The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
The defining moment of this generation
I usually tell students to remember that the event that will define their generation is yet to come. But it’s here. This is it. The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will reshape the world our kids will inherit.
This is going to be more important than 9/11 and the Great Recession combined. I think it’s the most important event since World War II reshaped the world. This is the black swan that no one’s really prepared for, especially if faced with another season or two of shutdown. World War II shut down the world in some ways, but it also drove incredible innovation and economic growth in much of the world. I don’t think the pandemic is driving economic growth in the same way. We live in a consumer-driven world. If the consumers are all trapped inside, how does that continue?
Imagine a generation spending the better part of two years inside, at home? That leaves an indelible mark. What about a generation watching hundreds of thousands of people, or more, die? What about if a large chunk of this generation ends up with a member of their family killed by the pandemic or the collapse of health care system? That starts to look like a wartime generation. And I can’t even begin to think about the mark this leaves on a generation of medical students and professionals if that community experiences severe losses.
Think about it.
Education
The rest of their academic life this generation is likely to have online education embedded in how they learn. The truth is we don’t really know how well that works. As an educator, I’m worried. I don’t think it’s as capable of helping kids build the soft skills that really matter — resilience, working in teams, adaptability.
Economy
When we come out of this, what does the employment landscape look like? Experts are predicting as high as 20 percent unemployment. But will this accelerate the end of much of the service industry? Self-driving cars and trucks don’t get infected. A lot of legal work and other repetitive white-collar work is already being automated. AI might get a computer virus, but not a coronavirus. Will this accelerate that, too?
The point is that people have been expecting these changes to happen slowly over the next 30 years, but if that gets truncated to 10, society isn’t ready. That’s why the soft skills matter more than knowledge — they allow people to adapt to the speed of modern life. But if a generation is weak in them, how will society adapt?
And I haven’t even addressed the global economic changes on the way.
American society
If the economy is radically altered, do the kind of direct payouts from the government continue because changes mean a larger and larger portion of the population don’t have jobs to work at? Andrew Yang isn’t crazy. There’s good evidence for a guaranteed basic income. We now have a Republican president instituting what is likely to end up being the largest government spending program since World War II, and it includes what amounts to an emergency guaranteed income.
National security
A failure to take the extreme measures we need to here is the greatest threat to our security. Our national strength starts with the stability of our political system and the dynamism of our economy. If we don’t get that back, we’re in trouble.
This changes everything. Everything. But the impacts will be uneven across the international system. The first thing people need to remember is that foreign policy is always a reflection of domestic politics. What happens inside a country determines what it does on the outside.
The three largest economies of the planet — 60 percent of world GDP — are in the midst of the biggest event since probably World War II. This will reshape the whole system. When people think of “national security” they tend to focus on military factors, but the dominant effect here is on the economy.
To take the U.S., as it crawls out of this having instituted wartime public spending programs, what happens to Social Security or Medicare five years from now? If a new administration tries to rebuild those systems, does it cut the $700 billion we now spend on defense? Does NATO weaken or collapse for similar reasons? I’d say one outcome is this is likely to suppress the desire of countries to spend on militaries or engage in peripheral expeditions like Syria (for us, Russia and Iran). Again, domestic pressures will drive foreign policy.
An interesting case is Russia. Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to try to drive out U.S. shale oil producers by driving prices down on the expectation that Moscow could keep their industry pumping long enough to outlast us with massive subsidies. And what about COVID-19 there? This is speculation, but in cold places is there less gathering in public spaces, meaning a lighter effect on the population? I don’t know, but it’s something I’m watching for. That could give Russia a window to use the relatively light economic effects of this to its advantage in targeted areas.
And of course China faces the possibility that the global supply chain that’s been anchored there and that’s been the linchpin of its massive economic expansion suddenly shifts, what happens if there’s unprecedented unemployment there? Is the Chinese political system at risk? Already there’s been a higher degree of public dissent than we’ve seen in the past. Does China’s “inevitable” rise continue? We just don’t know. All we can do now is ask questions.
And the big one is: Will COVID-19 come back? China is just now relaxing some restrictions on movement. Will a second wave start? Will our economies be in lockdown for months or a year or more?