It's hard to say what's going to change quite yet because we really don't know what we've learned yet...
-Is taking temperatures before you check in for a flight a good way to stop the spread via air travel? Dunno, but it seemed to work in China (with the proviso that those fuckers are a bunch of lying liars). If so, get used to that being part of travel going forward.
-I think shaking hands is largely an archaic habit that old white people decided was important to pass on and that will largely go away.
-Masks in public aren't just a thing, they should be encouraged in crowded areas (public transit, malls, etc). Especially if you have any illness symptoms at all, or during flu season.
-Cruise industry isn't dead per se, but I think that this generation of old people will be the last generation interested in it at nearly the scale it's reached.
-Airbnb "super hosts" are likely a thing of the past. Lenders just aren't going to line up to give someone their 10th mortgage without major down payments, net worth not attached to residential property equity, etc.
-National governments will be extremely interested in at minimum diversifying their health care supply chain. Bigger economies will look to have their own, but how long do we have to go between pandemics before that edge gets dulled? Also, knowing what supplies are needed for what pandemic is tricky at best...so you bought 100,000 ventilators, that's fantastic...what if the next pandemic isn't respiratory in nature? I think the big winner in this space isn't going to be specific manufacturers, but 3D printing tech. What this shows isn't that you need this super broad based infrastructure across your economy is a good thing...because if it's not competitive, it either needs to be a function of government or it's going to eventually get shuttered. It's that the flexibility at the core of 3D printing is the future of industry and needs major investment from governments now. Imagine if transitioning a solid chunk of your economy over to manufacturing a specific machine part (ventilator, for example) didn't require new machines and 1000's of man hours, it required uploading a new file to 1000's of already functioning industrial scale 3D printers. That's our manhattan project for the 21st century in my opinion.
-Everything I said above about 3D printing, but for medical AI. Invest in it now, heavily, on the government level. Don't wait for IBM and Google to do it for us.
- Working from home is great, people like it. Let them do it whenever possible.
- Smart governments will see the internet as a utility, and start to manage and invest in them like the utility it is. It's as essential as electricity, gas, etc in 2020. The government should own the tubes.
- UBI is going to be a thing in a lot of places. Had governments been re organized around delivering UBI already, massive shocks to the economy like this would be massively blunted. Instead of trying to figure out on the fly how to keep millions from ending up homeless and starving, you've baked it into your system. Temporarily scaling the payments up is a lot easier than building systems on the fly in a crisis.
