Yuval Noah Harari: 'If sex survived Aids, hugging will survive Covid'

In the future, historians may look back on 2020 as a turning point for the way that we do business, spend our free time and interact with each other. Then again, what might appear to us today to be a new trend could fade as quickly as it appeared.

So how can you make investment decisions today that will reap profits for years to come? Perhaps the best people to prophesy on the significance of 2020 are not fund managers or stock analysts, but academics who have dedicated their careers to understanding human psychology, economics and history – those who think in centuries rather than years.

Telegraph Money spoke to four experts in these fields about how 2020 changed the future – and how it didn’t.

Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of ‘Sapiens: a Graphic History’

The most important, long-term change will be digitalisation. Covid-19 has greatly accelerated this process, and some institutions and businesses will probably decide to maintain a reduced physical presence even after the pandemic is over.

Remote work and remote learning are behavioural changes that could have unpredictable consequences – for example, we could see a new wave of outsourcing.

In the field of education, British universities may conclude that if the students are all online then the professor might just as well be in India.

However, it is unlikely that Covid-19 will change the more basic features of human behaviour and of human nature. Our species has confronted much more deadly plagues before. The Black Death didn’t change human nature. The 1918 influenza pandemic didn’t change human nature. Aids didn’t change human nature.

Despite all of these horrible experiences in our history, we are still social animals that like contact. If sex survived Aids, I am pretty sure hugging will survive Covid.

One behavioural change I would like to see is more of this kind of solidarity and cooperation. If nothing else, I hope this crisis helps us see that each human being is safer when every human being is safer. If everyone around the world has access to quality healthcare, and every country has a well-funded centre for monitoring infectious diseases, then the chance of future pandemics spiralling out of control is smaller.

We can disagree about a lot of details, but clearly there is one lesson everybody should take from 2020: invest more in our healthcare systems.

Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history, University of Oxford

The countries that have handled Covid-19 best will be the ones that will manage future threats the best, such as climate change. The mixed reactions to the pandemic were partly down to government leadership, which will of course change, but it was also those societies that have a high level of trust which did best.

Asian countries were the quickest to shut down the virus and then get their economies moving. They have strong social ties and trust in the government. They may be authoritarian, but there is more to their successes than that.

Zoom, the video calling app, will stick around as it is very convenient, but the power and importance of face-to-face contact has not diminished. When I know someone it’s easier to use video conferencing, but it is harder to get to know new people and you miss a lot of their non-verbal cues. Casual conversations and random meetings are important for coming up with new ideas, so digital communication will not take over our lives.

We are seeing the end of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan idea that big government is bloated and inefficient and are now realising that government is essential for the good of society as a whole. We may not get more intervention, but we know its importance now. The crisis also showed that the Government has become too centralised in Britain as it didn’t use local knowledge to fight the virus.

We saw government spending last year that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic. We have moved beyond the idea that fiscal deficits are always bad – and the public has supported it. Economists now think that debt isn’t necessarily bad and we should accumulate it when it’s for a good cause, like infrastructure spending.

Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist, Harvard University

Humans live on information. It’s remarkable how much interaction can take place by language alone.

Videoconferencing adds the channels of facial expressions and graphics, and the pandemic has shown us how much work can be done without bodies being in the same room. Thanks to Zoom, courses get taught, papers get written, business is transacted.

For frequent fliers, the way that life has gone on has taught us that we spend too much time, hassle and fossil fuel putting bodies into metal containers and shuttling them across the city, country or world. Often the exchange of information is just as easily accomplished with a screen and speakers.

Of course, we are incarnate, and nothing can replace face-to-face contact, especially in more intimate relationships. But it would be a missed opportunity not to replace all those physical meetings we never enjoyed in the first place with quicker, cheaper and more carbon-neutral alternatives.

One of the longer-term consequences may be Zoom doing to meetings what email did to paper mail and tablets did to magazines – to some unknown extent.

Noreena Hertz, economist and author of ‘The Lonely Century’

Digital life is not the new normal. When we come out of the pandemic we will see a surge in demand for activities that bring people together, such as live music, co-working spaces, holidays and eating and drinking out.

Digital relationships are not comparable to the real thing. The more physical, the better. Covid-19 has not permanently changed the way we interact with each other and while online tools will continue to be important, the share of our lives that is currently ­digital will fall.

In countries where the virus has been defeated, such as New Zealand, Australia and Asian countries, nightclubs and music festivals are once again heaving. The shared trauma of Covid will spark a coming-together.

This has historical precedent. After the Second World War and the 1930s depression in America, there was an economic boom and a unified national spirit. After the 1918 Spanish flu, nightclubs, bars and cafes across Europe and the United States were packed.

Having been starved in person interaction for months, we will want it more than before.