2023 ECONOMIC OUTLOOK A look ahead at the coming year with Georgia economist Dr. Roger Tutterow ZAWN VILLINES
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Three years ago, as news of the first COVID-19 case in the United States spread, people began living their lives in two-week intervals. First, the news was that sheltering in place for two weeks would flatten the curve. Then, millions of people spent two weeks waiting in isolation after each potential COVID exposure. And public health officials in the early days argued that another two weeks would bring a greater understanding of how the pandemic was spreading. For months, it seemed that in a couple of weeks, we would know more about what to expect, whether the economy would shut down, and how the pandemic would affect each individual. Certainty never came. In many ways, the story of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath is the story of learning to live with uncertainty. For engineers, the pandemic brought dire predictions of a recession, of unprecedented unemployment, of construction shutdowns, of real estate collapse. Instead, all that happened was a contraction so short that many engineering sectors never even felt it. In fact, for most sectors, 2020 and 2021 brought unprecedented growth and a bonanza of mergers and acquisitions.
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