Read two articles recently - one by Paul Krugman about Gross Domestic Misery in America and the other about the K-shaped recovery in India. Both are about a very small minority getting ahead despite the pandemic and sometimes befitting because of it while the vast majority gets left far behind. That is what creates the K in the story about India and the increasing Gross Domestic Misery in the Krugman story. The Print article points out a common theme that ties many countries together in their failure to do right by its people in the time of a generational crisis:
But increasingly, governments don’t have the capacity or the competence to deal with the scale of what confronts them. This encourages escapism through the politics and economics of nationalism, made worse by tribalism or nativism, the package accompanied inevitably by the erosion of institutional bulwarks and therefore state capture by powerful businessmen. Typically, the political and economic winners are not the same.
Its frightening to imagine how this will end if there is one. Some businesses will close never to return and that list is ever growing. No one is really immune to this. I know several retirees who have been forced to rejoin the workforce in some capacity because they can no longer count on things they could before the pandemic hit.
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