While this book reflects around a decade of sustained thought and discussion, and was written and revised over several years, one intense period of writing was spring 2020, when the COVID-19 virus spread across the world, leading to national lockdowns, rolling restrictions and unprecedented economic shutdowns. Even as we write, much of Europe is entering a ‘second wave’; we are living through history, not looking back afterwards. Like in other recent epochal moments, from the oil crisis to the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the Asian financial crisis to the Global Financial Crisis, the carnival of the economy is volatile; the wheel of fortune will spin. Despite this state of emergency, this book addresses perennial elements of welfare and unemployment through an archaic anthropology rather than producing a hasty verdict on the current crisis. In this more relaxed form of an afterword, we consider what, if anything, the pandemic might reveal about unemployment and the labour market – or what reformations it portends.

The initial wave of infections prompted an extraordinary pause of economic activity, from Asia to Europe and beyond, so that only essential production continued – although America is another story. Such a suspension of economic activity was effectively required by the state, showing clearly that markets are not natural or automatic but partly constituted by state regulations of sites of exchange and competition. Millions lost their jobs overnight, yet curiously, they were not technically ‘unemployed’ as they did not meet the precise ILO definition used by EuroStat and other national statisticians. As the pandemic swept the world, states with established public health and welfare systems were in a position to protect their population and by extension their economies, society and politics. Indeed, the automatic and unconditional provision of support to those who found themselves jobless due to the pandemic was a striking example of welfare payments without the demand for personal reform; the careful and complex scrutiny exercised upon pre-COVID-19 unemployment applications – from means tests to the requirement to seek work – were notably absent, at least for those who lost their jobs because of the pandemic – another inscrutable accident of providence.