The pandemic has taught us some hard business lessons.
Michael O’Leary screamed the other week that Boris Johnson is a moron surrounded by idiots who should stop inciting “mass hysteria” about Omicron and treat the viral strain as seriously as leaders in the rest of Europe.
Ryanair’s blustering CEO told a reporter from The Times newspaper in London: “They’re not all panicking in Italy, Spain, Germany, or Holland.”
Unfortunately, a day after his interview was published last Saturday, the Netherlands enforced a statewide lockdown to halt the spread of Omicron, while Germany implemented strict new travel regulations for UK visitors. By Saturday, France had already implemented similar travel restrictions, and by Monday, even O’Leary’s own Ireland had implemented an 8 p.m. curfew for pubs and restaurants.
He had neglected a fundamental lesson of the pandemic, which was as valid in 2021 as it was in 2020: assurance is transitory in an uncertain world.
But what if this is simply the beginning of far more volatility?
The shocks of working from home, discovering Zoom, and witnessing the rapid development of vaccines last year have given way to another wave of shifts in 2021 that raise significant issues about technology, solidarity, and unrelenting change.
Some of the most noticeable changes have been technological in nature.
Did you suppose someone would spend $69 million on a piece of digital art by an artist named Beeple before 2021, as a crypto investor did in March at the inaugural Christie’s auction of NFT, or non-fungible token art?
Did you ever foresee a country making bitcoin official tender, as El Salvador did in June?
Or that two millionaires will ultimately reach the edge of space in their privately funded spaceship a month later? Or that Facebook would rebrand itself Meta and declare that it would focus on the virtual-world “metaverse,” where a company named Republic Realm recently spent $4.2 million on a tract of digital land?
It’s difficult to determine what these and other technological breakthroughs really mean, or whether they’re as concerning as many worry. According to a recent study published last week by scientists in the United Kingdom, artificial intelligence is just as likely to result in net job creation as it is in net job loss in businesses.
However, it is tough to be optimistic about a less obvious epidemic shift: the growing disparities between the affluent and poor, as well as corporate winners and losers. Nothing, in fact, has shown the hollow of the notions of “we’re all in this together” and “building back better” like 2021.
Despite a first COVID year of death, recession, and job losses, Forbes reported a record 493 new additions to its worldwide billionaires list in April. Since the magazine’s March 2020 wealth survey, the globe has gained a new billionaire every 17 hours on average.
Many on the list benefited from dynamics that were driving the tremendous pandemic gains made by the “Mega 25,” as McKinsey refers to them. These are the 25 firms, including Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, whose market capitalization increased so dramatically in the first pandemic year that they accounted for 40% of the $14 trillion in value gained by the overall market.
Finally, the most important lesson of 2021 is to be careful of any indication that the worst is gone.
It would be one thing if this surge in wealth coincided with a large wave of pandemic recovery investment being directed to areas where it is desperately needed.
However, according to Oxford University analysts tracking such expenditures, only 18% of such spending in leading economies in 2020 was directed toward measures to reduce carbon emissions, alleviate air quality, or protect biodiversity.
According to Brian O’Callaghan, principal researcher on the Oxford analysis, as of last week, this share had climbed to an estimated 29 percent, thanks in large part to provisions in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by US President Joe Biden in November.
It would be even higher if Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat with ties to the coal industry, wasn’t attempting to derail Biden’s $1.75 trillion climate and social spending programme, dubbed “Build Back Better.”
Nonetheless, the global policies that have already been authorised could result in massive amounts of green investment, which should provide a big boost to strategically located enterprises in 2022.
However, given the disparities in worldwide efforts to combat the pandemic, that boost is unlikely to be seen equitably.
According to the Oxford research, rich countries spent about $16,000 per person on COVID, whereas the least developed countries only spent approximately $60 per person.
Omicron has served as a sobering warning that leaving billions of people unsecured is a recipe for more variants. Nonetheless, as the year comes to a close, the proportion of people properly vaccinated against COVID has reached an astounding 70% in high-income nations, while only 4% in low-income countries.
Finally, the most important lesson of 2021 is to be careful of any indication that the worst is gone.
Inequalities between countries and within countries have both expanded, “and this can only be terrible news for how societies run in the future.”
