Jm Pique

Economic Lessons of the Pandemic Jm Pique

This is a book about the present and the future, and how we should think about them to make the most out of it. This is a book of ideas. You'll find a mural, like snapshots, we took during the last six months, reflecting about the four main fields of our economic reality: macroeconomics, governments, technology, and society. The old measures are getting rusty, and the economic models seem to explain very little of what's happening, let alone predict how the future will look like. Capitalism fears a time of immense change, and society is already asking for something else. The impact of the crisis is uneven, and winners and losers are increasingly opposed to each other. In the meantime, many economic sectors (banking, media, automotive...) are struggling to survive to maybe the most profound transformation in centuries. Are the old economic rules still in force?We took many things for granted. Democracy, growth, development, stability, even tension and conflict. But the liberal order that emerged after World War II is, finally, being entirely dismantled. Governments don't know how to cope with the new world that the Third Industrial Revolution brought, that of computers and telecommunication technologies. Challenges are global (energy, environment, migration, development, natural resources, digital transformation, demography), but the decision-making mindset is still based in the old Nation States, a.k.a. countries. Will we find a new (stable) order? As with the economy, old rules seem not to work much. The middle class was a great invention. It kept society together. But the rapid change and the polarization it has brought are stretching the capacity of the social structure to keep being cohesive, balanced, sustainable. "There's no middle anything, anymore," someone told me, which is becoming so true, too real, in many spheres of our life. Either you're in or out, right or left, up or down; but being in the middle, mild and quiet, does not have the best reputation these days. It's a pity, but in this new society, you'll probably be forced to take a side amidst the permanent flood of information. Being in the middle? That's becoming a really radical choice.