The pandemic’s impact shows growth is an arbitrary target.

Op-ed by Malka Older @ ForeignPolicy.com, April 6

The terrifyingly global progression of COVID-19 over the past year should shake long-held assumptions about the benefits of wealth and industrial-technological development. Estimations of which countries were best prepared for a pandemic display those prejudices in full: The 2019 Global Health Security Index, jointly produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, ranked the United States at the top, with the United Kingdom immediately behind it, then the Netherlands, and Sweden only a few rows down; New Zealand comes in at number 35; and Africa is blocked in red. A Washington Post report on the index when it was released expresses patronizing surprise that a “number of middle- and low-income countries scored higher than some wealthy countries.”

Contrasting those assessments with reality shows just how inaccurate they were. A map of COVID-19 deaths per hundred thousand people shows almost the opposite of the preparedness map: The United States, the U.K., and most of Europe are dark with total deaths, while most of Africa and Asia has had far fewer.

Certainly, a few wealthy countries, such as New Zealand, have done well at containing the pandemic. But so have places like the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, one of the densest and poorest places in the world. And while Africa is facing a second wave—and the reluctance of wealthy countries to share vaccines and the technology to build them—numbers from the continent are still far better than those of the United States or U.K. While there are a number of different theories to explain this success—including leadership, civil society, experience with epidemics, demographics, and successfully implementing the policies recommended by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—none of them include buying their way out of it [....]

GDP is a useful measurement, but it’s not the only one. So why does the international community still hold up a narrow form of economic growth as the goal toward which all countries should be working, even at the expense of planetary viability and human rights?

The world needs a new approach [....]