Resilience in the corona crisis: We are not defeating the pandemic with bans

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It is not the case that the corona pandemic and its fight only cause suffering and harm.

There are also profiteers.

This includes resilience.

The term has taken economic policy by storm.

Throughout Germany, Google searches for "resilience" have more than doubled compared to December 2019 in the current year.

In the meantime, “resilience” is even likely to outstrip sustainability.

That's right!

Because “sustainable” does indeed sound good, but “resilient” is better!

"Resilience" is about survivability.

In psychology, it makes it possible to overcome unexpected strokes of fate that suddenly throw people out of the path they have hitherto followed.

In engineering and environmental sciences, the term resilience is used to investigate how societies react to new technologies or how ecological systems can survive the consequences of natural disasters or earthquakes, for example.

At the center of "resilience" are adoption and adaptation - that is, acceptance of the new and the ability to adapt to the new.

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As a result of the corona pandemic, economies were thrown out of their course by fate and unprepared.

Much has changed suddenly and drastically.

That is why “resilience” fits so well with the economic policy of the (post) corona period.

Acceleration boost for digitization and data economy

Because after Covid-19 there will be no return to old conditions.

Neither home office nor video conferencing, nor hybrid lessons or online shopping will fall back into a deep slumber.

The triumphant advance of digitization and the data economy will not stop either.

Big data and algorithms, artificial intelligence and self-learning robots have taken command - and they will not give that up again - never again.

This results in a historical chance for an (even) better future for mankind, which must be used wisely.

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The prerequisite for this, however, is to adapt old behavior patterns to changed regularities - i.e. a resilient economic policy that draws strength for new things from a crisis.

The acceleration of digitization and the data economy triggered by Covid-19 and its fight against it provides decisive solutions for a whole range of existential threats - such as climate change, global warming, the destruction of the oceans, but also hunger or medical undersupply.

What speaks against "golden rice"?

Because in Corona times, the pace of innovation has increased rapidly.

Just think of the record speed with which vaccines and drugs were developed, tested and approved.

Ideological concerns about genetic engineering have been swept away overnight.

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This should also lead to a rethink in medicine, pharmacy and probably even in agriculture.

What speaks against growing genetically engineered "golden rice", which (like genetic engineering vaccines against Covid-19) could save the lives of millions of people.

Innovation and progress - change and adaptation - are precisely the behavior patterns on which "resilience" relies.

This is where it differs from “sustainability”, which rather strives to preserve the familiar and the existing.

The extent to which the concept of sustainability is now charged in politics with the protection, preservation and preservation of the old can be seen in the climate debate.

Prohibitions and renunciation, asceticism and abstinence are considered particularly sustainable instruments.

That is more likely to be a wrong than correct assessment, because among the billions of the poor and the poorest outside of the more highly developed economies, less than the nothing of today is simply not possible.

Only innovation can unleash strength

Resilience, on the other hand, wants to be aggressive and forward-looking, to use new technologies to reduce or even stop global warming, reduce environmental pollution, find vaccines and drugs, and eradicate hunger and diseases.

Only innovation can unleash the forces and trigger the dynamics that enable timely adaptation to climate change, future pandemics or other disasters.

The aim of a resilient policy must be to ensure with less ecological effort that people around the world can realize their elementary desires for less poverty and more prosperity.

To achieve this, everything that is produced must be manufactured more efficiently than is the case today.

This goal can in no way be achieved in time by doing without or saving.

Big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms, however, are the most effective weapons of all for recognizing and correcting errors, optimizing processes ecologically and economically, stopping idling, preventing waste, eradicating mismanagement and thereby steadily improving the lives of the masses.

A resilient economic policy recognizes that the challenges ahead are existential and enormous.

Pandemics, natural disasters, climate and environmental threats, but also (political or even military) conflicts are a constant threat.

Good rules of the game are important

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But it accepts that many of the changes are so complex and so dynamic that it would simply be presumptuous to predict today what will or should be tomorrow.

Resilient politics thus follows a well-founded behavior pattern.

"Whether a game is good depends more on good rules than on good players" - this is the final insight of James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics. If the rules are good, people are more or less motivated by themselves, doing the right thing and leaving the wrong thing behind.

Resilience accepts that the future is uncertain and uncertain.

Unlike ideological know-it-alls who claim to know the path to be taken in the (post) Corona period, it therefore only specifies the politically determined goals.

Implementation and procedure, however, are left to the population and the economy.

Resilience does not determine what needs to be done, it sets the rules of the game.

For example, it requires politicians to specify how high the total annual CO2 emissions in an economy can be, or how clean air and water should be.

Then, however, fees or taxes and pollution rights that are appropriate to the originator or the user must ensure the urgently needed greening of the economy.

Survival through adaptation is the motto of resilient politics.

And innovations are the decisive means to an end.

Understood in this way, resilience is the order of the day in (post) corona times.

Thomas Straubhaar is Professor of Economics, especially International Economic Relations, at the University of Hamburg