Hysteresis was a word bandied about by the Fed chairman at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. It’s a word engineers will immediately grasp but not one generally understood. To me that was an especially scary word to use in the circumstances. A situation so dramatic that might throw a systemic switch in global society is tantamount to suggesting that a revolution might take place, and those things generally end up very badly and take generations to sort out. Happily, the overwhelming of barriers seems to have been limited to economics.
As we find ourselves at the exit of the pandemic (at least we hope this is where we are), hysteresis is back with a vengeance, this time as the lag and resistance needed to be overcome to get the world economy running smoothly again rather than as a barrier breached by dramatic events.
In my first novel way back in 2005, one of the characters says the world economy is like one of those fancy £50,000 complicated watches...