Group items tagged

A successful peace initiative will need to involve them all, as complex as that will be; a simple deal bearing no relation to realities cannot hold. It will also require persuading Riyadh to be clearer and more realistic about its aims. Britain’s shameful role in Yemen gives it an extra duty to press that case. But for now it seems more focused on security and promoting Typhoon sales.

Li Shimin became Emperor Taizong and reigned for many years. He expanded China’s rule westward; in time, the area claimed by the Tang reached the Caspian Sea.

Chang'an welcomed traders from Korea, Japan, Syria, Arabia, Iran, and Tibet. Li Shimin also put in place a code of law that became a model for later dynasties and even for other countries, including Japan and Korea.

This period is considered the height of the Tang Dynasty. Peace and growth continued after Li Shimin’s death in 649.

a powerful general named Li Yuan defeated his rivals; captured the capital city, Chang’an (modern-day Xi'an); and named himself emperor of the Tang Dynasty empire. He created an efficient bureaucracy

Also in the mid-750s, the Arabs attacked from the west, defeating a Tang army and gaining control of western Tang lands along with the western Silk Road route. Then the Tibetan empire attacked, taking a large northern area of China and capturing Chang’an in 763.

Although Chang’an was recaptured, these wars and land losses left the Tang Dynasty weakened and less able to maintain order throughout China.

One result was the emergence of a merchant class, which grew more powerful due to weakening of the government’s control of industry and trade. Ships loaded with merchandise to trade sailed as far as Africa and Arabia. But this did not help to strengthen the Tang government.

During the Tang Dynasty’s last 100 years, widespread famine and natural disasters, including massive floods and severe drought, led to the deaths of millions and added to the empire’s decline.

The Tang Dynasty had a major influence on the culture of Asia. This was particularly true in Japan and Korea, which adopted many of the dynasty’s religious, philosophical, architectural, fashion, and literary styles.

While Israel’s operations rescued thousands of Ethio­pian Jews from poverty, famine and war, the country has struggled to integrate the immigrants into its society. Successive government and private panels have found serious flaws in the absorption process, uncovering policies of forced segregation in schools, unfair housing plans that sent many Ethio­pian families to live in ghetto-like neighborhoods, mistreatment in the health-care system and deep-rooted suspicion of their Jewishness by Israel’s strict ultra-Orthodox rabbis. 

“Many people in the community thought it was just a matter of time and if we tried to be like everyone else, not to focus on the differences but on the similarities, then it would pass. But we always got the message from the other side that we were different.” 

Baraku, also an immigrant from Ethiopia, was called to the park on the night of June 30. He said none of the teenagers were armed. “All the children are in shock and still very angry,” he said. “They are confused. We tell them this is their country and they want to serve in the army, but the police label them as problematic.”

Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

Hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent

Absolute economic mobility is also declining—the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century—and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor.

because meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, escaping meritocracy’s trap would benefit virtually everyone.

Nearly three-fifths of Republicans believe that colleges and universities are bad for America

Outrage at nepotism and other disgraceful forms of elite advantage-taking implicitly valorizes meritocratic ideals. Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the American dream. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.

But what, exactly, have the rich won

Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.

Elite middle and high schools now commonly require three to five hours of homework a night; epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation.

Where aristocratic children once reveled in their privilege, meritocratic children now calculate their future—they plan and they scheme, through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry.

Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country

education—whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution

A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.

Elite universities that just a few decades ago accepted 30 percent of their applicants now accept less than 10 percent.

The University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of its applicants as recently as 1995. In 2019 it admitted less than 6 percent.

A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine

In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer.

In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days

Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”

Americans who work more than 60 hours a week report that they would, on average, prefer 25 fewer weekly hours. They say this because work subjects them to a “time famine” that, a 2006 study found, interferes with their capacity to have strong relationships with their spouse and children, to maintain their home, and even to have a satisfying sex life.

