REALITY & HOPES FOR 2022

Year 2020 will always be noted for the advent of Covid-19. Year 2021 has been the year of hope with the discovery of vaccines and the end of Trump’s Presidency. We now are now approaching 2022 with mixed feelings of both optimism and fear. Here are some uneasy facts that we will have to accept as the way of life for the new year. 

The Covid-19 pandemic will turn into an endemic. Various mutations like Omicron will plague us for the near future and we will be taking annual boosters like flu shots. It will be a unique battle between the virus taking different forms and our bodies fighting back with vaccines and our own individual levels of immunity. The world will, hopefully, come to the realization that the best approach to Covid-19 and its many variants is a global all-inclusive vaccination program. That was the way smallpox, typhoid, plague, and other killers were brought under control. 

After two decades of relative price stability, inflation is here. The 7% annual price increase in the USA in 2021 after two decades of price stability is not transitory. The price increase is a fatal combination of cost-push and demand-pull inflation. For more than a decade easy money has been pumped into the economy and in some ways, the price increases were kept in check by importing cheap goods from China. Covid-19 has disrupted the supply chain. Also, Chinese goods had already started getting relatively expensive.  We should expect the federal reserve to put on anti-inflationary policies early in the new year and the days of cheap interest rates may be over. High inflation and higher interest rate are likely common worldwide phenomenon. 

In 2022 there will finally be a universal acceptance that the workplace will never go back to the pre-Covid 19 days. A significant percentage of work will be done from home and a new era of hybrid work process will replace the old model. For example, telemedicine has become the norm for many medical specialties. Many patients simply need regular monitoring which can be done by physician extenders like nurse practitioners or physician assistants. University-level education will continue to move towards online instruction. 

Preliminary results show that online instruction has been a disaster for elementary and middle school students. Young children simply do not have the attention span to sit for hours in front of a computer screen and the socialization process with other children is an essential element of learning. A new learning model will have to be developed for young learners if indeed pandemic indeed becomes endemic.   

The trend towards a new international political and economic order will continue. We must accept that China has the biggest economy in the world, and it will continue to flex its leverage and power. With its own strong domestic market and global economic relationships, China is no longer dependent on any country or region. China has also shown that it can do things on its own.  Recently when the United States and Russia shut China off from participating in the international program, China successfully opened its own international space station. 

With the world believing that the United States does not have the appetite to get into another foreign war, it is not a surprise that China and Russia are intimidating their closest neighbors like Taiwan and Ukraine respectively. One must look beyond the public rhetoric which is designed for each country’s domestic constituents. Such tensions also create opportunities for large arms sale opportunities. 

Regional conflicts in different parts of the world will continue. The long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict is taking a different shape with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and UAE lining up against Iran. There are other hot spots around the world, particularly Africa where local despots will continue to violate human rights and carry out their own agendas with impunity. These include places like Ethiopia, Libya, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia.        

Rate of change in every area of the world will continue to accelerate. Government rules and regulations are unlikely to catch up with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Google (Alphabet), and Facebook (Meta). No one including the central banks of most countries really knows how cryptocurrencies work. To counter the threat posed by this new unregulatable currency, some countries will start issuing their own digital currency. 

The fight is no longer a battle between different ideas and philosophies. Major countries are being defined by powerful autocrats like Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and India’s Modi. Compared to them the West looks feeble with leaders like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Olaf Scholz (successor to Angela Merkel).  

Among all these mixed signals emerging about 2022, I hope there will be a realization and consensus that global challenges can only be solved through global cooperation. All the progress made to reduce the poverty among the most unfortunate has been wiped out by the virus with its devastating effect on the economy, particularly among the poorest of nations. We need a global economic rescue plan, a global environment plan (with a special focus on global warming), and a universal vaccination program. Otherwise, we will continue to face more catastrophic storms and hurricanes, economic refugees, and violence in the streets.       

Faisal Rahman Ph.D.