The writer is a professor at University College London
If there is an economic lesson from the past 12 months, it is this: Covid-19 is the moment to do capitalism differently. The pandemic showed our economic system is not simply in crisis, it is structurally flawed.
Gig economy jobs are not protecting workers in hard times. Rising inequality means people turn to loans to make ends meet, lifting the ratio of private debt to disposable income. For all the talk of stakeholder capitalism, businesses still prioritise distributing short-term gains to shareholders. State capacity is hollowed out and outsourced to consulting companies. All the while, future crises like climate change have been made worse — indeed, 53 per cent of the Covid-19 recovery funding allocated to energy companies by G20 governments has been handed to fossil fuel projects, equivalent to around $151bn.