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A widespread view among economic policy elites, after the runaway inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, was that elevated unemployment was a necessary cost of keeping prices stable. Also, that the government can’t spend much more money than it takes in without crowding out private investment — leaving the economy weaker over time — and that policymakers should act pre-emptively to ward off these risks.

It may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.

And the Fed cut interest rates starting in 2019 despite a very low jobless rate, implicitly accepting the premise that it had moved too aggressively with rate increases to prevent inflation that never arrived.

Yet from spring of 2018 to the onset of the pandemic, the United States experienced a jobless rate of 4 percent or lower, with no obvious sign of inflation and many signs that less advantaged workers were able to find work.

She said that a high-pressure economy — one where unemployment is low and employers have to compete for workers — improves upward mobility

Mr. Mulligan and other allies of the president emphasize the role of deregulating major industries and lowering taxes on business investment — microeconomic strategies — as crucial to the economy’s success.

The Biden administration and Democratic Congress will view more aggressive regulation as a core goal, aimed at preventing corporate misbehavior, protecting the environment, and more. Indeed, left-leaning economists would argue that the very policies Mr. Mulligan credits with the boom are the least durable parts of the Trump-era expansion.

If you believe Mr. Mulligan and other Trump allies, the macroeconomic lessons of the Trump years — those having to do with things like deficits, inflation and interest rates — won’t be enough for the Biden administration to recreate the 2019 economy. In this view, the microeconomic details of how the president has governed will be crucial, and the policies that Mr. Biden has advocated — in areas as varied as tighter restrictions on carbon emissions and more aggressive regulation of banks — will prove counterproductive to the cause.

If inflation were to remain persistently low, she said, “a more radical rethinking of the economy’s productive potential would surely be in order.”

A central question for Mr. Biden will be: To what degree is the Trump-era economic success a result of policies that liberals disagree with, to what degree is it a result of policies that Mr. Biden might embrace, and to what degree is it just luck?

Mr. Powell, who will lead the Fed for roughly the first year of Mr. Biden’s term and then will be either reappointed or replaced in February 2022, has also become a vocal enthusiast for avoiding these mistakes of the past.In the strong pre-pandemic labor market, he said in an August speech on the Fed’s new policy framework, “many who had been left behind for too long were finding jobs, benefiting their families and communities, and increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”

President-elect Biden has embraced these lessons in shaping his agenda, as he made clear in a news conference Friday where he confirmed that his plans will add up to trillions of dollars when one includes both pandemic response money and longer-term plans.“With interest rates as low as they are,” Mr. Biden said, “every major economist thinks we should be investing in deficit spending to generate economic growth.”

How many congressional leaders “have deigned to pay a visit to the kingdom?” Prince Turki said at the event. “Should they visit Riyadh they may learn something about universal health care, which the kingdom has provided for its citizens since its establishment” or “they may get an insight into our improving and evolving educational system.”

Saudi Arabia has been working hard to remake its image since the Khashoggi killing, marketing it as a tourist destination. It is building major tourism projects, transforming its Red Sea coastline to bring in holidaymakers and developing an entertainment city near the capital of Riyadh. The kingdom also said it plans to drop a requirement for men and women who visit to prove they’re related in order to share a hotel room.

Last month, Saudi Arabia announced it would drop its strict dress code for foreign women, who will no longer be required to wear an abaya, the flowing cloak that’s been mandatory attire for decades. “Modest clothing” will still be called upon, according to Ahmed Al-Khateeb, chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage.

Sanders on wages of US childcare workersSanders said America's childcare system "is an embarrassment, it is unaffordable," claiming that childcare workers take home lower paychecks than people working at McDonald's. "Childcare workers are making wages lower than McDonald's workers," Sanders said. Facts First: While some childcare workers undoubtedly make less than some McDonald's workers, US government data from 2018 shows that childcare workers took home a higher mean hourly salary than fast food workers.

Biden claimed President Donald Trump "weakened" sanctions against Pyongyang in his pursuit of meetings with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "The President showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has not weakened the sanctions his administration has placed on North Korea to date, and has in fact ratcheted them up from the Obama administration. Although Trump did once spark mass confusion among his aides when he tweeted he was ordering the removal of sanctions on Pyongyang that had not yet been imposed or even announced.

During an exchange about electability and whether a woman can win the presidency, Warren compared the political careers of the men on the debate stage with the women. "Can a woman beat Donald Trump?" Warren said. "Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women. Amy and me." Facts First: Warren has the facts right. She and Klobuchar are undefeated, and their male opponents have lost a total of 10 elections during their political careers. But Warren's talking point ignores the fact that Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg have also prevailed in more than two dozen elections since 1970.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg asserted during the debate on Tuesday that the Trump administration admitted that the Iran nuclear deal was working before pulling out of it. Buttigieg said, "By gutting the Iran nuclear deal, one that, by the way, the Trump administration itself admitted was working, certified that it was preventing progress toward a nuclear Iran, by gutting that, they have made the region more dangerous and set off the chain of events that we are now dealing with as it escalates even closer to the brink of outright war." Facts First: This is basically true. By repeatedly recertifying the nuclear deal and waiving sanctions against Tehran as a result, the Trump administration effectively acknowledged that Iran was abiding by the terms of the deal even as the President publicly criticized it.

