3 July

If you Google ‘subsistence’, you usually get pics like this, self-sufficiency stuff. It’s revealing for me, because it suggests that to subsist you have to withdraw from society. Society is about movement and economic growth. Some thinkers, even military thinkers, are now saying that’s why our economies had no resilience, and collapsed inside days when we started quarantines. Our economic ideas need to be reframed around subsistence, the capacity of individuals and business to subsist under stress. This is why countries all around the world right now feel torn between protecting peoples’ health, and their economies. Because their economic ideas don’t include basic subsistence. Instead of forcing people to get infected to save the old economy, we really need to invent a new one.