The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success

Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

As the meritocracy trap closes in around elites, the rich themselves are turning against the prevailing system. Plaintive calls for work/life balance ring ever louder. Roughly two-thirds of elite workers say that they would decline a promotion if the new job demanded yet more of their energy

it is simply not possible to get rich off your own human capital without exploiting yourself and impoverishing your inner life, and meritocrats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive themselves

Building a society in which a good education and good jobs are available to a broader swath of people—so that reaching the very highest rungs of the ladder is simply less important—is the only way to ease the strains that now drive the elite to cling to their status

Parents—sometimes reluctantly, but feeling that they have no alternative—sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job

How can that be done

A parallel policy agenda must reform work, by favoring goods and services produced by workers who do not have elaborate training or fancy degrees

For example, the health-care system should emphasize public health, preventive care, and other measures that can be overseen primarily by nurse practitioners, rather than high-tech treatments that require specialist doctors

In finance, regulations that limit exotic financial engineering and favor small local and regional banks can shift jobs to mid-skilled workers.

The main obstacle to overcoming meritocratic inequality is not technical but political. Today’s conditions induce discontent and widespread pessimism, verging on despair.

In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia).

Rebuilding a democratic economic order will be difficult. But the benefits that economic democracy brings—to everyone—justify the effort. And the violent collapse that will likely follow from doing nothing leaves us with no good alternative but to try.

The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources.

In the Trump era, there are only two ways to toast the achievements of the Irish in America. One of them is tacitly racist. It relies on a silent distinction, an assumption that the Irish are somehow different from, say, today’s migrants from Latin America. But what is that distinction? It is not that the Irish were wealthier or better educated by contemporary standards, or more highly skilled or harder working. It is simply that they were white and their whiteness gave them a right to be in the United States.

people of Irish descent must celebrate their heritage in a radically different way: as the ultimate rebuke to a paranoid frenzy about immigration. We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed. Yesterday’s alien is today’s workmate; yesterday’s pariah is today’s patriot.

The Irish belong, not because they are better or worse than any other group of migrants, now or in the past. They belong because they are exactly the same: hopeful people doing their best to build dignified lives.

Farmers from Punjab and elsewhere have camped outside the capital, New Delhi, for four months in protest. The country’s Supreme Court has suspended the laws while it figures out the next steps.

“Agriculture in India does need change,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent economist in Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, “but this isn’t the way forward.”

Nearly 60 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people make a living from agriculture, though the sector accounts for only about 11 percent of economic output.

The change in the farm laws is an example of how Mr. Modi has a penchant for quick, dramatic moves that have roiled the country.

The prices are fixed at government-run markets called mandis, where farmers and buyers, for a fee, can meet where grains are sun dried, stored and sold.

Unquestionably, India’s current system is outdated. It was introduced in the 1960s to stave off a famine by encouraging farmers to grow wheat and rice. It included minimum prices set by the government, helping farmers sell what they grow for a profit.

The imbalances don’t end there. Price supports help keep smaller farmers in business, but most don’t till enough land to turn a profit, leading to crushing debt and suicides.

Under Mr. Modi’s plan, corporate buyers would take a much greater role in Indian agriculture because farmers would have greater power to sell their crops to private buyers outside the mandi system, which he said would lift farmer incomes and increase exports.

The system, along with improved techniques, greater use of machinery and fierce competition, increased yields. As a result, India has too much wheat and conventional rice — as compared with basmati rice — enough to fill more than 200,000 shipping containers.

Ms. Kaur, a widow, said her family lost most of its farm because her late husband needed to feed his drug and alcohol habit. It is only a half acre in size, compared with India’s average of about two and a half.

“I repay every six months,” she said, “but with interest, the amount never goes down.”If she loses her farm, “I will have to beg,” she said.

“We feel that the struggle of Punjab is everyone’s struggle,” said Gurjant Singh, the village head, “and unless everyone contributes to that cause, the protest will not be successful.”

Since he took over the farm in 2005, Mr. Gill has plowed his savings into a smart irrigation system, built a machine to clear crop residue and invested in a pair of John Deere tractors.

“Work hard, worship the Almighty, and share the benefits with all mankind,” Mr. Gill said. “That is what is taught to us at the gurdwara every day.”

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi. Bangladesh may have once epitomized hopelessness, but it now has much to teach the world about how to engineer progress.

That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.

As Bangladesh educated and empowered its girls, those educated women became pillars of Bangladesh’s economy. The nation’s garment factories have given women better opportunities, and that shirt you’re wearing right now may have been made by one of them, for Bangladesh is now the world’s largest garment exporter, after China.

