global pandemic

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How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

Washington Post, August 23. 350. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. cfr.org/publication.html.?id=8198. 351. Bor J. 2005. A versatile virus: an expert in infectious diseases explains why avian flu could trigger the next pandemic. Baltimore Sun, July 1. 352. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. cfr.org/publication.html.?id=8198. 353. Arnst C. 2005. A hot zone in the heartland.

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Public Broadcasting System. American Experience Transcript. 1918 Influenza. pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html. 646. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. www.cfr.org/publication/8198/threat_of_global_pandemics.html. 647. Antigua KJC, Choi WS, Baek YH, Song MS. 2019. The emergence and decennary distribution of clade 2.3 4.4 HPAI H5Nx. Microorganisms. 7(6):e156. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms7060156. 648. Weekly Epidemiological Record. 2005. H5N1 avian influenza: first steps towards development of a human vaccine.

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Lederberg J, Shope RE, Oaks SC. 1992. Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (Washington, DC: National Academies Press). 657. Osterholm M, Colwell R, Garrett L, Fauci AS. 2005. The Council on Foreign Relations meeting: the threat of global pandemics. Federal News Service, June 16. www.cfr.org/publication/8198/threat_of_global_pandemics.html. 658. Garrett L. 2005. The next pandemic? Probable cause. Foreign Affairs 84(4). www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84401/laurie-Garrett/the-next-pandemic.html. 659. Lurie N, Saville M, Hatchett R, Halton J. 2020. Developing Covid-19 vaccines at pandemic speed.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

The UK government, in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, WHO, G7, EU and other organisations, is launching the Global Pandemic Radar (GPR). This will be a global surveillance system with a clear purpose: to identify clusters of disease; to prevent clusters seeding epidemics; and to prevent epidemics turning into pandemics. It will unite traditional public health knowledge with twenty-first-century technology, such as genomic sequencing, the smarter use of data, artificial intelligence, plus non-traditional sources of information like rumours on social media. The blueprint for the Global Pandemic Radar is being finalised and, given there is no time to waste, should be functional this year.

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CHAPTER 3 AM I SUPPOSED TO CALL THE FBI? CHAPTER 4 WORRYING ABOUT A RIPPLE ... CHAPTER 5 IF THE PLAN IS CHICKEN POX PARTIES ... CHAPTER 6 IT’S TAKEN AN EMOTIONAL TOLL ON EVERYONE CHAPTER 7 ARE WE COMPLICIT IN THE OUTCOMES? CHAPTER 8 THE VACCINES VS THE VARIANTS CHAPTER 9 THIS DID NOT HAVE TO BE A GLOBAL PANDEMIC NOTES GLOSSARY DRAMATIS PERSONAE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 If anything happens to me, this is what you need to know ... 30 DECEMBER 2019 Known cases: 4 I WAS IN AN AIRPORT lounge on New Year’s Eve 2019 when my mobile rang. I was heading back to England from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had been visiting the Ebola vaccination centres in Rwanda across the politically fraught border region of North Kivu.

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It was also the day that he asked us all a question that would stay with me: ‘Two weeks from now, are there things that we wished we could have done to reshape the challenge we will likely face? ... We have a very narrow window to act.’ The aim, Carter said, was to ‘shape the battlefield’. After Davos, I was sure this was turning into a global pandemic. I discussed with Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief scientific and medical advisers, how the country should prepare and that we should try to start vaccine clinical trials as soon as possible in case US President Donald Trump refused to share future American-made vaccines.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

Since Wuhan’s lockdown began on 23 January, that meant at least ten weeks of the most extreme measures to extinguish virus transmission. Wuhan did cautiously start lifting its restrictions on social mixing on 8 April. But many schools, shops and cinemas remained closed. Gabriel Leung, who correctly predicted that a global pandemic would ensue from the events in Wuhan, was working intensively to define what an exit strategy should look like.8 He and his team in Hong Kong warned against relaxing restrictions too soon. If the Ro crept above 1 again, a second wave of the pandemic would be inevitable. He advised resuming economic activity in lockdown settings under what he called an Ro<1 constraint.

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The WHO pushed China’s misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable and there was no need for travel bans … The WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a twenty-fold increase in cases worldwide and it may be much more than that. The WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes of which there were many. I believe that President Trump’s decision to cut funding to WHO in the middle of a global pandemic constituted a crime against humanity. Is that claim an exaggeration? No, and here is why. WHO exists to protect the health and wellbeing of the world’s peoples. A crime against humanity is a knowing and inhumane attack against a people. By attacking and weakening WHO while the agency was doing all it could to protect peoples in some of the most vulnerable countries in the world, President Trump has, in my view, met the criteria for the act of violence the international community calls a crime against humanity

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Its budget was savaged, reducing epidemic prevention efforts across the world, including in China. The position of White House director for global health security and biothreats was axed by John Bolton, then national security advisor, in 2019, leaving no one to identify and call out the dangers of a global pandemic. The US was spectacularly unprepared for SARS-CoV-2, largely owing to its own acts of self-harm. These turns away from investment in national and global health security reflect a larger trend: a general political antipathy to globalism – that is, an appreciation of the importance of international interdependence, solidarity and cooperation between nations and peoples.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Assembling them in one place reveals how they overlap and reinforce one another. There are links between debt accumulation and debt traps, easy money and financial crises, artificial intelligence (AI) and workplace automation, deglobalization, geopolitical clashes among great powers, inflation and stagflation, currency meltdowns, income inequality and populism, global pandemics and climate change. Each hampers our ability to address the others. A single threat sounds distressing. Ten megathreats happening at once is far, far worse. After examining each threat in its own chapter, I will consider our collective prospects for surviving them. Spoiler alert: without amazing luck, almost unprecedented economic growth, and unlikely global cooperation, this won’t end well.

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The peristent talk and practice of deglobalization and fragmentation of the global economy; the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the risk that this conflict could expand geographically and in unconventional ways; the drum-beats of talk of a new Cold War between the US (and its Western allies) and China (and its effective allies Russia, Iran, and North Korea), and the rising tensions between the US and China on Taiwan; the massive droughts and heat waves from India and Pakistan to Sub-Saharan Africa and to the West of the United States, as global climate change is becoming more severe; the Chinese growth slowdown and the risk of a hard landing given its misguided Zero Covid tolerance policy; a global pandemic that was not yet controlled in many poorer nations and likely to mutate further in new variants; the risk of energy insecurity, of hunger, and even famines given the spike in food, energy, and other commodity prices. These were all ominous signs of a much worse and dangerous future and megathreats in the decade ahead.

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Today, we can see enormous amounts of debt wherever we look. Yet, like an iceberg, much more implicit debt lies below the surface. We know precisely how much money binds lenders and borrowers. We cannot measure the implicit cost of salvaging unfunded elderly health care and pension liabilities, the costs of climate change, the costs of future global pandemics, and other untold liabilities. Our debt crisis would still be terrible even if it was the only megathreat we faced, and even if our policy makers were as wise as Solon. Yet it’s much worse. All of our lessons from history have been based on a world of growing population, with growing labor pools to help local economies climb out of trouble.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

People from GERM would have to work closely with them, making it clear that their job is to support, not supplant, local expertise. If GERM becomes—or even appears to be—something imposed from the outside, some countries will reject its recommendations. For countries that need additional support, GERM should fund or loan public health experts who would participate in this global pandemic-prevention network. They would train and drill together to keep their skills sharp, and they would stay ready to respond locally or globally when they’re needed. Countries with greater need and a high risk of outbreaks would bring in more GERM team members from the network and host them to build local expertise in infectious diseases.

