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Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.

We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”

By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country

It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis

As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

“Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal

New Zealand’s record of learning

His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.

Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change

“The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.

with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”

Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.

0.6 percent of the world’s population is 47 million people, and 0.6 percent of the American population is 2 million people. The virus remains a major threat.

China had reported 90,294 cases as of Friday and 4,634 deaths, which is a C.F.R. of 5 percent. The United States was very close to that mark. It has had 2,811,447 cases and 129,403 deaths, about 4.6 percent

So far, in most countries, about 20 percent of all confirmed Covid-19 patients become ill enough to need supplemental oxygen or even more advanced hospital care

it is difficult to measure fatality rates during pandemics, especially at the beginning.

In the chaos that ensues when a new virus hits a city hard, thousands of people may die and be buried without ever being tested, and certainly without them all being autopsied.

Normally, once the chaos has subsided, more testing is done and more mild cases are found — and because the denominator of the fraction rises, fatality rates fall. But the results are not always consistent or predictable.

Ten sizable countries, most of them in Western Europe, have tested bigger percentages of their populations than has the United States, according to Worldometer, which gathers statistics. They are Iceland, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Britain, Israel and New Zealand.

But their case fatality rates vary wildly: Iceland’s is less than 1 percent, New Zealand’s and Israel’s are below 2 percent. Belgium, by comparison, is at 16 percent, and Italy and Britain at 14 percent

Those percentages are far higher rates than the 2.5 percent death rate often ascribed to the 1918 flu pandemic.

Whether those patients survive depends on a host of factors, including age, underlying illnesses and the level of medical care available.

Death rates are expected to be lower in countries with younger populations and less obesity, which are often the poorest countries. Conversely, the figures should be higher in countries that lack oxygen tanks, ventilators and dialysis machines, and where many people live far from hospitals. Those are also often the poorest countries.

new evidence that people with Type A blood are more likely to fall deathly ill could change risk calculations. Type A blood is relatively rare in West Africa and South Asia, and very rare among the Indigenous peoples of South America.

it had relied on a mix of data sent in by member countries and by academic groups, and on a meta-analysis done in May by scientists at the University of Wollongong and James Cook University in Australia.

Those researchers looked at 267 studies in more than a dozen countries, and then chose the 25 they considered the most accurate, weighting them for accuracy and averaged the data. They concluded that the global I.F.R. was 0.64 percent.

The 25 studies that the Australian researchers considered the most accurate relied on very different methodologies. One report, for example, was based on diagnostic PCR tests of all passengers and crew aboard the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that docked in Japan after it was overcome by the coronavirus. Another study drew data from an antibody survey of 38,000 Spaniards, while another included only 1,104 Swedes.

To arrive at the C.D.C.’s new estimate, researchers tested samples from 11,933 people for antibodies to the coronavirus in six regions in the United States. New York City reported 53,803 cases by April 1, but the actual number of infections was 12 times higher — nearly 642,000, the agency estimated.

The global fatality rates could still change. With one or two exceptions, like Iran and Ecuador, the pandemic first struck wealthier countries in Asia, Western Europe and North America where advanced medical care was available.

Many experts fear that infections and deaths will shoot up in the fall as colder weather forces people indoors, where they are more likely to infect one another. Discipline about wearing masks and avoiding breathing on one another will be even more important then.

In each of the eight influenza pandemics to hit the United States since 1763, a relatively mild first wave — no matter what time of year it arrived — was followed by a larger, much more lethal wave a few months later

More than a third of all the people killed by the Spanish flu, which lasted from March 1918 to late 1920, died in the short stretch between September and December 1918 — about six months after a first, relatively mild version of what may have been the same virus broke out in western Kansas.

In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward

What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years

The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?

The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.

Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.

One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”

“It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”

When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response

Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.

The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.

There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.

The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.

Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself

“It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”

What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.

Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.

Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.

Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.

In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.

Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”

When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.

In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher

Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.

Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.

other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.

However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.

Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.

A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.

Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:

Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none

If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.

Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.

Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.

the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”

In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.

This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.

It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.

“The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

But the American middle class is neither stable nor self-reliant. Recognizing this is the prerequisite to determining what we need to weather this storm.

