The Progressive Future

I'm working on a post that sort of categorizes visions for the new world. In an article about the future of restaurants, Matt Goulding imagines the restaurant of June, 2022:

Prices at most places are a little higher, and portions a little smaller, but on the bright side, you can see where the money goes. Notes on menus and social media explain new wage distribution, health-care initiatives, and relationships with the supply chain.

I'm interested in learning how the human society I'm familiar with, and the economic system those humans have developed, would produce a result anything like this. Restaurants like this exist, but they are upscale and niche. What is it about our experience of the coronaviurus that suggests that this kind of thing will become significantly more common?

This goes in the category called “I've had this progressive idea that will really advance sustainability, income equality, and quality of life for everyone. Wouldn't it be great if it turned out that we rebuilt society based on this idea?”

PS:  Obviously, I've lost control of the font again.  Help!

Probably Not the Last on Tourism

I live in a tourist county – we've got the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the whole James Fenimore Cooper legacy – his father founded the eponymous county seat where all this takes place – and Abbey and I, in our idyllic retirement, participate in theater that works only because of the high level of tourist activity. As I think I mentioned, our county is unique in our region for seeing twice as much revenue from sales tax as from property tax. So the collapse of the tourist industry has been devastating – and will become more so as the summer progresses.*

Naturally, this is happening all over the world. One in ten jobs worldwide depend on tourism. Revenues from tourism have fallen, on average, 80%. No industry can survive that. How will it look on the other side?

Short answer: no one knows. I've read a lot about this, because the lives of so many of the people around me depend on the answer, but as yet, there is no clear path to the future. Most speculation involves folks who have had some good ideas about improving tourism and creating more sustainable ways for the tourist industry to protect and enhance natural environments and indigenous people. They project these ideas into the future, in a wish-fulfilling fantasy.

Tourism is a realm of human activity which has essentially disappeared, and as such might be put back together, in the new world, any way we want to. Will we base its reconstruction on long-term, agree-upon, sustainable goals, or on the quickest buck?

There is a kind of tension between two possible outcomes. One is return to status quo ante, and quickly. This approach takes into account the millions of workers who have suddenly lost their ability to buy food and shelter, and the massive pressure on governments all over the world to get them back to work. Endangered animals in Africa are suddenly threatened like they haven't been in decades – they are huge sources of readily available protein. People have to eat. The story is the same, with variations, all over the world.

The other approach suggests that the answer for the future is to make tourism really expensive. Christopher deBellaigue, writing in the Guardian, suggests that:

Tourism isn’t the right that many holidaymakers, whatever their budgets, seem to think it is. It’s a luxury that needs to pay its way.

He suggests that the greater cost would be structured so that the tourist sites themselves retain most of it, for maintenance of the site itself (natural or man-made) and development of more robust indigenous industry, craft and art. Day-trippers on tours or cruise ships generally buy very little at a tourist site, and much of that is manufactured far away. Venice loses money on tourism, deBellaigue asserts, and so Venice sinks into the lagoon.

So will the new world include a tourist industry that, like yacht racing and skiing at San Moritz, is the realm of the wealthy? Or will we return to economy-of-scale tourism that values cheap, and damaging, travel, overwhelming sites and leaving them without the means to maintain and repair, not to mention improve?

Isn't there a Plan C?

* - Our little baseballville destination is far enough away from highways and airports that visitors usually need to stay over and eat in our restaurants. So we get few day-trippers and our problems – and solutions – are not on a scale of those discussed in this post.

We Need Others

Pope Francis has some hopes for the new world. Yesterday he expressed the hope that we would “be careful” so as not to make “individualism the guiding principle of society."

“Let us be careful,” the Pope warned, “because, as soon as the emergency has passed, it is easy to fall back into this illusion. It is easy to quickly forget that we need others, someone to take care of us, to give us courage.”

I'm just going to leave that there for us to think about. Maybe write about it later. “We need others.” Are we learning this lesson?

PSA

Apologies for my absence. It's been a long time – good heavens, it's been two weeks. That time span almost exactly corresponds with a period of (mostly) unexpected socializing with family.

One of the advantages of sheltering in a big house on Cape Cod, near the beach and with with a view of the Bay and Provincetown, is that family comes to visit. There was a lot of that in the last two weeks, including our son and daughter-in-law and grandbaby, who came to stay for four days. Then a frantic day and a half getting the house ready for renters, and the long trip back to upstate NY.

In this world, this kind of socializing is done exclusively outdoors, often with masks, on the beach, on walks, on big decks. Or, in the case of our houseguests, it is done with people who have been really, really careful, for a long time, eschewing indoor gatherings and staying mostly at home. And we do that precisely so we can enjoy four days together without fear of infection.