Sanders repeated his claim that NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China have cost the US "some 4 million jobs." "I am sick and tired," said Sanders as he drew a contrast with former Vice President Joe Biden, pointing to large multinational corporations that he says have reaped the benefits.Facts First: This is likely an overestimate of the impact trade agreements can have on the country's employment.

Biden repeated his false claim that he opposed the war in Iraq from the moment the war began. Biden said he made a "mistake" in casting a 2002 vote, as a senator from Delaware, to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. But he said he cast the vote because the Bush administration had said "they were just going to get inspectors" into Iraq to check for weapons of mass destruction -- and that, once Bush actually went to war, he became immediately opposed: "From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake." Facts First: As fact checkers have repeatedly noted, Biden did not oppose the war in Iraq from the point it started in March 2003. He did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, two years into the war, but he was a vocal public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004. And he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq

Biden said that President Donald Trump "flat-out lied" when he claimed the US killed Iran's top military general because he was targeting four US embassies. "Quite frankly, I think he's flat-out lied about saying that the reason he went after -- the reason he made the strike was because our embassies were about to be bombed," Biden said. Facts First: Trump has yet to provide evidence backing up his claim that Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was actively planning new attacks against four US embassies and top administration officials have struggled to defend the President's comments. But there is no way to know if Trump "flat-out lied" without seeing the underlying intelligence, which remains classified.

The effective barring of Roth from entering Hong Kong is not an isolated incident, happening days after a U.S. photographer covering the pro-democracy protests was also banned from entering the financial hub.

“I think it’s worth stressing that what happened to me pales in comparison to what is happening to the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong. They’re the ones who are facing tear gas, beatings and arrest, and I just had another 16 hour flight [back to New York],” Roth says. “But what it does reflect is a real worsening of the human rights situation in Hong Kong.”

At a press briefing on Monday after the incident involving Roth, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “allowing or not allowing someone’s entry is China’s sovereign right,” adding that foreign NGOs were supporting “Hong Kong independence separatist activities.”

“The justification they put forward was laughable, and insulting to the people of Hong Kong,” says Roth. “They don’t need me to tell them to take to the streets — they are looking to defend their own human rights, their own political freedoms and their own rule of law.”

Roth says Beijing’s explanation for barring him shows how fearful the authorities are of demonstrations in the city, and is an attempt to persuade those in the mainland not to emulate the pro-democracy protests. “They simply cannot admit to people on the mainland that hundreds of thousands Chinese citizens would take to the street in opposition to the increasingly dictatorial rule that is coming from Beijing.”

The Chinese government has attempted to deter, track and deport journalists and foreign investigators from reporting on forced indoctrination and detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in China’s western province of Xinjiang, highlighted in Roth’s lead essay in the HRW report.

On Monday, Chinese state media reported that the semi-autonomous region of Tibet would introduce forthcoming regulations to “strengthen ethnic unity;” echoing language used in regulations introduced in Xinjiang four years ago.

Beyond the worrying crackdown within China’s own borders, HRW’s report highlights Beijing’s efforts to deter the international community from scrutinizing its human rights abuses, taking “full advantage of the corporate quest for profit to extend its censorship to critics abroad.”

And at the individual level, the export of censorship is reaching dissidents and even universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.; the report notes that students from China who wanted to join campus debates felt unable to do so for fear of being monitored or reported to Chinese authorities.

The export of the Chinese censorship system also permeates governments and international institutions, and has “transformed into an active assault on the international human rights system,”

China has also consistently worked with Russia at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to investigate human rights abuses in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. “China worries that even enforcement of human rights standards someplace else will have a boomerang effect that will come back to haunt it,” says Roth.

Aside from China, the report also looks at several other concerning situations around around the world, including civilians at risk from indiscriminate bombing in Idlib province in Syria, the desperate humanitarian crisis resulting from Saudi-led coalition’s actions in Yemen, the refugee crisis emerging from Maduro’s grip on power in Venezuela, and Myanmar’s denial of the genocide of the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice. And while Roth is encouraged by a growing international response to China’s actions in Xinjiang, particularly from Muslim majority nations, there remains much more to be done. From a U.S. perspective, the report notes that strong rhetoric from officials condemning human rights violations in China is “often undercut by Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping and other friendly autocrats,” as well as the Trump-administration’s own policies in violation of human rights, including forced separation at the U.S.-Mexican border.

The federal government never intended to provide treatment, and though penicillin became widely available in 1943, the men were not treated. At least 28 and perhaps up to 100 men died from syphilis or its complications by the time the study was halted in 1972. Hundreds went on to infect their wives, some of whom then transmitted the disease to their children.