Educated women also filled the ranks of nonprofits like Grameen and Brac, another highly regarded development organization. They got children vaccinated. They promoted toilets. They taught villagers how to read. They explained contraception. They discouraged child marriage

This represents a revolution in American policy and a belated recognition that all society has a stake in investing in poor kids. To understand the returns that are possible, let’s look to lessons from halfway around the world.

As that nation turns 50, its surprising success offers lessons about investing in the most marginalized.

Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation. Henry Kissinger famously referred to Bangladesh then as a “basket case,” and horrifying photos from a famine in 1974 sealed the country’s reputation as hopeless.

In the early 1980s, fewer than one-third of Bangladeshis completed elementary school. Girls in particular were rarely educated and contributed negligibly to the economy.

Granted, factories in Bangladesh pay poorly by Western standards, have problems with abuse and sexual harassment, and pose fire risks and other safety problems; a factory collapse in 2013 killed more than 1,100 workers. But the workers themselves say that such jobs are still better than marrying at 14 and working in a rice paddy, and unions and civil society pushed for and won huge though incomplete improvements in worker safety.

In short, Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the one in seven American children who don’t even graduate from high school.

King Djoser asked Imhotep, an architect, priest and healer, to design a funerary monument for him; the result was the world’s first major stone building, the Step-Pyramid at Saqqara, near Memphis. Egyptian pyramid-building reached its zenith with the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo.

During the third and fourth dynasties, Egypt enjoyed a golden age of peace and prosperity. The pharaohs held absolute power and provided a stable central government; the kingdom faced no serious threats from abroad; and successful military campaigns in foreign countries like Nubia and Libya added to its considerable economic prosperity

until about 2160 B.C., when the central authority completely dissolved, leading to civil war between provincial governors. This chaotic situation was intensified by Bedouin invasions and accompanied by famine and disease.

The kingdom also built diplomatic and trade relations with Syria, Palestine and other countries; undertook building projects including military fortresses and mining quarries; and returned to pyramid-building in the tradition of the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom reached its peak under Amenemhet III (1842-1797 B.C.); its decline began under Amenenhet IV (1798-1790 B.C.

The controversial Amenhotep IV (c. 1379-1362), of the late 18th dynasty, undertook a religious revolution, disbanding the priesthoods dedicated to Amon-Re (a combination of the local Theban god Amon and the sun god Re) and forcing the exclusive worship of another sun-god, Aton. Renaming himself Akhenaton (“servant of the Aton”), he built a new capital in Middle Egypt called Akhetaton, known later as Amarna. Upon Akhenaton’s death, the capital returned to Thebes and Egyptians returned to worshiping a multitude of gods.

In 525 B.C., Cambyses, king of Persia, defeated Psammetichus III, the last Saite king, at the Battle of Pelusium, and Egypt became part of the Persian Empire.

The last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt–the legendary Cleopatra VII–surrendered Egypt to the armies of Octavian (later Augustus) in 31 B.C. Six centuries of Roman rule followed, during which Christianity became the official religion of Rome and the Roman Empire’s provinces (including Egypt). The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in the seventh century A.D. and the introduction of Islam would do away with the last outward aspects of ancient Egyptian culture and propel the country towards its modern incarnation.

China’s support for North Korea dates back to the Korean War (1950–1953)

Bilateral trade increased tenfold between 2000 and 2015, peaking in 2014 at $6.86 billion, according to figures from the Seoul-based Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency

In 2018, Chinese imports from North Korea plummeted by 88 percent, while exports dropped by 33 percent. Even in the face of mounting trade restrictions, established informal trade along the China-North Korea border in items such as fuel, seafood, silkworms, and cell phones appears to be ongoing, signaling that China may be softening its restrictions.

China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have provided more than 75 percent of food aid to North Korea since 1995. North Korea, whose famine in the 1990s killed between eight hundred thousand and 2.4 million people, has repeatedly faced extensive droughts and severe flooding, which seriously damage harvests, threatening the food supply.

China has regarded stability on the Korean Peninsula as its primary interest. Its support for North Korea ensures a buffer between China and the democratic South, which is home to around twenty-nine thousand U.S. troops and marines.

