Winilyme, I feel like a lot of items on your list are things that we should have been practicing long ago. There are powerful cultural forces that keep us from doing things that would keep us healthier. We all heard about how the Japanese have always worn masks in public when they were sick out of respect for the common good, but we thought that could never happen in the US, without asking why it couldn't. It's because we value individual freedom too much and the common good not enough.
So the first lesson I hope we will learn from this crisis is that the common good IS also the individual good.
I predict that at some point in the future we're going to realize that we've created a majority population of obese diabetics with heart disease, just as we previously created a population of nicotine addicts, and we're going to cleanse the country's food supply by stopping the shocking predominance of toxic junk food in grocery stores and restaurants. At some point it will be against the law to produce and sell food that kills. We're going to be FORCED to do this when we realize our population is unfit for most jobs and that instead of contributing to the economy, they're draining trillions of dollars in healthcare costs from the economy. We're not doing this right now because we still value individual freedom above everything else. We will start doing it when we just can't afford to support an unhealthy population and when we've run out of healthy workers.
I think the COVID-19 crisis is taking us one step closer to a food revolution because the scientific evidence is coming in about the vulnerability of obese people in the crisis.
Yes, this post is about the economy, because we've finally come to realize that human health is the basis of economic activity.
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