Tag: Coronavirus

And now we are not returning to our normally scheduled programming.

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

The Oasis of Normalcy

When we’re knocked for a loop, normalcy is the comfort food of the disoriented. It’s allure comes from the reordering of so many misplaced pieces. We won’t have to walk barefoot and blindfolded through this pool of shattered fragments known to many as Ground Hog Year, known to some as an unyielding series of cancellations, and known to all as the year the media told time according to a scoreboard of accumulated deaths and new Covid cases.

Flirting with the sudden, unannounced resumption of normal ends the uncertainty, clarifies our work schedule, sends our children back to class, and buys us a drink at the watering hole we used to call bumping into someone. The bipartisan prayer for a cure-all vaccine is an understandable as the natural inflating of expectations around a pay-off delayed. Even a promise so universal that it can’t be politicized.

But the funny thing about normal is this: As we begin our inevitable return to the creature comforts of indoor dining, commuter transit, karaoke nights, nail salons, movie theaters, and preassigned theatrical seating, we find that our audience antennas are tuned to once remote signals we hadn’t picked up before.

We begin to insist on safety platinum plus deluxe edition. There should be six sanitizing stations from the time the gel enters our fingers until the moment the card reader ca-chings. The sound piped into our ears is the breathy ventilation that infuses our lungs with a purified whiff of mountain spring breeze. Anything less and it’s the stale, recycled scent of someone waiting to exhale the memories of the now bankrupt perfume counters of department stores from the zombie malls of the 20-teens.

Funny how the normal we insist on has as little to do with those pre-pandemic aerosols from sample perfume spritzes at Macy*s or a whiff of cotton candy-scented mesh teddies at Victoria Secret. In the world to come, we are practically punch drunk from bombardments of judgment about the state of our containerized orifices. It’s not just a lack of will for taking on further changes. It’s the thinning air under that facial mask that limits our abilities to imagine a world we want to publicly engage in.

How do we overcome these instincts towards self-protection for rethinking what’s possible and not just what’s preventable? How do see this transition as a respite from carrying forward the former burdens we needn’t carry into a more enduring future? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. What does that look like?

When Taking Care of Business Means Business as Usual

Prediction #1 :  “I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of every Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed.” — Scott Galloway, New York Magazine, May, 2020

Destabilizing is bad. We get that. Even our most skydiver selves are clutching our parachute cords when confronted by the no tomorrow future of street violence spilling its way into living room, kitchen, and utility mud room mayhem. What’s not so easy to navigate is where an unquestioning return to flawed assumptions about how normalcy clears the destabilizing bar at any low, medium, or high bar setting.

Perhaps no evidence trail is more tread upon in the service of stability than social contract number one: Playing by the rules is good for me and for you. Like any prevalent notion, this agreement is presupposed. It is ingrained in both our better and second natures. This accommodation is primal. It is transcendent. It is central to how we conduct ourselves within a society held together by the same reciprocal understanding.

What pre-COVID assertion has risen up to challenge social contract number one? Is it that a vote for my opponent is a vote for chaos? Is it that I’m a chump for playing by the rules and the social contract was never followed in the first place? Is it that democracy is too unpredictable to be left in the hands of a public electorate? Nope. It’s about our uncompromising push for a return to normalcy. We’re talking finger-in-the-socket mental-distancing. It’s no longer getting back to the life we know. It’s more personal than that. It’s getting back to the life we miss. That’s one selective memory and it lingers long past any expired social contracts.

Put down your gun, your phone, your remote, your thumbs, and the jewels and metals around your ring finger. There is no negotiation. There is no commentary. There is no rehash of a status quo consensus. Just an insatiable appetite for the ending of this moment. And in its place? The comfort of the expected.