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See epidemic disease surveillance dexamethasone, 113–14, 136 diagnostic tests, 12–13, 19, 61–66 accuracy, 62, 63, 64 antigen tests, 63, 63, 251 cost reduction, 66, 226 innovation in, 64–66, 223–24, 234 lateral flow immunoassay technology, 63, 224 LumiraDx machines for, 64, 224 mass testing, 81 Nexar system, 65 PCR tests, 62–65, 63, 71, 224, 253 prioritizing recipients, 82 speed of results, 62–63, 64, 65 trucker testing, Uganda, 27, 27 ultra-high-throughput processing, 65 U.S. testing failures, 28–30, 29n diarrheal diseases, 5–6 deaths, sub-Saharan Africa, 199 Gates Foundation and, 58 prevention, 6 reducing child mortality and, 215 vaccines and, 6, 6n, 169 digital future, 237–50, 237n COVID lockdowns and digital tools, 237 e-commerce and, 238 education and, 238, 246–48 health data collection, 245 “metaverse,” 242–44 online meetings and platforms, 238, 241–43 remote-work options, 239–41 smartphones and, 237 telehealth services, 244–45 video calls, 249–50 video conferencing, 238 workplace augmented reality, 244n workplace automation, 244 workplace productivity, 241 disease modelers, 77–80 benefits for public health, 79 COVID deaths prediction, 80 data for, 79–80, 82 meteorologist analogy, 78–79, 79n Douglas Scientific, 65 drug development, 122–38, 222 accidental invention, 123 of acetaminophen, 123 of antibodies, 134–35 of antiviral drugs, 123–24 of chloroform, 123 CHO platform and, 134–35 clinical trials, 117, 126–27, 126n costs, 131–32 COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, 129–30, 129n drug candidates, chance of success, 140, 140n global pandemic plan and, 220–21 high-throughput screening, 125 history of, 122–23 of HIV antivirals, 124–25 human challenge study, 130–31 identifying targets (proteins), 124 infection-blocking drugs, 174–75, 220 innate immune response boosters, 137 innovations, 123–25, 130, 137–38 of Paxlovid, 124 phases of, 125–28 placebos, 126–27 Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success, 140 production/manufacturing, 131, 221 RECOVERY trial, U.K., 128, 221 regulatory approval, 128, 220–21 structure-guided drug discovery, 124 synthesized drugs, 122–23 targeting patients and training health care workers, 136–37, 137n E Ebola, 4, 11 contact tracing and, 97 EOCs in Nigeria and, 50, 213 epidemic (2014), 11–13, 56, 213 genetic sequencing and finding origins of an outbreak, 70 mutations (variants), 69 outbreaks (1976 to 2018), 7 polio surveillance teams and, 56 preventing outbreaks, 70 transmission, 11, 12 viral-vectored vaccine for, 156 endemic disease, 6, 188, 226 COVID as, 6, 216, 218 endemic killers, 7 EOCs (emergency operations centers), 49–51, 50, 212 epidemic disease surveillance, 53–82, 217 active or passive, 56, 226 birth/death records and, 57–58, 225 blog posts and social media, 56 causes of death, 58–59, 81 child mortality and, 58–59 computer modeling and, 82 diagnostic tests, 54, 61–66 digital data system, 64 disease modelers, 77–80 experts linking with governments, 76 genetic information on pathogens and, 68–70, 69, 76–77, 81, 225–26 global pandemic plan, 225–27 health systems and, 55–56, 77, 81 integration of systems, 226 in Japan, postal workers and, 57 on the local level, 54 mass testing and, 81 obstacles to, 54 ongoing for COVID, 217 reporting from pharmacists, 57 Seattle Flu Study and, 66–76 signals in the environment, 57 steps to take, 81–82 underinvestment in, 53 wastewater testing, 57 West African polio surveillance teams, 57 epidemics, 6, 7, 13 Global Fund and, 252 “silent epidemics,” 7–8 epidemiology/epidemiologists, 47, 68–70, 69, 76 European Union (EU) COVID vaccination in, 154 development aid by, 232 vaccine approval and, 169 vaccine manufacture and, 221 vaccine purchase, 229 Exemplars in Global Health, 26 F Famulare, Michael, 72, 72n, 80 Fauci, Anthony, 15–16, 86, 88, 153 FDA (U.S.

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., 128, 221 regulatory approval, 128, 220–21 structure-guided drug discovery, 124 synthesized drugs, 122–23 targeting patients and training health care workers, 136–37, 137n E Ebola, 4, 11 contact tracing and, 97 EOCs in Nigeria and, 50, 213 epidemic (2014), 11–13, 56, 213 genetic sequencing and finding origins of an outbreak, 70 mutations (variants), 69 outbreaks (1976 to 2018), 7 polio surveillance teams and, 56 preventing outbreaks, 70 transmission, 11, 12 viral-vectored vaccine for, 156 endemic disease, 6, 188, 226 COVID as, 6, 216, 218 endemic killers, 7 EOCs (emergency operations centers), 49–51, 50, 212 epidemic disease surveillance, 53–82, 217 active or passive, 56, 226 birth/death records and, 57–58, 225 blog posts and social media, 56 causes of death, 58–59, 81 child mortality and, 58–59 computer modeling and, 82 diagnostic tests, 54, 61–66 digital data system, 64 disease modelers, 77–80 experts linking with governments, 76 genetic information on pathogens and, 68–70, 69, 76–77, 81, 225–26 global pandemic plan, 225–27 health systems and, 55–56, 77, 81 integration of systems, 226 in Japan, postal workers and, 57 on the local level, 54 mass testing and, 81 obstacles to, 54 ongoing for COVID, 217 reporting from pharmacists, 57 Seattle Flu Study and, 66–76 signals in the environment, 57 steps to take, 81–82 underinvestment in, 53 wastewater testing, 57 West African polio surveillance teams, 57 epidemics, 6, 7, 13 Global Fund and, 252 “silent epidemics,” 7–8 epidemiology/epidemiologists, 47, 68–70, 69, 76 European Union (EU) COVID vaccination in, 154 development aid by, 232 vaccine approval and, 169 vaccine manufacture and, 221 vaccine purchase, 229 Exemplars in Global Health, 26 F Famulare, Michael, 72, 72n, 80 Fauci, Anthony, 15–16, 86, 88, 153 FDA (U.S.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Kessel, and Melissa Chan, “Made in China, Exported to the World: The Surveillance State,” New York Times, April 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html; “Chinese Tech Supports Ecuador’s Response to COVID-19,” Xinhua Net, May 30, 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020–05/30/c_139100735.htm; Aidan Powers-Riggs, “Covid-19 Is Proving a Boon for Digital Authoritarianism,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, August 17, 2020, https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/covid-19-proving-boon-digital-authoritarianism.   39.  Erica Chenoweth et al., “The Global Pandemic Has Spawned New Forms of Activism—and They’re Flourishing,” The Guardian, April 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/20/the-global-pandemic-has-spawned-new-forms-of-activism-and-theyre-flourishing; Anna Lührmann et al., Autocratization Surges—Resistance Grows: Democracy Report 2020 (Gothenburg: V-Dem Institute, 2020), 21, https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54–0bc5–4421–89ae-fb20dcc53dba/democracy_report.pdf.   40.  

