There will be calls to get back to ‘business as usual’ and carry on as we did after the ’08 financial crash. Let’s look at why that is a terrible idea:

The recovery to the ’08 crisis was to bail out failed banks and corporations and ignore ordinary people. As a result, poor and middle-class people lost houses, jobs and livelihoods; and then had to face an eroding state safety net due to the austerity enacted to pay for the bailouts. All the while the people responsible gained from a transfer of wealth to the rich via rock bottom interest rates and limited fiscal stimulus. Emmanuel Saez’s research found that that in the US in 2010, the first year of the recovery, ‘the top 1% captured 93% of the income gains’.

This cannot happen again — people and the planet must be the main benefactors of the recovery. Remember this change is inevitable, but the type of change is not. We can design the future we want to see.

The second part of Friedman’s quote is ‘When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. The good news is we already have many of the solutions we need to get started solving the dual issues of inequality and climate breakdown. The recovery from this Covid-19 crisis needs to be a seismic shift towards environmental sustainability and social fairness through a programme akin to the Green New Deal. It should be a programme of investment in a green economy and the well-being of all citizens. The goal of this investment cannot be to kickstart the economy and carry on a bit greener. It must be to permanently alter our path to living within our planetary boundaries and create an economy that can reduce consumption and production without negative social impacts. This will mark a stark realignment away from our growth at all costs system.

With the looming crisis of climate change, there is no excuse for the required fiscal stimulus during the Covid-19 recovery not to be put towards greening our society. Not only that, if the fiscal injection instead aims for ‘business as usual’, our hopes of solving the climate crisis will be severely hampered; any investment in fossil fuels now will continue to haunt us till the end of the century. Greening our society means initiatives such as investing in new sustainable industries and jobs, rapidly increasing energy efficiency, shortening the lifespan of heavy polluters, and rewilding our planet.

As mentioned above, fiscal stimulus is not enough — we need to enact policy to fundamentally change our society into one that is just and inclusive. We must shift focus from endless growth to well-being as our measure of success. To create this society, we must strengthen our safety net, expand our public goods, and strive for full employment. Policies such as universal basic income (UBI), reduced workweeks, government jobs programmes and living wage guarantees will be crucial to lowering inequality and improving happiness. Building a strong safety net will also make us resilient to future shocks, such as mass layoff of workers from technological advancements.

The response to this crisis must be compassionate, collective and centred on people and the environment. We must think big but act small with local supply chains and community-driven solutions. We need to realign our goals to well-being and quality of life while actively reducing consumption and production.

Aristotle’s view on politics was that the point of the polity is to ensure the well-being and happiness of all citizens. He said this about 2400 years ago and had it bang on. Since then, we have collectively forgotten this goal of happiness and replaced it with the goal of maximising GDP, whatever the cost. Let’s realign our priorities and make this crisis an opportunity to do things better.