The Pursuit of Human Misery

One thing that no one expects in America is justice: The notion that social contract number one is back in force, and binding, regardless of our social strata. We can miss the ideal of working towards a more just society. We can strive again towards that more perfect union. But until our measurement systems are refactored to include such goals, our pursuit of human happiness will be limited to trading averages, credit risks, hedge funds, and score-keeping perfected through the relationship between our online behavior and purchase histories.

How else to explain a financial scoreboard of booming stock markets and depression level unemployment numbers? And those are just the job consumers, i.e. people in need of a pay check or two. What about the small business owner who just sank a ton of dough into an unessential business? What’s their sense of what comes next?

Three-point-five-percent (3.5%) unemployment it turns out was no better firewall against our shuttered economy and its after-effects than if it hadn’t come down at all these past record-breaking 112 consecutive months. There is no social distancing the loss of a paycheck from the arrival of a rent bill. All those jobs created over those 9 years? Gone within a matter of weeks. In early June unemployment plummets to 13.5%! So much winning? You’re probably bored with so much winning!

The next set of financial health tests needs to focus less on corporate earnings and more on personal assets. Forget about another tax break encouraging big ticket investments of putting capital to work in employment-generating enterprises. Save your breath. Wear your mask.

Instead we need to scorecard how well the massive outlays from our next government find their way into a dynamic and re-awoken economy. For instance, what if money was not a contest of who’s richest but a travel log for what happens after it leaves the treasury? It certainly doesn’t find it’s way back if we look through the tax records of Amazon, Starbucks, and Chevron. But it might if instead we were tracking more graspable indicators of personal financial health:

(1) How many paychecks away from homelessness?

(2) The rate of adult children still living with their parents?

(3) The savings rate of all?

How much are these trends reversible, sustainable? Is there even a place at the policy-making table to seat for sustainability? Other than an incumbent’s need to stay in power?

That Deer in the Headlights is Yesterday’s Road Kill

If the capital outside of circulation is being sold as credit to poor people, the next election won’t be between two candidates from two parties. That’s no longer plausible when the business of America is politics. Elected leaders cease to govern or persuade in terms of electorates. They had been working the ballroom, not the big tent.

Now it’s the breakout room on Zoom. That’s a frank and open exchange compared to the headspace between an itchy Twitter finger and the inaudible scream factory. That piercing incitement you don’t have to unmute. The dog whistling to the same wind that catches cryptic QAnon jabbering and late night punch line chortles alike. Loud and clear.

What about your own internal chatterbox? The voices that escape from the scream factory into your own fingers. You want convenience? You’ll find your instant cash-out at the ATM located near the slot machines.

Oh, you said voting machines? Sorry. Some hearing loss is inevitable at the scream factory.

You’ll hope there’s enough time between jobs to get cross-town for the privilege of waiting hours for a crack at expressing your power. Exiting stage left: Evacuations of the donor class to their own bunker islands, sheltered from the pitchforks of the disenfranchised, income-challenged, followers on Facebook, and former homeowners-turned-refugees.

And now we resume our regularly unsustainable programming

Do we want to continue feeding an economic engine that halts to a sputtering stop once the perpetual motion brakes get pumped? That’s no simple brake job with the plumes rising under the hood.

Here’s what a good corporate citizen would say about what comes next for the recirculated capital that lands on their own balance sheets:

Prediction #2:  “With many businesses likely to be operating to some extent with public money, the scrutiny will be intense. There will be real effects on the relations between government and business, and between business and society. — McKinsey & Company, The Future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal, April 14, 2020

Remember, this ante-raising of untapped corporate responsibilities is a warning from the same preeminent consulting group that captains of industry retain to lessen their collective loads; to make social problems (and larger payrolls) disappear.

In fact it’s the separation anxiety of reliable labor pools from their steady pay checks that makes the American unemployment experience the towering shadow presence in the national psyche. Outfits like McKinsey rush to fill the void between the terminators and the terminated. It’s vital to organized lay-offs that a third-party luxury brand like McKinsey validate the decision. So vital, that paying McKinsey’s exorbitant fees is a relative bargain to the executive boards paying these fees from one ledger and justifying their workforce reductions from another.

