Danny Quah, dean, and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, addresses the questions: How should the world change post Covid-19? Will we all just go back to business as usual? What lessons do we need to learn from this pandemic?
Upclose and personal: “Post-Covid-19, the new focus will concentrate more sharply on individual well-being and individual responsibility. Old political dogmas about individual rights and state surveillance and control need to be recalibrated. In a world of spillovers, individual rights are immediately social ones too. Covid-19 has shown how our economic world is rife with externalities, where we ourselves rise by lifting others around us."
Two paradigms: The overall tradeoff involves two paradigms of development. Comparing a highly souped-up car with a slower sturdier one, he concluded: “The critical trade-off is between driving an economic system to maximal efficiency and building in redundancies and resilience through spare back-up capacity. Government intervention is needed to repair the problems created by externalities in health systems.”
Read here (Straits Times, April 23, 2020)