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No one knew what the ultimate death toll could be, but a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation was terrifying. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that up to 1.7 million Americans could die. German officials worried that they could lose half a million people. Everyone had known some sort of global pandemic was possible; some countries had even planned for it. But now that one had arrived, many leaders were flying blind. To curb the spread, economies were deliberately shut down, but that triggered an unimaginable worldwide recession that rivaled that of the Great Depression of the 1930s (or so it seemed for a while).

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This was apparent in the two decades following the Great War and the Great Influenza, commonly referred to as the “interwar years”—one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in modern times. The events of the interwar period are worth reflecting upon. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Great Influenza demonstrated the potential for global pandemics to shape international order by undermining the material capabilities of key states and by producing contingent historical events, such as the illness of Woodrow Wilson, that ripple through time. In the immediate postwar period, the hangover from the pandemic was not the sole—or in many cases the primary—driver of world events.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

From ill members of staff to remote working to IT issues with everyone working remotely to furloughing or laying off staff and closing entire departments or completely shutting down – managers and those in leadership positions were very quickly forced to deal with issues and situations that most had never had to tackle before – and certainly not all at once, during something as intense and as threatening as a global pandemic and threatened economic collapse. But no matter the exact circumstances or situation, managing in a crisis will put anyone’s management skills to the test. While there wasn’t a ‘How to Manage in a Global Pandemic’ rule book to consult (although I’m sure several will have now been published), there are certain things to keep in mind during a crisis of any kind. Be transparent. Even if you don’t have all the answers, share the ones you’re able to.

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Work, for those lucky enough to have it – whether a ‘9 to 5’, steady freelance gigs or enough paid hours to pay the rent – was what gave our days, weeks and lives structure – the takeaway coffee on the way to the station, the podcasts listened to on our daily commute, the faces of colleagues seen day in and day out, the misery of train delays on the way home. The global pandemic blew all of this to smithereens. People worldwide lost their jobs in incomprehensible numbers. The world of work has been changed in unprecedented ways. People who had never worked from home before were suddenly doing it every day. People who previously had no idea what Zoom was were suddenly using it several times a day for important meetings (and the occasional pub quiz).

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They’ll allow you to manage your professional reputation, your work and your sanity well. You’re teaching people how to treat you at work, and hopefully setting a positive example for other people in the office at the same time. Setting boundaries when you don’t work in an office For those of us who were able to work at home during the global pandemic, working remotely brought with it a whole new host of problems. Suddenly a huge part of the world’s workforce were communicating via video calls, huddled in messy kitchens while their toddlers wailed in another room, or hid from their partner’s loud conference call while stuffed in whatever corner of their home wasn’t piled with laundry.

Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Honest debate is one thing, but our response was demoralized by a sizable enterprise devoted to manufacturing skepticism about any steps that could potentially reduce the scope of the spread, even obviously effective measures like masks or vaccines. In this book, I examine the shortcomings that exposed America to the worst effects of this virus, and I try to draw some lessons on how we can make ourselves more resilient to similar threats. We must be better prepared when another dangerous pathogen inevitably emerges and threatens a global pandemic, but our purpose shouldn’t be simply to make sure we’re better equipped to respond, but to secure a greater assurance that a global contagion on the scale of COVID can never happen again. Reflecting on where our response fell short can provide a roadmap for how to be more effective when the next virus emerges.

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Our health officials were overwhelmed early on with repatriating Americans from China and focused too little attention on preparing the homeland for the inevitable spread of the virus. Many publicly clung to a tragic view that SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t become epidemic here. By March, when the evidence that it would spark a global pandemic could no longer be discounted, it was too late. That relative complacency was being fed by reliance on faulty information that had US officials believing that the virus wasn’t spreading here, even long after it had actually arrived in our communities. It was driven largely by a failure to field a test that would let us screen for it.

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Most countries still had laws in place that tied their local action not to the declaration of a PHEIC, but to the declaration of a pandemic by the WHO—a higher standard that had not yet been met in the WHO’s estimation. Indeed, the WHO wouldn’t declare the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic until five weeks later, on March 11, well after it was clear to anyone watching the news that a global pandemic was already under way. “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” the director general said at a briefing held to announce the belated declaration of a pandemic.75 By that point, the ground was shifting. A day earlier, on March 10, President Xi visited Wuhan to mark the culmination of a harsh seventy-six-day lockdown of that city that had largely succeeded in arresting the epidemic there.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Across the country at the state, local, and federal levels, political actors rammed through hundreds of structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections, resulting in what Time magazine would later call “a revolution in how people vote.”15 Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by state and county election officials. Many changes, allegedly justified by the global pandemic, were broad reforms that Democrats had long desired. The crisis was their chance to sneak in contentious policies through the back door. The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end.

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His final stop in Cleveland was at Burke Lakefront Airport, where masked guests in one hundred spaced-out vehicles honked in the place of polite applause.4 In Pennsylvania, he hosted small drive-in events in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh. The last two weeks of the 2020 election had been the most normal anyone on the campaign had experienced in months. Just as Biden locked up his nomination in March, the country locked down in response to the coronavirus outbreak, a global pandemic that had spread across the world from its origin in Wuhan, China. The pandemic crushed the thriving economy, one of Trump’s major selling points as the country underwent what he liked to call a “blue-collar boom.”5 His deregulatory agenda, tax cuts, willingness to tackle illegal immigration to stop the flood of cheap labor into the country, and renegotiation of trade deals to strengthen industry had jump-started an economy that had been flagging throughout his predecessor’s two terms.

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Trump was the first president in forty years who hadn’t invaded a country or launched a new war.4 He brought peace to the Middle East, brokering a series of historic deals between Arab nations and Israel.5 And he shifted the nation’s foreign policy focus to China, a nation that much of the country had come to view as a serious adversary. The spread of the COVID-19 virus from China changed everything. The global pandemic squelched the thriving economy that was Trump’s best argument for re-election. In fact, it shut down the country entirely.6 Children were banned from school. Religious adherents were prevented from worship. Restaurants and gathering places were shuttered. It gave the media massive reserves of fuel for their unhinged anti-Trump operation.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Likewise, prominent Democrats in 2020 considered trying to use one of the market rescue programs the Fed had established to funnel cheap money to state and local governments in lieu of passing legislation. These issues are unlikely to go away. While the Fed’s actions in 2020 came in response to an unprecedented global pandemic, the pages ahead will make clear that the financial vulnerabilities that necessitated huge Fed action were kindling waiting for a spark. They were known weaknesses, and many of them still exist. It is somewhere between possible and likely that Fed market interventions like the ones that took place during the pandemic will be required again in the future.

…

Nobody, however, questioned that they needed to do whatever they could to fix the government bond market. So it was, on a Sunday in March, that the central bank voted to begin rescuing Wall Street and the economy for the second time in a dozen years. * * * — The root cause of the crisis in 2020 was a global pandemic, not irresponsible risk-taking by banks and investors. Likewise, the solution was no repeat of the bank-specific bailouts of 2008. This time around, the Fed would buy government-backed bonds—huge sums of them—until the market traded more normally. It was a pumped-up version of a bond-buying program that had first been enacted more than a decade earlier.[7] Of course, some investors would undeniably benefit, including hedge funds that had amassed huge Treasury holdings as part of a trade that was usually safe but that had turned disastrous in the face of the March 2020 volatility.

