Boris Johnson is an idiot surrounded by idiots who should stop drumming up “mass hysteria” about Omicron and treat the viral variant as sensibly as leaders in the rest of Europe, Michael O’Leary raged the other week.
“They’re not all panicking in Italy or Spain or Germany or Holland,” the blustering boss of the Ryanair airline told a reporter from the Times newspaper in London.
Alas, a day after his interview appeared last weekend, the Netherlands imposed a nationwide lockdown to curb Omicron’s spread and Germany brought in tough new travel rules for arrivals from the UK. France already had similar travel limits by then and by Monday even O’Leary’s native Ireland had an 8pm curfew for pubs and restaurants.
He had overlooked a basic lesson of the pandemic that has been as true in 2021 as it was in 2020: certainty is fleeting in a world beset by uncertainty.
But what if this is just the start of even greater volatility?
Last year’s shocks of working from home, discovering Zoom and watching the speed of vaccine development have given way to another round of shifts in 2021 that raise profound questions about technology, solidarity and remorseless change.
Some of the most visible moves have been technological.
Digital art
Before 2021, did you think anyone would pay $69 million for a piece of digital art by an artist called Beeple, as a crypto investor did at the first Christie’s auction of NFT, or non-fungible token art in March?
Did you imagine a country would ever make bitcoin legal tender, as El Salvador did in June?
Or that two billionaires would finally reach the edge of space a month later in their privately funded spacecraft? Or that Facebook would rebrand itself Meta and declare it would focus on the virtual-world “metaverse”, where an outfit called Republic Realm said it paid $4.2 million for a plot of digital land a few weeks ago?
It is hard to know what these and other tech developments really portend, nor if they are as alarming as many fear. Artificial intelligence is as likely to lead to net job creation as net job loss in companies, one new study by academics in Britain suggested last week.
But it is difficult to be sanguine about a less visible pandemic shift: the widening gulfs between rich and poor, and business winners and losers. Indeed, nothing has exposed the emptiness of the idea that “we’re all in this together” and “building back better” as well as 2021 has.
When Forbes released its global billionaires list in April it reported a record 493 new additions, despite a first Covid year of death, recession and job losses. That meant the world had on average gained a new billionaire every 17 hours since the magazine’s March 2020 wealth snapshot.
Many on the list benefited from trends behind the spectacular pandemic gains made by what McKinsey calls the “Mega 25”. These are 25 companies, including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, whose market capitalisation surged so much in the first pandemic year that they collectively accounted for 40 per cent of the $14 trillion of value that the overall market gained.
Surging wealth
It would be one thing if this surging wealth had come as a big wave of pandemic recovery spending was being directed to where it is sorely needed.
Ultimately, the great lesson of 2021 is to be certain of uncertainty, and wary of any suggestion that the worst is over.
Yet just 18 per cent of such spending in leading economies in 2020 was heading to efforts to cut carbon emissions, improve air pollution or support biodiversity, say Oxford university analysts tracking this expenditure.
As of last week, this share had risen to an estimated 29 per cent, says Brian O’Callaghan, lead researcher on the Oxford analysis, in large part thanks to measures in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that US president Joe Biden signed into law in November.
It would be even higher if Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat with ties to the coal industry, weren’t trying to sink Biden’s $1.75tn climate and social spending bill, which is literally called the Build Back Better plan.
Even so, the measures already approved globally could add up to enormous sums of green investment that should be a significant boost for strategically placed businesses in 2022.
But that boost is unlikely to be felt equally when global efforts to tackle the pandemic itself remain so wildly uneven.
Rich nations have spent almost $16,000 per person on Covid, while least developed countries have only managed about $60 per person, the Oxford data shows.
Grim reminder
Omicron has been a grim reminder that leaving billions of people unprotected is a recipe for further variants. Yet as the year closes, the share of people fully vaccinated against Covid has reached an impressive 70 per cent in high-income countries, while just 4 per cent in low-income ones.
Ultimately, the great lesson of 2021 is to be certain of uncertainty, and wary of any suggestion that the worst is over.
As O’Callaghan says: “Inequalities between countries and within countries have both grown, and that can only spell bad news for how societies operate in the future.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021
