have accepted as normal a Robin Hood society, in which wealth is systematically distributed upward from lower-income to the rich.

This same economic system that was failing millions of Americans, relied upon chewing up ecosystems and wildlife species at a rapacious pace. Such large-scale sacrifice of environmental health for economic growth was accepted as normal. It should serve as a stunning existential wake-up call that when COVID-19 shut the economy down for a time, the planet benefited. Air and water pollution dropped; climate change emissions went way down; wildlife got a reprieve. All of that took place because we were forced to push pause on an economic system that is fundamentally unsustainable and destructive and it’s proof that the planet will heal if given a chance.

Long before COVID, there was already a robust New Economy movement delivering concrete examples of people earning livings doing work that heals and helps, companies delivering social and environmental profits as well as financial profits and cities and countries stepping off the limitless growth tract and succeeding. There are many already showing us that a more beautiful economy is possible.

It’s said that if you don’t ask the right questions, the answers don’t matter. COVID-19 isn’t what broke the economy; it merely revealed fundamental flaws in societal and economic norms that have been hindering upward mobility, eroding our sense of security, connection and well-being, and devastating our environment. Instead of asking how do we get the economy growing again, we need to be asking growth of what and for what?

The economy is not an act of God or a force of Nature. It is a human-made construct. We invented it, which means we can reinvent it. We can create a better normal if we really decide to.