Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

by Scott Galloway

At Harvard, David Malan has made the school’s renowned introductory computer science course into an international phenomenon, taking it online and tuition-free. In 2018, 1,200 students enrolled in Yale professor Lauri Santos’s course “Psychology and the Good Life,” making it the most popular in the school’s 300-year history. But when Santos and Yale put the course online, for free, over one million people enrolled.

General Assembly and Lambda School are a gangster way of preparing a person of any age for a career in those fields in a matter of months.

The wealthy have done well over the past few decades, in a supernova kind of way. A ton has been written on this, because the data is abundant. There is shocking data at the extremes: the top 0.1% now own more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 80%.11 The three richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50%. And there is bad news in broad strokes as well: since 1983, the share of national wealth owned by lower- and middle-income families has declined from 39% of the pie to 21%, while upper-income families have increased their share of national wealth from 60% to 79%.

As Benjamin Franklin said when he signed the revolutionary document, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall hang separately.”

Might this generation inspire greater comity of man, more empathy for the disenfranchised, and a greater appreciation for what it means to be American? And finally, might we decide to reinvest in the greatest source of good in history—the U.S. government? Might we?