Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

by Scott Galloway

The pandemic has laid bare a generation’s worth of poor choices and accelerated the consequences. The song remains the same: the rich get richer. The cost of a few garnering most of the gains is not just economic, it attacks the ballast of the U.S., our middle class. For forty years, we have engaged in a gross idolatry of private enterprise and the wealth it creates, while hollowing out government institutions and denigrating public servants. When the virus hit our shores, it found a society optimized for spread. Relative to our wealth and power, America’s handling of the challenge of this generation has been the worst in the world. In truth, we were sick already, riddled with comorbidities. Government agencies were weakened and science discredited. Individualism had become prized above all, resulting in a false conflation of freedom with a lack of civic duty and a refusal to bear minor inconvenience. Our muscles of collective sacrifice had atrophied so as to become feeble. The prescription for the pandemic is the same as the prescription for our broader illness—a wholesale renewal of our sense of community. We must wrest our government from the hands of the shareholder class, which has co-opted it, and end the cronyism they have instituted to protect their wealth. We must set aside our idolatry of innovators and look unflinchingly at the exploitation it promotes. In short, we need to take government seriously—as a respectable, necessary, and noble institution—so that we c...