- Position‹3 of 5›
- The authoritarian position, or 'Do not lift lockdown!'
Amsterdam has already announced it plans to introduce Oxford University's so-called "doughnut model" to rehabilitate its economy. Critically, this viewpoint sees lockdown as necessary, but longterm economic damage as optional. It suggests current growth models are outdated, and that contemporary ideas, which consider social factors and environmental health, are the way to avoid a post-pandemic depression. This model is largely championed by third sector players, including Oxfam, who see it as a route to longterm sustainable development.
The argument
Lockdown is not a guarantee of economic devastation. It's a wake up call to reform our economies. Preserving the greater good and saving lives needs to be paramount to all other concerns. That being said, Covid-19 has revealed major issues within the economic system that needs reforming. The UK's economic model, as it stands, cannot last. The government needs to adopt a donut-style economic model to future-proof the UK's economy. The Donut—a term and model coined by economist Kate Raworth and Oxfam—details how an economic, social, and political system can be built to help those most in need. Raworths model has several social issues in the interior of the donut: mass unemployment, world poverty, the gender pay and representation gap, and malnourishment, and others. All the while, the exterior of the donut names nine ecological issues that, according to Raworth and Oxfam, can be achieved while fixing social issues. The happy middle, where geological effects are minimized and social issues are lifted, is where the donut lies. If one climate or earth issue passes the "ecological ceiling," the earth will begin to deteriorate beyond repair. This model can—and should—be used to enact monetary policy that preserves the environment, all the while working to lift people out of poverty, create equitable governments and equal pay, and better society. Raworth writes that, in order for her model to work, we need to rethink what we know about equality. This new economy and move towards more conscious capitalism needs to be distributive, but not just on income, on all factors of wealth including land, enterprise, and money creation. While economic and social justice might seem incompatible, activist George Monbiot says that the two are linked. In an opinion for The Guardian, Monbiot writes that the only way to create a socially equitable economy and uplift the poorest people is by preserving the environment and our planet. While lockdown can be grueling and people will get restless, the health of the population must come before all else. And after months of lockdown, Britain needs to implement a system that is more equitable for everyone.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The donut model is not compatible with all nations. Amsterdam is much smaller than England with a much different population and economy. While a donut model could work there, the scale of the UK economy is prohibitive to drastic overhaul of the economy and a shift in the distribution of wealth.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise states a priority rather than defending it, and the trade-off it dismisses is the substance of the debate. Prolonged closure has its own measurable costs in untreated illness, delayed diagnosis, lost education and deteriorating mental health, so 'the health of the population' does not sit cleanly on one side of the question. [Rejecting P2] The two halves of the argument are not connected. Whether the UK's economic model needs reform is a question about long-run economic policy; whether a lockdown should be lifted on a particular date is a question about epidemiology and public-health capacity. Nothing in the case for the second follows from the first. [Rejecting P3] The doughnut model is presented without the objections it faces as a policy instrument. It is a framework for setting goals rather than a mechanism for reaching them, and the passage overstates the planetary boundaries it invokes — these are described in the literature as thresholds of increasing risk, not points beyond which the earth deteriorates irreparably. [Rejecting C] The counter-argument on record raises the scaling problem: the model's most cited application is to a single city, and applying it to a national economy of the UK's size and structure would require redistribution of land, enterprise and money creation that the argument names but does not explain how to achieve. The conclusion also joins an indefinite restriction to a programme of economic transformation, which is a considerable amount to rest on an argument about a public-health measure.