Second, the federal government knowingly withheld treatment for 40 years from the same citizens it was supposed to protect.

There have been numerous reports of Black people being turned away at emergency departments, sent home without having been examined or treated and later dying of the virus

In an August essay about Covid-19 treatment written for the California Health Care Foundation, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, a nephrologist, noted, "No available data suggest such implicit bias is happening on a large scale and resulting in worse outcomes. But the lack of data is less a sign that the problem does not exist than a reflection of what data we choose not to gather."

First, the study had been developed to test the repulsive idea that Black people are biologically different than White people. This idea -- suggesting Black people are somehow less than human -- has powerful echoes in medical training and practice today.

We live in a country organized around structural racism. This means Black Americans are less likely to receive the health care we deserve. We are more likely to live in neighborhoods with poor air quality and fewer outlets to purchase healthy food. We are more likely to work in low-paying "essential" jobs that put us more at risk for contracting Covid-19.

Because the vaccine came to market so quickly, we do not have long-term safety studies, and there are still many unanswered questions.

One of the lasting lessons of Tuskegee is that denying medical care is among the biggest breaches of trust between citizens and their governments. We must ensure that marginalized groups like Black, Indigenous and people of color, immigrants, disabled people and people in prison can receive this vaccine. We must also ensure people are allowed to ask questions to make informed and uncoerced decisions about their health care.

Housing in the best cities has become too expensive for first-time buyers

Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Mr. Ma’s Ant Group, have debts they increasingly resent.

For all of China’s economic success, a long-running resentment of the rich, sometimes called the wealthy-hating complex, has long bubbled below the surface. With Mr. Ma, it has emerged with a vengeance.

“An outstanding people’s billionaire like Jack Ma will definitely be hanged on top of the lamppost,”

The Communist Party seems more than willing to tap into that resentment. This could mean trouble ahead for entrepreneurs and private businesses

Some businesspeople say that the hostility toward Ant and Mr. Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country.

“You can either have absolute control or you can have a dynamic, innovative economy,”

Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa.

He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.

He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.

He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too

. “Given what has happened, eventually Ant will have to be controlled or even majority owned by the state,” said Zhiwu Chen, an economist at the University of Hong Kong’s business school.

Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States.

Instead of disrupting the state system, the companies have cozied up to it. Sometimes they even help the authorities track people. Still, the government has increasingly seen their size and influence as a threat.

some pro-market people in China worry that the country is drifting toward the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capital class, using language that compared capitalist leanings to impurities, flaws and weaknesses.

To these people, some of the language recently used by Eric Jing, Ant’s chairman, evoked the era. At a conference on Dec. 15, he said the company was “looking into the mirror, finding out our shortcomings and conducting a bodily checkup.”

Mr. Trump’s criticism of the relief effort, which he called a “disgrace,” was that it was not generous enough: He called on Congress to provide $2,000 a person in direct payments to households, rather than the $600 included in the bill.

The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 people filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week. That was down from a week earlier but is significantly above the level in early November, before a surge in coronavirus cases prompted a new round of layoffs in much of the country.

A further 398,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two federal programs to expand jobless benefits that were set to expire this month without congressional action. Some forecasters expect the December employment report to show a net loss of jobs.

By waiting until the last minute to act, legislators forced state labor departments — which administer both state and federal unemployment benefits — to prepare for the programs’ end. Many states won’t be able to reverse course in time to avoid a lapse in payments.

Those savings could help fuel a rapid recovery once coronavirus vaccines are widely available, allowing Americans to resume traveling, attending concerts and gathering in bars and restaurants. But that prospect only underscores the need for aid to ensure that businesses make it until then.

our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s

We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.

Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,”

As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality.

Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.

calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.”

The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.

The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters.

The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people.

the CDC had waited “its entire existence for this moment,” but it was so unprepared to deal with COVID-19 that the group initially in charge of the response, the Division of Viral Diseases, had to cede responsibilities to the Influenza Division, despite the fact that COVID-19 is not caused by any kind of influenza virus

Police aren’t just trained to feel like warriors; many are armed for war

Over time, SWAT itself served as a gateway drug for police militarization, as equipment once reserved for special teams, such as AR-15 rifles, were made available to ordinary officers.

the War on Drugs has been roundly discredited as a trillion-dollar failure that incurs thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it has bequeathed us a world where police bearing semiautomatics are armed with the wrong tools for the actual job

Violent crime plays a minuscule role in the day of a modern officer, who spends most of his or her time driving around, taking ho-hum radio calls, and performing the tertiary duties of traffic patroller and mental-health counselor.

the U.S. mental-health crisis has been effectively outsourced to the streets, where police who aren’t trained as social workers or behavioral therapists must perform the ad hoc duties of both.

Rather than respond to the drastically changing nature of American life, our cities and counties use police as a civic Swiss Army knife to solve problems such as homelessness and mental-health emergencies that have little to do with police training.

the failures of American police are not unique, but rather a symptom of a broader breakdown in high-quality governance.

