Getting back to normal is no longer an option; some things that Covid broke can be fixed, but others are probably changed forever.
We may be learning to live with Covid but as the latest inflation report shows, it's still a pandemic economy. Two and a half years after the first lockdowns, the economy remains weird: It can take more than a year to a get a dishwasher, many months to get a passport, businesses are short-staffed, stores routinely run out of basic staples like pain reliever and, of course, there is high inflation. Americans enjoyed years of plenty, where the newest, best thing was always available and many services got cheaper by the day. Now somedays it feels like we woke up in the dystopian second half of "Atlas Shrugged."
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in Bloomberg Opinion