None of the terminators want the social contract muscling in here. That’s the nuanced conversation between labor and management that once sought common ground and goes like this:

(1) No one gets everything they wanted.

(2) Nobody leaves empty-handed.

I’m not aware of such a meeting. Maybe McKinsey shouldn’t be faulted for keeping the guest list to clients only.

Here’s another meeting I wasn’t invited to that I can overhear going down in my kitchen. It’s a Zoom call between public school administrators and staff in the district my wife teaches in. She and her unionized colleagues are being duly informed that they’re simultaneously teaching virtual and classroom school. The choices here for public school teachers? Do what I tell you. Maybe you’ll keep your job. Maybe.

Nobody ever said the business of America is labor. Not even Bernie, right? What about restaurant owners, pet groomers, and local farmers? What about the local repair shop, the nail salon, and the micro brew? Let’s compare the difference between the smallness and the largesse that passes for American business.

The $25 billion the Senate scrounged up to address the zero balance of the small business rescue fund is also the same sum marketing the increase of Jeff Bezos’ net worth since the beginning of the pandemic. Percentage-wise that’s a second place finish for eye-popping according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

The winner is Mark Zuckerberg whose personal net worth has soared by nearly half of his pre-corona fortune. So has Zuckerberg’s capacity for recouping perceived losses at the hands of his labor force, like the popularity of working from home:

“If you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places.“

These veiled suggestions of salary reductions for not shouldering the same real estate costs as one’s corporate keeper is astonishing both for its miserliness and rejection of one of few remaining cards a remote worker has left to play: The cost differential between where they settle and the more urbane locations of their office commutes.

In one career-span, we’ve seen “people” downgraded from their employer’s “most prized assets” to their costliest. What rounding error does management solve? The margins they can’t deliver to the board without those pink slips. The rewards are obvious: a bigger share price and sudden drop of interest in next year’s bonuses. Good thing too. A raise is no longer a justified investment in human capital. It’s an arrow on your back that follows you to the next downsizing.

Who’s essential in that equation? It’s cash horses like Zuckerberg. It’s the boss who identifies with putting their capital assets to work — not their workers, and certainly not themselves. That could create even costlier, unplanned liabilities as-in small tokens of empathic understanding: Let them work from worksites of their choosing? Sounds consistent for a tech giant that…

(1) Mines the emotional surveillance of its users regardless of location, and

(2) Outsources its editorial function to faceless, underpaid offshore contractors.

Stealing the Future from the Social Ordering Economy

For all this doomsday forecasting, why am I then more optimistic about making promises than pensive about holding onto the ones no longer worth keeping?  Because, however you define 2020…

• • • We’re in it together
    • We’re all fighting the same real enemy
    • Gated communities are not immune from it
    • Winning that fight is more important than pleasing shareholders
    • Many of the newly invented enemies are jokers in the deck of an overplayed hand. They are seen for the distractions that they are.

For all of us privileged with the gift of health, COVID-19 has some overlooked, silver linings. It’s provided us…

(1) Clearer skies,

(2) Puttering around the residence, (a.k.a. home improvement),

(3) Plummeting crime rates,

(4) Accelerated time tables for the demise of coal, and fossil fuels, and the,

(5) Boatloads of time we never had to reflect on the contrived clutter of our double-bookings and self-serve regular approach to hitting already congested highways.

But wait, you say. What advantages our idle minds to serve an economy in toxic shock? Is there no higher calling than reviving that social-ordering economy? And what of the spoiled appetites of our newly enfranchised non-workforce? Isn’t the disrepair of our unemployment systems enough incentive to settle for the entry floor of the big box stock room?

