While we’re in lock-down, it’s difficult to see the upside. We can’t spend time with our friends or see family that is farther out. However, as this is likely the state of our lives for quite an extended period of time, it’s important that we evaluate cost and opportunity in an honest way. The risks are clear. What about the opportunities? There are two steps to a successful public response; Now and Later. Now is about helping people get through it and Later is about paving the way for the future. The Later is going to be much more successful if we spend some of the Now preparing for it.
For individuals and businesses, chaos, as Lord Baelish of Game of Thrones would say, is a ladder. This crisis is exposing institutions that previously seemed venerable to be precarious. Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, has said that when the tide goes out you find out ‘who is swimming naked.’ The tide has retreated and we are starting to see some naked swimmers. Restaurants have been the first to fall (and for a particularly interesting take on this I highly recommend this interview with Nick Kokonas of Alinea fame), but everything will be impacted. Unless there are going to be monthly bailouts, untouchable titans will be felled. It’s sad in many ways, but in that tragedy comes opportunity. New businesses will rise from the ashes. What form they take is anybody’s guess.
That process, in many ways, is natural. The market is a competition for resources in the same way that all life is a competition for food. Fire and flood are natural parts of many ecosystems. Remember the fire in the Disney classic, ‘Bambi’? With the following spring came blooms even more bountiful than before. In the same way, the fires of the business cycle downturn make way for the blooms of the next. It is for the entrepreneurs of tomorrow to decide what those blooms look like. The only thing we can do now is make sure the transition phase is as painless as possible and that the regrowth phase has the fewest obstacles we can give it.
Government response is a bit trickier. Every policy has a downside, but there are some things that we KNOW we can do better. US Healthcare, for example, leaves much to be desired. A light has been shone down on it particularly brightly by this situation and that bright light should be able to help us understand what parts are most in need of improvement. The biggest opportunity for government improvement, though, might lie in infrastructure. Our entire infrastructure is desperately in need of updating, repair, and expansion.
One of the biggest obstacles to improving that infrastructure, though, has nothing to do with the construction itself. It’s a wall of paperwork. A pipe or a railroad will be laid across many jurisdictions, each with their own set of regulations and their own set of government departments that need to be worked with. This process takes an enormous amount of time, and that’s before you even consider the effects of NIMBYism. You could have a perfectly well-thought-out plan to build a railroad, but if there’s a majority from a single municipality blocking it, the whole thing could be put in jeopardy. There are many benefits from the governmental experimentation that takes place under our federalist system of government, but building infrastructure is not one of them.
What does this have to do with our current situation? I would posit that the number of municipalities that would protest to the consolidation of infrastructure planning would be a small fraction of that of normal times and that if we included a Federal lifeline extended to cities in states in dire financial straits would bring that pretty damn close to zero. It’s one opportunity I would venture to say that is too good to…pass up.