When we emerge from Covid-19, we’ll have the opportunity to do things differently
Pandemic will allow us to consider what is really important
HEARTS sank across Northern Ireland as we listened to the news over the weekend of a potential new strain, rising cases and confirmation of another six-week lockdown from Boxing Day.
As 2020 draws to a close, it is a year we will want to consign to history very quickly. But in the sadness and misery, this year has brought into sharp focus the things that are really important to us, both as individuals and as a society.
The absence of things we would normally take for granted, such as seeing friends and family, has given us a renewed perspective that can only come from a shared and collective feeling of vulnerability.
Moreover, this shared vulnerability has brought out the most basic instincts of compassion and kindness across the whole of Northern Ireland.
We often look to history as a predictor for the future when facing moments of such adversity, and, perhaps for a change, we have cause to be hopeful in this case.
Over the centuries and millennia, the period immediately after a pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 has been one of profound renewal and renaissance — a time when society has taken a step back and reassessed its priorities.
The Black Death devastated Italian society from 1347-1350.
It led to enormous socio-economic, cultural, and religious change. But after the devastation, Italy made a spectacular recovery. The country became more prosperous and more secular and a new wave of social mobility meant that individualism came to be respected and celebrated. The Plague ushered in a change in Italian society that made the Renaissance possible.
More recently, the Roaring Twenties and a period of global economic and social prosperity followed the Spanish Flu which ended in April 1920. Pandemics aside, the end of the Second World War led to a series of events which saw the creation of the National Health Service and organisations such as the United Nations.
The question is, then, what will we do with our opportunity to rethink in Northern Ireland? Are we defining success as a society here in the right way?
And how are we measuring it?
Since the 2008 financial crash, a group of economists have been considering whether we are measuring the right things.
For a long time, we have considered economic success as a proxy for societal success, and mainly through a measure known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
GDP is essentially everything that is produced in a country, and so our value and success is measured by what we make, both as individuals and collectively. It doesn’t, for example, consider things like volunteering, unpaid caring, stay-at-home parenting, air quality, work-life balance, educational attainment, gender pay parity — all things we would say are pretty important.
For being conventional wisdom, then, it’s neither particularly conventional nor wise. Apart from a brief period around the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, GDP in the UK has been ticking along and has actually been growing year-on-year, you may be surprised to know.
According to GDP, things have been going reasonably well. But that isn’t how we feel, is it?
There is something clearly fundamentally wrong with how we are measuring our social and economic success. And whilst it might seem a nerdy or abstract point, that matters because, if we are measuring the wrong things, we will do the wrong things.
If we’re told things are going fine when they really aren’t, we won’t do anything about it.
Regardless of your political persuasion, it should be clear to us from flicking through the pages of our local newspapers that, even before the pandemic, everything was not fine.
Here in Northern Ireland, we have unacceptable levels of homelessness and rough sleeping. Our suicide rates are amongst the highest in the UK and beyond. Child poverty is rife and there is an enormous gap in the educational attainment of children from more deprived family backgrounds and those from more affluent.
As with everything in Northern Ireland, it’s easy to blame the folks on the hill. But this is bigger than politicians — it’s about what we collectively decide as a society is important to us.
Over the last few years, the idea of the “wellbeing economy” — a model of trying to create success (and measuring it) based on a much wider range of things than simply what we produce — has emerged.
Already countries around the world have adopted this approach in their budget-setting and policy-making — New Zealand, Iceland and Scotland, for example.
This does include traditional measures of economic success, but it also considers a much wider range of things like levels of loneliness, air quality, civic engagement, social connections, quality of living conditions.
In short, it can and is being done, so why can’t we do it here?
We have a way to go before we get out of the hugely difficult situation in which we find ourselves, but we will. And when we do, history tells us we will have a moment in time to reevaluate and do things differently.
But until then, Happy Christmas!