Here are three what comes next game-changers to keep those end-of-the-tunnel lights set to sustainable and away from our personal stash of unpaid bills. This is what the social contract to address economic insecurity looks like in three bold strokes:

1) Guaranteed minimum income (GMI): The GMI proposals floated by Andrew Yang in last fall’s primary season predated the generous unemployment package attached to the passage of last spring’s CARES Act. Both The unsqueezing of the already marginalized means giving workers the ability to better determine where they invest their labor.  Perhaps one guy standing in the way said it best: “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else.’” — Senator Rick Scott

Those of us less tormented by notions of sloth may not agree with Senator Scott that our work ethics are in the balance so much as the fighting shape of our beleaguered American middle-class. There is no better color, race, or red/blue state-blind bill than the economic security provisions it contains.

Without those? Remove the last vestiges of that frayed social fabric and you have more than skin in the game. You have exposed bone striking against raw nerve. Or, what we already had before the pandemic.  That’s where the terminators lose their ability to float undesirable jobs for unsustainable wages. That’s where the gravity of the virus speeds into the passing lane; then swerves into the oncoming rattle of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and a prolonged loss of appetite for all but the essentials.

2) Education as Equalizer | The return to social mobility — Somewhere along the lines of self-interest, we lost sight of higher education as a win/win proposition for its graduates and a future depending on their success.

The end of the college campus as party central and the intimacies of classroom instruction means a refocus on learning and away from the emptiness of the overachieving: boilerplate recommendations, standardized test scores, an over-scheduled crush of extracurriculars, “and middling students who play arcane sports.”

Our future notions of leadership, community, and a responsible citizenry should not rest on a winner-take-all competition for acceptance to elite colleges and universities. A virtual education depends on access to technology, not the trappings of privileges that come with SAT coaching, bribing, or the boasting of what NYU Professor, Scott Galloway refers to as the luxury brands of higher education: The lower the admission rate, the more bullet-proof the Harvards, Princetons, and Stamfords of this stardom-ticketing enterprise.

A return to admissions based on the capacity of each students’ willingness to better themselves is not some vain hope or fabled stepping stone. It’s what used to pass for a college degree:

1. 1. Its restoration will scale to social mobility for the graduate and the greater social good for the world they pass on.
   2. What they will learn there is not to be traumatized by the debating of ideas. There they will learn to hold two opposable views in their heads while considering the respective merits of competing explanations.

That both of these aspirations are no longer even offered as electives these days is reason enough to ride roughshod over the glimmering towers of the ivory-coated fortresses. Yes, end the tax-exempt status of institutions that stockpile bloated endowments for the single purpose of inflating them further.

3) Gamify the IRS | From Tax Avoidance to Aspiration Spending — Looking for redress from that ransacked social contract? The one that says we’re all equal under the law? The one that says our treasury is funded by the size of our incomes, not our loopholes? Sorry, next party in power. But soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. That’s skin in the game we need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The empathy, perspective-taking, and context needed to govern effectively is replaced by the concussive bluster of who gets to govern.

We don’t have a demand-side system based on need. It’s a want-based system based on the incentive to opt-out. Where’s the justice in that? The only ones left holding the treasury afloat is a declining base of taxpayers; too affluent to avoid taxes, and too poor to stash their incomes under said loopholes.

One way to spend-down our debts and shortfalls is to give taxpayers the agency required to address policy issues of their own choosing: Immigration, defense, housing, Medicare, early childhood education… (as if the list ever shortens).

Given the monopoly-sized influence of the lobbies on tax policy, we taxpayers must insist that we file our returns with the added calculation for where to direct those funds. Need to gin-up the stakes? Market the choices like a Power Ball Lottery? Fine. Go gamify the thing. Give every thousandth return collected a free pass. The more skin, the better the game.

Now that you see what happens next, how can I bait your breath for more?

Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Our next installment is Part 4’s What Needs to Come Sooner (if there is to be a later) and petitions the innovation orthodoxy of faster, better, cheaper with a supply chain that squares with accountable demand-side outcomes of compensation, merit, and stability.