The 1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, up for renewal in 2021, says China is obliged to intervene against unprovoked aggression.

During their most recent meeting, Xi was welcomed to Pyongyang, marking the first time a Chinese leader visited North Korea since 2005.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.

the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.

The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.

the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.

The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*

In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.

But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.

Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.

the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.

But every class struggle is a political struggle.

a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for

The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.

He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.

It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Yemen is already facing what UNICEF calls the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with around 80% of the population—more than 24 million people—needing food and other aid.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that Yemen was "in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades." He added, "In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost."

Trump and his advisers blamed the war on Iran and its support for the Houthis, ignoring war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which could implicate US officials who continued to sell weapons to the two allies.

By March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's closest allies in the Arab world, intervened in the war with massive air strikes and a blockade of Houthi-controlled areas.

Since taking office in 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to end US involvement in foreign wars, especially in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the Trump administration goes ahead with designating the Houthi rebels as terrorists, the UN and many international humanitarian groups likely would stop delivering aid to Houthi-held territory in Yemen for fear of running afoul of the United States

Despite international criticism and growing evidence of war crimes, Trump continued to support Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is a major proponent of the Yemen war. In 2019, Trump used his veto power four times to prevent Congress from ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization is likely to make the group more intransigent and to drive it closer to Iran.

Because of constraints imposed by the Houthis on humanitarian work, Washington has already cut nearly half of its assistance to Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen this year. In 2019, US aid amounted to more than $700 million.

The UN also decreased its food rations to millions of Yemenis because of reduced aid from the US and other donors. If the terrorism designation is finalized, Washington would immediately stop its remaining aid to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.

A terrorist designation would also have a ripple effect beyond hampering the work of UN and humanitarian groups: it would dissuade insurance, commercial shipping and trade firms from operating in Yemen because they would be afraid of violating US laws.

As a result, it would become far more difficult and expensive to ship crucial supplies into Yemen, which is almost entirely reliant on imported food. The threat of sanctions or US prosecution could also devastate shipments of medical aid and other supplies intended to shore up a healthcare system that has been devastated by years of war and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also unlikely to be a top priority of the new administration, which could be worried about being portrayed as "soft" on terrorism.

The full scope of suffering in Yemen has gone partly unnoticed because of an unreliable death toll.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.

Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”

in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.

the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.

It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.

The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.

Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.

Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”

When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.

If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.

In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.

That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.

the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.

It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.

t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.

In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.

Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.

Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.

The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.

A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach

Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”

A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.

A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.

Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics

It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.

Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.

This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.

Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.

More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found

More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide

So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.

The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism

An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.

During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization

Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks

Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives

And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.

“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.

Even before the pandemic struck, local public health agencies had lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce since 2008 — a reduction of almost 60,000 workers

The agencies’ main source of federal funding — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency preparedness budget — had been cut 30 percent since 2003. The Trump administration had proposed slicing even deeper.

According to David Himmelstein of the CUNY School of Public Health, global consensus is that, at minimum, 6 percent of a nation’s health spending should be devoted to public health efforts. The United States, he said, has never spent more than half that much.

the problems have been left to fester.

Delaware County, Pa., a heavily populated Philadelphia suburb, did not even have a public health department when the pandemic struck and had to rely on a neighbor to mount a response.

With plunging tax receipts straining local government budgets, public health agencies confront the possibility of further cuts in an economy gutted by the coronavirus. It is happening at a time when health departments are being asked to do more than ever.

While the country spends roughly $3.6 trillion every year on health, less than 3 percent of that spending goes to public health and prevention

“Why an ongoing government function should depend on episodic grants rather than consistent funding, I don’t know,” he added. “That would be like seeing that the military is going to apply for a grant for its regular ongoing activities.”

Compared with Canada, the United Kingdom and northern European countries, the United States — with a less generous social safety net and no universal health care — is investing less in a system that its people rely on more.

Himmelstein said that the United States has never placed much emphasis on public health spending but that the investment began to decline even further in the early 2000s. The Great Recession fueled further cuts.

Plus, the U.S. public health system relies heavily on federal grants.

