Building back better From the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, President Higgins sought to promote greater public debate on the vulnerabilities in our national and international systems that exacerbated the impact of the spread of the virus. In April, the President published a number of articles arguing that the response to the Covid-19 pandemic relied heavily on State action, and that this renewed appreciation for the role of the State should inform not only shortterm responses to the pandemic but also the long-term strategies to reconstruct our society, and reduce our future vulnerabilities. The President stated that “successful crisis management is, as we have come to learn, no guarantee of durable reform. We therefore must embed the hard-earned wisdom from the Covid-19 crisis into strong scholarly work, policy and institutional frameworks.” The President has argued that the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated how the global economic system is inherently subject to crises and cascading failures, and that new systemic approaches and economic thinking are needed to address these problems. In a keynote address to the OECD, the President said that “understandably, much current economic commentary focuses on the cost of the pandemic. But we must also reflect on the systemic weaknesses it has exposed in how we organise our society and economy.” Citizens and governments should use the lessons of the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to tackle growing inequality and environmental damage, and move away from an unhelpful focus on economic growth as a core metric of economic success. A narrow focus on GDP growth has resulted in consumption, investment, government expenditure and the balance of trade being “calibrated so that economic growth is maximised at whatever cost to social cohesion and without any due regard to inequality or adverse ecological impacts.”
“How regrettable it is that it has taken a pandemic in which thousands of lives have been lost in so many countries to establish, or rekindle, widespread appreciation of work in the public sphere, of the public sector and the importance in the economy of the public good—and, in terms of our shared future, the state’s benign and transformative capacity.” 22 April 2020
16 2020 IN REVIEW
