From minimising harm to maximising potential

Modern-day crises are taking on a new character: they are becoming more unpredictable, severe, frequent, and transboundary. Since traditional crisis mitigation efforts like social solidarity and countercyclical stabilisation policies were designed for crises with a certain degree of predictability, they are likely inadequate for dealing with the complex shocks we expect to face in the future. In addition to these existing systems, we need new crisis mitigation approaches. We argue that overcoming modern crises requires both small and large-scale innovations, across all levels of society -from incremental innovations that occur at the individual and family levels, to large-scale innovations that occur at the levels of the firm, community, and even the nation. However, to maximise the chances of successful innovation at the scale needed to address future crises, all people need to be operating at their full developmental potential. Achieving this requires massively increasing our spending efforts in human development, particularly for vulnerable populations. This is not an argument for supporting vulnerable people at the lowest possible cost, so that if a crisis strikes, we will minimise the harm that comes to these people. This is an argument for an enormous scale up of social spending and international aid to maximise people's development potential, because we believe that this is an essential and non-negotiable condition for enhancing our collective capacity to overcome future crises.