Post Corona


Book Description

New York Times bestseller! "Few are better positioned to illuminate the vagaries of this transformation than Galloway, a tech entrepreneur, author and professor at New York University’s Stern School. In brisk prose and catchy illustrations, he vividly demonstrates how the largest technology companies turned the crisis of the pandemic into the market-share-grabbing opportunity of a lifetime." --The New York Times "As good an analysis as you could wish to read." --The Financial Times From bestselling author and NYU Business School professor Scott Galloway comes a keenly insightful, urgent analysis of who stands to win and who's at risk to lose in a post-pandemic world The COVID-19 outbreak has turned bedrooms into offices, pitted young against old, and widened the gaps between rich and poor, red and blue, the mask wearers and the mask haters. Some businesses--like home exercise company Peloton, video conference software maker Zoom, and Amazon--woke up to find themselves crushed under an avalanche of consumer demand. Others--like the restaurant, travel, hospitality, and live entertainment industries--scrambled to escape obliteration. But as New York Times bestselling author Scott Galloway argues, the pandemic has not been a change agent so much as an accelerant of trends already well underway. In Post Corona, he outlines the contours of the crisis and the opportunities that lie ahead. Some businesses, like the powerful tech monopolies, will thrive as a result of the disruption. Other industries, like higher education, will struggle to maintain a value proposition that no longer makes sense when we can't stand shoulder to shoulder. And the pandemic has accelerated deeper trends in government and society, exposing a widening gap between our vision of America as a land of opportunity, and the troubling realities of our declining wellbeing. Combining his signature humor and brash style with sharp business insights and the occasional dose of righteous anger, Galloway offers both warning and hope in equal measure. As he writes, "Our commonwealth didn't just happen, it was shaped. We chose this path--no trend is permanent and can't be made worse or corrected."




COVID Societies


Book Description

COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory. The book provides insights into everyday life around the world as people battled with containing the pandemic and explores the broader historical, social, cultural and political contexts in which these responses have developed. COVID-19 is the most serious pandemic to affect the world in the past century. We have all lived in ‘COVID societies’, the long-term effects of which have yet to be experienced or imagined. The COVID crisis has affected countries, regions within countries and social groups within regions in strikingly different ways. These impacts are continually changing, just as the novel coronavirus has mutated into different strains and variants. Throughout the book, a series of intertwined threads cross back and forth between the macropolitical and micropolitical dimensions of COVID-19: contagion, death, risk, uncertainty, fear, social inequalities, stigma, blame and power relations. Overarching these threads are five complementary themes: the historicity of COVID societies; the tension between local specificities and globalising forces; the control and management of human bodies; the boundary between Self and Other; and the continuously changing sociomaterial environments in which the world is living with and through the shocks of the COVID crisis. This book will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the manifold complex sociocultural consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.




COVID-19 and the Structural Crises of Our Time


Book Description

“We live in paradoxical times. Traditionally, the West has led the world in theory and practice. Yet, recent developments, from COVID-19 to the storming of the US Capitol, show how lost the West has become. This loss of direction has deep roots. In their usual thoughtful and incisive fashion, Lim Mah-Hui and Michael Heng Siam-Heng, draw out the deeper origins of our current crises and show us a new way forward. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand our strange times." -- Kishore Mahbubani, founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is the author of Has China Won? “A powerful and compelling critique of neoliberal globalization and its potentially devastating, but long underestimated, consequences for financial stability, the environment, social equity and democracy. COVID-19 has laid bare these dysfunctions and stresses. But this is not a pessimistic book. The authors argue, correctly, that we may be on the cusp of another Great Transformation. The choices we make today to make markets more resilient, improve social protection, and preserve our freedoms could lay the foundations for a sustainable globalization that works for future generations.” -- Donald Low, Professor of Practice in Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Emerging Market Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology “This fascinating book highlights the interplay between financial and health crises that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed. Financialized capitalism is bad for the planet, bad for human health, and creates more unequal and insecure societies. The authors make a strong and convincing case for re-embedding markets into society and finance into the real economy.” --Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA “Lim and Heng’s ambitious volume argues that 2020 was the year of the global ‘perfect storm’ of multiple crises, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating financial, economic, socio-political and environmental breakdowns. They extend Karl Polanyi’s original insights to appeal for a sustainable global New Deal. While the reader may not agree with all their theses, the scope of their coverage and ambition will set the stage for debates over the annus horribilis.” -- Jomo K.S., Founder-chair, IDEAS www.network.ideas; former United Nations Assistant Secretary General "This book provides plenty of food for thought for many pondering if the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a major transformation of the global economic system shaped by unfettered market forces and policies of governments in their service."-- Yilmaz Akyuz, former Director, UNCTAD, Geneva




Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency


Book Description

What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it? The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social order and prevent the spread of the virus. This is often exercised with the notion that we will return to normal as soon as we can. What if that is not possible? Secondly, if the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case. There can be no excuse for inaction any longer.




