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Why America Must Rethink Public Goods
The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the folly of four decades of disinvestment in shared resources.
I didn’t write last week, and I was barely able to write this week. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has become so all-pervasive, it’s tough to think about anything else.
It’s especially tough to think about the future of cities when we have no idea what sort of future we will emerge into when the worst of this is over. It’s certain that our cities will endure, though, I’m reminded, as Richard Florida noted on Twitter, “Our cities have been reshaped and re-designed by previous health crises.”
What that reshaping and redesigning will look like, however, is not a question I’m going to tackle today. I want to write about something much more basic, and do so briefly so as not to take up too much of your time when you have bigger things to worry about.
I think what we’re seeing is the folly of forty years of mass privatization and disinvestment in public goods. As state and national leaders have stripped our shared societal goods down in reckless pursuit of tax cuts and profits for corporations and the wealthy, ordinary people were left vulnerable to exactly what we’re seeing play out now across the country as a result of the pandemic.