The American middle class long has been presented as evidence that self-reliance leads to stability, even prosperity. The very existence of a middle class appears to prove the notion that if we work hard enough and make the right choices, everything will be OK — and also its corollary: that the poor must have somehow brought poverty upon themselves and that we, industrious workers that we are, will surely never be one of them

Before the pandemic, Americans saved approximately 8 percent of their income, which would cover a fraction of their living expenses. American households carry an average of $111,198 in debt. Even in flush times, this kind of financial exposure can be stressful. During long spells of unemployment and underemployment, it can lead to ruin.

it’s not just the design of a nation’s welfare infrastructure that matters but also its level of commitment to protecting basic human needs.

the average middle-class American family (with a before-tax household income of $66,400) receives more help from the government than it pays in federal taxes and collects more aid than the average American family in the lowest income quintile (with a before-tax household income of $24,600).

We’re all on the dole, however meager it may be.

countries with more robust welfare states have been able to respond to the recent economic downturn with a high level of competence and the kind of deep investment that the Covid-19 pandemic demands.

In nations like Britain and Germany, workers have been allowed to keep their jobs even as businesses shuttered because their governments are paying all or most of their wages.

Because Germany already had a system, known as Kurzarbeit, in place to pay workers whose hours are reduced during economic crises, it didn’t need to reinvent the wheel when the coronavirus began to spread. Other countries that didn’t have such a system in place, including Ireland and Denmark, quickly fashioned one.

virtually every American has benefited from some form of public aid, from programs widely recognized as ‘‘welfare,’’ like food stamps, to more hidden subsidies issued through the tax code, like government-subsidized retirement benefits

just as states go to war with the army they have, in a recession they tend to catch the unemployed with the safety net they have

America not only lacks many programs that buffer workers from economic calamity — such as the right to housing or universal health care — it is also bereft of a national culture characterized by social solidarity and faith in government.

About a third of Americans express trust in the government, unlike most Germans, Norwegians and Swiss.

countries that have been able to bend the curve of Covid-19 cases, both in Europe (Switzerland, France) and Asia (South Korea, Taiwan), have been those where citizens recognize the importance of strong government.

Countries that have yet to respond as effectively — including Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States — have publics deeply skeptical of their governments as well as current heads of state (Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who share, and stoke, that sentiment.

‘‘The American public consistently expresses a desire for more government effort and higher levels of spending for almost every aspect of the welfare state,’’

The New Deal erected an institutional scaffolding designed to provide unprecedented stability and predictability for the American economy,’

The quarter century of prosperity that followed World War II was rooted in the profound structural reforms of the New Deal. A strong market was made possible by strong government intervention.

It is now widely acknowledged that the federal government should have acted sooner and spent bigger when addressing the 2008 financial crisis. In March, Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the rescue package (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) and is now president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote, ‘‘My experience underscores that if there is a principle policymakers need to keep in mind going forward, it’s this: Err on the side of helping as many workers and businesses as possible rather than on prudence.’’

In 2008, the government hobbled the rescue package by trying to make sure that only ‘‘deserving’’ Americans received help, slowing and narrowing relief. ‘‘The American people ultimately paid more because of our attempts to save them money,’’ Kashkari wrote with hindsight.

‘‘Adding $3 trillion in spending,’’ as the HEROES Act would, ‘‘is necessary for spending after the summer and most importantly to start helping states.’’ J. W. Mason, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York, pointed out that $3 trillion corresponds to a 20 percent decline in private demand, which, based on what happened in the 2008 recession, we should prepare for.

Think about that: Stop testing. Then we’ll have no knowledge. Then we’ll have no numbers. Then we’ll have no virus. Why didn’t I think of that?

this impugning of scientific methods, this embrace of conspiracy theories, this undermining of truth and data by our president and vice president — this is not happening in other countries. This is not happening in Germany, France, China, South Korea, Denmark, Canada, Israel or Japan. This is a form of American “exceptionalism” that we never imagined possible.

“A prime difference between the Enlightenment and the Dark Ages is respect for knowledge, respect for science. The whole idea of progress requires objectively looking at problems, finding and testing solutions, and then spreading and using the best of them. That’s how we grow, that’s how we learn, that’s how we prosper.”

