A to B and (Almost) Back Again

Remember ratchets?

A lot of the speculating about the new world involves systems and processes which had to make fundamental changes when the virus arrived, and whether they will return to normal once they can.  Having moved from A to B, will they move all the way back to A, or will there be a good reason to retain some of the movement toward B?  This would require that being at B, or being somewhere between A and B, works better than A.  A lot of what's new in the new world will be the result of  this discovery.

Take rice farming, for instance.   

None of the world's major rice exporting nations - India, Vietnam and Thailand - makes significant use of seeding machines.

They have come into play in a big way in India this year because hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers... did not arrive in the northern grain belt for the 2020 planting season due to the coronavirus lockdown.

That pushed up the price of local workers and made it more economical for farmers to lease rice planting machines rather than pay for hired help.

Rice farmers "...are still wary of the technology and overturning the time-honoured use of manual labor."  They approached the idea of automation with "trepidation," as one farmer described it.

But it turns out that planting rice with seeding machines takes much less time, uses less water, and is cheaper than the traditional methods.  Even so, rice farmers are waiting until October to see if yields improve.  I find it interesting that, after improving time, water use and cost, they still won't accept the new technology unless it also increases yields.

There will probably be more planting machines in the rice fields next spring than there would have been had the virus not appeared.  And a lot more unemployment, as well, although, cruel as it may sound, we would have to say "buggy whips," since automation was coming eventually.

So - probably not entirely back to pre-COVID systems and processes in the rice business.  How about business travel, which has fallen off a cliff in the last few months?  Surely corporations will have discovered that Zoom meetings, in many instances, have worked fine, and that at least some expensive business travel was unnecessary.  My father, an executive in a public utility, refused a promotion because it would require him to travel a lot and be away from his family.  Lots of reasons to limit business travel.  Once again, from A to B, but not entirely back to A when it's all over.

Two examples of how the pandemic moved industry in a more efficient direction.  This won't happen all the time - there are plenty of instances where A was always the better place - but when it does, we've got to understand that efficiency is rarely achieved without cost.  In India, countless migrant workers will be out of work.  The travel industry will take a big hit when business travel - it's most profitable sector - shrinks.  

Looks like we need to be thinking and working on building a new, healthy economy based on different rules and realities.  Imagine that.