“That’s the way we run much of our public health activity for local health departments. You apply to the CDC, which is the major conduit for federal funding to state and local health departments,” Himmelstein said. “You apply to them for funding for particular functions, and if you don’t get the grant, you don’t have the funding for that.”

Many public health officials say a lack of a national message and approach to the pandemic has undermined their credibility and opened them up to criticism.

Few places were less prepared for covid-19’s arrival than Delaware County, Pa., where Republican leaders had decided they did not need a public health department at all

At the same time, many countries that invest more in public health infrastructure also provide universal medical coverage that enables them to provide many common public health services as part of their main health-care-delivery system.

Taylor and other elected officials worked out a deal with neighboring Chester County in which Delaware County paid affluent Chester County’s health department to handle coronavirus operations for both counties for now.

One reason health departments are so often neglected is their work focuses on prevention — of outbreaks, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking-related illnesses. Local health departments describe a frustrating cycle: The more successful they are, the less visible problems are and the less funding they receive. Often, that sets the stage for problems to explode again — as infectious diseases often do.

It has taken years for many agencies to rebuild budgets and staffing from deep cuts made during the last recessio

During the past decade, many local health departments have seen annual rounds of cuts, punctuated with one-time infusions of money following crises such as outbreaks of Zika, Ebola, measles and hepatitis. The problem with that cycle of feast or famine funding is that the short-term money quickly dries up and does nothing to address long-term preparedness.

“It’s a silly strategic approach when you think about what’s needed to protect us long term,”

She compared the country’s public health system to a house with deep cracks in the foundation. The emergency surges of funding are superficial repairs that leave those cracks unaddressed.

“We came into this pandemic at a severe deficit and are still without a strategic goal to build back that infrastructure. We need to learn from our mistakes,”

With the economy tanking, the tax bases for cities and counties have shrunken dramatically — payroll taxes, sales taxes, city taxes. Many departments have started cutting staff. Federal grants are no sure thing.

80 percent of counties have reported their budget was affected in the current fiscal year because of the crisis. Prospects are even more dire for future budget periods, when the full impact of reduced tax revenue will become evident.

Christine Hahn, medical director for Idaho’s division of public health and a 25-year public health veteran, has seen the state make progress in coronavirus testing and awareness. But like so many public health officials across the country taking local steps to deal with what has become a national problem, she is limited by how much government leaders say she can do and by what citizens are willing to do.

“I’ve been through SARS, the 2009 pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and of course I’m in rural Idaho, not New York City and California,” Hahn said. “But I will say this is way beyond anything I’ve ever experienced as far as stress, workload, complexity, frustration, media and public interest, individual citizens really feeling very strongly about what we’re doing and not doing.”

“I think the general population didn’t really realize we didn’t have a health department. They just kind of assumed that was one of those government agencies we had,” Taylor said. “Then the pandemic hit, and everyone was like, ‘Wait, hold on — we don’t have a health department? Why don’t we have a health department?’ ”

“People locally are looking to see what’s happening in other states, and we’re constantly having to talk about that and address that,”

“I’m mindful of the credibility of our messaging as people say, ‘What about what they’re doing in this place? Why are we not doing what they’re doing?’ ”

Many health experts worry the challenges will multiply in the fall with the arrival of flu season.

“The unfolding tragedy here is we need people to see local public health officials as heroes in the same way that we laud heart surgeons and emergency room doctors,” Westergaard, the Wisconsin epidemiologist, said. “The work keeps getting higher, and they’re falling behind — and not feeling appreciated by their communities.”

The US and the UN have made some concessions to allow humanitarian aid to operate outside the auspices of the Taliban; the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) granted some licenses to aid groups to operate in Afghanistan without running afoul of of financial restrictions on certain individuals and institutions in the country.

In the aftermath of the US withdrawal, many Afghans working as interpreters, aid workers, prosecutors, professors, and journalists suddenly lost their positions and their incomes, and many have been forced into hiding, further hampering their ability to provide even the most basic necessities — blankets, food, fuel, and medicine — for their families.

Many of Afghanistan’s current problems are intimately connected to the US withdrawal from the country last year, and the Taliban’s ensuing takeover of the central government. Since then, US sanctions and an abrupt end to international aid have wrecked Afghanistan’s economy and sent it spiraling into crisis.