Before it stood for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC was founded as the Communicable Disease Center in the 1940s. Its original mission was to stop an epidemic. The organization’s first 400, Atlanta-based employees were tasked with arresting an outbreak of malaria in the Southeast

Today, the center’s 14,000 employees work “at the speed of science”—that is, slowly and deliberately—to understand an array of health issues, including cancer, obesity, and vaping.

its mission creep has transformed what was once a narrowly focused agency into a kaleidoscopic bureaucracy with no fast-twitch instinct for achieving its founding mission to protect Americans from an epidemic.

The CDC’s recent failures are well known, but worth repeating. It failed to keep track of early COVID-19 cases in part because of a leaden-footed reliance on fax machines and other outdated record-keeping technology. It failed to compile accurate case counts, forcing private actors—such as The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project—to fill the void. It failed its most basic coordination functions as an agency

“The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,”

Most important, the CDC failed to manufacture basic testing equipment. Its initial test kits were contaminated and unusable, which allowed the disease to spread undetected throughout the U.S. for weeks.

Compare the situation in the U.S. with the one in East Asia, where several countries have navigated the pandemic far more deftly. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam all updated their infectious-disease protocols based on what they learned from 21st-century epidemics: SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and MERS in 2012. These countries quickly understood what artillery would be necessary to take on COVID-19, including masks, tests, tracing, and quarantine spaces. Yet the CDC—armed with an $8 billion budget and a global team of scientists and officials—was somehow unprepared to read from the playbook.

The FDA fumbled just as tragically. In January, Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, was prepared to build an in-house coronavirus test

By the time Greninger was ready to set up his lab, the calendar had turned to March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sick, and the outbreak was uncontrollable.

the White House cannot be entirely blamed for the ponderous incompetence of what ought to be the greatest public-health system in the world.

Not every American institution is trapped in amber. For a perhaps surprising example of one that has adapted to 21st-century needs, take the Federal Reserve.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair during the Great Recession, used his expertise about the 1930s economy to avoid a similar collapse in financial markets in 2008. Today’s Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has gone even further, urging Congress and the Treasury to “think big” and add to our already-historic deficits.

the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.

what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed

The crisis has marred Peru’s veneer of economic progress, exposing the deep-rooted inequality and corruption that have thwarted its pandemic response.

“They asked us to stay at home, but a lot of people have no savings so that was impossible. They asked us to wash our hands, but one in three Peruvian households has access to running water,” said Hugo Ñopo, who works for a Peruvian research group, Grade. Only half of Peruvian homes have refrigerators, he said, forcing many families to return daily to crowded markets, a major source of contagion.

About 1.5 million people in Latin America have tested positive — and experts say the real number of infections is much higher.

In May, the death rate in Peru from all causes was twice as high as the average of recent years, according to data compiled by The New York Times, suggesting a coronavirus death toll two to three times the laboratory-confirmed figure.

Peru’s swift descent from regional success story to calamity has demoralized its 32 million citizens and provoked national soul-searching.

“Results haven’t been exactly what we expected,” Mr. Vizcarra said last month. “This isn’t just a health or sanitary crisis, but a social and economic crisis without precedent.”

Under a string of pro-business presidents, millions of Peruvians escaped poverty in this century, allowing them to send children to private schools, install running water or start small businesses.

Two decades of economic growth lifted many incomes but brought few stable jobs and little health care investment, reducing the effectiveness of President Vizcarra’s pandemic measures.

many Peruvians find themselves in the same situation as Mr. Domínguez — forced to risk catching the coronavirus, rather than stay at home and slide into poverty and hunger.

“Here we were congratulating ourselves in Peru for starting to be a middle-class country,” he said. “But it turns out our middle class is very vulnerable, very fragile.”

“Help didn’t arrive. It didn’t arrive. I was crying and screaming for help but no one would come,” Ms. Ponte said, weeping as her husband’s body lay in a bag outside the room where she sat on a bed with her 10-year-old son and 8-month-old baby.

All modern Americans inherit a legacy stained by that suffering. But black Americans also inherit the suffering

Well-designed studies show that discrimination against various signifiers of “blackness” persist in our labor markets.

Note that this could happen even if the people making discriminatory decisions have no particular animus toward black people. All it takes is a slight preference for people whom they perceive to be “like me.”

media and academia aren’t leaning ever further left because a bunch of lefties got into a room and decided to oust the conservatives. Mostly it happened because human beings tend to think that others who agree with them must be especially fine people. That “affinity bias” influences hiring decisions, often unconsciously. The fewer conservatives there were, the more pronounced the skew came, a process that sped up as it advanced.

The way small decisions cascade into major social forces is how Americans who profess no racial hatred — and declare their implacable hatred for racism in all forms — could nonetheless end up contributing to patterns of residential, educational and employment segregation that left the average black American with fewer opportunities for well-paid office work than the average white person.

