Winners and losers in the world after corona
Good read via Dan Perry /ThriveGlobal
“Going down:
- Globalization. It’s hard to believe it was ever popular and it had to do with efficiency, modernity and inevitability. Then people figured out it meant jobs fleeing the West and manufacturing and supply chain dependence on other countries, some of which were heinously governed.
- Liberal democracy. While for a laudable minority principles matter, for many it is survival and sustenance they seek. Authoritarians all over the world have eroded civil liberties under cover of a crisis. This trend may continue. In the United States, President Trump has been showing for a few years now how brittle is the whole edifice of civilized society
- U.S. credibility. The United States is not set up to handle health emergencies — not with tens of millions without health insurance, so much distribution of power that little can efficiently be done, a doltish leadership, and a third of the population prepared to believe nonsense and follow that leadership off a cliff. …the U.S. will be looking like the superpower version of an idiot”
Thanks to @Perry_Dan
“Going up.
- Social democracy. If humanity overcomes corona and the related economic disaster, it will be governments that did it. Governments will strong-arm or nationalize companies, pay salaries, compensate businesses and do it by printing money and piling up debt.
- Sustainability. The denial of global warming and the other disasters we are sowing has depended on a sort of complacency about the resilience of our way of life. The global lockdown may leave even the less observant among U.S. conservatives…
- Nationalism. After people hunkered down and got used to closed borders, as every country ends up depending on its own response and counting its own dead, fear of outsiders will rise. As authoritarians gain the upper ground over liberals, they will stoke nativist tendencies…
- All things digital. This has been happening for a while, and the coronavirus will accelerate the primacy of digital. It’s not just everything around online meetings. Something similar will likely happen to online education and online commerce…