Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters the word ‘the economy’ today. /1 https://t.co/BwqAxRxYjZ

That astronomical jump in GDP, for the first time in 2 millennia, was caused by the Industrial Revolution. Mostly, engineers. Most people know that. What’s not said though is why this caused such a massive jump in GDP. All of those engineering works beginning in the…/2 https://t.co/dJhHIPAM6m

…Industrial Revolution were fulfilling basic social needs that societies had for centuries. Mass production of textiles, food, water supply, transport, etc. Society understandably gobbled it up, why wouldn’t it? After centuries of the hard slog of subsistence living, the joy…/3 https://t.co/A1QTxyKKvG

…of suddenly having these basic social goods in abundance is one we can barely imagine today. That’s the key point, the Industrial Revolution *was an engineering response to social need*. It not only lifted the standard of living of much of humanity (yes, not all of it,…/4 https://t.co/m5AOnToM9J

…the politicians can never get that bit right), it created far and away the greatest ‘economic’ boom in human history. Keep those two things together, to me that’s the crucial thing - the massive, astronomical growth in the ‘economy’ was produced by two things. /5 https://t.co/CBGKssZubk

Social, human need. And engineering. Fast forward to today and I think this lets us reframe both Covid and climate change in a completely different way. While most of the social challenges the Industrial Revolution helped us mitigate hugely are now taken for granted parts of…/6

…ordinary life, societies now have new urgent needs, that require an engineering response. Covid, and climate change. The people obstructing that action are nearly universally doing it on behalf of ‘the economy’. But we’ve been here before. What sends economies into orbit…/7

…IS the engineering response to social need. We’re not seeing that the challenges in front of us are (as @EdConwaySky says) our new Industrial Revolution. Engineering solutions to climate change and Covid won’t just help fix those problems, it will be the basis of the new…/8

…economic boom for the 21st century and beyond. Our problem is we financialised societies, banks and other economic figures (including politicians) encourage us to gaze at endless economic data, divorced from the underlying material and human realities that create it. /9

Fixing material, human problems is what not only creates economies, it’s what supercharges them. We need the politicians, supported by the finance industry, out of the way, to let the engineers get to work. They’ll fix the problems, and also the economies. /end