The vaccination campaign works like an economic stimulus program.
This remarkable sentence is in an outlook on the world after Corona recently published by the OECD, the club of the rich industrialized countries.
Three things can be deduced from this: The better and faster a country can vaccinate, the faster the economy will improve.
The better the vaccination works, the more freedom we regain.
And finally: The vaccination is a great success of capitalism and its creativity, which saves freedom and human lives.
Anyone who, like the Greens boss Robert Habeck, thinks that capitalism failed in the pandemic because the market did not offer a free mask to everyone in the world in spring 2020 should check out the vaccination miracle.
Rainer Hank
Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Follow I follow
The joy of freedom and declining incidences has been palpable since the sunny days.
Our corona irritation subsides, giving way to a mood of joyful serenity.
"Back to normality" is the catchphrase of the hour.
Open everything quickly, demands the Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger: "Otherwise the summer will be over again." That hits our impatience well.
There are contemporaries who want to convince us that we shouldn't go back to normal now.
Modesty, asceticism and the reduction of life to real needs are the order of the day: Bavaria instead of Bali, bread and butter instead of beluga caviar.
That would suit the prophets of asceticism.
I want to decide for myself what my “real” needs are.
Anyone who thinks there is an objective measure for this is only pursuing a re-education program according to their own standards.
Presumptuous behavioral control in the guise of morally good, ecologically correct adult education.
Robots are immune to viruses
In the meantime, clever analyzes are piling up that expect us to approach the Roaring Twenties of the 21st century. This is supported by the vital need to finally live to the fullest again. Economic and historical indicators are added to this. If you look at the growth forecasts of the International Monetary Fund, robust growth is expected in all G-7 countries this year, from more than six percent in the USA to 3.6 percent in Germany and a good three percent in Japan enough. The global economy has not experienced such a synchronized upswing, and of this strength, since the 1950s. The decisive drivers of this growth are gigantic economic stimulus programs that many countries have launched.
In addition, the pandemic has brought about an enormous boost in digitization. The inventions related to the Internet and their possible technical and economic benefits have long been known. But now digital progress is taking hold. It was no different with television sets, dishwashers and automobiles in the 1950s and 1960s. Everything had been around since the 1920s and 1930s. But it wasn't until the Roaring Sixties that these devices found their way into every household. Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, takes the view that the digitization push of the pandemic finally brings the solution of the "productivity paradox": Now the fruits of digitization in the health or education system,in the factories and offices and therefore also in the economic statistics. Of course, this could also have the effect that companies automate their production into the Internet of Things - as a measure to strengthen resilience against coming shocks: unlike humans, robots in the factory are permanently immune to dangerous new viruses.