After the crisis, opportunity
What forces will shape the post-covid, post-Trump world?
By Zanny Minton Beddoes: editor-in-chief, The Economist
SOME YEARS loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.
Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified. At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality. And by showing the toll of being unprepared for a low-probability, high-impact disaster, it has focused more minds on the coming century’s inevitable and even higher-impact disaster, that of climate change. All this means there is no going back to the pre-covid world.
