Jobs as memory: Don't invite new anarchies on top of that wrought by Covid

Will people buy as many cars as before? How much office space becomes surplus as office-goers work from home? How will that impact construction? T N Ninan raises some questions the future invites

When people look back at Covid-19, what they remember most of all might be the loss of jobs on a scale unimagined since the Great Depression. That earlier crisis gave birth to such classics as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote his Nobel-prize winning fiction with the flavour of non-fiction, so Stalin banned the book because (it is said) he did not want Russians to see that even a poor American family could afford a car (at the time a Ford Model T cost barely four