evidence: What has occurred in the past five months relative to the virus unfortunately fits in much too closely with predictions of contagion, about a U.S. torn apart by wealth inequality, racial and other critical tensions around competing views of social justice, the difficulty of coping with an incredibly large and rapidly increasing national debt and annual budget that even before the pandemic stimulus was growing more than $1 trillion per year, aging population demographics that Pope Francis has referred to as the ‘Age Curse,’ along with health care issues and underfunded pension concerns facing the federal, state and local governments (as well as corporate pension and health plans)." [...] "In the short-medium term, I expect this to have significant disruptive effects requiring workers across the economy to retrain and be more flexible and adaptive. The overhang of COVID-19-related debt, grotesquely amplified by bad fiscal policies since 2016, will make it difficult to raise the funds for subsidy programs to aging populations, and the pension-fund risk is significant and could herald a global economic crisis that might make 2008 look like child’s play. … The world is a more complex place and this requires more multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural engagement to address challenges; putting those together is hard. Digital technology is essential to support the multistakeholder types of governance solutions we need, but it is also very effective in implementing authoritarian solutions and in mobilizing ignorance and mob rule. It will be a battle to see whether our better halves can succeed."