As for respecting nature, that has two meanings. The first is to respect the power of nature

She doesn’t negotiate. You cannot seduce her or sue her. She does whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. Full stop. Which means in a pandemic that she will just keep infecting people — relentlessly, mercilessly, silently and exponentially — until she runs out of people to infect or a vaccine or exposure makes enough of us immune. She also doesn’t keep score. She’ll make you sick and then blow down your house with a tornado.

Respect for nature also means understanding that we live on a hard rock called planet Earth with a thin cover of oceans and topsoil, enveloped by a thin layer of atmosphere. Abuse that soil, junk up those oceans with plastics, distort that atmospheric blanket and we will likely (further) destroy the perfect Garden of Eden that has been the basis of all human civilization.

remember, as bad as this pandemic is, it’s just training wheels for the big, irreversible atmospheric pandemic: climate change.

Respect each other? That’s not so easy in the midst of our other pandemic — a pandemic of incivility.

We have a level of inequality that is so endemic that your ZIP code is now a better predictor of life expectancy than your genetic code.

Respecting each other means ensuring each other’s equal access to the American dream — and right now, Black, Hispanic and white Americans are climbing very different housing, education and health care ladders, which simply has to be fixed.

We have so many important issues to discuss among ourselves right now, but for that discussion to be productive we can’t just go from justifiable outrage straight to firings, public shamings or disbanding police departments — without pausing for respectful dialogue and moral distinctions.

The other is getting people out of Facebook and into each other’s faces again — not to shout or denounce, but to listen

It’s even more important what you say when you listen. Listening is a sign of respect. And it is amazing what people will let you say to them if they first think that you respect them. That’s our job.

Respect science, respect nature, respect each other. Biden 2020.

“Respect science, respect nature, respect each other.”

Biden should highlight his commitment to all three values in every speech and interview he gives. They draw such a clear, simple and easy to remember contrast with Trump.

He’ll now always be known for working a political miracle — and for making clear, to borrow from JFK, that saving the planet is this generation’s long twilight struggle.

Mixed messages, misinformation and a relaxed attitude were spreading in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the summer, experts say. "I am glad we are less and less afraid of this virus, of this epidemic. You don't have to be afraid of it anymore," Mateusz Morawiecki, prime minister of Poland, said as he urged voters to July polls. "All of you, especially the elderly, don't be afraid, let's go and vote,” he added.

“Politicians were saying that the virus has weakened and the pandemic is over, and maybe it didn’t even exist. That put people in doubt, and led to a growing group of people who doubt the virus, its origins and consequences,” Ms. Afelt said.

Second wave lockdowns were slower and softer than those in the first wave, experts note, and in many cases they have not been strictly enforced, curbing their effectiveness, even as societies suffer economic losses and disruption. A collective exhaustion with new restrictions made it harder to get widespread support and compliance.

“There was a certain hesitancy to reintroduce the measures after the summer, because we all knew what they meant in terms of the economy and society,” said Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

“That hesitancy didn't really pay off. When you reach the levels that you see now, you have to go back to those measures anyway, but the price you pay is very high in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” he added.

The few countries that did move fast saw great benefits. Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway have kept the second wave at bay. Ireland has recorded fewer than 300 deaths since September 1, just 15 percent of its first wave total, after a tough and early second national lockdown.

49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.

Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”

In large countries, even comparing people within the same borders can be difficult to accomplish accurately. Happiness is defined very differently in northern versus southern India,

research shows that the United States is home to significant regional differences in personality characteristics. For example, people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions tend to display more attachment anxiety (“When will you call?”), while the western states breed more attachment avoidance (“See you when I see you”).

in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.

Even the words we use to talk about happiness have different connotations in different tongues. In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.”

cultures vary widely in their definitions of happiness. Therefore, it is impossible to say that one country is happier than another in some absolute sense, and a single index of “the happiest countries in the world” is not instructive.