…

“We were always too slow and too timid in responding to the crisis,” Kashkari told 60 Minutes, referencing the prior meltdown.[11] “Today, whether it’s healthcare policy makers, fiscal policy makers, which means Congress, or the Federal Reserve, we should all be erring on the side of overreacting to try to avoid the worst economic outcomes.” The Fed would do just that in the months ahead. In the spring of 2020 and over the two years that followed, as the global pandemic first imperiled society’s most important financial markets and then—together with massive government spending—touched off an unexpected chain of events that revived long-dormant inflation, America’s central bank would more fully embrace its role as the most powerful economic institution the modern world had ever known.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

And all 330 million Americans were along for the ride. Moments after our “invisible enemy” was named, the nation’s foremost disease expert, speaking at a public forum in Aspen, Colorado, sought to elucidate the virus. He said the risk was “relatively low” to most Americans but hedged. “Is there a risk that this is going to turn into a global pandemic?” said Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Absolutely, yes.” For more than thirty-five years, Fauci had served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the National Institutes of Health, advising six presidents on everything from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to the disease that had been named just moments before.

…

On March 9, many weeks after Bright and Bowen and others had sounded the alarm on the looming mask shortage, Kadlec’s office sought a meeting with the CEO of 3M to get more masks flowing into the stockpile, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. On March 11, the WHO made it official: COVID-19 was a global pandemic. That same day, responding to an outbreak in New Orleans, officials in Louisiana requested tens of thousands of respirators, masks, face shields, and gowns. Oregon requested 400,000 N95s and 600,000 surgical masks. And the requests kept coming. Officials in North Carolina, seeing little help from the federal government, reached out to the home improvement chain Lowe’s, which is headquartered there, to see about buying every mask the company had.

…

“How are you today? What can I do for you?” It was near 5 p.m. on March 15, 2020, the same day the CDC warned against gatherings of more than fifty people, just two days after President Donald Trump had declared a national state of emergency, four days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and many weeks after this call should have come. “Health and Human Services has asked for some logistics planning help,” VanHerck said. Polowczyk took that to mean that HHS secretary Azar or ASPR Kadlec had reached out for help from the Defense Department. “Yeah, uh, okay,” Polowczyk said.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

The coronavirus may have amplified the challenges facing today’s global companies, but I believe now more than ever in the positive role these corporations—and their boards—can play in society. Businesses are reckoning with a period of shocks, tremendous uncertainty, and heightened complexity that is testing whether corporations, and indeed capitalism itself, will survive. The damage caused by the 2020 global pandemic—both in economic terms and in the cost to human health—has intensified a debate about corporate power that was already underway. Today, popular opinion is turning against large corporations, and political, social, and cultural landscapes are shifting at a rapid clip. Boards go about their work acutely aware of the stakes of their decisions.

…

Failure could imperil the health of the global economy and, with it, jobs, prosperity, human progress, and the “American way of life” that not only Americans but people around the world have long pursued. No one organization, government, or individual can provide stability amid the turbulence. But the 2020 global pandemic has revealed that corporations have an important and central role to play in navigating global disruption. In all times, but especially in times of turmoil, corporate boards have a responsibility as custodians not just of a single organization, but of our economic well-being as a whole. The prosperity of society relies on corporate boards succeeding.

…

The growth of anti-corporate sentiment in recent years has even led some to hope for such an outcome—there are those who would cheer the destruction of the corporate landscape as we know it. Of course, they overlook the devastating consequences of such a scenario: the economy would contract, investment in innovation would plummet, millions of jobs would be lost, pension and health-care benefits would evaporate, and living standards would collapse worldwide. The 2020 global pandemic and economic shutdown has offered an unnerving idea of what economic carnage might look like in terms of spiking unemployment and plummeting growth prospects, especially in the most affected sectors of travel, tourism, and retail. Recent memory provides plenty of examples of the fallout of individual corporate failure.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In many ways, we’re even more vulnerable today. Densely packed cities, wars, natural disasters, and international air travel mean a deadly virus propagated in a small village in Africa can be transmitted almost anywhere in the world, including the United States, within 24 hours. . . . Biosecurity and global pandemics cut across all national boundaries. Pathogens, viruses, and diseases are equal-opportunity killers. When the crisis comes, we will wish we had more funding and more global cooperation. But then, it will be too late. It was too late. We had ample warning to gird ourselves for Covid-19. But beyond the specific dangers of a pandemic, we should have recognized the general possibility of a shock to our system.

…

Economic anxiety bred cultural anxiety, hostility to immigration, and a nostalgic desire to return to a familiar past. Right-wing populism gained strength across the West. The third shock is the one we are living through. It may be the biggest of them all, and it is certainly the most global. What began as a health-care problem in China soon became a global pandemic. But that was only the start. The medical crisis prompted a simultaneous lockdown of all business across the globe, resulting in a Great Paralysis, the cessation of economics itself. By some measures, the economic damage from this pandemic already rivals that of the Great Depression. The political consequences will play out over the coming years in different ways in different countries.

…

A couple of months later, the British politician Michael Gove was quizzed about his advocacy for Brexit and asked to name a few economists who supported his view that leaving the European Union would be good for business. His response: “People in this country have had enough of experts.” Now that the world has experienced a global pandemic, it should have become painfully clear that people need to listen to experts. But that is not exactly how things have worked out. To be sure, in many countries, particularly in East Asia, there was a strong, instinctive deference to authority, especially scientific authority. Taiwan’s near-flawless response was overseen by its vice president, a Johns Hopkins-educated epidemiologist who previously steered Taiwan through the SARS epidemic as health minister.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

To get a more effective national government, we must first collectively agree on shared objectives—like preventing pandemic and extending life spans. We must then judge our national leaders on their ability to achieve those objectives, just as we already fire our mayors when they take too long to clear the streets of snow in winter. The fight against global pandemic requires not only more national competence, but also a multinational entity that monitors the globe for new outbreaks and speedily closes the travel routes that spread death. Across the world, a plague that begins in an Indian pit latrine or a Chinese open-air market can infect billions. Even the best-run countries were flattened by COVID-19.

…

After World War II, NATO was given a clear mission—preventing an attack on its members by the Soviet Union—and a budget commensurate with it. NATO was spectacularly successful. In the same way, a revitalized international health organization must monitor the emergence of any new infectious disease and set rules about disease risk, reporting, and travel. To reduce the risk of global pandemic, the rich world should be willing to contribute more to ensure better sanitation in the world’s poorest cities. The price of that aid could be the enforcement of bans on excessive mixing of humans, bats, pigs, and other animals involved in spreading viral disease, along with limits on excessive use of antibiotics that might seed the next superbug.

…

It must have the ability to investigate without restraint. There must be consequences for countries that fail to limit risks. And it must be sufficiently resourced. After World War II, the West invented such a structure, and it defended Europe from the Soviet Union for forty years. The threat of global pandemic is similarly dire and requires no less a commitment. Even with such a structure, pandemics can still occur. The risk will never be zero. In this chapter, we have focused on the first source of urban vulnerability. Cities are nodes on a global network, and they provide the ports of entry for any new disease.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. It’s a mildly technical term, zoonosis, unfamiliar to most people, but it helps clarify the biological complexities behind the ominous headlines about swine flu, bird flu, SARS, emerging diseases in general, and the threat of a global pandemic. It helps us comprehend why medical science and public health campaigns have been able to conquer some horrific diseases, such as smallpox and polio, but unable to conquer other horrific diseases, such as dengue and yellow fever. It says something essential about the origins of AIDS. It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.

