# Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Fareed Zakaria]] - Full Title:: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World - Category: #books ## Highlights > The United States alone devotes almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars to its defense budget every year. And yet, we were unprepared to defend against a tiny microbe. It may well turn out that this viral speck will cause the greatest economic, political, and social damage to humankind since World War II. ([Location 48](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=48)) > In the case of the novel coronavirus, the impact is being shaped by the reality that the world is deeply interconnected, that most countries were unprepared for the pandemic, and that in its wake, many of them—including the world’s richest nations—shut down their societies and economies in a manner unprecedented in human history. ([Location 53](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=53)) > Almost everyone alive had been spared from experiencing a plague, so far. But now we know what a pandemic looks like. We have seen the challenges and costs of responding to it. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=56)) > Lenin is supposed to have once said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.” ([Location 62](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=62)) > We should have seen it coming. The coronavirus may be novel but plagues are not. Western literature begins with one. In the opening verses of Homer’s Iliad, the Greek armies are being ravaged by pestilence. It turns out to be divine punishment directed at their leader, the vain, avaricious, and quarrelsome King Agamemnon. The first serious history written in the West hinges on a plague. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War chronicles the long conflict between the two superpowers of the age, Athens and Sparta. Toward the beginning of the war, Thucydides writes, a terrible plague swept through Athens, killing vast numbers of able-bodied citizens and, most significant, the city-state’s peerless leader, Pericles. The two sides had very different political systems: Athens was democratic, Sparta a more rigidly run warrior society. Sparta eventually prevailed, and it’s not a stretch to say that, had there been no plague, Athens might have won, and the course of Western history would have been different—with a vibrant democracy becoming a successful role model rather than a flame that burned brightly, but then flickered out. Plagues have consequences. ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=74)) > Walter Scheidel explains that labor became scarce and land abundant, so wages rose and rents fell. Workers won more bargaining power and nobles lost out. Serfdom withered away in much of Western Europe. ([Location 90](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=90)) > Many fourteenth-century Europeans asked why God would allow this hell on earth and questioned entrenched hierarchies—which had the ultimate effect of helping Europe break out of its medieval malaise and setting in motion the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. From death and horror came science, modernity, and growth. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=94)) > Still, the three most important guidelines from health authorities at the time—social distancing, masks, and handwashing—remain three of the four most important mechanisms used today to slow the spread of coronavirus, until the development of a vaccine. The fourth, regular testing, is the one modern addition. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=110)) > It was too late. We had ample warning to gird ourselves for Covid-19. But beyond the specific dangers of a pandemic, we should have recognized the general possibility of a shock to our system. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=128)) > They are all asymmetric shocks—things that start out small but end up sending seismic waves around the world. This is particularly true of the three that will be judged as the most enduring—9/11, the crash of 2008, and the coronavirus. ([Location 134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=134)) > Even though the roots of the crash lay in the excesses of the private sector, in many countries, people did not move to the left economically; they moved to the right culturally. Economic anxiety bred cultural anxiety, hostility to immigration, and a nostalgic desire to return to a familiar past. Right-wing populism gained strength across the West. ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=144)) > The social and psychological consequences—fear, isolation, purposelessness—might endure even longer. Covid-19 is having deep and lasting effects on each of us, repercussions we cannot yet fully grasp. ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=151)) > The word influenza, for example, traces back to an Italian folk attribution of colds and fevers to the influence of the stars. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=166)) > This emergency has highlighted one of the oldest truths about international life—that ultimately, countries are on their own. When the pandemic struck, nations that had long cooperated—in Europe, for example—shut their borders and focused on their own survival. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=177)) > Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=189)) > It would be hard to bring stability to anything so dynamic and open. It turns out that in any system, of these three characteristics—open, fast, stable—you can have only two. An open and fast system, like the world we live in, will be inherently unstable. A fast and stable one will tend to be closed, like China. If the system is open and stable, it will likely be sluggish rather than dynamic. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=190)) > As people get richer, they tend to eat more meat. When this happens globally, the effect is staggering: some 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn’t even count fish.) ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=243)) > Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide, yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=245)) > Samuel quotes the biologist Rob Wallace: “Factory farms are the best way to select for the most dangerous pathogens possible.” ([Location 252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=252)) > warning, “The top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.” ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=276)) > One of the world’s most crucial water sources is the Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls through the semiarid lands of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas and supplies about a third of the groundwater used to irrigate American farms. This seemingly bottomless well is in fact being emptied by agribusiness so fast that it is on track to shrivel by 70% in less than fifty years. If the aquifer ran dry, it would take 6,000 years for rainfall to refill it. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=278)) > “contemporary man is a man-made species.” ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=287)) > But nuclear weapons are hard to build and relatively easy to detect. Bioweapons are far more practical to develop; they can be made cheaply and secretly in small laboratories on shoestring budgets. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=305)) > “Outbreaks are inevitable but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox forty-five years ago. What he means is that we may not be able to change the natural occurrences that produce disease in the first place, but through preparation, early action, and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=330)) > The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared to the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability. Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=340)) > * This is why bats, as reservoirs for viruses (including a variety of coronaviruses), are studied at facilities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There are those who allege that the novel coronavirus was an accidental leak from this lab. This claim is as-yet unproven, but we should note that such facilities, even at the highest grade of biosecurity, BSL-4, have experienced leaks in the past, as with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that escaped from a UK lab in 2007. ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=356)) > By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism? ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=368)) > America will always disappoint its most ardent detractors—and admirers. It’s a big, complicated place, and you can always find in it what you want. But the pandemic laid bare fissures that have been persistently widening. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=420)) > John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote that America was defined by “private opulence and public squalor.” The United States has long had a dazzling private sector, but its public institutions, with a few exceptions—such as the independent, self-funded, and highly respected Federal Reserve—limp along. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=422)) > In late April, at least 50 million Americans were waiting for their money while the Treasury Department had sent a million checks to dead people. Meanwhile, Canada’s relief bill was simple and unencumbered by bureaucracy or politics—the money got to its citizens via direct deposits into their bank accounts within the first two weeks of the crisis. ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=429)) > For the twentieth century, the great political debate was about the size and role of government in the economy—the quantity of government. But what seems to have mattered most in this crisis was the quality of government. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=440)) > What was the common element? A competent, well-functioning, trusted state—the quality of government. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=450)) > The American tax code is one of the world’s longest for a reason. The thousands of amendments to it are what politicians sell when they raise campaign money. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=469)) > Byzantium (renamed Constantinople and later Istanbul) ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=484)) > The scholar Charles Tilly famously noted that “war made the state and the state made war,” ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=499)) > The Southern states always resisted the encroachment of Washington, for fear that it would mean the end of the Jim Crow laws. They were right, as it was the power of the federal government that eventually did away with segregation. ([Location 549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=549)) > In the 1950s, federal civilian employees made up more than 5% of total employment. That figure has now dropped below 2%, despite a population that is twice as large and an inflation-adjusted GDP that is seven times as large. Government investments in science, technology, and infrastructure have slumped sharply from their levels in the 1950s. Twenty-first-century America is living off that old capital. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=556)) > For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded? ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=567)) > There is pride in good government. ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=606)) > America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy.” ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=611)) > One version of the vetocracy, NIMBYism—named for the rallying cry of those opposed to local construction, “not in my backyard”—hobbles worthwhile projects across the country. ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=620)) > As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done. ([Location 625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=625)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Look around. There are now many liberal democracies that are just as free as America but with governments that are far more competent. ([Location 646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=646)) > On the contrary, they began as corrupt dictatorships but they developed their own models over decades, learning from others. In fact this is a common trait of almost all the countries that handled the pandemic well—they learned from history. ([Location 654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=654)) > Consider how Republicans, who a few years ago identified as staunchly free-market, now enthusiastically support protectionism and closed borders. ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=728)) > Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host most in tune with this shift, declared in a striking 2019 monologue, “Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. . . . You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” ([Location 729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=729)) > Take China, the fastest-growing economy on the planet over the last twenty years—indeed the fastest-growing major economy in history. ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=765)) > That country followed its own particular mix of capitalism, state planning, openness, and dictatorship. Its economy grew, but so did its political controls. (The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof described it as “Market-Leninism.”) ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=766)) > As important as China’s successes have been America’s failures. The liberation of markets over the last decades has produced growth and innovation but it has also produced an impoverished public sector, rising inequality, a trend toward monopolies, and a political system that has been bought by the rich and powerful. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=771)) > Twice in recent years, in 2008–9 and 2020, the federal government spent several trillion dollars to rescue large companies and prop up the assets of the richest Americans. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=776)) > And yet calls to spend a few billion on preschool or low-income housing are repeatedly met with grave concerns about the cost or the harmful effect of giving people handouts. (Why is that effect not a concern when the Federal Reserve provides support to those with stocks and bonds?) ([Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=778)) > Before the 2008 financial crisis, the rating agencies—supposedly independent and impartial—eagerly put their stamps of approval on shoddy, risky financial products because they were paid handsomely to do so. ([Location 803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=803)) > This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=831)) > The studies on this topic are so numerous and convincing that even the staunchly conservative National Review published an essay that concluded, “What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional . . . where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom.” ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=838)) > The American Dream, in other words, is alive and well, just not in America. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=848)) > How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.” ([Location 850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=850)) > Imagine that you’re an average family. You and your spouse have a child, and make the mean household income. You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model. More than just the free education and nice trains, the overwhelming advantage of Nordic flexicurity is that it embraces the dynamism at the heart of the modern, globalized world and yet eases the anxieties it produces. And these anxieties, of course, have reached new heights amid the pandemic. ([Location 872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=872)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The path to making America—or any country—great again is to move forward, not backward. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=886)) > I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it.” It was life imitating art, mirroring what the comedian Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” in the first episode of The Colbert Report. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” his character asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart . . . Face it, folks, we are a divided nation . . . divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart . . . Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.” ([Location 930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=930)) > The reality is that science does not yield one simple answer, especially not with a new phenomenon like the coronavirus. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, came to a reasonable conclusion given the initial evidence. ([Location 944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=944)) > As the evidence changed, Fauci and others changed their minds. This is normal. No expert is infallible. Some of the early models’ projections for Covid-related hospitalization rates were far too high, causing hospitals to stop performing non-urgent care in order to conserve beds. ([Location 948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=948)) > When public health officials like Fauci had to make immediate judgment calls about how seriously to take the virus, it had existed for barely two months and had surfaced in just a few countries. ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=958)) > They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=973)) - Note: Bazian logic > Some studies have found that “high-information voters,” those who read widely and follow news carefully, are in fact more guilty of this kind of partisan thinking. As two political scientists who have studied this phenomenon, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, have argued, the more appropriate term might be “rationalizing voters”—smart people who read the facts and follow the debates, but use their knowledge to justify and support their preexisting biases. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1041)) > This research echoes an insight from the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who called reason “the slave of the passions.” ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1045)) > David Roberts has called an “epistemic crisis.” As Roberts explains, “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge and how we come to know things; the crisis is that, as a polity, we have become incapable of learning or knowing the same things, and thus, incapable of acting together in a coherent fashion.” ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1047)) > Almost always they demonize some “other,” from minorities to urban liberals. All these divergent movements share the populist hostility toward the elite. The pandemic has heightened this tendency to fever pitch. ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1060)) > Quoting 1960s radicals, he explains: “The issue is not the issue,” meaning the real conflict is not over any particular matter or dispute. “The issue is power.” ([Location 1077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1077)) > A 2019 study noted that this sorting process “has progressed to the point that there is now essentially no such thing as a Republican city”—Republicans now control only 6% of “pure urban” districts in the House of Representatives. ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1096)) > That is because the Covid divide is also a class divide. ([Location 1106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1106)) > In 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report looking at how much job flexibility Americans enjoyed. Of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, almost half reported working from home at least occasionally. For those with a high school diploma, fewer than 10% ever worked from home—for high-school dropouts, 3%. Not surprisingly, then, when Covid-19 hit and the lockdowns started, it was those who couldn’t work from home who were hurt most. ([Location 1107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1107)) > Only 13% of people in households making over $100,000 were laid off or furloughed, compared with 39% in households making less than $40,000. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1110)) > Trump has tapped a genuine vein of disgust among many Americans at the way their more successful fellow citizens have mismanaged the country and yet still want to manage their lives. ([Location 1114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1114)) > Reflecting on this reality decades ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.” ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1119)) > In short, power kills empathy. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1124)) > In his book The Power Paradox, Keltner likened these effects of power to “a form of brain damage, leading us to self-serving, impulsive behavior”—which paradoxically undermines the very compassion and empathy needed to wield power effectively. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1129)) > One of the deepest students of human psychology has described this process with great literary skill. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a story of a man who, as he gains power, loses empathy, to the point where, by the end of the play, he is even unable to feel sorrow for the death of his wife. ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1131)) > King Lear, having been in power for decades, can no longer hear anything but flattery, banishing the one person—his own daughter Cordelia—who dares to speak to him truthfully. ([Location 1133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1133)) > That inevitably makes them an elite of some kind, a group whose knowledge lends them authority and power. The alternative is unthinkable in the modern age: government by gut and the celebration of ignorance. ([Location 1147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1147)) > The greatest moral failing of meritocracy is the belief that your success, your higher perch in society, makes you superior in any fundamental sense. ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1150)) > In the 1920s, people went back to their farms, factories, and offices because there was no alternative. To work, you had to be at work. If you sought entertainment, you would find it only in theaters and music halls. If you wanted to buy food or clothing, you needed to go to a brick-and-mortar store. That is no longer true. ([Location 1164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1164)) > It has been estimated that in 2020, Americans will rack up one billion virtual health-care interactions. ([Location 1260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1260)) > Unfortunately, the obstacle to that shift lies in an inconvenient truth: there is much less money in prevention than in treatments and cures. ([Location 1267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1267)) > Right now, computers do have limits. When the Covid-19 outbreak began, many observers hoped that AI might find solutions that humans could not. The results were mixed. Numerous obstacles got in the way. For one thing, computers need mountains of data to see patterns, and with the novel coronavirus, there was little data at the start, and for months afterward, the information continued to be incomplete. ([Location 1286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1286)) > China, South Korea, and Singapore do not owe their success in fighting Covid-19 to invasive new technology. Rather, what made the difference were the hallmarks of a proper pandemic response: fast, widespread testing and old-fashioned contact tracing, conducted through in-person interviews. ([Location 1295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1295)) > For human beings, especially men, work has historically given them an identity, a sense of accomplishment, and dignity. These are not irrelevant attributes. That’s why I have always found the idea of a universal basic income unsatisfying, preferring the expansion of a program like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which essentially tops up the wages of low-income workers. ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1356)) > People would naturally adapt to this new world differently, some feeling liberated, others trapped. But a darker alternative future is one in which the trends gradually deepen, and yet the government doesn’t respond with a large-scale program. Inequality gets worse, more jobs disappear, real wages stagnate, the quality of life for most people falls. This is a future in which wealth moves into the hands of a rich few, while everyone else is left behind, the worst crippled by alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. The demand for populism increases. We’re currently in the foothills of each of these futures, but it is unclear which one lies ahead. ([Location 1371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1371)) > Henry Kissinger has asked whether the rise of artificial intelligence will mean the end of the Enlightenment. That eighteenth-century movement elevated human reasoning above age-old superstitions, dogma, and worship. Immanuel Kant called the Enlightenment “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Humanity had to grow up—we had to understand the world ourselves. But if AI produces better answers than we can without revealing its logic, then we will be going back to our species’ childhood and relying on faith. ([Location 1402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1402)) > This is not such a strange thought. For much of history, humans were praised for many qualities other than their power to calculate—bravery, loyalty, generosity, faith, love. The movement to digital life is broad and fast and real. But perhaps one of its deepest consequences will be to make us cherish the things in us that are most human. ([Location 1438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1438)) > THE REAL PUZZLE about pandemics is why they don’t happen more often. Covid-19, along with the bubonic plague, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and certain other diseases, are known as zoonoses—infections that jumped from animals to humans. ([Location 1443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1443)) > “We predict between 1 [million] and 7 million people a year actually get infected by these bat coronaviruses,” says Peter Daszak, the “virus hunter” I introduced in lesson one. But, Daszak notes, “it’s only occasionally that that unlucky person happens to go to a market or the animal infects someone in a wildlife market, and then the virus can spread and become a pandemic.” ([Location 1454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1454)) > In a world of connected cities—linked through railroads and steam-powered shipping—the virus circled the globe in just four months. