Liberal Democracy in Eclipse: The Economy Post-February 2020, Nourished by Four Odds—Disease Phobia, Profanity in the Media, Unethical Profit Seekers and Tail Risk

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) had spread across the globe since late February 2020 and posed a significant menace to public health worldwide. The travel industry, the public and private sectors, democratic activities in a liberal democracy, public policies, etc., have been affected. The important democratic activities affected have been election canvassing, the counting of votes, forming constitutional bodies, etc. The disaster had given rise to extraordinary circumstances attributed to noncooperation, coronaphobia, workplace conflicts, violations of contractual terms and frivolous lawsuits, technopiracy, and several maladaptive coping strategies post-March 25, 2020, which were inconspicuous before the date. Political satire in media podcasts has used sarcasm and sardonic comments to present a society, which unequivocally has pernicious effects on the cognitive behaviour of individuals of different age groups. Furthermore, unpremeditated remarks in relation to tail risk measures were frequently discovered in post-February 2020 political-economic discourse. On the one hand, those remarks/arguments have been difficult to justify convincingly, and, on the other, there is evidence of model misspecification. We produce anecdotal evidence of the fact that the adoption of heuristics in model formulation to simplify the framework affects model performance. In particular, models failed to capture the unusual flux of financial markets.