Our resilient and anti-fragile future is digital
The President of Estonia (the only truly digital society with a state, according to him) recently penned a piece which I think will prove prescient. In it, he argues that states and the services they provide for their residents, funded by taxpayers largely within their geographic borders, and indeed the social (and political) models built thereon, are all losing relevance as ‘work’ becomes less location-specific with the rise of the gig economy, telecommuting / working remotely, digital / online commerce, and digitization in general.
In a world that has yet to properly tax and treat with Multinational Corporations, how can states sustainably and reliably provide security and services to a growing number of globally mobile individuals, such that they would want to remain taxpayers in any specific jurisdiction? And as private sector entities increasingly provide basic services such as healthcare, education and security, more reliably and competitively than states sometimes do (as is often the case in the Caribbean), it again begs the question of the relevance of the state (in providing these services, at least) — but even more so considering the increasingly unfettered nature of the workforce.
Further, an estimated USD2 trillion or 2% of global GDP is lost every year to bribes (let alone corruption more broadly) paid by taxpayers just to gain access to state-provided services!
With these funds we could eliminate hunger, eradicate malaria, bridge the global infrastructure gap, AND provide basic education to all children globally. How perverse is this?!
Layer on top of all this the fact that the Caribbean — already the most heavily indebted region in the world — will only face growing risks and therefore higher costs of living and doing business due to the effects of climate change. This leaves one wondering, what will the state have to look like to be relevant in the first place, but fiscally sustainable, climate resilient, and antifragile even?
Bribes cost an estimated 2% of global GDP each year — enough to eliminate hunger, malaria, close the infrastructure gap AND educate all children globally.
To truly #BuildBackBetter, in addition to renewable energy generation and climate resilient reconstruction, our Governments must consider the viability of state provided services, and the extent to which these should be provided digitally, à la Estonia. Already the Estonians are assisting some of the more progressive Governments in this region, one of whom — Jamaica — has been the most frequently impacted by hurricanes historically, and knows well the importance of securing efficiency and resilience.
Further, new technologies that are not location-specific and have built-in redundancy mechanisms, such as distributed ledger, could arguably allow governments to recover much more quickly following a natural disaster, than relying on physical hardware / infrastructure located within a disaster zone. If the Caribbean truly wants to be the first climate resilient zone in the world, we must first embrace the fact that the future is digital.
