If there is one thing that the past year has taught us, it’s that humanity is capable of immense adaptation and ingenuity in the face of crisis. Before COVID-19, the idea of shutting down borders, locking down economies, and requiring months-long social isolation and almost obsessive hygiene en masse was the stuff of Hollywood movies — not to mention the trillions of dollars in economic aid to hundreds of millions of struggling citizens across the world, as well as the rapid development of highly effective vaccines less than a year into a pandemic.
History also shows that major external shocks, from the Spanish flu a century earlier to the Great Depression, can radically reshape the trajectory of human societies. As studies by leading economists such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have shown, cataclysmic events such as plagues can lead to “institutional drift,” similar to “genetic drift” in evolutionary biology, with far reaching consequences for humanity. The pandemic can change patterns of growth and governance in Asia.
The relative success of Asian countries in managing the pandemic therefore shouldn’t obscure the long-term challenges.