In a world with covid-19 racing around, that disparity isn’t simply unjust; it’s deadly

One can acknowledge this without endorsing every solution advanced by social justice activists.

But if you think that it is a major social problem when large numbers of people are pushed to the margins of important aspects of American life — well, then you should believe that it’s a problem even when you aren’t one of those marginalized.

I want you to step back and look at our republic through the eyes of a 21 year old who lives in a median American city and who wasn’t educated about our infallible nation by the new Patriotic Common Core Curriculum.

They were born in 1999. Two of the three presidents in their lifetime were elected by minority vote. The only one who was twice elected with a majority vote was denied the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice based on some quite shaky arcana and phony rule-making that they think was largely political bullshit

The president they know the best has a complete disregard for the law or political norms, received about 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, had the help of a foreign enemy, was impeached for soliciting illicit foreign help again and not removed from office. After all that, he did exactly the thing that his party said the black president who had actually received a majority vote couldn’t do in an election year.

Pretty much every person this 21 year old knows is looking for a job in one of the dynamic largely democratic cities where all the growth is in the country but most of these enclaves have minimal national political power and their vote is irrelevant. In the Senate, the Republicans hold a majority of the seats representing states that make up a minority of the country

Nate Silver tells them that for Joe Biden to be assured to win the electoral college he needs to win the popular vote by about 5 points. 5 points!

So, I recognize things are cyclical and there are hypothetical political realignments that could benefit the Democrats. And, yes, I recognize and support our system of checks and balances. But we need to balance that structure against a body politic that believes they are represented or else they are either going to restructure it or burn the whole thing down. 

as a general matter at the time I believed 2015 was probably the best or one of the best years in human history and that 2035 would probably be even better. 

I found that everyone else pretty much landed in the same place. Whether it was the increasing view that we have lost the rope on the climate catastrophe, or that our political system was faltering, or that some of our biggest tech innovators are actually doing more harm to society than good, or that the country poised to supplant us in global dominance is an evil and repressive regime or some combination of it all… There was just this sense that something has shifted, that we have crossed a threshold and maybe our best days are actually behind us.

I was thinking about your comments on The Next Level about the conservative movement.  I know you're still trying to figure out "what happened" because I've also been trying to figure out what happened and how I didn't see it.

I am not sure how much "fault" there is, but I think a big problem was that a large part of the conservative base thought that [conservative elites] were dog whistling when we were on the level.

Conservatives three decades ago talked about Western Civilization and Great Books.  In retrospect, it's amazing to me to think that people really thought the conservative base was interested in things like Aristotle or Shakespeare or Beethoven.  (I was very naive.) 

We talked about “markets” and the wisdom of the masses—and then a plague hits and people scoff at basic safety measures.

We said “personal responsibility”—and they heard that African Americans were poor because they deserved it.

If I had to do it over again, I am not sure I would have figured out the problem any faster.  I would not have imagined that so many people were faking it.  It wasn't an intellectual error so much as being a poor judge of character. 

Which is funny—because we conservatives thought we had such a hard-headed view of human nature.

But all along it turned out that we were deeply sentimental in wanting to believe that “like-minded” people cared about the same things we did, for the same reasons.

The party jammed through a tax cut at a time of low unemployment and low economic growth, making a mockery of modern economics and leaving little flexibility to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. It slashed the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delivering an 80 percent cut to global-health programs designed to fight pandemics, and leaving the agency without the resources necessary to battle COVID-19

It has said almost nothing about the pitiful and reckless responses of the president to the pandemic, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths that should never have occurred. And now it is silent as we learn that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers, while the president said and did nothing.

America’s crisis of governance has been driven by a party that my colleague Tom Mann and I, long before Trump, described as an insurgent outlier in American politics. “It is ideologically extreme,” we wrote in 2012; “scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

A reshaped GOP would be very conservative, but not radical. It would believe in limited government, but a government run by professionals, respecting data and science, and operating efficiently and fairly. It would believe in genuine fiscal discipline. It would try to apply free-market approaches to solving difficult problems, such as climate change. It would believe in the integrity of institutions and insist that those in office adhere to high ethical standards. It would respect the sanctity of alliances and the fundamental values of decency and equal treatment. It would work to broaden its base across racial and ethnic lines, not use division and voter suppression to cling to power.

Sadly, even if Donald Trump is defeated in November, there is no sign that such a party will return anytime soon. But restoring the Republican Party to its traditional values is absolutely essential to preserve the core of our system of governance.

I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump

As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.

“I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

“White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”?

the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

But was I being fragile? Was I being defensive or just trying to share something more personal, intimate and complex than DiAngelo’s all-encompassing sociological perspective? She taught, throughout the afternoon, that the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait, a way to play down the societal racism all white people have thoroughly absorbed.