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1467)) - Note: 1889 St Petersburg flu > For centuries, denizens of cities have abandoned their homes in times of trouble. In the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague hit Florence hard, killing more than half of the city’s population, by some estimates. In his collection of stories from that time, The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio offered advice that sounds remarkably current: flee the city; isolate with a few friends; and gather in the evenings to eat, drink, and tell stories (their version of Netflix). ([Location 1488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1488)) > And crucially, Londoners chose—in modern parlance—to “build back better.” The old city, mostly wooden, had been a tinderbox. The new city recreated itself in brick and stone. ([Location 1496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1496)) > The journalist Clay Jenkinson points to a New World example of this tendency to declare the death of cities. In 1793, when Philadelphia was America’s leading metropolis—the nation’s capital and most populous city—it experienced a gruesome yellow fever epidemic that literally decimated the population, killing 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 residents. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who had always disliked urban centers, lived in the city’s outskirts and continued to commute to work. “Most evils are the means of producing some good,” he later wrote. “The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation.” It didn’t quite work out that way. ([Location 1498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1498)) > No rural awakening is at hand. Most of the people who leave one city will simply move to another, perhaps smaller one. Others will buy homes in the suburbs, still centering their lives around a city, and many more will decide to stay put. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1521)) > Despite the rise of fax machines, email, cheap phone calls, and videoconferencing, cities reinvented themselves in myriad different ways, drawing on a simple asset: human beings like to mingle. Glaeser notes that in industries such as finance and technology, people gain huge advantages by being close to the action, meeting new people, learning day-to-day from mentors, and comparing notes—much of which happens accidentally. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1530)) > “Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50% more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account.” ([Location 1533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1533)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In 1890, for example, death rates in America’s urban areas were around a third higher than in rural areas. The young had it worst. For children aged one to four, mortality was 94% higher in urban areas. But over time, that penalty disappeared. Paved roads, sewers, streetlights, trash disposal, professional fire departments, building codes, hygiene laws, public parks—all improved health and safety. ([Location 1546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1546)) > The creator of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, captured the prevailing wisdom, writing in 1870 that “air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage,” so parks served as the “lungs of the city.” ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1550)) > New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik calls the accrued advantages of liberalism “a thousand small sanities.” ([Location 1553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1553)) > Mortality rates in the United States fell by 40% from 1900 to 1940 and life expectancy rose from forty-seven to sixty-three, note researchers David M. Cutler and Grant Miller. ([Location 1566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1566)) > Even those mountains of garbage on New York’s streets are misleading. The average urban resident recycles more while consuming less water and electricity than those in the countryside and suburbia. Major European and Asian cities are the world leaders in efficiency and sustainability. ([Location 1584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1584)) > If you look abroad, massive cities have handled the virus stunningly well. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei are all dense cities with packed mass transit systems, and yet their death tolls from Covid-19 have been amazingly low. ([Location 1592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1592)) > By late July 2020, despite being exposed to millions of travelers from mainland China annually, Hong Kong had 2,100 cumulative cases of the disease and just eighteen deaths. These cities succeeded in tackling this virus because they were prepared. The SARS epidemic had taught them some painful lessons. They invested in health care and hygiene and reacted to the coronavirus early, aggressively, and intelligently. For any city with good leadership, density was not destiny. ([Location 1593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1593)) > We know that cities have always been the centers of ideas, innovation, and action. They are also fonts of political progress. As John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker explain in their study of global demography, “As a society urbanizes, and women gain more power, the ties of kin, the power of organized religion, and the dominance of men decline, along with the fertility rate.” ([Location 1615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1615)) > Cities free women from restrictive village life, providing them with new opportunities. ([Location 1619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1619)) > Yet much of this relates to the high cost of living in cities—a symptom of success, not failure. After all, the cities of 1970s America were hollowed out by “white flight”—today’s cities face gentrification, a problem arising from too many affluent people wanting to live there. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1627)) > When President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords in 2017, the leaders of Atlanta, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles pushed ahead with the agreement anyway. Climate change, terrorism, and, yes, the pandemic have driven home the notion that cities face common challenges and should work together to tackle them. ([Location 1659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1659)) > Older people, too, are choosing to live in smaller cities, often university towns that have a mix of culture and access to top-notch medical facilities. ([Location 1665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1665)) > And these people are going to be of all backgrounds, races, colors, and creeds, believing in all kinds of gods or none at all. To succeed in this world, we will have to learn to manage diversity and gain strength from it, rather than feel threatened by it. Cities do that better than anyplace else. They are built to be factories of assimilation and amalgamation. ([Location 1693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1693)) > Yet bringing on new coworkers, and establishing trust and teamwork with them, is extremely hard to achieve on video. Not to mention that remote work leaves out all the spontaneous water-cooler conversations and accidental meetings that ultimately create greater productivity and innovation from the collision of minds. ([Location 1698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1698)) > One of the first works of political science, Aristotle’s Politics, written around 350 BC, declares on its first pages that man is by nature a “social animal.” The phrase is sometimes translated as “political animal.” Both touch on a key part of the meaning, and the original Greek is instructive. It’s zoon politikon, from the same transliterated root for animal as zoonosis—and from the concept of a polis, an ancient Greek city-state and its human community. ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1718)) > Humans create cities and cities make humans—these are two sides of the same coin. ([Location 1726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1726)) > Global inequality, that is, the gap in income between the richest and poorest countries in the world, has been declining for several decades. ([Location 1749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1749)) > Worldwide, the total number of people who live in extreme poverty dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 650 million in 2018. On one crucial metric, the progress has been immense: the mortality rate for young children dropped 59% over the same period. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1780)) > India, for example, partly as a result of the lockdown, is on track to see its economy shrink by 5% in 2020, rivaling the worst performance in its history. And yet, as of July 2020, the number of people confirmed to have died from Covid-19 in the country was about 28,000, fewer than the 60,000 children who die of malnutrition there each month. ([Location 1805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1805)) > Capital is a coward, as the saying goes, and in the first months of the pandemic, over $100 billion fled from emerging markets. ([Location 1815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1815)) > After the pandemic, the work of decades was undone in months. Various studies estimate that somewhere between 70 million and 430 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty over the next few years. The most essential inequality—between the very richest and the poorest humans on the planet—is now growing again and at a rapid rate. ([Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1820)) > The gains from Federal Reserve support, and from America’s major pandemic relief bill, the 2020 CARES Act, went disproportionately to larger and better-connected businesses. ([Location 1868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1868)) > (No wonder the report found that minorities made up 37% of the US labor force in February 2020 but accounted for 58% of the newly unemployed by mid-March.) ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1872)) > It is a fundamental remaking of capitalism—one with no punishment for failure, no dangers of collapse, and no real mechanism for valuation of assets.* ([Location 1878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1878)) > Matthew Effect,” which takes its name from a verse in the Gospel according to Matthew: “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” The Fed’s action is, as the saying goes, socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And it could hardly have come at a worse moment in American history. ([Location 1881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1881)) > The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5% of assets. