The Current Economic Model Challenged with Coronavirus: Towards a Metamorphosis of the Consumption Model (original) (raw)

Beyond a Sustainable Consumption Behavior: What Post-pandemic World Do We Want to Live in?

Frontiers in Sustainability, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic has uncovered the foremost struggles of the twenty first century: social-economic inequality, global value chains, national security, and the environmental crisis. None of these seems novel, as many staged fiction dystopias have been predicting and warning mankind about the negative impacts of unsustainable consumption behaviors by displaying scenarios of exponential human population and economy growth. Several scientific tools for assessing sustainability have been developed to cover social, economic, and environmental aspects, however, most of them are simply used either separately or without a solid conceptual model supporting an epistemological construct to allow for deeper and scientific-based discussions on sustainability. This work presents a perspective about possible scenarios of the world's sustainability, based on a straightforward integrated framework for its quantification. The three capitals of sustainability, summarized as environmental susta...

Coronavirus and the Ideological, Moral and Metaphysical Challenges to Capitalism, Individual Freedom and Money

Asian Social Science

Coronavirus Pandemic has taken the world by storm. Just as it has posited a severe threat to human lives, so has it leveled grave concerns to the mode of life cultured by the world's industrialized societies. Through argumentative analysis, the present study attempts to substantiate that at-least three imminent philosophical crises have arisen in the wake of COVID-19 i.e., ideological, moral, and metaphysical. On the one side, Capitalism and the Free Market have essentially been left defenseless, and individual freedom has substantially been threatened. On the other side, family and social capital have been inflexed with a breath of fresh air.

The Post-Covid-19 Reality and Economic Theory

Mednarodno inovativno poslovanje = Journal of Innovative Business and Management

This paper examines interconnectedness between Covid-19 and six nested subsystems of our planet: people, economy, society, anthroposphere, biosphere and planetosphere. It argues the complexity inside of them and in their interactions. The main question is what paradigmatic shift related to sustainable development economics did Covid-19 initiate, and what are the changes in paradigmatic manifestations of a post Covid-19 sustainable economic theory. Through comparison between neoclassical economics together with neoclassical paradigm manifestations, and what should be changed to avoid business as usual and enhance environmental economy, the paper concludes that much of everyday economic intellectual constructs and activities, including dominant economic theory is the part of the present reality that is not sustainable and has to be changed.

COVID-19 and the emergency of new economies for the design of a new world

Strategic Design Research Journal, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic situation has proven the fragilities of current human lifestyles. The previously established patterns, as they were formerly, generated work and income based on production and consumption through a predominately linear type of economy demonstrated to be unsustainable. The necessity of social isolation has undermined the structures supporting this model. In this context, this article aims to resume the emergency for finding new ways of thinking and acting in the economy exploring emerging views. A comparative framework was constructed as a result, based on four models of new economies. It has arisen from the end of the XX century to the beginning of the XXI in the literature. Design evolution is also related to the circular, distributed, creative, and regenerative economy as an agent for change. In conclusion, the authors reported on strategies and actions created during the pandemic to collaborate on views posed by the new economies and design culture that are continually being transformed in the eminence of contributing to a new material immaterial world.

A new opportunity for capitalism resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic

2020

The article presents a philosophical discussion about how the economic restructuring after the COVID-19 recession is based on two main factors: labour precariousness and consumption stimulation. From a review of data and literature about global economic growth and incomes from big companies like Amazon, it is possible to suggest that capitalism is facing a decline yet not a structural crisis. Nonetheless, labour after the outbreak is damaged by the application of flexibilization and informality – particularly telecommuting and immaterial labour – as seen in countries like Ecuador, Italy, India, and United States. Also, companies and governments are calling for a boost of consumption to save the economy based on fiscal policies, consumerism, and a ‘cleaning’ of consumption. In conclusion, a theoretical alternative is a microphysics of struggle understood as a politicization of the private space and a re-definition of labour as a material activity that requires better conditions for w...

The COVID-19 pandemic: an economic disaster, a philosophical challenge. A philosophical essay

Book Chapter, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown policies in the years 2020 and 2021 have exerted economic, social, and psychic implications for most people. The reception by social scientists is almost exclusively a negative one; in this essay, a contrasting, more positive perspective is developed, based on the philosophy of Aristotelian Ethics. The idea is developed that this coronavirus pandemic interrupts and distorts the work-consumption-treadmill, enabling people to live out those talents and capabilities that make people human, lifting them beyond the stage of an animal with only basic needs. This societal development continues under the influence of the energy crisis and the rising inflation in the year 2022.

The Absent Cause: Time, Work and Value in the Age of Coronavirus

The Philosophical Salon (Los Angeles Review of Books), 2020

Making 'good use' of Covid-19 is without a doubt illusory, not to mention offensive for those who -as always the weakest social groups -die, suffer and are now preparing to face a devastating economic recession. However, the virus provides us with an increasingly rare object: a time at least partially freed from the conformist hyperactivity that binds us to our world. Suddenly it becomes possible, even inevitable, to escape the imperatives that regulate our lives. The fixity of the space in which we are confined is offset by a temporality somewhat liberated from the ideological regimes of compulsive behaviour typical of postindustrial turbo-capitalism. Whether we like it or not, we are forced to stop and listen to the silence of a world that, at least for now, no longer belongs to us.

Some social-economic implications of COVID-19 pandemic in our life

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

The article analyzes the transformations of our everyday life that are caused by the social processes that have occurred under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes affect spheres such as education, entrepreneurship, politics and the spiritual sphere. The irreversible state of the transformation that has literally divided the society into "before" and "after" the pandemic is thoroughly analyzed.

The Covid-19 pandemic as a potential change agent for selected economic concepts

2021

The objective of the article is to refer to the thesis about the need to modify the main paradigm of economic sciences-by which we mean mainstream economics-with all its consequences that influence the whole economic sciences. We posit the need for the modification of how economic sciences are practiced in ontological, epistemological, and methodological aspects. The need results from the impact of several factors that appeared even in the pre-pandemic period, for which Covid-19 may be a complementary and reinforcing circumstance that may even directly determine the change. Research Design & Methods: The main method we used was that of critical literature analysis. We constructed a set of normative recommendations for changes in economic sciences. Next, we selected four issues to exemplify the areas that require change, for which we proposed a set of postulates that constitute the desired modifications in economic sciences. Findings: The conducted literature review shows that the number of people convinced of the need to modify the assumptions and content of economic sciences grows systematically. Sometimes, there even appears a more elaborate demand for the revision of economic sciences, not only of their modification. Implications & Recommendations: Firstly, the most important consequence of the study is the justification of the postulate of departing from the dominance of the main paradigm of economic sciences contained in mainstream economics towards noticing the multi-paradigm character of economic sciences, and secondly, the support of the position leaning towards the active and normative involvement of economic sciences in creating/correcting the surrounding reality. Contribution & Value Added: The text is a synthesis of the postulates previously reported in the literature regarding the modification of economic sciences with the consequences caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chronologically, the Covid-19 pandemic is the last of the causative factors of the revision under consideration-neither the only nor the most important factor-but what draws attention are its direct nature, violence, and the surprise associated with its appearance. Article type: research article