REIMAGINING OUR ECONOMIC CHOICES

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Introduction to our choices

The COVID-19 pandemic will reshape all our economic choices. Nations have made a crucial choice in recent weeks, choosing human life over economic growth.
Governments including ours have mandated lockdowns to slow the pandemic, relieve the pressure on their hospitals and save lives.
Economics is about choices, a study of ‘human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means’. Trade-offs are central to these choices.
On the one hand, there will be massive economic costs.
On the other hand, updates land in our phones on a minute-by-minute basis, invoking both our empathy and our fear.
Our choice is obvious — human life over economic growth.

For decades, we have chosen profits and growth over human lives.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.2 million lives are lost annually due to air pollution.
These deaths occur in dispersed locations, through varying illnesses and outside our frenzied social media feeds. Therefore, the choice is not as clear to us.
It is a choice between 4.2 million lives and the marginal returns from industries choosing polluting vs. non-polluting technologies.
This is not a Luddite call to replace our cars with carriages. Cleaner technologies are available, for instance, through our IFAD programs, low-cost technologies are being developed even for smallholder farmers.

Social Distancing is hardly viable for the 2% of the global population who are homeless or the 20% who lack adequate housing.
Social distancing will also take a disproportionate economic toll on the informal sector, employing up to 60% of the working population globally and 90% in India.
The cure could trigger deep poverty and a food security crisis, actually endangering more lives.
According to UNICEF, even prior to COVID-19, diseases directly linked to lack of safe water killed 1,400 children under five every day, globally over half a million a year.