Schularick’s central thesis is that the state is ill-equipped for its role as a crisis manager. That has to change in the face of threats like climate change.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin The corona crisis was a dress rehearsal. A test run for future challenges such as climate change. But this “dress rehearsal failed”, states the Bonn economist Moritz Schularick in his book “Die Entzauberung des Staates”, which is nominated for the German Business Book Prize. “We must therefore not simply go back to the agenda, but must take the lessons from the botched dress rehearsal seriously,” writes Schularick.
And that’s what he does in his book. In it, the 46-year-old clearly takes the crisis management of the EU, the federal government and the states apart, but also draws the long lines beyond the acute crisis and gives specific recommendations on what needs to change after Corona.
Schularick’s central thesis is that the state is ill-equipped for its role as a crisis manager. “Father state needs an update.” The state stumbled through the corona crisis. “The limits of the efficiency of the administration, the lack of digitization, but above all the problems with political decision-making were obvious,” writes Schularick. In the 21st century, exponentially growing threats “can no longer be fought with fax machines”.
Of course, the course of the crisis could not have been foreseen. But the state has “fallen into inactivity” again and again when the next wave of infections has long been foreseeable and problems in obtaining a vaccine have become apparent, writes Schularick.
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The corona crisis revealed how much the state lacks strategic thinking, but also the willingness to take risks. In the “risk society” that the sociologist Ulrich Beck outlined in the 1980s, the state finds itself “as a proactive risk manager who has to find a way through the crisis based on our knowledge”, writes Schularick.
But there is no state “knowledge infrastructure” in the form of data, processes and institutions, he complains. Therefore, the state did not recognize crucial things in the pandemic. For example, the fact that the economic costs were largely not due to state-imposed contact bans, but to changes in behavior of citizens for fear of the virus. Because of this lack of understanding, talk shows have become more and more “the intellectual focus of the debate”.
Moritz Schularick: The disenchanted state. What Germany has to learn from the pandemic.
CH Beck
Munich 2021
140 pages
14 euros
Schularick therefore calls for the state to be armed. It is not about “more or less, but about a more efficient state”. In three areas in particular, he said, he had to become more resilient to crises.
Firstly, there needs to be a “change in mentality, a different mindset in dealing with risks”. The state would have had to take financial risks in vaccine production in order to speed up production. The state must therefore rethink its financial policy and leave the “cultural war over the debt brake” behind.
Second, the state needs a “thorough reduction of bureaucracy”, an “upgrade of administration, data and the networking of science and politics”. Germany has an “outdated idea of independent expertise”.
Thirdly, politicians in Europe must “have the necessary capacities ready in important core areas of medical and technological production”, and have sufficient protective suits and breathing masks available in a pandemic.
These three doctrines are not without controversy. There are voices who warn against possible trade disputes as a result of foreclosure as well as against a debt policy and too much science being absorbed by politics.
But Schularick’s book sparked the right debates. And for the fact that it has a slim 130 pages, it is packed full. Schularick not only analyzes the acute crisis, but also describes that the state was not sustainable even before Corona or which mistakes were made after the financial crisis in 2008 that should not be repeated now. Even if the crisis management of the corona crisis has already been described many times, the book is therefore a great asset with many clever insights, thoughts and backgrounds.
More: These are the ten business books of the year.