“Humankind is now facing a global crisis. Perhaps the biggest crisis of our generation,” wrote the influential historian Yuval Noah Harari in March last year. “The decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks will probably shape the world for years to come,” he added. “They will shape not just our healthcare systems but also our economy, politics and culture.”1
Harari is known for making such grand, sweeping pronouncements—and he occasionally takes criticism for it. In this instance, however, it’s hard to argue that he over-shot the mark. COVID-19 has claimed a horrific toll in terms of human life and well-being, with grim statistics remorselessly continuing to climb. We may need the better part of a decade to fully tally the pandemic’s economic toll. When numbers grow this large, they become an abstraction—people struggle to apprehend events fully at such scale.
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