One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.”

she returned to white supremacy and how she had been imbued with it since birth. “When my mother was pregnant with me, who delivered me in the hospital — who owned the hospital? And who came in that night and mopped the floor?” She paused so we could picture the complexions of those people. Systemic racism, she announced, is “embedded in our cultural definitions of what is normal, what is correct, what is professionalism, what is intelligence, what is beautiful, what is valuable.”

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.”

Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance

the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (“they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak”) and a measure of moral hunger.

Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data that’s about race, we need to be talking about racism. Don’t get caught up in detours.” He wasn’t referring to racism’s legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.

The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white society’s not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to today’s antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singleton’s and DiAngelo’s programs

unning slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture

For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned

if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.”

the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”

“This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?”

Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”

Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”

he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.”

When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”

Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,

She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.

Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist

Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination

whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?

With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered

Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?

I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning.

They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”

he said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed worl

it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for “resiliency and compassion.”

Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.”

He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t “armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,” a place where we “actually love.”

I reread “How to Be an Antiracist.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he writes. “They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”

“I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,” he said. “If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.”

Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications

“The cost,” he told me in January, “is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.” With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about

“When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,” he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, “it’s like the game must be rigged.” He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, “I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.”

But, he suggested, “in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications. You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.”

DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’”

We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”

what matters is the number of tests per million people. The United States, at about 17,855 per million, was the lowest of those five countries — Russia tested at a rate of 21,511, Germany at 24,748, Italy at 30,547, Spain at 28,799 and the UAE at 106,904.

in his stunning lack of concern that others enjoy the same protections he wants for himself, we see that it is not so much that Trump doesn’t believe in science, but that he is determined to ignore science when it serves his personal interests.

The flip side of falling rates of business investment is a slackening pace of economic growth, which economists have termed “secular stagnation.” It’s this decades-long slowdown that has generated the insecure labour force on which Uber and Lyft rely.

This fight for workers’ rights is grounded in a growing recognition that the expansion of the digital economy does not simply reflect the triumph of an unstoppable technological change. Behind Silicon Valley rhetoric, much of what appears to be technological innovation turns out to be a means of circumventing legal regulations, including minimum wage laws

That governments turned a blind eye to Uber and Lyft’s misbehaviour for so long is no surprise. Governments are complicit in making workers more vulnerable. Facing persistently slow economic growth and high rates of unemployment, governments have spent decades trying to coax companies to invest by making it easier to deny workers’ benefits and to avoid paying taxes.

Capitalist economies have been able to extend security to widening circles of workers only in periods of rapid economic growth, when low rates of unemployment made it possible for more and more workers to demand better wages and working conditions.

High rates of economic growth in the mid-20th century – the reference point for any politics that seeks to restore economic growth in the present – were premised on a historically exceptional period. The restoration of stable international trade following two world wars made possible the largest growth of economic productive capacity in human history, not just in Europe and the United States, but worldwide

By the 1970s, rapid expansion had given way to worsening global overcapacity, resulting in rising competition and falling rates of investment in internationally traded goods. People were left scrambling for work in the growing service sector, where the potential for labour productivity growth, and hence economic growth, is significantly lower.

By misclassifying its workers, Uber avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars into US state unemployment insurance schemes. Yet during the Covid-19 economic crisis, Uber lobbied the federal government to step in and pay its drivers’ unemployment benefits anyway.

this bid to restore conditions of rapid economic growth, much like supply-side and trickle-down solutions that failed to produce generalised prosperity, was a failure. The Covid crisis has only made economic prospects less auspicious.

People need security that is not tied to their job. The pandemic has revealed this imperative more than ever before. In a world that is as wealthy as ours, and given the technologies we have already produced – even without the realisation of the dreams of automation – everyone should have access to food, energy, housing and healthcare

The owners of Uber and Lyft know that their business is predicated on a world in which they get to make the key decisions that shape our futures, without our input. The world of work is going to have to be democratised. They are just delaying what should be inevitable.

Last year, a Chinese scientist he worked with published a specific forecast: “It is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”

Humans today are exposed to more deadly new pathogens than ever. They typically come from animals, as global travel, trade and economic development, such as meat production and deforestation, push people, livestock and wildlife closer together

Scientists knew infectious disease outbreaks were becoming more common, with 2010 having more than six times the outbreaks of pathogens from animal origins than in 1980, according to data in a study by Brown University researchers.

Yet plenty was left undone, in areas including funding, early-warning systems, the role of the WHO and coordination with China. A big chunk of U.S. funding went toward protecting Americans against a bioterror attack. Government funding for pandemics has come largely in emergency, one-time packages to stop an ongoing outbreak.

She said a better solution would be to fund public health more like national defense, with much more guaranteed money, year in, year out.

“Will there be another human influenza pandemic?” Dr. Webster asked in a paper presented at an NIH meeting in 1995. “The certainty is that there will be.”

Experts including Dr. Webster were particularly concerned about the potential for spillover in southern China, where large, densely populated cities were expanding rapidly into forests and agricultural lands, bringing people into closer contact with animals. Two of the three influenza pandemics of the 20th century are thought to have originated in China.

