Traditionally, major pandemics have led to more equal societies, as the power of labor increases, but experts today think this is unlikely to happen once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, said the Wall Street Journal. In a recent paper published this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research, three economists looked at the last 15 outbreaks that had 100,000 or more deaths worldwide and found that, in general, real wages grew for the three decades afterwards, sometimes by as much as 5 percent. At the same time, return on capital declined by about 1.5 percentage points, leading to an overall narrowing of the gap between the wealthy and everyone else. A big reason behind this outcome was the macabre fact that there were just fewer workers after these pandemics because a lot of them died, and so, since the supply of labor was smaller, compensation needed to rise in response.

However, while the current outbreak has claimed 168,000 lives so far worldwide, the Journal said it's unlikely we'll see the same effects afterwards. Mass lockdowns have limited the virus's impact on the working age population, which means there likely will not be major labor shortages once the pandemic is behind us. While people saving more might affect interest rates and overall increase some economic security, it will be a far cry from previous recoveries. Further, if there are increases in jobs, that will mostly be due to people bringing previously outsourced industries back to their home shores, as companies rattled by supply chain shocks steel themselves against future disruptions.