Changes In The Economy

I don't see how many restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions continue to operate, even after all restrictions are off.  Their margins are often slim, and even slight changes in the distancing that people expect are going to but some below sea level. In a long-view sense, this is unrelated to the current crisis, which merely exposes a level of risk that was always there but ignored.  One can picture it as analogous to building a house on a floodplain, in a hurricane area, or where storm tides periodically come.  How we have lived is fine for most years, but seasons of greater wind or higher water are not that unusual. 

Viruses come, usually from China, and will continue to come.  In an interconnected world they can come quickly, in a matter of months, as opposed to the years it took for the Black Death. (Blame the Mongols not the Chinese for that one, BTW, at least in the 14th C version.) Some will be lesser and some greater, but the way a large percentage of us have been living - including elevators and restaurants - is too risky for safety.  Some but not all of us will make life adjustments that change the arithmetic for may businesses.

I had predicted before that foreign travel might gradually decline because of Virtual Reality, especially as VR can be adjusted to provide different eras, and augmentations such as food, sounds, and even smells can be provided as well.  This will hasten that.

An odd analogy.  In the centuries before the first Crusades, the Christians in Constantinople couldn't understand why so many Western Christians wanted to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land.  After all, they had the Crown of thorns and the True Cross, as well as many other relics right there in the city!  Why bother to go out to Jerusalem and walk around in a place where even the buildings were no longer the same.  What's holy about dirt? So in our era, why go to Paris when it is no longer Paris? VR Paris 1975 is much cheaper, and reusable all year.

We who have been raised on going to actual places and relishing the quiddity of such things will want "the real thing," but A) it actually isn't the real thing, B) the imitations will get better, and C) our successors will be more comfortable with derivative versions.  Most people prefer their sporting events and concerts on a screen at this point.  That will be increasingly true for friends as well.  We had a Zoom Room with all five sons this afternoon.  That has never happened for Mother's Day before, nothing like it. As we can do this for all holidays plus some times when we just feel like it, for a helluva lot cheaper for the sons over 1000 miles away, we will come to prefer our new world, with actual presence increasingly viewed as a lot of work for not much more payback.  And that's us, in our 60's who grew up on live-space.  Our granddaughters will be even less tied to it.

Some things will just be distant, not so much changed by C19 and revealed by it.