Dr. Webster and others warned it could re-emerge or mutate into something more contagious. With U.S. funding, he set up an animal influenza surveillance center in Hong Kong. The WHO, which hadn’t planned for pandemics before, started compiling protocols for a large-scale outbreak, including contingency plans for vaccines.

At a dinner back in the U.S., he remembers one guest saying, “Oh, you really needed to have someone in the U.S. to be impacted to really galvanize the government.”

That “drove home the reality in my own mind of globalization,” said Dr. Fukuda. SARS showed that viruses can crisscross the globe by plane in hours, making a local epidemic much more dangerous.

The WHO’s director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, publicly criticized China. The government under new leaders reversed course. It implemented draconian quarantines and sanitized cities, including a reported 80 million people enlisted to clean streets in Guangdong.

By May 2003, the number of new SARS cases was dwindling. It infected around 8,000 people world-wide, killing nearly 10%.

After SARS, China expanded epidemiologist training and increased budgets for new laboratories. It started working more closely in public health with the U.S., the world’s leader. The U.S. CDC opened an office in Beijing to share expertise and make sure coverups never happened again. U.S. CDC officials visiting a new China CDC campus planted a friendship tree.

In Washington in 2005, a powerful player started driving U.S. efforts to become more prepared. President George W. Bush had read author John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic

Mr. Bush leaned toward the group of 10 or so officials and said, “I want to see a plan,” according to Dr. Venkayya. “He had been asking questions and not getting answers,” recalled Dr. Venkayya, now president of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. ’s global vaccine business unit. “He wanted people to see this as a national threat.”

Mr. Bush launched the strategy in November, and Congress approved $6.1 billion in one-time funding.

The CDC began exercises enacting pandemic scenarios and expanded research. The government created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to fund companies to develop diagnostics, drugs and vaccines.

A team of researchers also dug into archives of the 1918 pandemic to develop guidelines for mitigating the spread when vaccines aren’t available. The tactics included social distancing, canceling large public gatherings and closing schools—steps adopted this year when Covid-19 struck, though at the time they didn’t include wide-scale lockdowns.

A year after the plan was released, a progress report called for more real-time disease surveillance and preparations for a medical surge to care for large numbers of patients, and stressed strong, coordinated federal planning.

A European vaccine makers’ association said its members had spent around $4 billion on pandemic vaccine research and manufacturing adjustments by 2008.

The $6.1 billion Congress appropriated for Mr. Bush’s pandemic plan was spent mostly to make and stockpile medicines and flu vaccines and to train public-health department staff. The money wasn’t renewed. “The reality is that for any leader it’s really hard to maintain a focus on low-probability high-consequence events, particularly in the health arena,” Dr. Venkayya said.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama’s administration put Mr. Bush’s new plan into action for the first time. By mid-June, swine flu, as it was dubbed, had jumped to 74 countries. The WHO officially labeled it a pandemic, despite some evidence suggesting the sickness was pretty mild in most people.

That put in motion a host of measures, including some “sleeping” contracts with pharmaceutical companies to begin vaccine manufacturing—contracts that countries like the United Kingdom had negotiated ahead of time so they wouldn’t have to scramble during an outbreak.

In August, a panel of scientific advisers to Mr. Obama published a scenario in which as many as 120 million Americans, 40% of the population, could be infected that year, and up to 90,000 people could die.

H1N1 turned out to be much milder. Although it eventually infected more than 60 million Americans, it killed less than 13,000. In Europe, fewer than 5,000 deaths were reported.

The WHO came under fire for labeling the outbreak a pandemic too soon. European lawmakers, health professionals and others suggested the organization may have been pressured by the pharmaceutical industry.

France ordered 94 million doses, but had logged only 1,334 serious cases and 312 deaths as of April 2010. It managed to cancel 50 million doses and sell some to other countries, but it was still stuck with a €365 million tab, or about $520 million at the time, and 25 million extra doses.

The WHO had raised scares for SARS, mad-cow disease, bird flu and now swine flu, and it had been wrong each time, said Paul Flynn, a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly and a British lawmaker, at a 2010 health committee hearing in Strasbourg.

Ultimately, an investigation by the council’s committee accused the WHO and public-health officials of jumping the gun, wasting money, provoking “unjustified fear” among Europeans and creating risks through vaccines and medications that might not have been sufficiently tested.

“I thought you might have uttered a word of regret or an apology,” Mr. Flynn told Dr. Fukuda, who as a representative of the WHO had been called to testify.

Back in Washington, scientist Dennis Carroll, at the U.S. Agency for International Development, was also convinced that flu wasn’t the only major pandemic threat. In early 2008, Dr. Carroll was intrigued by Dr. Daszak’s newly published research that said viruses from wildlife were a growing threat, and would emerge most frequently where development was bringing people closer to animals.

