Apathy, not inequality, the 2022 normal

What are the adverse consequences of apathy globally in the short and long run, and at what margins?

Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited India and showcased a ride on a JCB bulldozer just when bulldozers were used to controversially raze homes in Delhi's Jahangirpuri, ignoring orders from India's Supreme Court. Soon thereafter, a photo was tweeted officially congratulating the British manufacturing excellence and exporting capabilities of JCB.

This week, Elon Musk is now nearing completion of his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, just when one was reminded that last year he couldn't spend $6 billion to support a UN and WFP food assistance programme to combat global hunger, despite an open UN challenge on that to him.

A couple of weeks back, the UK also earned strong criticism on the question of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda for resettlement with one-way tickets.

Meanwhile, you must have surely forgotten what happened in Afghanistan nine months back in August 2021 or starting to forget what has been happening in Ukraine for the last couple of months, indeed what might have been happening to the Rohingyas or Uighurs the last few years. Perhaps what will capture a bit of your attention is the recent strong lockdown policies in Shanghai and the cries of home isolated residents emerging from there circulated on social media.

What does it all tell us about our 2022 world? Our seven-year-old, while watching the news on the TV with me the other day, answered it when he asked me, Dad, what is the meaning of the word riot? Why do people fight and kill each other in riots?

Sure I was unsettled, but I soon realised I had to be honest with him since apathy is the new normal in this brave new world we live in, and our children are growing up in. And "the most dangerous thing in the world is apathy," said His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa at a 2015 address at Harvard Divinity School, I told him.

Spurred by our little one, I also did some leisurely analytics for a Google-Trends normalised plot looking at the search for the word apathy; in 2004, in the UK, it was around 25 but reached 100 in 2022. The situation remains similar if you do the same search in the US, Indonesia, India, indeed worldwide, with some mild fall or relatively stable rate in search terms of "apathy" only in some (but not all) the Scandinavian countries.

What explains this global rise of apathy? Is it our pandemic-induced WFH lives and associated mental unwellness? Or was it already brewing with automation and digitisation pre-pandemic causing societal distortions and inequality? What kind of education do we want to give our children to teach empathy instead? And more broadly, what are the adverse consequences of apathy in the short and long run globally and at what margins?

Science, research and experimental evidence can perhaps answer this. Easier would be simply looking at how the world has wasted vaccines in the rich world and not provisioned for them in the Global South instead. Or perhaps the least we can do is recognise that apathy is indeed the new normal and that we need in our schools and universities more central conversations around it. What has apathy done to humankind in its civilisational history? And indeed, even to extinct species (when things moved to apathy from empathy for them)? Can kindness curriculums help, like research by a U-Sussex faculty colleague, Dr Robin Banerjee, is seeking?

It is clear that zeitgeists on the streets await the world if we don't pay attention to this post the pandemic. New unemployment numbers from India already is giving early signals. According to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), more than half of the 900 million Indians of legal working age do not even want a job these days. We don't know what they want to do, but it is easy (but morbid) to guess where they may be finding a source of subsistence.

(The author is a health economist, a Reader in Economics of Innovation at SPRU-Sussex, University of Sussex, Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University & Visiting Adjunct Professor in Economics at IIM-Ahmedabad, India.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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