Will we ever go back to the status quo？ Not likely.
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with economist and author of The Pandemic: How Will It Change Our Lives and the World We Live In After 9/11. We talk about the impact of the government shutdowns, the impact on the economy, and the implications for our lives and the world.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I think some of the biggest changes to our lives and to our societies as a result of the pandemic
00:00:10.840
are yet to come. Now what do I mean by that? Because that may seem like a sort of counterintuitive
00:00:15.860
thing. Because we're now at a point where the economy is coming back online, things are returning
00:00:20.620
to normal, or at least some degree of new normal, and our lives right now in August seem to be
00:00:26.100
resembling more or less what they looked like a year ago as opposed to what they resembled in say
00:00:30.760
April when everything was shut down. So how can that make sense that the most, the most profound
00:00:36.660
changes are still yet to come? Well I think to some stories that I've been reading, a number of them
00:00:41.720
about how there is more of an exodus from the cities to the country. Particularly I read about
00:00:46.580
in Manhattan where units used to be priced you know 20 million dollars, they have a lot of expensive
00:00:51.160
real estate in Manhattan, and those 20 million dollar listings have been cut down massive amounts,
00:00:55.420
20 down to 15, 12, 10 million dollars, 50 percent off. Meanwhile in the outlying areas, New Jersey,
00:01:01.760
Connecticut, places where you can get to Manhattan in about an hour's train ride, they have been soaring
00:01:06.420
those prices unlike ever before really. Real estate agents say this is quite something. So what you have
00:01:12.280
there when people pick up and move their families, that is a major change. That is more or less a
00:01:17.960
permanent change. That is not just a temporary situation where okay we're going to try things a little
00:01:22.520
different for a few months like we've all been doing in March, April, May, and June and so forth
00:01:26.720
during the shutdowns. I think what's going on is this pandemic is making people stop and they are
00:01:33.100
asking a lot of very fundamental questions about their lives, about the nature of work, their
00:01:38.860
relationship to work and commuting and so forth, about their relationship to the parts of their
00:01:44.300
country that they live in, their relationship to health care, to travel. Starting to say,
00:01:48.920
do I really need to get on a plane and go around the world all the time as I've been doing?
00:01:53.100
Maybe I can enjoy places in my own province, in my own state more. A lot of rethinking and a lot of
00:01:58.180
this is not clear. Who knows how this is going to chalk out and there's going to be different degrees
00:02:02.260
of changes for different sectors. But I think that those are the changes that people have yet to really
00:02:08.640
factor in. And more interestingly, I think government, the politicians, media, a lot of these so-called
00:02:15.180
influencers, they have yet to factor in. I mean, you look at Canadian politics right now and people
00:02:20.180
are kind of acting and talking as if this is business as usual. I don't think so. I think the
00:02:24.340
very nature of government is going to change in the next few years. I think the nature of traditional
00:02:29.220
political parties is going to change, whether it's in how the Liberal Party and government has been
00:02:33.600
behaving or even during the Conservative leadership. I mean, a lot of people are kind of stuck on the same
00:02:38.400
ideas, the same old path as if life is normal. It is not. We're going to see some profound changes to
00:02:44.640
sort of the basic fundamentals of the way we live our lives in the years ahead. I don't know how those
00:02:51.240
all are going to be. It'll be interesting. I mean, tell me your thoughts on what you think is going to
00:02:55.520
change in a permanent sense and how it's going to change. But it's kind of funny to see that a lot
00:03:00.380
of people haven't clued into this yet, or they're maybe even resistant to it. They want to go back to the