Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Will COVID-19 Remake the World? @rodrikdani argues no, probably not. "Rather than putting the world on a significantly different trajectory, it is likely to intensify and entrench already-existing trends." prosyn.org/g7kA21U

I don't know.

I genuinely don't even have a strong intuition about whether the virus will significantly change the world. When I read this, I thought, "That sounds plausible, maybe he's right."

But I can go the opposite way in a heartbeat:

I can imagine fully plausible scenarios in which this leads to complete geopolitical chaos, wars--ranging from the hybrid to the nuclear--and a world so changed we'll be nostalgic for the tranquility of the pandemic. I can also imagine world-changing technologies emerging--

or the emergence of the big-data surveillance state as the dominant global model; and it seems foolish to think there won't be as-yet-unimagined, but massive, second-order effects. There always are when billions of people around the globe completely change their daily habits.

(I mean, think of the effect it had when women entered the workforce en masse during WWII to fill vacancies left by the men who were overseas--and discovered they liked doing those jobs and liked having financial independence. That genie never went back in the bottle.)

So maybe @rodrikdani's right: Maybe what we get out of this is "the same trends, only more so." He's been right about many things; he has solid intuitions.

But I just don't know why anyone would be confident in making a strong prediction about the future right now.

Or even if it's theoretically possible to make good predictions. The number of critical variables that are not only unknown right now but unknowable, especially to the general public, just seems too high to me.