Now, much of the country is facing poverty and starvation: In December, the World Food Program (WFP) found that 98 percent of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, and Guterres warned this month that “we are in a race against time to help the Afghan people.”

“Sanctions are intended to have a chilling effect, in that sanctions will always go beyond the face of the text,”

So far, however, no policy shift has been forthcoming. As of earlier this month, the US has pledged an additional $308 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but the Afghan central bank reserves remain frozen.

And while Afghanistan’s current crisis isn’t wholly caused by external factors — even without sanctions by the US and its allies, the Taliban’s inability to manage the bureaucracy of government would have created issues, as would the pandemic and a severe drought that began in June last year — US actions do play a substantial role.

The chilling effect of sanctions is keeping businesses and banks from actually engaging with the economy. As House Democrats pointed out in their letter last month, relatively simple steps — like issuing letters to international businesses assuring them that they are not violating US sanctions — could help alleviate the crisis and shore up the Afghan private sector, but Treasury has yet to do so.

In the meantime, however, the Taliban will hold talks this coming week with Western nations, including Norway, Britain, the US, Italy, France, and Germany, about humanitarian aid. The talks should not be seen as a legitimization of Taliban rule, Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt stressed to AFP on Friday, “but we must talk to the de facto authorities in the country. We cannot allow the political situation to lead to an even worse humanitarian disaster.”

Mr. Abiy succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. “Nothing will stop us. The enemy will be destroyed,”

Drones have also hit refugee camps in Tigray and killed dozens of civilians. Despite recent releases of political prisoners by Mr. Abiy, which prompted a phone call with President Joe Biden, the prospect of a cease-fire seems distant.

The conflict threatens to tear apart Ethiopia, a once-firm American ally, and further destabilize the volatile Horn of Africa region.

But after he took office in 2018, he set about draining the group of its power and influence in Ethiopia, infuriating the Tigrayan leadership, which retreated to its stronghold of Tigray. Tensions grew.

In September 2020, the Tigrayans defied Mr. Abiy by going ahead with regional parliamentary elections that had he had postponed across Ethiopia.

Two months later, T.P.L.F. forces attacked a federal military base in Tigray in what they called a pre-emptive strike against federal forces preparing to attack them from a neighboring region.

The Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray, and several thousand of its soldiers were taken captive.

Through it all, civilians have suffered most. Since the war started, witnesses have reported numerous human rights violations, many confirmed by a U.N.-led investigation, of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence.

The T.P.L.F. was born in the mid-1970s as a small militia of ethnic Tigrayans, a group that was long marginalized by the central government, to fight Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship.

Tigrayans make up just 6 or 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, compared with the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, which make up over 60 percent.

But at home, the Tigrayan-dominated government systematically repressed political opponents and curtailed free speech. Torture was commonplace in government detention centers.

Mr. Abiy, a onetime T.P.L.F. ally, moved quickly to purge the old guard. He removed Tigrayan officials from the security services, charged some with corruption or human rights abuses and in 2019 created a new political party. The Tigrayans refused to join.

At the same time, he strengthened his ties to President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, who nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans.

But by mid-2020 that peace pact had become an alliance for war on Tigray.

Children are dying of malnutrition, soldiers are looting food aid, and relief workers have been prevented from reaching the hardest-hit areas, according to the United Nations and other aid groups. Since July, a government-imposed blockade of Tigray has kept desperately needed aid from reaching the area. In late November, the World Food Program announced that 9.4 million people across northern Ethiopia required food aid.

In western Tigray, ethnic Amhara militias have driven tens of thousands of people from their homes as part of what the United States has called an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Ethiopia’s ties to the United States, once a close ally, have come under great strain. Mr. Biden has cut off trade privileges for Ethiopia and threatened its leaders with sanctions.

He freed political prisoners, abolished controls on the news media and helped mediate conflicts abroad. His peace deal with Eritrea and its authoritarian leader, Mr. Isaias, caused the Ethiopian leader’s international profile to soar and led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

But even before the war erupted in Tigray, Mr. Abiy had resorted to old tactics of repression — shutting down the internet in some areas, arresting journalists and detaining protesters and critics.

In a stark speech in November, Mr. Abiy called on soldiers to sacrifice their “blood and bone” to bury his enemies in “a deep pit” and “uphold Ethiopia’s dignity and flag.”