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1892)) > The premium that labor could once command simply does not exist in a postindustrial world. ([Location 1915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1915)) > Donald Trump, elected in part as an economic populist who railed against Wall Street, still implemented these regressive policies. The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this two-faced ideology “plutocratic populism.” ([Location 1924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1924)) > If money can buy a better house or car or even a yacht, that’s one thing. But if it can buy citizenship, special access to public spaces, preferential treatment at colleges, and favors from politicians, it becomes a corrupting and corroding force. ([Location 1945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1945)) > * As Frank Borman, the CEO of Eastern Airlines, once quipped, “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” (Eastern Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 1989.) ([Location 1963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1963)) > Writing in the early weeks of the pandemic, the author Zachary Karabell concluded that once we examine the data more closely, “we are likely to find fresh confirmation of what we already know about globalization: that it’s easy to hate, convenient to target and impossible to stop.” ([Location 1995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1995)) > One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China. ([Location 2025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2025)) > Instead of reshoring, the goal should be to create a kind of strategic medical reserve akin to the strategic petroleum reserve. ([Location 2070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2070)) > This transition was already under way, as China becomes a middle-income country and its labor costs rise. In fact, the greatest long-term beneficiary of this Covid-related concern might well be Mexico, as American firms move Chinese facilities closer to home while still taking advantage of cheap labor. ([Location 2083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2083)) > Despite Donald Trump’s promises to America’s blue-collar workers and his imposition of the most extensive duties since the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, the percentage of American jobs that are in manufacturing has stayed flat under his watch, still down more than half from 1980. ([Location 2093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2093)) > (Ironically, we have continued to call the world’s most advanced economies “industrialized countries,” when really they are all postindustrial.) ([Location 2111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2111)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > And while we can describe this drop as a fall in the cost of communication, it is really a fall to zero in the cost of transport for many goods and services that are digital. ([Location 2163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2163)) > By many measures, it took some sixty years for global trade and travel to return to the peaks they reached before World War I. What undermined the last great age of globalization was not economic or technological backlash but politics—of the oldest kind, realpolitik. ([Location 2187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2187)) > “EVERY MORNING in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state,” declared the writer George Packer in the early weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak. ([Location 2201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2201)) > “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.” ([Location 2209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2209)) > In The Collapse of British Power, the historian Correlli Barnett argued that Britain, the superpower of its age, went through a similar pattern. It endured a number of setbacks, but over time, the problems festered, the mistakes compounded, and the international competition grew tougher. After many decades of erosion, by the late 1940s, despite having won World War II, the country was effectively bankrupt. Britain’s empire fell apart, and it spent the next half-century adjusting to its diminished global role. Is that what the future has in store for America? ([Location 2229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2229)) > The United States has far more gun violence, police shootings, and prison inmates than other advanced countries, sometimes an order of magnitude more. Inequality is markedly greater. Large numbers of people lack the basic security of health insurance. The racial divide persists, unhealed. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2236)) > I use the example of Turkey because it illustrates the central reason for the growing limits on American power, which is not the decline of America but rather the rise of the rest. ([Location 2267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2267)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > China is the world’s largest manufacturer and the second-largest importer, and it holds the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. It is number one in shipbuilding and the production of solar panels and wind turbines. It is the biggest market for cars, computers, and smartphones in the world. It has 226 of the 500 fastest computers in the world, twice as many as America. ([Location 2279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2279)) > Russia has some of the formal attributes of a major power, such as a UN Security Council veto and a vast nuclear arsenal. But its economy is now one-eighth the size of China’s and its military budget a quarter. ([Location 2292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2292)) > Scholars, starting with Thucydides, have long worried about the dangers of “power transitions,” when a rising great power bumps up against an established one. ([Location 2299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2299)) > China pledged $2 billion to the global response to Covid-19 while the US moved to cut funding for the World Health Organization and withdraw from the agency altogether. ([Location 2316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2316)) > This turn has been especially tragic for the inhabitants of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region, where the government has interned a million ethnic Uighurs in holding camps for “re-education,” and subjected millions more to intrusive surveillance. (As trade negotiations drag on, President Trump has been notably silent on this abuse. Obsessed with his reelection, Trump reportedly begged Xi to have China buy more Midwestern soybeans to help him win—while assuring Xi that repressing China’s Muslims was the right thing to do.) ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2359)) > China’s foreign policy has also become more ambitious under Xi, from its pursuit of leadership roles in UN agencies—where it now outnumbers the US four-to-one— ([Location 2364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2364)) > Deng Xiaoping’s adage “Hide your strength, bide your time.” ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2366)) > For the United States, dealing with a competitor like China is a new and unique challenge. Since 1945, the major states rising to wealth and prominence have been Washington’s closest allies, if not quasi-protectorates: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. A normally disruptive feature of international politics—the rise of new powers—has thus been extraordinarily benign for the United States. The People’s Republic of China, however, is not only much larger than the rising powers that came before; it has also always lived outside the United States’ alliance structures and sphere of influence. ([Location 2379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2379)) > The political climate in Washington always pushes policymakers toward being “tough” rather than “soft”—which is a dangerous way to frame international affairs. The real question is, can they be smart rather than stupid? ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2391)) > Consider how the two superpowers acted. Moscow placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, risking a cataclysmic war, to extend its global influence and counter Washington’s. For its part, America sent a total of three million troops into the jungles of Vietnam to prevent a poor, minor country on the other side of the globe from becoming communist. ([Location 2437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2437)) > The China model is an unusual combination of liberal and mercantilist economics and repressive politics, emanating from China’s particular history. It is a juggling act more than a coherent ideology and has been copied almost nowhere else in the world. ([Location 2441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2441)) > We have enjoyed the fruits of their labor: seventy-five years of relative peace. But as a result, we have become cynics, contemptuous of the idealism that got us to where we are. It is now fashionable to bash “globalism,” with little thought to the costs of the alternative. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2486)) > Eisenhower spoke in language that few left-wing peaceniks would dare to employ today. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” ([Location 2525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2525)) > “I will always put America first,” Donald Trump declared at the UN General Assembly in 2017, “just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first.” But the world that we inhabit was built by statesmen who took a broader view—that collective security, and collective endeavors, were in each nation’s enlightened self-interest. ([Location 2537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2537)) > But the problems with the WHO prove the need for more multilateralism, not less. The organization has a tiny budget and relies on voluntary cooperation from its member states. It has no authority to force them to do anything, and often cannot even shame its more powerful funders into action. ([Location 2559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2559)) > Between 1947 and 1989, when America was on the one hand building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world seventy-two times, by one scholar’s count, almost every time without UN approval. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2598)) > Consider China’s abuse of the open world economy. Almost all economists agree that the country owes most of its economic success to three fundamental factors: the switch from communist economics to a more market-based approach, a high savings rate that enables large capital investments, and rising productivity. ([Location 2608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2608)) > Avoiding reform, they have warned, will leave the country floundering in the “middle-income trap”—a common fate in which countries escape poverty, only to hit a wall at a per capita GDP somewhere around $10,000, having refused to modernize their economic, regulatory, and legal systems any further. ([Location 2625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2625)) > The truth about the liberal international order is that there never really was a golden age, nor has the order decayed as much as is often claimed. ([Location 2631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2631)) > That would, of course, require that the United States join and support bodies like the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court. If America flouts the rules and norms it has little standing to criticize China for doing the same. ([Location 2641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2641)) > America’s most significant contribution to international life has been that, unlike every other victorious great power in history, after decisively triumphing—in the world’s bloodiest conflict—it chose to forgive, rebuild, and rehabilitate the vanquished. It imagined a new way for the nations of the world. It often acted in ways that were inspired by the common good and not just narrow national interest. ([Location 2643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2643)) > That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China’s expansionism but America’s abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation. ([Location 2649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2649)) > The US has long been secure on the home front, guarded by two oceanic moats from instability and war. This position has given American leaders since 1945 the farsightedness to use a portion of their power and resources for the common good. ([Location 2665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2665)) > The rise of the rest continues. The world is now filled with new groupings and institutions, many of them regional in nature. ([Location 2679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2679)) > Like him, they are urging us not to assume that nature is a benign force that has any particular interest in the survival of life on this earth. The climate doesn’t care about us; it is simply an accumulation of chemical reactions that could easily get out of control and destroy the planet and all who live on it. ([Location 2710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2710)) > But the novel coronavirus has upended society. People are disoriented. Things are already changing, and in that atmosphere, further change becomes easier than ever. ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2760)) > The world is a better place than it was fifty years ago, by almost any measure. We understand the deficiencies and the ways to address them. The problem has not been to arrive at solutions—it has been to find the political will to implement them. ([Location 2789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2789)) > Great leaders like FDR read polls to understand the nature of their challenge, not as an excuse for inaction. ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2798)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The pandemic is leading countries to look inward. But enlightened leaders will recognize that the only real solution to problems like pandemics—and climate change and cyberwar—is to look outward, toward more and better cooperation. ([Location 2807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2807)) > In a nod to the United States, he quoted in his speech a letter Thomas Jefferson had written to Edward Jenner, who had pioneered the smallpox vaccine. “Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed,” Jefferson wrote. It was an early attempt to put into action Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin plan of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. ([Location 2828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2828)) # Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Fareed Zakaria]] - Full Title:: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World - Category: #books ## Highlights > The United States alone devotes almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars to its defense budget every year. And yet, we were unprepared to defend against a tiny microbe. It may well turn out that this viral speck will cause the greatest economic, political, and social damage to humankind since World War II. ([Location 48](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=48)) > In the case of the novel coronavirus, the impact is being shaped by the reality that the world is deeply interconnected, that most countries were unprepared for the pandemic, and that in its wake, many of them—including the world’s richest nations—shut down their societies and economies in a manner unprecedented in human history. ([Location 53](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=53)) > Almost everyone alive had been spared from experiencing a plague, so far. But now we know what a pandemic looks like. We have seen the challenges and costs of responding to it. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=56)) > Lenin is supposed to have once said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.” ([Location 62](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=62)) > We should have seen it coming. The coronavirus may be novel but plagues are not. Western literature begins with one. In the opening verses of Homer’s Iliad, the Greek armies are being ravaged by pestilence. It turns out to be divine punishment directed at their leader, the vain, avaricious, and quarrelsome King Agamemnon. The first serious history written in the West hinges on a plague. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War chronicles the long conflict between the two superpowers of the age, Athens and Sparta. Toward the beginning of the war, Thucydides writes, a terrible plague swept through Athens, killing vast numbers of able-bodied citizens and, most significant, the city-state’s peerless leader, Pericles. The two sides had very different political systems: Athens was democratic, Sparta a more rigidly run warrior society. Sparta eventually prevailed, and it’s not a stretch to say that, had there been no plague, Athens might have won, and the course of Western history would have been different—with a vibrant democracy becoming a successful role model rather than a flame that burned brightly, but then flickered out. Plagues have consequences. ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=74)) > Walter Scheidel explains that labor became scarce and land abundant, so wages rose and rents fell. Workers won more bargaining power and nobles lost out. Serfdom withered away in much of Western Europe. ([Location 90](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=90)) > Many fourteenth-century Europeans asked why God would allow this hell on earth and questioned entrenched hierarchies—which had the ultimate effect of helping Europe break out of its medieval malaise and setting in motion the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. From death and horror came science, modernity, and growth. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=94)) > Still, the three most important guidelines from health authorities at the time—social distancing, masks, and handwashing—remain three of the four most important mechanisms used today to slow the spread of coronavirus, until the development of a vaccine. The fourth, regular testing, is the one modern addition. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=110)) > It was too late. We had ample warning to gird ourselves for Covid-19. But beyond the specific dangers of a pandemic, we should have recognized the general possibility of a shock to our system. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=128)) > They are all asymmetric shocks—things that start out small but end up sending seismic waves around the world. This is particularly true of the three that will be judged as the most enduring—9/11, the crash of 2008, and the coronavirus. ([Location 134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=134)) > Even though the roots of the crash lay in the excesses of the private sector, in many countries, people did not move to the left economically; they moved to the right culturally. Economic anxiety bred cultural anxiety, hostility to immigration, and a nostalgic desire to return to a familiar past. Right-wing populism gained strength across the West. ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=144)) > The social and psychological consequences—fear, isolation, purposelessness—might endure even longer. Covid-19 is having deep and lasting effects on each of us, repercussions we cannot yet fully grasp. ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=151)) > The word influenza, for example, traces back to an Italian folk attribution of colds and fevers to the influence of the stars. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=166)) > This emergency has highlighted one of the oldest truths about international life—that ultimately, countries are on their own. When the pandemic struck, nations that had long cooperated—in Europe, for example—shut their borders and focused on their own survival. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=177)) > Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=189)) > It would be hard to bring stability to anything so dynamic and open. It turns out that in any system, of these three characteristics—open, fast, stable—you can have only two. An open and fast system, like the world we live in, will be inherently unstable. A fast and stable one will tend to be closed, like China. If the system is open and stable, it will likely be sluggish rather than dynamic. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=190)) > As people get richer, they tend to eat more meat. When this happens globally, the effect is staggering: some 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn’t even count fish.) ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=243)) > Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide, yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=245)) > Samuel quotes the biologist Rob Wallace: “Factory farms are the best way to select for the most dangerous pathogens possible.” ([Location 252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=252)) > warning, “The top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.” ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=276)) > One of the world’s most crucial water sources is the Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls through the semiarid lands of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas and supplies about a third of the groundwater used to irrigate American farms. This seemingly bottomless well is in fact being emptied by agribusiness so fast that it is on track to shrivel by 70% in less than fifty years. If the aquifer ran dry, it would take 6,000 years for rainfall to refill it. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=278)) > “contemporary man is a man-made species.” ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=287)) > But nuclear weapons are hard to build and relatively easy to detect. Bioweapons are far more practical to develop; they can be made cheaply and secretly in small laboratories on shoestring budgets. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=305)) > “Outbreaks are inevitable but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox forty-five years ago. What he means is that we may not be able to change the natural occurrences that produce disease in the first place, but through preparation, early action, and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=330)) > The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared to the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability. Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=340)) > * This is why bats, as reservoirs for viruses (including a variety of coronaviruses), are studied at facilities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There are those who allege that the novel coronavirus was an accidental leak from this lab. This claim is as-yet unproven, but we should note that such facilities, even at the highest grade of biosecurity, BSL-4, have experienced leaks in the past, as with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that escaped from a UK lab in 2007. ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=356)) > By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism? ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=368)) > America will always disappoint its most ardent detractors—and admirers. It’s a big, complicated place, and you can always find in it what you want. But the pandemic laid bare fissures that have been persistently widening. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=420)) > John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote that America was defined by “private opulence and public squalor.” The United States has long had a dazzling private sector, but its public institutions, with a few exceptions—such as the independent, self-funded, and highly respected Federal Reserve—limp along. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=422)) > In late April, at least 50 million Americans were waiting for their money while the Treasury Department had sent a million checks to dead people. Meanwhile, Canada’s relief bill was simple and unencumbered by bureaucracy or politics—the money got to its citizens via direct deposits into their bank accounts within the first two weeks of the crisis. ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=429)) > For the twentieth century, the great political debate was about the size and role of government in the economy—the quantity of government. But what seems to have mattered most in this crisis was the quality of government. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=440)) > What was the common element? A competent, well-functioning, trusted state—the quality of government. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=450)) > The American tax code is one of the world’s longest for a reason. The thousands of amendments to it are what politicians sell when they raise campaign money. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=469)) > Byzantium (renamed Constantinople and later Istanbul) ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=484)) > The scholar Charles Tilly famously noted that “war made the state and the state made war,” ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=499)) > The Southern states always resisted the encroachment of Washington, for fear that it would mean the end of the Jim Crow laws. They were right, as it was the power of the federal government that eventually did away with segregation. ([Location 549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=549)) > In the 1950s, federal civilian employees made up more than 5% of total employment. That figure has now dropped below 2%, despite a population that is twice as large and an inflation-adjusted GDP that is seven times as large. Government investments in science, technology, and infrastructure have slumped sharply from their levels in the 1950s. Twenty-first-century America is living off that old capital. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=556)) > For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded? ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=567)) > There is pride in good government. ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=606)) > America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy.” ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=611)) > One version of the vetocracy, NIMBYism—named for the rallying cry of those opposed to local construction, “not in my backyard”—hobbles worthwhile projects across the country. ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=620)) > As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done. ([Location 625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=625)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Look around. There are now many liberal democracies that are just as free as America but with governments that are far more competent. ([Location 646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=646)) > On the contrary, they began as corrupt dictatorships but they developed their own models over decades, learning from others. In fact this is a common trait of almost all the countries that handled the pandemic well—they learned from history. ([Location 654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=654)) > Consider how Republicans, who a few years ago identified as staunchly free-market, now enthusiastically support protectionism and closed borders. ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=728)) > Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host most in tune with this shift, declared in a striking 2019 monologue, “Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. . . . You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” ([Location 729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=729)) > Take China, the fastest-growing economy on the planet over the last twenty years—indeed the fastest-growing major economy in history. ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=765)) > That country followed its own particular mix of capitalism, state planning, openness, and dictatorship. Its economy grew, but so did its political controls. (The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof described it as “Market-Leninism.”) ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=766)) > As important as China’s successes have been America’s failures. The liberation of markets over the last decades has produced growth and innovation but it has also produced an impoverished public sector, rising inequality, a trend toward monopolies, and a political system that has been bought by the rich and powerful. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=771)) > Twice in recent years, in 2008–9 and 2020, the federal government spent several trillion dollars to rescue large companies and prop up the assets of the richest Americans. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=776)) > And yet calls to spend a few billion on preschool or low-income housing are repeatedly met with grave concerns about the cost or the harmful effect of giving people handouts. (Why is that effect not a concern when the Federal Reserve provides support to those with stocks and bonds?) ([Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=778)) > Before the 2008 financial crisis, the rating agencies—supposedly independent and impartial—eagerly put their stamps of approval on shoddy, risky financial products because they were paid handsomely to do so. ([Location 803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=803)) > This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them. ([Location 831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=831)) > The studies on this topic are so numerous and convincing that even the staunchly conservative National Review published an essay that concluded, “What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional . . . where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom.” ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=838)) > The American Dream, in other words, is alive and well, just not in America. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=848)) > How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.” ([Location 850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=850)) > Imagine that you’re an average family. You and your spouse have a child, and make the mean household income. You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model. More than just the free education and nice trains, the overwhelming advantage of Nordic flexicurity is that it embraces the dynamism at the heart of the modern, globalized world and yet eases the anxieties it produces. And these anxieties, of course, have reached new heights amid the pandemic. ([Location 872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=872)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The path to making America—or any country—great again is to move forward, not backward. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=886)) > I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it.” It was life imitating art, mirroring what the comedian Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” in the first episode of The Colbert Report. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” his character asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart . . . Face it, folks, we are a divided nation . . . divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart . . . Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.” ([Location 930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=930)) > The reality is that science does not yield one simple answer, especially not with a new phenomenon like the coronavirus. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, came to a reasonable conclusion given the initial evidence. ([Location 944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=944)) > As the evidence changed, Fauci and others changed their minds. This is normal. No expert is infallible. Some of the early models’ projections for Covid-related hospitalization rates were far too high, causing hospitals to stop performing non-urgent care in order to conserve beds. ([Location 948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=948)) > When public health officials like Fauci had to make immediate judgment calls about how seriously to take the virus, it had existed for barely two months and had surfaced in just a few countries. ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=958)) > They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=973)) - Note: Bazian logic > Some studies have found that “high-information voters,” those who read widely and follow news carefully, are in fact more guilty of this kind of partisan thinking. As two political scientists who have studied this phenomenon, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, have argued, the more appropriate term might be “rationalizing voters”—smart people who read the facts and follow the debates, but use their knowledge to justify and support their preexisting biases. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1041)) > This research echoes an insight from the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who called reason “the slave of the passions.” ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1045)) > David Roberts has called an “epistemic crisis.” As Roberts explains, “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge and how we come to know things; the crisis is that, as a polity, we have become incapable of learning or knowing the same things, and thus, incapable of acting together in a coherent fashion.” ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1047)) > Almost always they demonize some “other,” from minorities to urban liberals. All these divergent movements share the populist hostility toward the elite. The pandemic has heightened this tendency to fever pitch. ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1060)) > Quoting 1960s radicals, he explains: “The issue is not the issue,” meaning the real conflict is not over any particular matter or dispute. “The issue is power.” ([Location 1077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1077)) > A 2019 study noted that this sorting process “has progressed to the point that there is now essentially no such thing as a Republican city”—Republicans now control only 6% of “pure urban” districts in the House of Representatives. ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1096)) > That is because the Covid divide is also a class divide. ([Location 1106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1106)) > In 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report looking at how much job flexibility Americans enjoyed. Of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, almost half reported working from home at least occasionally. For those with a high school diploma, fewer than 10% ever worked from home—for high-school dropouts, 3%. Not surprisingly, then, when Covid-19 hit and the lockdowns started, it was those who couldn’t work from home who were hurt most. ([Location 1107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1107)) > Only 13% of people in households making over $100,000 were laid off or furloughed, compared with 39% in households making less than $40,000. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1110)) > Trump has tapped a genuine vein of disgust among many Americans at the way their more successful fellow citizens have mismanaged the country and yet still want to manage their lives. ([Location 1114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1114)) > Reflecting on this reality decades ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.” ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1119)) > In short, power kills empathy. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1124)) > In his book The Power Paradox, Keltner likened these effects of power to “a form of brain damage, leading us to self-serving, impulsive behavior”—which paradoxically undermines the very compassion and empathy needed to wield power effectively. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1129)) > One of the deepest students of human psychology has described this process with great literary skill. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a story of a man who, as he gains power, loses empathy, to the point where, by the end of the play, he is even unable to feel sorrow for the death of his wife. ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1131)) > King Lear, having been in power for decades, can no longer hear anything but flattery, banishing the one person—his own daughter Cordelia—who dares to speak to him truthfully. ([Location 1133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1133)) > That inevitably makes them an elite of some kind, a group whose knowledge lends them authority and power. The alternative is unthinkable in the modern age: government by gut and the celebration of ignorance. ([Location 1147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1147)) > The greatest moral failing of meritocracy is the belief that your success, your higher perch in society, makes you superior in any fundamental sense. ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1150)) > In the 1920s, people went back to their farms, factories, and offices because there was no alternative. To work, you had to be at work. If you sought entertainment, you would find it only in theaters and music halls. If you wanted to buy food or clothing, you needed to go to a brick-and-mortar store. That is no longer true. ([Location 1164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1164)) > It has been estimated that in 2020, Americans will rack up one billion virtual health-care interactions. ([Location 1260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1260)) > Unfortunately, the obstacle to that shift lies in an inconvenient truth: there is much less money in prevention than in treatments and cures. ([Location 1267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1267)) > Right now, computers do have limits. When the Covid-19 outbreak began, many observers hoped that AI might find solutions that humans could not. The results were mixed. Numerous obstacles got in the way. For one thing, computers need mountains of data to see patterns, and with the novel coronavirus, there was little data at the start, and for months afterward, the information continued to be incomplete. ([Location 1286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1286)) > China, South Korea, and Singapore do not owe their success in fighting Covid-19 to invasive new technology. Rather, what made the difference were the hallmarks of a proper pandemic response: fast, widespread testing and old-fashioned contact tracing, conducted through in-person interviews. ([Location 1295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1295)) > For human beings, especially men, work has historically given them an identity, a sense of accomplishment, and dignity. These are not irrelevant attributes. That’s why I have always found the idea of a universal basic income unsatisfying, preferring the expansion of a program like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which essentially tops up the wages of low-income workers. ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1356)) > People would naturally adapt to this new world differently, some feeling liberated, others trapped. But a darker alternative future is one in which the trends gradually deepen, and yet the government doesn’t respond with a large-scale program. Inequality gets worse, more jobs disappear, real wages stagnate, the quality of life for most people falls. This is a future in which wealth moves into the hands of a rich few, while everyone else is left behind, the worst crippled by alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. The demand for populism increases. We’re currently in the foothills of each of these futures, but it is unclear which one lies ahead. ([Location 1371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1371)) > Henry Kissinger has asked whether the rise of artificial intelligence will mean the end of the Enlightenment. That eighteenth-century movement elevated human reasoning above age-old superstitions, dogma, and worship. Immanuel Kant called the Enlightenment “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Humanity had to grow up—we had to understand the world ourselves. But if AI produces better answers than we can without revealing its logic, then we will be going back to our species’ childhood and relying on faith. ([Location 1402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1402)) > This is not such a strange thought. For much of history, humans were praised for many qualities other than their power to calculate—bravery, loyalty, generosity, faith, love. The movement to digital life is broad and fast and real. But perhaps one of its deepest consequences will be to make us cherish the things in us that are most human. ([Location 1438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1438)) > THE REAL PUZZLE about pandemics is why they don’t happen more often. Covid-19, along with the bubonic plague, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and certain other diseases, are known as zoonoses—infections that jumped from animals to humans. ([Location 1443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1443)) > “We predict between 1 [million] and 7 million people a year actually get infected by these bat coronaviruses,” says Peter Daszak, the “virus hunter” I introduced in lesson one. But, Daszak notes, “it’s only occasionally that that unlucky person happens to go to a market or the animal infects someone in a wildlife market, and then the virus can spread and become a pandemic.” ([Location 1454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1454)) > In a world of connected cities—linked through railroads and steam-powered shipping—the virus circled the globe in just four months. