Capitalism and Covid in the moral maze
What principles do we need to create a better society after the pandemic?
On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, we discussed whether Covid-19 had conspired with global capitalism to create a “lost generation” — no, not the people who have died from the virus but the young, who some people claim have “sacrificed everything” to save the lives of the old.
As the programme’s home page puts it:
A parallel has been drawn with the post-war period which saw the birth of the welfare state. While there is widespread support for short-term financial help, there are those who caution against what they see as writing off an entire generation as ‘lost’, or institutionalising state dependency; they believe that the pandemic has merely accelerated inevitable economic change from which a brighter future can emerge. There are many young people who don’t share that optimism, and point to how the Covid crisis has exposed pre-existing health and wealth inequalities, which, for them, raises bigger questions about the morality of global capitalism. This is the moment, they argue, to change capitalism so that it focuses on what humans really want and need, and to actively promote the things we value beyond financial success and economic usefulness.
My co-panellists were Tim Stanley, Mona Siddiqui and Giles Fraser. Our witnesses were Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development at Oxford university; Daniel Pryor, head of programmes at the Adam Smith Institute; Grace Blakeley, a writer at Tribune magazine; and Dr Jamie Whyte, a libertarian philosopher and writer.
You can listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer here.
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