Things will never truly return to "normal" after the coronavirus. That's cause for eager anticipation, and also for dread.
What to expect: The world after COVID-19 will be poorer, at least for a time.
- It will be more unequal too, both within countries — where many skimmed along without coffee meetings and business trips, while others performed newly dangerous jobs, or lost them — and between them.
- Developing nations were hit earliest and hardest, and they'll likely be slowest to recover.
That’s some of the bad news, but perhaps not all of it.
- Leaders have flashed their authoritarian tendencies more brightly in this time of global crisis.
- International antagonism — between the U.S. and China, but also India and China and between North and South Korea — has heightened.
- As the virus collides with rising nationalism, the multilateral global system is growing weaker. No vaccine will cure that.
The other side: There's cause for optimism among the rubble. Practices and institutions that endured only through inertia before the pandemic may be halted, and then reversed. ...
- Systemic racism, inadequate health care and incompetent governance have all been laid bare. Unprecedented displays of international solidarity have filled streets from Minneapolis to Nairobi.
- Technologies and ideas that already existed are now being put to widespread use — to conduct business, education and health care remotely, for example.
- Crises have historically yielded innovation and creativity, as the FT’s Tim Harford documents. After the Plague came the Renaissance; after the Great Depression,