Maybe Finland is the happiest country by one definition; it is almost certainly not by another. Countries should be classified more than compared.

handy way to get started on that task is to distinguish between two ways of focusing on happiness. The first is an “inner” or “outer” focus on happiness—that is, on introspection versus interaction with others. The second is a “relation” or “task” focus—people-oriented versus doing-oriented. This gives us four major models for well-being, based on survey research from around the world.

1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.

2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.

3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.

4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.

Just as different places have different definitions of happiness, so do different people. Understanding that diversity can help you understand yourself—to see whether and why you are a misfit in your home, and what you might do about it, whether that’s moving, joining a new community, or simply making peace with your surroundings.

In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.

Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.

Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g

When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.

This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society

under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still

We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.

The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.

The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.

Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice

A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.

I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.

Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.

The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”

Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.

We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos

The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.

The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.

The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations

Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.

moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.

This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them

Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.

Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.

Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations

gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.

When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.

Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.

People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.

Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.

As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”

During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions

In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.

By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.

Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi

sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate

In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.

In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.

In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”

Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.

There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.

Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.

Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.

Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons

As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.

high national trust is a collective moral achievement.

High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.

Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust

In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.

People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.

In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.

The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.

this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.

“They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”

the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.

In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted

Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.

A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.

Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.

Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.

“values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away

Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home

the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.

By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth

First, financial insecurity

As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Next, emotional insecurity:

fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.

Then, identity insecurity.

All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.

liquid modernity

Finally, social insecurity.

n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?

Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”

In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.

Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.

People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse

Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent

People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”

In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed

People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.

fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.

When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.

By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.

From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession

These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.

The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest

“low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic

Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.

Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them

The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.

The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.

In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.

In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.

Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.

South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.

For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.

On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system

On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy

In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.

In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”

Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil

55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths

Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.

This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.

institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,

Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.

People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.

The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

The Failure of Society

The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”

Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.

While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed

in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.

Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.

Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value

When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.

The Crack-up

This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.

The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent

By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001

In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.

By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.

The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.

The Age of Precarity

Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.

The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.

This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.

From risk to security.

we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers

In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.

From achievement to equality

In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy

Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.

From self to society

If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.

The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”

From global to local

When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.

From liberalism to activism

enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.

Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.

liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle

The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.

The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.

How to Rebuild Trust

Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.

In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.

But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.

As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on

After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.

The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.

Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?

I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.

The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.

The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?

social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.

Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.

For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust

But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.

By David Brooks

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

it is also the continuation of a remarkably consistent German attitude toward Europe and the world since 1945. Think about how different the world would look if we did not have, at the center of Europe, its most powerful nation — the country that is the largest net contributor to the E.U. — totally committed to democratic and liberal values and willing to make sacrifices for them. Germany today is the rock on which a new Europe is being built.

the sacrifices are real and deep. Natural gas prices are up tenfold in Europe compared to last year. The price of electricity for 2023 is more than 15 times higher than it has been in recent years, by one estimate. Vladimir Putin is ramping up the pressure by slowing and even stopping gas exports to Germany

But Germany has not given in. Confronted with these massive challenges, it has patiently sought to diversify away from a dependence on Russia, investing even more in green technology, buying liquefied natural gas, reopening coal-fired plants and even debating whether to keep its last three nuclear power plants running longer than planned.

The European Union has suggested a 15 percent reduction in the consumption of natural gas this winter. Germany is trying to achieve a 20 percent cut just to be safe. German industry is being resourceful about energy efficiency, and companies are even thinking about sharing resources with competitors, all to get through the crisis.

Merkel herself was seen in similar ways when she came to power. Over time she developed the skills and stature to gain respect from all quarters. She might have erred in trying to develop too conciliatory a relationship with Moscow

but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, she was at the forefront in condemning it and persuading Europe to impose an ambitious program of sanctions. She also led the world in responding to the Syrian refugee crisis, reassuring her country by declaring, “We can do this.” As of mid-2021, Germany hosts more than 1.2 million refugees, half of whom are from Syria. In fact, Germany has managed this stunning act of integration with minimal problems.

We always underestimate modern-day Germany and its leadership. The federal republic has had a remarkable run of leaders in the post-World War II era, from its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to Willy Brandt to Helmut Schmidt to Merkel — and now, let’s hope, to Scholz. Can any other country compare over the past seven decades?