Peter Schwartz describes a policy trilemma for COVID-19: governments must balance public health, economic recovery, and civil liberties at once. He warns of mounting pressure to reopen despite health risks, severe damage to small business and services, and growing political backlash against restrictions.
What we see is what we call kind of policy trilemma. There are three fundamental goals that want to be pursued at the same time, and getting the balance of those right is what's critical. The first is obviously protecting public health, but you want to get the economy open as quickly as possible, and you'd like to do both of those while protecting social values like individual liberty and privacy. And so the challenge is, how do you get the balance of those things right? So when you're focusing on initially at the public health side, you're willing to accept in many instances, some constraints on social conditions as well as economic consequences. But over time, this becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. The pressure to open up, the pressure to minimize the social impact is really quite profound. And so what we see is a huge variation, very much dependent upon social conditions as much as conditions with respect to the virus. The second set of goals has to do with the economy. And here you want to get recovery, but the only way to do that is if you're down in the green zone. Countries have done a reasonable job of providing stimulus. We'll see if it continues. But what we see is an enormous economic impact, many industries being very hard hit, small business devastating, restaurants and other services enormously impacted. So this is a profound issue. And social cohesion will be impacted by the economic consequences of massive unemployment and poverty that is resulting. And so the third aspect of this obviously is the question of basic social values like liberty and privacy. And you know, at first it was an emergency and people were willing to accept a bit more than they would today. China, they could do it whatever they wanted because personal liberty, frankly, is a non issue. But what we've seen in some places, especially United States, is a kind of pushback against essentially what people perceive as authoritarian measures. And I think this is extremely difficult. So how do you manage these three different concerns at the same time of health, economy and values and social conditions is actually the fundamental challenge going forward.
