A review of “Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World” by Fareed Zakaria
Zakaria is an Indian-American political scientist who hosts CNN’s flagship international affairs show. His book – published in October 2020 with information as recent as July 2020 – is immensely topical, informative and thought-provoking, even if there is nothing terribly original or radical in it and too few proposals for practical change. My effort at summarising the 10 lessons is as follows:
- Global capitalism is so open and so fast that it is inherently unstable, promoting a clash between people and nature that has caused zoonotic diseases like Covid-19, and we need to build in some security and resilience through measures like better regulation of markets, stronger public health systems and a new carbon tax.
- In the United States, the weakness of the federal government and the multiplicity of state and local units has made a concerted effort to tackle issues like coronavirus almost impossibe, so that the country needs not so much larger government as better government with more professional expertise and better learning.
- Reliance on free markets to provide comprehensive health, access to education & training, and social mobility – the Reagan-Thatcher model – is not working and a better approach is the ‘flexicurity’ model of Northern European economies (classically Denmark) based on high taxation, substantial welfare provision, and social cohesion.
- The pandemic has revealed how the less educated and less wealthy feel alienated from the elite, but people should listen to the experts who know best how to respond to such a crisis and, for their part, the experts should show empathy and listen to the people.
- New technologies – most notably artificial intelligence – will utterly transform the world of work, so that we will have to consider ideas like a universal basic income or topping up the wages of low-income workers.
- Covid-19 will not lead to a decline in urban living because people thrive on real life contact, but it could encourage a reimagining of cities with more walking and cycling and ideas like ‘the 15 minute city’.
- Coronavirus has highlighted and worsened the inequalities in societies and economies with poor and (in the US especially) black citizens suffering the most, but meanwhile countries with less inequality and higher levels of trust seem to have handled the crisis best.
- In spite of what some commentators may think, the pandemic will not result in the death or even the decline (except perhaps a small and temporary one) in globalisation because the forces are too great and the benefits too large.
- The world is becoming bipolar as the historic ascendancy of the United States is increasingly being challenged by the growing economic and military power of China but, while bipolarity is inevitable, a new cold war is a choice.
- The ‘liberal international order’ created by the United States after the Second World War has brought unprecedented peace and prosperity, but is now under threat from America’s abdication and China’s expansionism, yet there are strong practical reasons why it can survive.
If one had to reduce this book to one sentence, it would be: “the pandemic will not reshape history so much as accelerate it”. Overall it is a profoundly positive work but, Zakaria does warn, especially in the relation to climate change, that “the next crisis could be the last”.