…

(It’s a little confusing, I concede, that they use R0 as the symbol for basic reproduction rate and plain R as the symbol for recovered in an SIR model. That’s just a clumsy coincidence, reflecting the fact that both words begin with the letter R.) R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. 28 Plasmodium falciparum isn’t the only malarial parasite of global concern. Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, most human cases are caused by Plasmodium vivax, the second-worst of the four kinds adapted particularly to infecting people. (The other two, P. ovale and P. malariae, are far more rare and not nearly so virulent, causing infections that usually pass without medical treatment.)

…

Most of those papers are narrowly technical, addressing the details of molecular evolution, reservoir relationships, or epidemiology, but some take a broader view, asking What is it that makes this virus unusual? and What have we learned from the SARS experience? One thought that turns up in the latter sort is that “humankind has had a lucky escape.” The scenario could have been very much worse. SARS in 2003 was an outbreak, not a global pandemic. Eight thousand cases are relatively few, for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and the impact of the outbreak, of which humanity’s good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics—finding the virus and identifying it—performed by Malik Peiris, Guan Yi, their partners in Hong Kong, and their colleagues and competitors in the United States, China, and Europe.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Only about a third of Americans trusted Donald Trump’s medical advice.22 One poll in late April showed that 62 percent of the French had no confidence in their government’s handling of the crisis, with commentators, on both the right and the left, comparing France’s response to Covid to the country’s “strange defeat” by Germany in 1940.23 At its worst, this distrust created conspiracy theories: that the virus had been deliberately manufactured, either by China or Big Pharma or indeed the United States; that it spread through 5G towers and masks; that it was a plot to kill off the old. Bill Gates was blamed, because long before Covid he had (correctly) warned about the danger of a global pandemic in a TED talk, and invested cash in trying to find a cure. This nonsense has consequences: people have burned down scores of 5G towers, including sometimes towers that served medical facilities. A third of Americans say that they won’t get themselves vaccinated if one is found. OVERLOADED—AND OVER?

…

“The model of how democracy began,” says Bass, “is also a study in how it can founder and fall.”6 Britain was slow into lockdown not just because Boris Johnson was incompetent but also because of his libertarian instincts (Johnson has a bust of Pericles on his desk). In France, Macron went ahead with the elections that helped spread the virus, partly because he thought it was the right thing to do. But wait. If there was ever a test that autocracies ought to ace, it is a global pandemic. The problem is what these draconian administrations do to you the rest of the time. Moreover, there is actually nothing antidemocratic about giving elected officials more power in the short term, in order to beat a disease—providing those powers are temporary and pragmatic. Governor Cuomo’s decision to tell the National Guard to look for ventilators in New York and Johnson’s decision to instruct the army to build a hospital in East London were admirable responses to a crisis—not Covid coups.

…

Covid-19 was the third outbreak of a Coronavirus this century—after SARS (2003) and MERS (2012). It had also watched the damage done by swine flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014, and Zika in 2016. For a while America looked prepared. Under Bill Clinton it created a National Pharmaceutical Stockpile to store supplies. George W. Bush warned the American public to beware of a global pandemic, declaring that “if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” Barack Obama drew up ambitious plans to produce twenty million reusable face masks and cheap ventilators. But when the stockpile was tapped to deal with swine flu, Ebola, and Zika, the supplies were never fully replaced.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

I thought long and hard about including fear and anxiety in this list, but in the end I decided to add them to a list of 5 things that won’t change over the next 50 years, which appears at the very end of the book. Why these 5 key trends? Any list is inevitably highly personal and subjective, but ageing is hard to disagree with. Indeed, demographic trends are more certain than virtually anything else because short of a global pandemic, nuclear annihilation or rogue asteroids, we can be pretty sure how many people will be around in 50 years’ time based on how many are already here and on current death and fertility rates. Global connectivity is a little less certain, not least because there are some good arguments about the end of globalization and the emergence of (re)localization.

…

Industrial markets will split between luxury and low-cost options, with access to services like health and education, transport and 16 FUTURE FILES security similarly polarizing, depending on your ability to pay. The economic middle class will eventually disappear in most developed countries, with people either moving upwards into a new global managerial elite or downwards into a new enslaved working (or not working) class. Anxiety If “they” don’t get you, a global pandemic or high interest rates probably will. At least that’s how many people will feel in the future. Trust in institutions will all but evaporate and the speed of change will leave people longing for the past. This insecurity is to some extent generational, but whether you are 18 or 80 there will be a growing feeling of powerlessness and a continual state of anxiety that will fuel everything from an interest in nostalgia and escapism to a growth in narcissism and localization.

…

The average person now carries two to three times as much weight in their pockets and bags as they did two decades ago, so targeted personal fitness programs will soon have to appear unless someone invents a lightweight alternative or micro-payments become more widely accepted. Coins and banknotes could also disappear almost overnight for another reason. In all the recent talk about the consequences of a global pandemic, it appears to me that one important implication has been missed: banknotes and coins tend to be dirty, so people will refuse to handle them if they think they could be a conduit for disease. In Japan, some ATMs already heat banknotes as a precautionary hygiene measure; in an age of anxiety, “hot money” could be a very cool idea.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The Future of Agriculture Lessons from Brazil Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Racial Identity Contents List of Figures Preface 1 Introduction 2 Engines of Progress 3 Levelling Up 4 Divided Cities 5 Remote Work: The Threat to Cities 6 Cities, Cyberspace and the Future of Community 7 Beyond the Rich World 8 The Spectre of Disease 9 A Climate of Peril 10 Conclusion: Better Together Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index List of Figures Figure 1: More than half the world’s population now lives in cities Figure 2: Income dispersion across cities varies from country to country Figure 3: Rising sea levels will leave many cities under water Preface We live in tumultuous times. In the space of just a few years, we have witnessed a surge in populist politics across the world, a global pandemic, a spike in environmental disasters and a fraying of geopolitical relations demonstrated by the tragic war in Ukraine and escalating tensions over Taiwan. That has all occurred against a backdrop of dramatic technological changes that are fundamentally altering the way we work and relate to one another.

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In 1987, on the back of these triumphs, the US Surgeon General William Stewart boldly declared: ‘The war against diseases has been won.’10 Even in poor countries, where rates of death from preventable infectious diseases are still much higher, progress has been enormous. Infectious diseases seemed poised for defeat. The devastating toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has shattered this naiveté. That global pandemic has led to the loss of over 20 million lives, a similar death toll to the First World War.11 Most of these deaths have occurred in poor countries, though rich countries have certainly not been spared, with over one million deaths in the US alone. Many of our readers will have lost loved ones, with the burden of mortality having fallen disproportionately on the elderly, medics and essential workers who were most exposed to the pandemic, particularly in the first year before vaccines became available.

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About 250 people can fit into a single carriage on the New York subway, greater than the size of a typical medieval village.23 In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the global aviation industry completed 4.5 billion passenger journeys, nearly all of which departed and arrived in cities.24 Only through cities can an outbreak of a novel disease in central China cascade in a matter of weeks into a global pandemic. The Origins of Infectious Disease When our ancient ancestors transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, they forever changed our relationship with the world of infectious diseases. Rising population density made it easier for microorganisms to establish themselves in multiple hosts.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

The British economist Lord Nicholas Stern once remarked that climate change results from history’s greatest market failure—the failure to attach a price to the costs of CO2 emissions.23 If this is true, then as the coronavirus crisis of 2020 demonstrates, the failure to build adequate defenses against global pandemics must be a close second. Even the best-funded global public health infrastructure cannot offer guarantees, but as 2020 began, the disproportion between pandemic risk and the investment in global public health was nothing short of grotesque. * * * — To talk in terms of “market failure” understates the force of the point.

