‘This Is An Opportunity’: Fareed Zakaria On ‘Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World’
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A volunteer loads food into a cart at a mobile pantry in Detroit in April 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an uptick in the demand at food banks.
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Author Interviews
What Does A ‘Post-American World’ Look Like?
«We have to do something about the inequality that has become so dramatic in these Western societies,» he says. «We have to get our infrastructure in shape. We have to have a better health care system that allows poor people access to good, decent health care.»
Zakaria is hopeful for the future: «We can’t forget that human beings have choice. We are not doomed to go down the path that people think we have. And yet, nor is it guaranteed that we will make the right choices. It’s all up to us.»
Zakaria says that depending on the actions we take now, «We could well look back on these times 10 or 20 years from now and say, ‘This was the turning point. We were finally able to make some of these changes.'»
Interview highlights
WW Norton
On comparing how authoritarian and democratic countries have fared in the pandemic
It turns out that there’s a mixture of results on both sides, the democratic side and the authoritarian. So I don’t want to suggest that authoritarian states are all good or bad at this. There is no question that China handled it very well overall. They mishandled it at the start, that mishandling had something to do with the secretive and repressive nature of the Chinese system. But then they pivoted and did a remarkably good job. … But consider other dictatorships: Russia, Venezuela, Iran — they’ve all done terribly at it.
Goats and Soda
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On the other hand, with democracies, you see countries like the United States and Great Britain that have not done very well, but some of the best performing countries in the world — Taiwan, South Korea, Germany — are all democracies. And in fact, what’s interesting is when you look at the Taiwanese response and you look at the South Korean response, it isn’t that they used draconian powers of government very well. They did not, actually, in either of those cases, do a shutdown ever. What they did instead was very good testing and tracing. The key to stopping the growth of Covid is that when you find somebody has it, you very quickly do contact tracing and isolate those people who have it so that you are, in a sense, separating out the small number of possible infectors from the large population. … It turns out that the intelligent democracies, because they’re open, they’re transparent, may be the best performers of them.
On how lean, adaptable governments seem better able to respond to the pandemic
It’s not the quantity of government, it’s the quality.
The 20th century was consumed by this huge debate originating in, of course, the debate between capitalism and communism on the size of the government. How big should your government be? And it’s an important debate and it has important dimensions. But I think it is obscured something very important that is getting highlighted in the 21st century, which is it’s not the quantity of government, it’s the quality.
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Fareed Zakaria’s previous books include The Post American World.
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Jeremy P. Freeman/WW Norton
Goats and Soda
What 6 Of The 7 Countries With The Most COVID-19 Cases Have In Common
But then let’s take a look at the United States. … If you look at the last four recessions and you look at the top 25 percent of earners and the bottom 25 percent, and you say during the recession, what percentage lost jobs, it turns out that for the last three recessions, the top 25 percent and the bottom 25 percent lose jobs at about the same rate. In this recession, the top 25 percent have actually stayed stable. They haven’t lost many jobs. The bottom 25 percent, it’s just a cratering. … It’s all the bankers, the lawyers, the people in media, we’re all fine or mostly fine. But think about the restaurant workers, think about the waiters, think about the people who work in hotels, on cruise ships, in theme parks. All those people who were low-wage in any case, have seen their livelihoods destroyed. And this massive acceleration and exacerbation of inequality is, to me, the most deeply worrying thing about what this pandemic has done.
On why the federal government should step in to help the people who need it most
I think that the most important piece of what the federal government can do is to stabilize these people’s lives with direct aid, with the massive infrastructure spending, so that people who are in these categories, people without college educations, can can find their way forward.
Coronavirus Live Updates
Harvard Researchers Find ‘Inequality On Top Of Inequality’ In COVID-19 Deaths
Look, at the end of the day, you can only do it for some transition period. But I think we should be erring on the side of helping rather than not. I understand there are concerns about the deficit and I understand their concerns about inflation and all that. But if we don’t do this for the next year or two, you won’t have a society. You won’t have an economy that is going to function in any kind of meaningful sense. Worrying about inflation is a luxury, if you have 30 to 40 percent of the country that literally can’t make ends meet.
Sam Briger and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
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