It's 2022. What Does Life Look Like? (NYT Oped)

[SoonerPride]

The pandemic could shape the world, much as World War II and the Great Depression did.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-economy-two-years.html?referringSource=articleShare

It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.

Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.

And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.

All of this, obviously, is conjecture. The future is unknowable. But the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach, and the United States is suffering through a new virus surge that’s worse than in any other country.

With help from economists, politicians and business executives, I have tried to imagine what a post-Covid economy may look like. One message I heard is that the course of the virus itself will play the biggest role in the medium term. If scientific breakthroughs come quickly and the virus is largely defeated this year, there may not be many permanent changes to everyday life.

More at the link. Really thought provoking stuff.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Here's how I've been explaining how things will change.

Imagine it's the spring of 1939, and we are planning to go to Europe next year. It's going to be a wonderful trip! We're going to visit Paris, London, Rome, Madrid, probably some other places. We've been saving and anticipating for a couple of years now.

Then September rolls around, and it's clear our trip is on hold. We hope the war will end soon and we can go in 1941. Well, the war doesn't end soon. It continues, getting worse and worse. Finally, in May, 1945 the war in Europe does end.

The soonest we will take that long-planned, long ago planned trip, will be 1946. Maybe even a year or two after that. And when eventually we do go, everything is different. We won't be seeing the same Europe we'd have seen had we taken that trip in 1939.

This pandemic is like that. It's going to change a lot of things. It's impossible right now to know what will change, and what exactly will be the nature of those changes. But it's going to be a very different world when all this is finally over.

And honestly, we will be very lucky if this is over by 2022.

[Initech]

2. The end of the Spanish Flu pandemic ushered in a golden age.

I would like to think that the same could happen here. I think that outcome will entirety depend on who is elected president. If we elect Biden, he will help enact programs and policies to steer us toward that goal. If Trump is reelected, expect this nightmare world run by the virus to continue indefinitely with no plan to defeat it.