A whole new world to embrace
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated a trend towards job reductions that had been anticipated for some years. We have suddenly been propelled into a paperless society, not because of computers, meaning we don’t need paper, but to reduce the transfer of germs. We have taken to online shopping, not because we can, but because it was the only way to get goods.
Young people have been learning online teaching because schools were shut, and having tried it, they find that it has advantages over a school room. If online tuition works well, why would a student incur debts of $30,000 or more by staying in a university town when they could do a course from home and go to a local technical college for practical experiments and monitoring? Tens of thousands of people already do it every year, and it works.
We have drastically reduced travel by using Skype or Zoom for meetings, and employers like the reduction in travelling costs and the time saved, and will insist on its use in the future. In addition, employers find no loss in productivity through staff working from home, and will be keen to shed overheads by alternating staff attendance in the office and moving to smaller premises.
As a modern example, farming has already incurred massive reductions in labour by mechanisation, which has led to the depopulation of the countryside and an increase in the size of our cities, so we already have some experience of societal change.
We have yet to manage the big increase in electric transport and the changes it will bring to transport during the next five to 10 years, with fewer garages and fuel stations. So big changes looming there.
Believing that having a job is sacrosanct, and anyone who is unemployed is a loser, is not an answer when there are simply not enough jobs for the people wanting them, so we need to think about managing society in this new environment.
Two things have been proven to work. One is that the happiest nations are those where all levels of society are cared for, even though this leads to higher taxes, and the second is that poverty and societal deprivation will lead to social unrest, which will eventually prove ruinous to the country.
One solution is some form of universal basic income, so everyone has a safety net to keep food on the table, universal health care and education for all. We are almost there already, because a quarter of the population can be considered children, another quarter are retired, and in addition we have the sick and disabled, the unemployed and those who do not intend to work, such as the well-off and stay-at-home parents.
We need to start thinking about our future society before it gets thrust upon us and causes hardship and divisions where dictators and populist politicians can thrive.
We have drastically reduced travel by using Skype or Zoom for meetings, and employers like the reduction
in travelling costs and the time saved, and will insist on
its use in the future.