The fear in China now is that the “zero Covid” policy has become another Mao-style political campaign that is based on the will of one person, the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping — and that it could end up hurting everyone.

This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”

We tend to take it for granted, but it is an astonishing novelty in human history. For thousands of years, military expenditure was by far the biggest item on the budget

The decline of war didn’t result from a divine miracle or from a change in the laws of nature. It resulted from humans making better choices. It is arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation.

he fact that it stems from human choice also means that it is reversible.

Technology, economics and culture continue to change. The rise of cyber weapons, AI-driven economies and newly militaristic cultures could result in a new era of war, worse than anything we have seen befor

Maybe the law of the jungle is a choice rather than an inevitability?

a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.

This is why the Russian threat to invade Ukraine should concern every person on Earth

The first and most obvious result of a return to the law of the jungle would be a sharp increase in military spending at the expense of everything else

A return to the jungle would also undermine global co-operation on problems such as preventing catastrophic climate change or regulating disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

If you believe that historic change is impossible, and that humanity never left the jungle and never will, the only choice left is whether to play the part of predator or prey.

To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choice

If so, any leader who chooses to conquer a neighbour will get a special place in humanity’s memory, far worse than your run-of-the-mill Tamerlane. He will go down in history as the man who ruined our greatest achievement

perhaps we can learn from the Ukrainians.

They endured two centuries of tsarist autocracy (which finally collapsed amidst the cataclysm of the first world war). A brief attempt at independence was quickly crushed by the Red Army that re-established Russian rule. Ukrainians then lived through the terrible man-made famine of the Holodomor, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and decades of soul-crushing Communist dictatorship. When the Soviet Union collapsed, history seemed to guarantee that Ukrainians would again go down the path of brutal tyranny – what else did they know?

Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents

Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices

In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.

“If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.

Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.

Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.

The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species

Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.

Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.

If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,

The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.

Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.

Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.

Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.

Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.

Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations

Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.

Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.

In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)

Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”

In a country where famines have destabilized dynasties throughout history, the ruling Communist Party is also aware that fulfilling basic needs is a prerequisite for political stability.

Already, farmland in China is shrinking, as rapid urbanization has polluted large swaths of the country’s soil and governments have sold rural land to developers. The distribution of water between northern and southern China is uneven, leaving some crop-growing regions vulnerable to droughts and others to flooding.

The war in Ukraine has threatened China’s access to wheat and fertilizers. And a trade war with the United States that began in 2018 made it more expensive for China to buy soybeans and other foods from America.

The Chinese government frequently points out that it has to feed one-fifth of the world’s population with less than 10 percent of the world’s arable land.

To create a more stable food supply, China has stockpiled crops and purchased more farmland overseas. It has been developing heat-resistant rice strains, genetically modified soybeans and new seed technologies, an effort that has triggered accusations of intellectual property theft from the United States.

The rains hit just as farmers were preparing to begin this year’s harvest, causing some of the wheat to sprout. This lower-quality wheat is unsuitable to process into flour and is typically sold at a lower price as animal feed.

the most recent fears about food security stemmed from the flooding in Henan Province and the surrounding regions in central China, which produce more than three-quarters of the country’s wheat.

“But when extreme weather conditions happen, it not only creates damage, but it’s also very expensive to fix.”

The extent of the damage to this year’s crop is still unclear. A lower wheat yield could force China to import more wheat this year and raise global grain prices

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of wheat. Demand has risen along with incomes as people in cities buy more Western-style breads and desserts. Soaring meat consumption in China has also necessitated more wheat, which is used for animal feed.

China’s fixation on food security has global implications, in large part because it maintains huge stockpiles of food, including what the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates is about half of the world’s wheat reserves.

Gauging the stability of China’s food supply is difficult because information about the exact quantity and quality of its crop stockpiles is treated like a state secret. Although the country’s official data regularly shows record high wheat output, for instance, analysts have questioned the reliability of the data.

In response to the accusations by Western countries that China was hoarding food, a commentary published in The Economic Daily, a state-controlled newspaper, revealed that China had enough wheat and rice reserves to feed its people for at least 18 months, which the article suggested was a reasonable amount of stockpiling.