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Kristalina Georgieva, IMF managing director, repeated the warning she had made in Munich the week before. But what those warnings added up to was a downward revision of the IMF’s growth forecasts for China from 6 to 5.6 percent. Bad news, but hardly a disaster. That was about to change. With hindsight, we can see that it was in the third week of February that the global pandemic began in earnest. Starting on February 15, significant outbreaks were registered in South Korea, Iran, and Italy. The first death in Iran may have occurred on January 22, though it was not registered at the time.30 The regime was too busy celebrating the forty-first anniversary of the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran and rigging local elections.

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“For the neighborhood salesmen, for the shop owners in city centers, for domestic employees, for millions of Brazilians, Brazil cannot stop,” the ad said. Would there be casualties? Yes. As Bolsonaro remarked with a shrug: “Sorry, some will die.” On the familiar left-right political spectrum, President AMLO of Mexico is the antithesis of Bolsonaro, but even after the global pandemic was officially declared, he showed a similar disregard for the disease. Early cases were largely imported by wealthy Mexicans holidaying in America. This gave succor to the idea that the Mexican masses enjoyed immunity.54 AMLO urged audiences across the country not to be disturbed by exaggerated media reports.55 He accused conservatives of delighting in the spread of the epidemic and exaggerating failures of policy so as to destabilize his government.56 While establishment media spluttered with indignation, AMLO himself flouted scientific advice, refusing to wear a mask or to comply with social distancing.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Empire explains why we have a diaspora of millions of Britons spread around the world. Empire explains the global pretensions of our Foreign and Defence secretaries. Empire explains the feeling that we are exceptional and can go it alone when it comes to everything from Brexit to dealing with global pandemics. Empire helped to establish the position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres, and also ensures that the interests of finance trump the interests of so many other groups in the twenty-first century. Empire explains how some of our richest families and institutions and cities became wealthy.

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Nearly two centuries after the company’s foundation and more than 150 years after the opening of the Suez Canal, which permitted wealthy Britons to visit Asia in comfort and style, the British are the world’s fourth most enthusiastic tourists, spending $71.4 billion on tourism every year, behind Germany, the USA and China, but ahead of France, Canada and Korea.9 More than three-quarters of residents in England and Wales hold passports, according to the last Census in 2011, compared to just 40 per cent in the USA.10 In 2018, when global pandemics were merely the stuff of dystopian fiction, the British took over 71.7 million trips abroad and in the month of August 2019 alone11 British travellers made 9.4 million trips abroad.12 Five per cent of these trips were to America, which has remained a popular destination for the British since the colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century.13 But it’s not just our predilection for travel and relocation that has been shaped by our imperial history – the way we travel and live abroad has been influenced by it too.

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For when it comes to the question of how our politics has been shaped and influenced by empire, there is one issue that dominates all else – a political event which has been compared to Suez by many, and which also happens to be the most divisive and contentious political issue of our lifetime: Brexit. Difficult as it has been confronting the subject of empire in the middle of a global pandemic, I have consoled myself during these challenging months that I have at least been offered respite from the enervating question of our relationship to Europe. There turns out, however, to be no escape, with the argument that our departure from the European Union has been ultimately inspired by our experience of empire being one of the most common criticisms of Brexit.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

This is what we witnessed with COVID-19, which is infectious while lying undetected for up to two weeks. Hiding for two weeks allows it to jump from one carrier to many others before it is detected, and sparing most of its victims allows it to live longer and continue to spread. Spreading through the air we breathe while being this smart is what turned COVID-19 into a global pandemic. But intelligent as it may be among viruses, COVID-19 is superstupid when compared to the lowest level of superintelligence humanity is currently creating. And yet how has our collective intelligence served us in our handling of the COVID-19 outbreak? Our mistakes, fortunately, did not lead us to total destruction, simply because COVID-19 itself did not have that capability, at least at the time of writing this.

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Our mistakes, fortunately, did not lead us to total destruction, simply because COVID-19 itself did not have that capability, at least at the time of writing this. Here are some of the glaring mistakes we made. We ignore the evangelists For years prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, scientists, public health experts, prominent public figures and global organizations warned us about the possibility of a global pandemic. They provided evidence for this and estimated the impact it would have. They made it clear that we needed to prepare for an imminent, widespread pandemic. Despite the outbreaks of SARS and other infectious diseases acting as a clear and present reminder of the possibilities, reports by the World Health Organization fell on deaf ears.

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And yet here we are, decades on from Turing and Good’s warnings, still unprepared, even as the speed of development outpaces our wildest expectations. What can I say? When the warnings depict a scenario that is far removed from our common experience, our impulse is to ignore it. We’re ignoring the messengers warning of the threat of superintelligence. Just as we ignored the threat of a global pandemic. And even as the events start to unfold to confirm the validity of the warning . . . We hide the facts and react late The story of the pandemic is well known, of course, but it’s worth revisiting here because there are many potential parallels between the way we reacted to the virus and the way we are reacting to the potential threat of AI.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Despite the tragedies of Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and a long list of other school shootings, we don’t protect our students and restrict the kinds of guns that can be purchased because some people’s allegiance is to the Second Amendment and not to the safety of our youth. Hell, look at the national response to Covid-19 in America. We can’t even come together in the face of a global pandemic. After nine months of the federal government spreading disinformation, coupled with the nation’s “me first” mentality, which resulted in many people refusing to wear a mask and socially distance, more than three thousand people were dying per day, meaning that each day we were surpassing the total deaths on 9/11.

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If letter writing could keep a marriage alive during the entirety of the Civil War, then I’m sure my working relationship with Heather can thrive via the emails I send her while taking a dump. If this stance paints me as antisocial, then so be it. I just believe that working from home during a global pandemic is taxing enough—after all, we’re expected to maintain the same level of productivity we had pre-Covid—so having to carry on as though we’re not experiencing collective trauma, all the while putting on our professional bests or code-switching for the Zoom cameras is . . . well, frankly, none of us are getting paid enough to do that.

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But for real, I knew nothing about trees except to say “tree” like Jodie Foster in Nell when I see one—#DeepCutReference—yet I instantly mourned the end of ignoring trees on my way home from Target after capitalizing on a two-for-six-dollars face scrub deal. Of course, that’s a trivial thing to miss, but I believe that when soul-shaking, life-changing, world-breaking things like a global pandemic happen, your brain turns to anything that can help you self-soothe. For some, that might’ve been making a box cake and eating half of it in one sitting. For others, maybe it was buying three twelve-pack rolls of toilet paper. By the way, who were all these overly confident people who knew their shit schedule for the next six weeks?

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

The word jarred because, as doctors, we are always taught that “trust” simply isn’t good enough. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. But we were only doing the latter. All the while we could physically see our own future coming down the line, just two weeks ahead of us in Italy. It was obvious then that global pandemic was inevitable, and yet we weren’t reacting. That evening I wrote some of these thoughts down, at first as a thought experiment. Later, I developed it into an article covering the scale of the potential need for intensive care and PPE, the high burden of deaths, the lack of current NHS capacity and the major issues with those non-coronavirus patients who would not get looked after for every COVID patient that came in.4 It’s almost difficult to imagine what it was like writing down the numbers that we had been talking about in the abstract for weeks prior.

