2020/14 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
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Unequal societies in usual times, unjust societies in pandemic ones |
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Giovanni Dosi, Lucrezia Fanti and Maria Enrica Virgillito |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
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Social fabric; Pandemics; Inequalities; Lockdown; Social Injustice.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
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P00, D63, E6
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the ''last straw
that breaks the camel's back''. At the time of writing, after three months since its out-
burst, we can hardly find any sign of a ''broken camel'': indeed, it could have been
the opportunity to collectively question the current regime of production and appro-
priation, exclusion and marketization characterizing this phase of unjust ''rentified
capitalism'', but the route taken has largely seen a frightening combination of
''business as usual'' on the production side and pervasive forms of social control, limitations
of individual and collective rights and the perpetuation of a false dichotomy between
economic and health security. This pandemic, which under decent public health
provisions might have been a controlled disease, is producing the most severe crisis after
the Great Depression and has been used to implement forms of massive social control
hardly conceivable in ''advanced democracies''. Butterfly effects are well-known in
complexity sciences. However, social scientists have still difficulties in understanding
how a grain can make the sandcastle fall down. On the contrary, we are now under
the actual risk of starting a ''new normal'' without dealing with the deep routes and
origins of this crisis, with the dominant intellectual discourse pushing for maintaining
and indeed reinforcing the status quo, established power and social blocks.
This myopic strategy might end up in collectively disruptive socio-political transformations.
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