In the new world? Who knows.

OK. I'm back.

Gap Year

We are sheltering for a while here in our house toward the end of Cape Cod, a house we rent out in the summer and enjoy (a lot) in the not-summer. The local consolidated High School covers the outermost four towns on the Cape – basically, the forearm and hand of the arm-shaped Cape. I was reading the bios of the graduating Seniors (it's been a long quarantine...) in the Provincetown paper, and I was struck by the number of students who had committed to take a gap year before college.

More than half were heading off for college (most to state schools or Cape Cod Community College), but nearly a third were taking gap years, or were not sure what they'd be doing. That seemed to be a lot, and I wondered if it were because there is so much uncertainty about everything at the moment – even whether a particular college will be in session in the fall. I did some Googling and discovered that gap years are suddenly the thing that you recommend to graduating Seniors.

I've always been in favor of a gap year, or even two. College provides a very narrow view of life in general, and, in general, is not a great way to prepare for life*. Some perspective can be very valuable, especially at that impressionable age.

All this got me thinking – potentially, thousands of graduating Seniors who would normally move right to college will, instead, be finding their way through the new world on their own. I can't imagine that this can be anything but a good thing.

I went to college because it was expected – the mid-century's American dream. There's still a lot of that going around (one of the students said in her bio that she was the first in her family to go to college). What if a lot more students made decisions based on what they found in the real world, and not what everyone told them they should do? What if they chose courses of study based on some real-world experiences – or maybe decided not to go to college at all?

If we all stop and remember how we ended up in the careers we pursued or are pursuing, many of us, myself included, would realize that a lot of serendipity was involved – the right place at the right time, stumbling onto an opportunity, one door closing and another one opening. Apparently random experiences that opened whole new worlds. How far were our careers from what we studied? Imagine if we had all spent a year or two wandering around a world we'd have to inhabit in the future, learning its ins and outs, and bumping into chance and opportunity and that random person or event that changed everything.

So the new world, which will be fueled, more and more as time goes on, by these graduating Seniors, might be more... what? Coherent? Satisfying? Will the new problems inherent in the new world be addressed by young people who have had a chance to figure out what's what?

I hope so. Best wishes, class of 2020.

* - In my experience, it's also not a great way to prepare for a career, but that's grist for another mill.

Hoax and History

Yesterday, while reading a 2-star review of a Great Course on Amazon Prime called “Black Death” (it's been a long quarantine) I came upon this:

...since many historians actually believe it occurred, we have their "expertise" to remind us of history. It never happened, at least not in the way they said it did …

Good heavens. There are Black Death deniers? Who knew?

Googling “black death deniers” led me to what seems to be a long-standing controversy regarding exactly which virus (or other malicious microbe) was responsible for killing half of Europe. A “plague denier” is someone who believes that the devastation – which, it turns out, everyone believes in – was not caused by the bubonic plague (Y. pestis) but by something else: an Ebola-like virus, anthrax, pneumonia, or marmot plague (I'll let you go read that). Giant gerbils are also involved, as are germs from space.  I am not making this up.

It occurs to me that we have pandemic deniers, right now, while the pandemic is going on. They believe that the pandemic is a hoax. It doesn't help that the President of the United States said just this as recently as late in February (and his son said the same thing in May).

So how will the history books treat the notion that the pandemic was a hoax? How will the new world look back on us at this point? The deniers will be laughed off the stage. Right?

Although the numbers of sick and dying in the US are currently plateauing, we are focused almost entirely on opening our economy. Thousands (tens of thousands? millions?)of Americans are doing, on a daily basis, what we are clearly told is dangerous. The virus is not responding, for the most part, and so their history books will read closer to hoax than to horror. If the dire warnings do come true, well, then this history will be much different. And so many more will be dead.

The new world needs to be ready for the next pandemic – actually, it needs to be ready for this one to return, if it doesn't turn on us now. The new world will need to draw both on the fear of sickness and death, and also on the confidence that we can stand against the virus – we need to draw on our history, the story of us meeting the virus and defeating it. Without the fear, we will not take it seriously. Without the confidence, we will not make the sacrifices necessary to get most of us to the other side.

So history matters. I am afraid that, if we are not able to tell this story of great danger and great resolve, that the pandemic will drift off into history, like the hurricane that didn't actually crash onto the land. And we won't be ready – psychologically or functionally – for the next one.

Another Ratchet

If we are working from home a lot more in the new world - and especially if we're more likely to be doing school and work from home, at the same time, in the new world - we'll have to fix this.