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There are now two obvious and inescapable truths – that the virus can no longer be contained, because we aren’t testing or finding contacts anymore, and that without widespread measures it will continue to double every two to three days. And yet still nothing changes. It occurs to me then, puffing in my running gear and looking at the collective journalism of our country spread before me, that a global pandemic is now inevitable. At least the tone of the conversation has changed – there is some realization of the scale of this disaster – but it is no less ill-thought through. The next tabloid reads “Govt will call up retired medics to fight coronavirus”. A group of men and women in a high-risk group, coming back to a service they’ve only just, I can only assume happily, retired from.

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She’d sweep the floors during a hurricane. “No, Beck, come now. We don’t know when we’ll be allowed to travel next afterwards.” “Okay, okay. I’ll come today. You finally get what you want.” “To get you to live in our attic, and to stop working at the spin studio and focus on your music?” “Yes.” “And all it took was a global pandemic.” Beck laughs, and rings off. In the midst of the chaos it’s a cheering thought, to know that Dilsan and Beck will be together, especially as they get on so well. I’ll know that Beck is safe and looked after, the kids can see their Aunty “Buckie”, as Ayla is wont to call her, and I can stop worrying about her being alone in the midst of the pandemic

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Chapter 1 - The White Swan Chapter 2 - Crisis Economists Chapter 3 - Plate Tectonics Chapter 4 - Things Fall Apart Chapter 5 - Global Pandemics Chapter 6 - The Last Resort Chapter 7 - Spend More, Tax Less? Chapter 8 - First Steps Chapter 9 - Radical Remedies Chapter 10 - Fault Lines Conclusion Outlook Acknowledgments NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ALSO BY NOURIEL ROUBINI New International Financial Architecture (with Marc Uzan) Bailouts or Bail-Ins? Responding to Financial Crisis in Emerging Economies (with Brad Setser) Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy (with Alberto Alesina and Gerald D.

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Since banks were not lending to each other or to nonbank financial firms or even to nonfinancial corporate firms, central banks were forced to become lenders of first, last, and only resort. The storm engendered little in the way of the “creative destruction” that Joseph Schumpeter would have celebrated. Instead, strong and weak alike remained in a state of suspended animation, awaiting the final reckoning. Chapter 5 Global Pandemics An old saying in financial markets has it that “when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.” However clichéd, that observation contains plenty of truth: the United States is the biggest, most powerful economy in the world, and when it gets sick, countries that depend on its insatiable demand for everything from raw commodities to finished consumer goods find themselves in trouble too.

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However clichéd, that observation contains plenty of truth: the United States is the biggest, most powerful economy in the world, and when it gets sick, countries that depend on its insatiable demand for everything from raw commodities to finished consumer goods find themselves in trouble too. This dynamic takes on dangerous potency in times of financial crisis. An outbreak of some financial disease in the world’s economic powerhouse can swiftly become a devastating global pandemic. A crash in the stock market, the failure of a big bank, or some other unexpected collapse at the epicenter of global finance can become a countrywide panic and then a worldwide disaster. It’s a scenario that has played out many times, whether in Britain in the nineteenth century or in the United States since that time.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

Disease X was a placeholder, representing a future, hypothetical disease. No one knew what the disease would be, or when it would emerge, but experts agreed that the emergence of something, sometime soon, was inevitable. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see that then, the planning was for an epidemic, meaning an outbreak in one geographical area – but not a global pandemic. Nonetheless, the very act of putting Disease X on the list was an important recognition of the need to prepare for pathogens we don’t yet know, as well as the ones we do. So how could we prepare for a disease that we don’t yet know about? How do you design a vaccine against an unknown pathogen?

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In the committee room in the Palace of Westminster I spoke about the vaccine development work we were doing in Oxford, how it followed on from other work we had done on the MERS vaccine, and why it was both possible and essential to proceed very quickly. I also said that we needed funding for the work as a matter of urgency. The following day, 11 March, the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. The next few weeks were some of the most hectic and surreal of my life. I was running in parallel half a dozen stages of vaccine development that would usually happen over years and in sequence. At the same time we were starting to attract a lot of media interest, setting up a deal with big pharma, and going into lockdown.

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We expected to be making at least two more, but that number would only go up as more ‘variants of concern’ were identified. Although it felt like an end to the pandemic could be in sight with the rapid vaccine roll-out, it also felt like missteps over new variants could set us back again. I was not sure the team could take that. Our resilience was close to crumbling. — There will be a next time. The next global pandemic will come. And well before the start of 2021 we were thinking about what we needed to do to be ready for it. But it also became clear in the early months of 2021, as the world started to roll out our vaccine and others, that we were not finished with SARS-CoV-2, and it was not finished with us.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

(Chuyuan later came under some criticism for suggesting his company’s herbal medicine could stave off the disease.) But unknown to the Davos crowd, the first case had already arrived within the United States—later confirmed in Washington state on January 21. The virus hit southern Europe in force in February, and by March, it was declared a global pandemic. The “global society,” long heralded as a supreme advance of the modern era, aided the spread of the disease. In the coming weeks travel bans were announced, and when the spread continued, lockdowns began. California was the first with a statewide stay-at-home order. On the East Coast, New York state became the epicenter of the coronavirus, with Governor Andrew Cuomo ordering all nonessential businesses closed.

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He was feeling the pressures around personal protective equipment, the N95 masks in particular. 3M had started ramping up its manufacturing of PPE before it hit the American public that the need was desperate here at home. Roman explained: “Coming out of SARS, we had developed a strategy to have idle capacity available for the next pandemic. We didn’t anticipate a global pandemic like we’re facing with COVID-19. We responded and have been ramping up capacity ever since.”12 The priorities were clear to his leadership: “Protect our employees, so we could keep executing, fight the pandemic from every angle, and deliver for our customers and shareholders, as we went through the uncertainty that we were facing.

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NO LOSS OF MOMENTUM Competition is the core of the free market economy. It is competition that drives companies to improve quality and reduce prices, to become more efficient, to innovate. Competition is the magic that makes capitalist economies successful. But solving society’s biggest problems—like a global pandemic—requires cooperation as well as competition. The scientists at pharmaceutical companies were competing with each other to be the first to develop vaccines and treatments for COVID. But they also were sharing data, knowledge, and even their facilities in ways that never would have been imaginable before the pandemic.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

This book is invaluable right now, a must-read for anyone working to dismantle prisons and borders, and to end poverty and war.” —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) “As communities and social movements scramble to respond to the threat of a globalized far-right against the apocalyptic backdrop of a global pandemic and impending ecological disaster, Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule reminds us of how we got here. With clinical precision, Walia unravels the genealogies and histories of border militarization, incarceration, and imperialism, laying bare the webs of domination and exploitation that threaten the poor and vulnerable everywhere, from those incarcerated in Australia’s offshore immigration camps to the victims of drone warfare in Yemen.

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My material privileges are built atop the unceded jurisdictions of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations and, in continuities of oppression, also the extracted lands, exploited labor, and expendable lives of many others locally and globally. This book is in service to dismantling the violences we are bound up in and to imagining relations and worlds anew. Foreword I write these words amid a global pandemic. The twenty-four-hour news cycle is saturated with images of suffering and death as well as a parade of healthcare professionals recruited to share stories from the front lines or impart expert opinion. These workers are often South Asian, Latinx, Caribbean, Filipino, and African American, many presumably immigrants or children of immigrants.

