The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of economic systems, and the precariousness of the incomes and lives of people all over the world. We must "build back better" and create a more resilient economy, which is more inclusive, and more just, than our economies are. What should be the contours of the "new normal", and how will we change the old normal to the new, are questions we must collectively address now, and urgently. Otherwise, the old will recreate itself, driven by the embedded ideas about good economics on which it was founded. "Never waste a crisis", leaders and policymakers say.

A Billion Fireflies is a reminder of the ideas for a new paradigm—of what it should be and how it can be brought about—that far-sighted people had proposed before the pandemic. The time has come to convert those ideals into reality.