Covid

Commerce After Covid

Lessons from (mis)managing a crisis

by

Walter Frick

by

Walter Frick

From the Magazine (September–October 2023)

Carolina Moscoso

Summary.

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, what lessons have we learned? Four new books—The Big Fail, Lessons from the Covid War, The Phoenix Economy, and Chaos Kings—and a blog series on Crooked Timber search for answers. They examine the response to the crisis, the systemic and societal weaknesses it revealed, and the ways it has fundamentally changed the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed just how fragile the global economy really is—and simultaneously transformed it forever. Books about the crisis tend to focus on one effect or the other: They either catalog the things we learned and cannot unsee or explain why we are never going back.

A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival, a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, and the BBC, among other publications.

Commerce After Covid

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