Ten lessons for a post-pandemic world
Fareed Zakaria
W.W. Norton & Company
Rs.473 Pages 224
It’s India’s loss and America’s gain that Mumbai-born, Yale and Harvard grad Fareed Zakaria has made his career in the US rather than in India. Over the past two decades, he has emerged as one of America’s most respected public intellectuals — author of The Future of Freedom (2003), The Post-American World (2008), In Defence of Liberal Education (2015), and now the title under review. That’s in addition to having served as editor of Newsweek International and Foreign Affairs, columnist at Time and Washington Post, and weekly anchor of a CNN current affairs television show which has a viewership of 220 million worldwide.
Although Zakaria’s books and TV show tend to be US-centric, he does occasionally comment on the mess in the country he left behind. But on the whole, his comments on India’s national development effort and current progress in that direction are less than complimentary.
Be that as it may, because of the unforeseen global impact of the novel Coronavirus, a “single particle about 1/10,000 the size of the period (full-stop) that ends this sentence,” Zakaria believes that we now live in a radically altered “post-pandemic world” which will “not reshape history so much as accelerate it” — a new post-pandemic — “world on steroids”.
The purpose of this work of penetrative insights is to provide important advice to national governments and societies co-existing in a now more than ever inter-connected world.
The titles of most of the ten lessons for the post-pandemic age are self-explanatory, but not all. The first lesson titled ‘Buckle Up’ is mysterious. It advises people and governments to take our collective foot off the GDP growth foot-pedal.
Urgent collaborative action is needed to prevent environmental destruction by resource extractive industries, greedy meat consumption which has prompted cruel, inhumane factory farms — “the best way to select for the most dangerous pathogens possible”, decimation of glaciers, rivers, forest and mountains, in retrospect rightly worshipped for providing ecological balance.
The next four lessons we need to learn to survive and prosper in the post-pandemic world are titled ‘What matters is not the quantity of government, but quality’; ‘Markets are not enough’; ‘People should listen to experts and experts should listen to people’; and ‘Life is digital’.
The somewhat puzzling Lesson 5 titled ‘Aristotle was right — we are social animals’ makes the point that despite plagues, pandemics, two world wars and the latest Covid-19 pandemic which hit crowded cities hardest, a reverse migration to rural spaces is unlikely. The author highlights that the number of cities in the world with populations of over 1 million has increased from just two (London and Beijing) in 1800 to 371 in 2000 and will “surpass 700 in 2030,” because homo sapiens is a social animal, and loves to huddle in cities.
But a new metropolitan model city in which every citizen can reach wherever she needs to go by a 15-minute walk or a short bike ride, is taking shape. It may well eliminate trains, cars and traffic jams — and civic pollution (see p. 238).
In Lesson 7, Zakaria warns that income and living standard inequalities between nations and within nations, will get worse. Rising disparity is already generating international and national tensions. According to him, the post-pandemic era “demands burial of the Washington Consensus — free market reforms that rich countries have been prescribing to poor ones”.
The market economy the world needs to learn from, if not follow, is of Denmark that is “prosperous, democratic, secure, well-governed and experiences low levels of corruption,” in which business and industry are lightly and transparently regulated. In this chapter, Zakaria also busts the leftist myth that Denmark is a socialist, planned economy. It is ranked higher than the US on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, he notes.
Although cursorily addressed by your reviewer because of space constraints, all the ten lessons delivered by Zakaria have valuable takeaways. Yet perhaps the most important point raised by the learned author is that addressing climate change is an urgent global imperative, and preventing continuous destruction of the environment and Earth’s habitat by extractive industries has to be stopped. Even at the cost of accepting de-growth and reduction of standards of living in developed OECD countries.
The other vitally important recommendation Zakaria makes in this riveting compendium replete with data and penetrating insights, is for national leaders and publics to resist the temptation to retreat into cynicism and isolationism.
In an insightful chapter (Lesson 10), Zakaria lauds America’s idealist presidents and thinkers who shaped the post-World War II international order which he reminds us, has unprecedentedly prevented a major global war for over 80 years.
This has happened because of establishment of international governance organisations such as the UN, IMF, Unesco, UNDP, Unicef and several regional trade blocs. The chapter ends with a plea for persistence with international cooperation because “it can change the world… it is common sense”.
Unsurprisingly this insightful book — the outcome of deep scholarship, tightly written and argued with noble purpose — has received scant attention in the Indian academy and media. It ends with a message of hope and declaration of faith in human agency. “Nothing is written (in stone),” concludes Zakaria. “It (the pandemic) has opened up a path to a new world. It’s ours to take that opportunity or squander it.”
Recommended reading for all trying to shape this straggler country’s future. And all concerned about it
Dilip Thakore
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