The Coronavirus Crisis and Challenges to Social Development


Book Description

This book is a novel contribution to academic discourses on the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis and how it has impacted societies globally. It proffers an overview on the social development and political measures, from both the Global North and Global South, to prevent COVID-19's spread. It illuminates major social, political and economic challenges that already existed in different contexts and which are also currently being amplified by COVID-19. Curiously, this global pandemic has opened spaces for different actors, across the globe, to begin to fundamentally question and challenge the hegemony of the Global North, which sometimes is evident in social work. Linked to the foregoing and while reflecting beyond the pandemic and into the future, the book proposes that social work must become more political at all levels, and strive to transform societies, global social development efforts, and economic and health systems. This contributed volume of 38 chapters discusses and analyses ethical, social, sociological, social work and social development issues that complement and enrich available literature in the socio-political, economics, public health, medical ethics and political science. It provides various case studies which should enable readers to gain insights into how countries have responded to the pandemic and learn how COVID-19 negatively impacted countries in different parts of the world. This book also provides a platform for the articulation of neglected and marginalized voices, such as those of indigenous populations, the poor, or oppressed. The chapters are grouped according to three main themes as they relate to research on the COVID-19 pandemic and social work in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America: Analysis: Social Issues and the COVID-19 Pandemic Strategies and Responses in Social Work: Globally and Locally Outlook: Looking Ahead Beyond the Pandemic Intended to engage a global, diverse and interdisciplinary audience, The Coronavirus Crisis and Challenges to Social Development is a timely and relevant resource for academics, students and researchers in inter alia Social Work, Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, and Development Studies.




The Corona Crash


Book Description

Free market, competitive capitalism is dead. The separation between politics and economics can no longer be sustained. In The Corona Crash, leading economics commentator Grace Blakeley theorises about the epoch-making changes that the coronavirus brings in its wake. We are living through a unique moment in history. The pandemic has caused the deepest global recession since the Second World War. Meanwhile the human cost is reflected in a still-rising death toll, as many states find themselves unable—and some unwilling—to grapple with the effects of the virus. Whatever happens, we can never go back to business as usual. This crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism, argues Blakeley, as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and the tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions. We need a radical response. The recovery could see the transformation of our political, economic, and social systems based on the principles of the Green New Deal. If not, the alternatives, as Blakeley warns, may be even worse than we feared.




Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus


Book Description

Democracy in crisis -- Pandemic resilience -- Federalism is an asset -- A transformed peace: an agenda for healing our social contract.




Life After COVID-19


Book Description

What might the world look like in the aftermath of COVID-19? Almost every aspect of society will change after the pandemic, but if we learn lessons then life can be better. Featuring expert authors from across academia and civil society, this book offers ideas that might put us on alternative paths for positive social change. A rapid intervention into current commentary and debate, Life After COVID-19 looks at a wide range of topical issues including the state, co-operation, work, money, travel and care. It invites us to see the pandemic as a dress rehearsal for the larger problem of climate change, and it provides an opportunity to think about what we can improve and how rapidly we can make changes.




The COVID-19 Catastrophe


Book Description

The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest science policy failure in a generation. We knew this was coming. Warnings about the threat of a new pandemic have been made repeatedly since the 1980s and it was clear in January that a dangerous new virus was causing a devastating human tragedy in China. And yet the world ignored the warnings. Why? In this short and hard-hitting book, Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal The Lancet, scrutinizes the actions that governments around the world took – and failed to take – as the virus spread from its origins in Wuhan to the global pandemic that it is today. He shows that many Western governments and their scientific advisors made assumptions about the virus and its lethality that turned out to be mistaken. Valuable time was lost while the virus spread unchecked, leaving health systems unprepared for the avalanche of infections that followed. Drawing on his own scientific and medical expertise, Horton outlines the measures that need to be put in place, at both national and international levels, to prevent this kind of catastrophe from happening again. Were supposed to be living in an era where human beings have become the dominant influence on the environment, but COVID-19 has revealed the fragility of our societies and the speed with which our systems can come crashing down. We need to learn the lessons of this pandemic and we need to learn them fast because the next pandemic may arrive sooner than we think.




Coronavirus Politics


Book Description

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.