The Trent Research Group on the Pandemic is an informal group of researchers at Trent University, Canada. The Group will be publishing guides to the existing literature on Pandemics and original research.
Economic effects of the Pandemic. A lot of people are out of work right now. Businesses will be slow to get back to normal because of problems in the supply chain. Consumers may be reluctant to go out and start spending again. Initial estimates by the IMF talk of the global economy contracting by 3% in the next 12 months, and in some countries this could be a 6% or 7% decline. (A small number of experts are suggesting much higher figures.) Many economies were not in great shape before March 2020, with high government debt, high individual debt, and fairly low economic growth. People with part-time, low-wage jobs can’t go out and buy expensive consumer goods.
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, A Lasting Remedy for the Covid-19 Pandemic’s Economic Crisis, New York Review of Books, April 8, 2020.
- Adam Tooze, How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system, The Guardian, April 14, 2020.
- Jayati Ghosh, The pandemic and the global economy, MR Online https://mronline.org/2020/04/22/the-pandemic-and-the-global-economy/
- If you prefer to listen to a podcast try David Harvey http://anticapitalistchronicles.libsyn.com/anti-capitalist-politics-in-the-time-of-covid-19
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). With so much of life online during the Pandemic, this thick book makes a strong argument against big tech collecting and exploiting data about our lives. You can watch an interview with Zuboff online: https://vimeo.com/385274374. Also a good review of the book that explains her main arguments: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business. There has been a lot of discussion about contact-tracing apps, with doctors and human rights activists agreeing that they’re creepy–and Public Health measures work best with trust, not coercion. See, for example, Adam Smith on the risks of using big tech to tackle coronavirus: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/22/using-big-tech-to-tackle-coronavirus-risks-swapping-one-lockdown-for-another.
The revelations of Edward Snowden showed that governments in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere routinely monitor the online activities of their citizens. Snowden suggests that citizens educate themselves about encryption and services such as Signal. Here is Ed Snowden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM&feature=youtu.be
Comic Book on Free Open Source Software, by Sarai (India). While we’re on the topic, here is a reminder of why FLOSS is not just good for your teeth. It’s a comic book and its FREE. http://vastal.waag.org/media.opencultures.net/floss/floss_book07.pdf
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 