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1467)) - Note: 1889 St Petersburg flu > For centuries, denizens of cities have abandoned their homes in times of trouble. In the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague hit Florence hard, killing more than half of the city’s population, by some estimates. In his collection of stories from that time, The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio offered advice that sounds remarkably current: flee the city; isolate with a few friends; and gather in the evenings to eat, drink, and tell stories (their version of Netflix). ([Location 1488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1488)) > And crucially, Londoners chose—in modern parlance—to “build back better.” The old city, mostly wooden, had been a tinderbox. The new city recreated itself in brick and stone. ([Location 1496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1496)) > The journalist Clay Jenkinson points to a New World example of this tendency to declare the death of cities. In 1793, when Philadelphia was America’s leading metropolis—the nation’s capital and most populous city—it experienced a gruesome yellow fever epidemic that literally decimated the population, killing 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 residents. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who had always disliked urban centers, lived in the city’s outskirts and continued to commute to work. “Most evils are the means of producing some good,” he later wrote. “The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation.” It didn’t quite work out that way. ([Location 1498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1498)) > No rural awakening is at hand. Most of the people who leave one city will simply move to another, perhaps smaller one. Others will buy homes in the suburbs, still centering their lives around a city, and many more will decide to stay put. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1521)) > Despite the rise of fax machines, email, cheap phone calls, and videoconferencing, cities reinvented themselves in myriad different ways, drawing on a simple asset: human beings like to mingle. Glaeser notes that in industries such as finance and technology, people gain huge advantages by being close to the action, meeting new people, learning day-to-day from mentors, and comparing notes—much of which happens accidentally. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1530)) > “Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50% more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account.” ([Location 1533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1533)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In 1890, for example, death rates in America’s urban areas were around a third higher than in rural areas. The young had it worst. For children aged one to four, mortality was 94% higher in urban areas. But over time, that penalty disappeared. Paved roads, sewers, streetlights, trash disposal, professional fire departments, building codes, hygiene laws, public parks—all improved health and safety. ([Location 1546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1546)) > The creator of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, captured the prevailing wisdom, writing in 1870 that “air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage,” so parks served as the “lungs of the city.” ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1550)) > New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik calls the accrued advantages of liberalism “a thousand small sanities.” ([Location 1553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1553)) > Mortality rates in the United States fell by 40% from 1900 to 1940 and life expectancy rose from forty-seven to sixty-three, note researchers David M. Cutler and Grant Miller. ([Location 1566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1566)) > Even those mountains of garbage on New York’s streets are misleading. The average urban resident recycles more while consuming less water and electricity than those in the countryside and suburbia. Major European and Asian cities are the world leaders in efficiency and sustainability. ([Location 1584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1584)) > If you look abroad, massive cities have handled the virus stunningly well. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei are all dense cities with packed mass transit systems, and yet their death tolls from Covid-19 have been amazingly low. ([Location 1592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1592)) > By late July 2020, despite being exposed to millions of travelers from mainland China annually, Hong Kong had 2,100 cumulative cases of the disease and just eighteen deaths. These cities succeeded in tackling this virus because they were prepared. The SARS epidemic had taught them some painful lessons. They invested in health care and hygiene and reacted to the coronavirus early, aggressively, and intelligently. For any city with good leadership, density was not destiny. ([Location 1593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1593)) > We know that cities have always been the centers of ideas, innovation, and action. They are also fonts of political progress. As John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker explain in their study of global demography, “As a society urbanizes, and women gain more power, the ties of kin, the power of organized religion, and the dominance of men decline, along with the fertility rate.” ([Location 1615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1615)) > Cities free women from restrictive village life, providing them with new opportunities. ([Location 1619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1619)) > Yet much of this relates to the high cost of living in cities—a symptom of success, not failure. After all, the cities of 1970s America were hollowed out by “white flight”—today’s cities face gentrification, a problem arising from too many affluent people wanting to live there. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1627)) > When President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords in 2017, the leaders of Atlanta, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles pushed ahead with the agreement anyway. Climate change, terrorism, and, yes, the pandemic have driven home the notion that cities face common challenges and should work together to tackle them. ([Location 1659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1659)) > Older people, too, are choosing to live in smaller cities, often university towns that have a mix of culture and access to top-notch medical facilities. ([Location 1665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1665)) > And these people are going to be of all backgrounds, races, colors, and creeds, believing in all kinds of gods or none at all. To succeed in this world, we will have to learn to manage diversity and gain strength from it, rather than feel threatened by it. Cities do that better than anyplace else. They are built to be factories of assimilation and amalgamation. ([Location 1693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1693)) > Yet bringing on new coworkers, and establishing trust and teamwork with them, is extremely hard to achieve on video. Not to mention that remote work leaves out all the spontaneous water-cooler conversations and accidental meetings that ultimately create greater productivity and innovation from the collision of minds. ([Location 1698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1698)) > One of the first works of political science, Aristotle’s Politics, written around 350 BC, declares on its first pages that man is by nature a “social animal.” The phrase is sometimes translated as “political animal.” Both touch on a key part of the meaning, and the original Greek is instructive. It’s zoon politikon, from the same transliterated root for animal as zoonosis—and from the concept of a polis, an ancient Greek city-state and its human community. ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1718)) > Humans create cities and cities make humans—these are two sides of the same coin. ([Location 1726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1726)) > Global inequality, that is, the gap in income between the richest and poorest countries in the world, has been declining for several decades. ([Location 1749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1749)) > Worldwide, the total number of people who live in extreme poverty dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 650 million in 2018. On one crucial metric, the progress has been immense: the mortality rate for young children dropped 59% over the same period. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1780)) > India, for example, partly as a result of the lockdown, is on track to see its economy shrink by 5% in 2020, rivaling the worst performance in its history. And yet, as of July 2020, the number of people confirmed to have died from Covid-19 in the country was about 28,000, fewer than the 60,000 children who die of malnutrition there each month. ([Location 1805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1805)) > Capital is a coward, as the saying goes, and in the first months of the pandemic, over $100 billion fled from emerging markets. ([Location 1815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1815)) > After the pandemic, the work of decades was undone in months. Various studies estimate that somewhere between 70 million and 430 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty over the next few years. The most essential inequality—between the very richest and the poorest humans on the planet—is now growing again and at a rapid rate. ([Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1820)) > The gains from Federal Reserve support, and from America’s major pandemic relief bill, the 2020 CARES Act, went disproportionately to larger and better-connected businesses. ([Location 1868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1868)) > (No wonder the report found that minorities made up 37% of the US labor force in February 2020 but accounted for 58% of the newly unemployed by mid-March.) ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1872)) > It is a fundamental remaking of capitalism—one with no punishment for failure, no dangers of collapse, and no real mechanism for valuation of assets.* ([Location 1878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1878)) > Matthew Effect,” which takes its name from a verse in the Gospel according to Matthew: “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” The Fed’s action is, as the saying goes, socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And it could hardly have come at a worse moment in American history. ([Location 1881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1881)) > The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5% of assets. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1892)) > The premium that labor could once command simply does not exist in a postindustrial world. ([Location 1915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1915)) > Donald Trump, elected in part as an economic populist who railed against Wall Street, still implemented these regressive policies. The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this two-faced ideology “plutocratic populism.” ([Location 1924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1924)) > If money can buy a better house or car or even a yacht, that’s one thing. But if it can buy citizenship, special access to public spaces, preferential treatment at colleges, and favors from politicians, it becomes a corrupting and corroding force. ([Location 1945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1945)) > * As Frank Borman, the CEO of Eastern Airlines, once quipped, “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” (Eastern Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 1989.) ([Location 1963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1963)) > Writing in the early weeks of the pandemic, the author Zachary Karabell concluded that once we examine the data more closely, “we are likely to find fresh confirmation of what we already know about globalization: that it’s easy to hate, convenient to target and impossible to stop.” ([Location 1995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=1995)) > One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China. ([Location 2025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2025)) > Instead of reshoring, the goal should be to create a kind of strategic medical reserve akin to the strategic petroleum reserve. ([Location 2070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2070)) > This transition was already under way, as China becomes a middle-income country and its labor costs rise. In fact, the greatest long-term beneficiary of this Covid-related concern might well be Mexico, as American firms move Chinese facilities closer to home while still taking advantage of cheap labor. ([Location 2083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2083)) > Despite Donald Trump’s promises to America’s blue-collar workers and his imposition of the most extensive duties since the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, the percentage of American jobs that are in manufacturing has stayed flat under his watch, still down more than half from 1980. ([Location 2093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2093)) > (Ironically, we have continued to call the world’s most advanced economies “industrialized countries,” when really they are all postindustrial.) ([Location 2111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2111)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > And while we can describe this drop as a fall in the cost of communication, it is really a fall to zero in the cost of transport for many goods and services that are digital. ([Location 2163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2163)) > By many measures, it took some sixty years for global trade and travel to return to the peaks they reached before World War I. What undermined the last great age of globalization was not economic or technological backlash but politics—of the oldest kind, realpolitik. ([Location 2187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2187)) > “EVERY MORNING in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state,” declared the writer George Packer in the early weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak. ([Location 2201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2201)) > “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.” ([Location 2209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2209)) > In The Collapse of British Power, the historian Correlli Barnett argued that Britain, the superpower of its age, went through a similar pattern. It endured a number of setbacks, but over time, the problems festered, the mistakes compounded, and the international competition grew tougher. After many decades of erosion, by the late 1940s, despite having won World War II, the country was effectively bankrupt. Britain’s empire fell apart, and it spent the next half-century adjusting to its diminished global role. Is that what the future has in store for America? ([Location 2229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2229)) > The United States has far more gun violence, police shootings, and prison inmates than other advanced countries, sometimes an order of magnitude more. Inequality is markedly greater. Large numbers of people lack the basic security of health insurance. The racial divide persists, unhealed. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2236)) > I use the example of Turkey because it illustrates the central reason for the growing limits on American power, which is not the decline of America but rather the rise of the rest. ([Location 2267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2267)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > China is the world’s largest manufacturer and the second-largest importer, and it holds the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. It is number one in shipbuilding and the production of solar panels and wind turbines. It is the biggest market for cars, computers, and smartphones in the world. It has 226 of the 500 fastest computers in the world, twice as many as America. ([Location 2279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2279)) > Russia has some of the formal attributes of a major power, such as a UN Security Council veto and a vast nuclear arsenal. But its economy is now one-eighth the size of China’s and its military budget a quarter. ([Location 2292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2292)) > Scholars, starting with Thucydides, have long worried about the dangers of “power transitions,” when a rising great power bumps up against an established one. ([Location 2299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2299)) > China pledged $2 billion to the global response to Covid-19 while the US moved to cut funding for the World Health Organization and withdraw from the agency altogether. ([Location 2316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2316)) > This turn has been especially tragic for the inhabitants of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region, where the government has interned a million ethnic Uighurs in holding camps for “re-education,” and subjected millions more to intrusive surveillance. (As trade negotiations drag on, President Trump has been notably silent on this abuse. Obsessed with his reelection, Trump reportedly begged Xi to have China buy more Midwestern soybeans to help him win—while assuring Xi that repressing China’s Muslims was the right thing to do.) ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2359)) > China’s foreign policy has also become more ambitious under Xi, from its pursuit of leadership roles in UN agencies—where it now outnumbers the US four-to-one— ([Location 2364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2364)) > Deng Xiaoping’s adage “Hide your strength, bide your time.” ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2366)) > For the United States, dealing with a competitor like China is a new and unique challenge. Since 1945, the major states rising to wealth and prominence have been Washington’s closest allies, if not quasi-protectorates: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. A normally disruptive feature of international politics—the rise of new powers—has thus been extraordinarily benign for the United States. The People’s Republic of China, however, is not only much larger than the rising powers that came before; it has also always lived outside the United States’ alliance structures and sphere of influence. ([Location 2379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2379)) > The political climate in Washington always pushes policymakers toward being “tough” rather than “soft”—which is a dangerous way to frame international affairs. The real question is, can they be smart rather than stupid? ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2391)) > Consider how the two superpowers acted. Moscow placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, risking a cataclysmic war, to extend its global influence and counter Washington’s. For its part, America sent a total of three million troops into the jungles of Vietnam to prevent a poor, minor country on the other side of the globe from becoming communist. ([Location 2437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2437)) > The China model is an unusual combination of liberal and mercantilist economics and repressive politics, emanating from China’s particular history. It is a juggling act more than a coherent ideology and has been copied almost nowhere else in the world. ([Location 2441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2441)) > We have enjoyed the fruits of their labor: seventy-five years of relative peace. But as a result, we have become cynics, contemptuous of the idealism that got us to where we are. It is now fashionable to bash “globalism,” with little thought to the costs of the alternative. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2486)) > Eisenhower spoke in language that few left-wing peaceniks would dare to employ today. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” ([Location 2525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2525)) > “I will always put America first,” Donald Trump declared at the UN General Assembly in 2017, “just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first.” But the world that we inhabit was built by statesmen who took a broader view—that collective security, and collective endeavors, were in each nation’s enlightened self-interest. ([Location 2537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2537)) > But the problems with the WHO prove the need for more multilateralism, not less. The organization has a tiny budget and relies on voluntary cooperation from its member states. It has no authority to force them to do anything, and often cannot even shame its more powerful funders into action. ([Location 2559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2559)) > Between 1947 and 1989, when America was on the one hand building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world seventy-two times, by one scholar’s count, almost every time without UN approval. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2598)) > Consider China’s abuse of the open world economy. Almost all economists agree that the country owes most of its economic success to three fundamental factors: the switch from communist economics to a more market-based approach, a high savings rate that enables large capital investments, and rising productivity. ([Location 2608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2608)) > Avoiding reform, they have warned, will leave the country floundering in the “middle-income trap”—a common fate in which countries escape poverty, only to hit a wall at a per capita GDP somewhere around $10,000, having refused to modernize their economic, regulatory, and legal systems any further. ([Location 2625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2625)) > The truth about the liberal international order is that there never really was a golden age, nor has the order decayed as much as is often claimed. ([Location 2631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2631)) > That would, of course, require that the United States join and support bodies like the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court. If America flouts the rules and norms it has little standing to criticize China for doing the same. ([Location 2641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2641)) > America’s most significant contribution to international life has been that, unlike every other victorious great power in history, after decisively triumphing—in the world’s bloodiest conflict—it chose to forgive, rebuild, and rehabilitate the vanquished. It imagined a new way for the nations of the world. It often acted in ways that were inspired by the common good and not just narrow national interest. ([Location 2643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2643)) > That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China’s expansionism but America’s abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation. ([Location 2649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2649)) > The US has long been secure on the home front, guarded by two oceanic moats from instability and war. This position has given American leaders since 1945 the farsightedness to use a portion of their power and resources for the common good. ([Location 2665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2665)) > The rise of the rest continues. The world is now filled with new groupings and institutions, many of them regional in nature. ([Location 2679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2679)) > Like him, they are urging us not to assume that nature is a benign force that has any particular interest in the survival of life on this earth. The climate doesn’t care about us; it is simply an accumulation of chemical reactions that could easily get out of control and destroy the planet and all who live on it. ([Location 2710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2710)) > But the novel coronavirus has upended society. People are disoriented. Things are already changing, and in that atmosphere, further change becomes easier than ever. ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2760)) > The world is a better place than it was fifty years ago, by almost any measure. We understand the deficiencies and the ways to address them. The problem has not been to arrive at solutions—it has been to find the political will to implement them. ([Location 2789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2789)) > Great leaders like FDR read polls to understand the nature of their challenge, not as an excuse for inaction. ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2798)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The pandemic is leading countries to look inward. But enlightened leaders will recognize that the only real solution to problems like pandemics—and climate change and cyberwar—is to look outward, toward more and better cooperation. ([Location 2807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2807)) > In a nod to the United States, he quoted in his speech a letter Thomas Jefferson had written to Edward Jenner, who had pioneered the smallpox vaccine. “Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed,” Jefferson wrote. It was an early attempt to put into action Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin plan of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. ([Location 2828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BWRX6H5&location=2828))