Plaguenomics: The Social Recession We Can’t Escape скачать в хорошем качестве

Plaguenomics: The Social Recession We Can’t Escape

We're a society running on a glitch. An entire generation came of age during lockdown, spending their formative years staring at rectangles instead of faces, learning conflict resolution through blocks and bans rather than actual human interaction. They missed the ordinary cruelties and graces that teach young people how to be human together. Even those who lived through COVID describe feeling socially rusty years after restrictions lifted. Basic social skills atrophied during the screen years - reading facial expressions, navigating group dynamics, tolerating disagreement without fight-or-flight responses. Many report anxiety in face-to-face situations that would have been routine for previous generations. This social brittleness isn't confined to teenagers. Adults across the West emerged from lockdown with shortened attention spans and thinned social networks. We now spend roughly 51 minutes less per day on out-of-home activities compared to 2019. Communities that gathered for worship, recreation, and mutual aid saw participation plummet and never recover. With physical communities weakened, digital communities flourished according to different rules. Online spaces reward the most provocative voices and amplify extreme positions. We lost the muscle memory of democratic engagement while gaining fluency in performative outrage. A society that stopped practicing togetherness started voting like strangers. The post-COVID political landscape became defined by relentless anti-incumbent reflex. From Germany to Canada, from France to Australia, established governments fell as citizens expressed frustration with persistent inflation, degraded services, and institutions that seemed simultaneously overbearing and incompetent. In 2022, the developed world witnessed the largest wipeout of incumbent governments since World War II. Why did this anti-establishment rage take hold so deeply? The price level jumped during COVID and never came back down. People don't experience inflation rates - they live on a higher price floor. Every trip to the grocery store became a small humiliation, a reminder that money buys less than it used to. Meanwhile, service quality deteriorated everywhere. Flight cancellations became routine, hospital wait times stretched, school systems remained chaotic years after reopening. Citizens found themselves paying more for worse service across both private and public sectors. The rules governing daily life seemed arbitrary and constantly changing, building into a crisis of institutional legitimacy that persisted long after emergency measures ended. Trust in government, media, and scientific institutions plummeted. By 2023, only 35% of Americans expressed trust in the federal government near historical lows. The expert class that promised to manage the pandemic competently delivered years of chaos and mixed messaging, and their credibility never recovered. Into that chaos walked the only politician who promised vengeance rather than repair: Donald Trump. His return to power in 2024 was the COVID hangover in executive form. Trump 2.0 reaped everything the pandemic had planted - resentment over institutional failure, skepticism toward expert guidance, and desire to punish someone for how our lives fell apart. The economic consequences were predictable. Tariffs drove up prices while providing limited protection for domestic industries. Immigration enforcement reduced labor supply in sectors already struggling with worker shortages. Political interference with monetary policy undermined confidence in financial markets. But Trump didn't invent the hangover - he monetized it. This is where plagonomics has left us: broke, isolated, and furious. We're simultaneously hyper-connected and profoundly alone, living in the most networked society in human history while reporting unprecedented levels of loneliness. We have access to more information than any previous generation, but our trust in facts has collapsed. Learn More: • Social capital decline research: https://www.bowlingalone.com/ • Post-pandemic political trends: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/ • Loneliness epidemic studies: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/fil... • Algorithmic radicalization research: https://datasociety.net/library/algor... • Trust in institutions polling: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023-tr... • Political violence trends: https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_... • Mental health pandemic impact: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... • Economic inequality post-COVID: https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/ine... • Democratic backsliding studies: https://www.v-dem.net/documents/29/V-... • Social media and polarization: https://www.brookings.edu/research/ho...