If most of these viruses spilled over to humans in just a few places, including southern China, USAID could more easily fund an early warning system.

“You didn’t have to look everywhere,” he said he realized. “You could target certain places.” He launched a new USAID effort focused on emerging pandemic threats. One program called Predict had funding of about $20 million a year to identify pathogens in wildlife that have the potential to infect people.

Drs. Daszak, Shi and Wang, supported by funds from Predict, the NIH and China, shifted their focus to Yunnan, a relatively wild and mountainous province that borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

One key discovery: a coronavirus resembling SARS that lab tests showed could infect human cells. It was the first proof that SARS-like coronaviruses circulating in southern China could hop from bats to people. The scientists warned of their findings in a study published in the journal Nature in 2013.

Evidence grew that showed people in the area were being exposed to coronaviruses. One survey turned up hundreds of villagers who said they recently showed symptoms such as trouble breathing and a fever, suggesting a possible viral infection.

Over the next several years, governments in the U.S. and elsewhere found themselves constantly on the defensive from global viral outbreaks. Time and again, preparedness plans proved insufficient. One, which started sickening people in Saudi Arabia and nearby

On a weekend morning in January 2013, more than a dozen senior Obama administration officials met in a basement family room in the suburban home of a senior National Security Council official. They were brainstorming how to help other countries upgrade their epidemic response capabilities, fueled by bagels and coffee. Emerging disease threats were growing, yet more than 80% of the world’s countries hadn’t met a 2012 International Health Regulations deadline to be able to detect and respond to epidemics.

The session led to the Global Health Security Agenda, launched by the U.S., the WHO and about 30 partners in early 2014, to help nations improve their capabilities within five years.

Money was tight. The U.S. was recovering from the 2008-09 financial crisis, and federal funding to help U.S. states and cities prepare and train for health emergencies was declining. Public-health departments had cut thousands of jobs, and outdated data systems weren’t replaced.

“It was a Hail Mary pass,” said Tom Frieden, who was director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017 and a force behind the creation of the GHSA. “We didn’t have any money.”

At the WHO, Dr. Fukuda was in charge of health security. When the Ebola outbreak was found in March 2014, he and his colleagues were already stretched, after budget cuts and amid other crises.

The United Nations created a special Ebola response mission that assumed the role normally played by the WHO. Mr. Obama sent the U.S. military to Liberia, underscoring the inability of international organizations to fully handle the problem.

It took the WHO until August to raise an international alarm about Ebola. By then, the epidemic was raging. It would become the largest Ebola epidemic in history, with at least 28,600 people infected, and more than 11,300 dead in 10 countries. The largest outbreak before that, in Uganda, had involved 425 cases.

Congress passed a $5.4 billion package in supplemental funds over five years, with about $1 billion going to the GHSA. The flood of money, along with aggressive contact tracing and other steps, helped bring the epidemic to a halt, though it took until mid-2016.

Global health experts and authorities called for changes at the WHO to strengthen epidemic response, and it created an emergencies program. The National Security Council warned that globalization and population growth “will lead to more pandemics,” and called for the U.S. to do more.

r. Carroll of USAID, who had visited West Africa during the crisis, and saw some health workers wrap themselves in garbage bags for protection, started conceiving of a Global Virome Project, to detect and sequence all the unknown viral species in mammals and avian populations on the planet.

Billionaire Bill Gates warned in a TED talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than nuclear war, and urged world leaders to invest more in preparing for one. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helped form a new initiative to finance vaccines for emerging infections, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

Congress established a permanent Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Fund for the CDC in fiscal 2019, with $50 million for that year and $85 million in fiscal 2020.

In May 2018, John Bolton, then President Trump’s national security adviser, dismantled an NSC unit that had focused on global health security and biodefense, with staff going to other units. The senior director of the unit left.

It pushed emerging disease threats down one level in the NSC hierarchy, making pandemics compete for attention with issues such as North Korea, said Beth Cameron, a previous senior director of the unit. She is now vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Deteriorating relations with China reduced Washington’s activities there just as researchers were becoming more certain of the threat from coronaviruses.

Dr. Carroll had earlier been ordered to suspend his emerging pandemic threats program in China.

Dr. Carroll pitched to USAID his Global Virome Project. USAID wasn’t interested, he said. He left USAID last year. A meeting that Dr. Carroll planned for last August with the Chinese CDC and Chinese Academy of Sciences to form a Chinese National Virome Project was postponed due to a bureaucratic hang-up. Plans to meet are now on hold, due to Covid-19.

By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left

a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about

For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.

The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.

Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.

Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.

Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.

It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary

That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice

The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.

Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals

it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means

And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion

Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.

Some companies that rely on undocumented workers pay them below the market rate for jobs, exploiting immigrants and undercutting competitors.

The Obama administration sought to focus work-site enforcement efforts on employers who hired undocumented workers rather than on the workers themselves,

Democrats tried to include a measure in a multitrillion-dollar spending package that would allow a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, but their efforts have failed.

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.