With America Shut Down, Daily Life May Change
I think he's onto something. I talked to my older son tonight, asked what they were doing for the weekend. He said they'd planned on going to the Shamrock Run to watch Liam for Derek and Lindsay who were running. Canceled.
He said Derek called and invited them over to play board games, that's what they're doing.
At least for my kids, seems his conclusion may not be quite on the mark.
https://slate.com/business/2020/03/c...ore-times.html
We’re Not Going Back to the Way Life Was Before
Thanks to the coronavirus, the future may arrive earlier than expected.
By HENRY GRABAR
MARCH 12, 2020
A few years ago I interviewed Tyler Morse, the developer working to restore Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK Airport into a hotel. A large chunk of the business, he told me, would be hidden from the travelers who came to sip cocktails and gawk at the soaring central atrium. This was the conference center: a subterranean zone of banquet halls and offices that would provide a crucial revenue stream. “A big part of airport hotel business is the 12- to 15-person meeting,” Morse went on. “People fly in, you just need to meet, then they fly out.” You didn’t need a city to do that, just an airport and a conference room. Suits were already meeting near hubs in Dallas or Chicago; American executives with partners from Europe, the Middle East, or Africa could meet at his hotel. And fly right back home again.
It seems insane, but that’s the way things go in the corporate world. For businesses that trade primarily in ideas, study after study has shown enormous benefits associated with being in one place. Economists call this the “agglomeration effect”; it explains why firms keep clustering in places like Silicon Valley despite the expense.
I thought of Morse last week after a single biotech leadership meeting at a Boston hotel was found responsible for 77 of Massachusetts’ 95 COVID-19 cases. I thought about all the corporate gathering that ultimately doesn’t seem all that necessary. If there is any sign of our future in Italy, where everything but groceries and pharmacies has been shut down, a once-in-a-lifetime break with normalcy is ahead of us.
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But what happens after the coronavirus?
In some ways, the answer is: all the old normal stuff. The pandemic will take lives and throttle economies and scuttle routines, but it will pass. Americans will never stop going to basketball games. They won’t stop going on vacation. They’ll meet to do business. No decentralizing technology so far—not telegrams, not telephones, not television, and not the internet—has dented that human desire to shake hands, despite technologists’ predictions to the contrary.
Yet there are real reasons to think that things will not revert to the way they were last week. Small disruptions create small societal shifts; big ones change things for good. The O.J. Simpson trial helped tank the popularity of daytime soap operas. The New York transit strike of 1980 is credited with prompting several long-term changes in the city, including bus and bike lanes, dollar vans, and women wearing sneakers to work. The 1918 flu pandemic prompted the development of national health care in Europe.
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People might stick with the disruptions to their lives, too: More deliveries taking the place of personal trips. More cooking, and less eating out. More driving in solitude—or, optimistically, biking—and less reliance on Uber, Lyft, and transit. Therapy, yoga, and medical advice online. More video games; less live entertainment. The social fabric that breaks might not be repaired.
All these changes point in one direction: away from being together, whether that means meetings of multinational VPs or concerts at the local dive bar. They all suggest ways of business and life in which people travel much less than they do now. Maybe the only thing that sticks is virtual yoga. Let’s hope so.
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Originally Posted by Kathianne