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After years of watching footage of unarmed Black people beaten and killed by police for walking, loitering, running, standing in front of their homes, showing insufficient deference, protecting their kids, or being a kid, these scenes of white men brandishing AR-15s in the face of police and government officials and evading jail, injury, or death begs incredulity. Harsha Walia’s incisive and prescient book, Border and Rule, could not have been timelier. She reminds us that these wars are not new. This global pandemic is just the latest manifestation of capitalism’s five-hundred-year war on the earth by means of land enclosure, dispossession, occupation, extraction, exploitation, commodification, consumption, destruction, pollution, immiseration, and oppressive forms of governance. It is war on the people in the form of military violence, executed in the name of “security”—securing resources, borders, life, and “liberty” against dictators, terrorists, and communists.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

While the node in the supply chains of Asia I was about to tour had already been growing in importance and was fast becoming something like the next China—a hub of low-cost manufacturing rapidly transforming into a hot spot of high-tech expertise—what I couldn’t have predicted was that the black swan of the coronavirus was about to make everything I would see that day, and in the days following, so much more important. Just as the Saigon River on which we traveled had shifted its course across the Mekong Delta countless times before, eradicating one shoreline as it built up another, its path dictated by forces beyond human scale, the supply chains that had until the global pandemic of 2020 seemed adequate were about to whipsaw into new configurations, a flood of goods reshaping them to fresh and urgent needs. The day I stepped from our yellow speedboat onto the concrete pier of Cai Mep International Terminal, part of one of the largest container ports in Southeast Asia, shipping containers in its yard contained a not insignificant portion of the goods that people, businesses, and hospitals across the globe would be panic-buying in the months ahead.

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After racking up more than seven years of time at sea, broken up by time ashore to attend maritime university, Jeff, as he likes to be called, was on his final tour on a container ship. Jeff has black hair, a disarmingly boyish face, and nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube, where he posts videos about life at sea. He was supposed to be on board the Brussels, which circumnavigates Earth every seventy-seven days, for just six months. Thanks to the global pandemic, he would stay on the ship for nearly a year. Under normal circumstances, containerized shipping companies exchange 150,000 sailors every month, pulling as many off ships as they put on, for a total movement of 300,000 people. But when Covid-19 struck, the companies invoked the legal principle of force majeure—extraordinary circumstances—to keep officers, captains, and crew on board their ships until ports allowed sailors to disembark again and cross-border travel on international flights could be worked out.

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By this point, the e-commerce giant was already sold out of toilet paper and dozens of other household goods. A study published by a pair of economists in January 2021 will find that all over the world, panic buying reached its highest intensity in the week after governments declared restrictions on movement within a state or country. It turns out this USB charger, manufactured when the global pandemic had yet to start, put on a ship just as China began its shutdowns, ordered from Amazon just today, wasn’t an idle purchase. It was one tiny element of the mass shift in the global economy from services to goods, from being out in the world to working, entertaining, and learning from home. It’s just a tiny, inexpensive gadget, but it’s also an embodiment of the journey of billions of dollars’ worth of other goods, all part of a tsunami of creative destruction that has permanently transformed the way we live.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

To change what is wrong, we need to imagine what a world that is human made, embracing technology for good, can look like. Examples of using AI for such good are all around us. Machine learning shows promise for addressing intractable challenges from poverty to climate change to ocean pollution to global pandemics. The stories of those who have skin in the game—who are doing good and adding diversity, all while doing well in the field—can motivate the next generation to join in. In debates about the future of technology, I see how scholars are far more willing to accept the role of AI in areas such as medicine, climate studies, and environmental sustainability—which they perceive as more purely scientific—than in other areas such as employment, social justice, domestic violence, and equal pay.

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She writes, “In a world where the commonly held wisdom is that technology isolates us, it’s worth considering another side of the story.”4 Newman’s love letter to Siri is incredibly sweet and tender. Her book captures not only the unique challenges of raising a child with developmental differences, but also the universal challenges we face in the modern world, including, of course, isolation because of a global pandemic or other natural disaster. Even amid our cautiousness and at times trepidation, we should celebrate the benefits of chatbots and their potential to do good. They help us remember things, save us time, and alleviate life’s burdens, even lessen our loneliness. At the same time, a feminist examination of the chatbot phenomenon also needs to grapple with the market’s thirst for artificial housewives—how it started, how it’s going, and how we can shape AI to better emulate tomorrow’s society rather than yesterday’s.

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A dramatic population gap has resulted: it is predicted that by 2030, China will have over 30 million more men than women, which means that countless men will end up lonely and isolated, facing barriers to starting human relationships. All over the world, the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated starkly how socially isolated we can become, and the mental health problems that can ensue. The loneliness and isolation of a global pandemic offer a poignant use case for the value of having robots (sexual and otherwise) in our homes. In an interview with Forbes, the CEO of Realbotix and creator of the sex robot Harmony claimed that sales were 75 percent higher than they were before the pandemic.14 Another possible benefit of sex robots is a safer sex industry.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape. There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability and complexity.

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In essence, zero-carbon targets save cities by starting to untangle the energy system that keeps capitalism, and our ceaseless growth paradigm, going. That’s the big challenge. The second big area of action is transport. This is about the urgent task of how and why we need to lock down city car culture. Almost all modern ills can be understood through the rise of the private fossil-fuel-powered automobile: unnecessary road deaths, the global pandemic of urban air pollution, mounting greenhouse-gas emissions, geopolitical wars, the concentration of corporate wealth and mounting consumer debt, depression, status anxiety, obesity, alienated streetscapes, the decline of vibrant public life and the corrosive effects of individualism. We simply need to lock down city car culture: privatized, corporate-led, fossil-fuel-hungry automobile dependency, and growth-based planning.

The Atlas of Disease by Sandra Hempel

clean water, coronavirus, Easter island, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, trade route, wikimedia commons

Equally, none of the 450 inmates of the local workhouse fell ill. The workhouse had its own water supply and never used the pump. Modern outbreaks During the second half of the nineteenth century, when people were provided with efficient sewers and clean drinking water, cholera largely disappeared in the developed world and the great global pandemics were consigned to history. However, the disease continues to be a threat when sanitary conditions are poor in countries where it is endemic, particularly when the infrastructure is damaged by natural disasters or war. In 1961 a new, less deadly strain of the bacterium, known as El Tor, caused a pandemic that started in Indonesia and spread to Bangladesh, India, the Middle East, North Africa and by 1973 into Italy.

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Transmission Transmitted to humans by wild animals, then spreads from person to person through body fluids Symptoms Fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, haemorrhaging Incidence and deaths 28,616 cases in the 2014–16 epidemic and 11,310 deaths. Average case fatality rate is around 50 per cent. Prevalence Two isolated outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the global pandemic of 2014–16 Prevention In affected areas, avoid contact with: body fluids; infected medical equipment and bedding, and bats and non-human primates and bush meat from these animals Treatment No proven treatment but treatments for different symptoms and support to maintain the body’s functions Global strategy Fast containment of outbreaks combined with health education for health workers and general population An illustration of a cross-section through an ebola virus particle.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

Either way, we stop thinking, give in to our instincts, and make bad decisions. The Five Global Risks We Should Worry About I do not deny that there are pressing global risks we need to address. I am not an optimist painting the world in pink. I don’t get calm by looking away from problems. The five that concern me most are the risks of global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. Why is it these problems that cause me most concern? Because they are quite likely to happen: the first three have all happened before and the other two are happening now; and because each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades.

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It is the probability that something we have not yet even thought of will cause terrible suffering and devastation. That is a sobering thought. While it is truly pointless worrying about something unknown that we can do nothing about, we must also stay curious and alert to new risks, so that we can respond to them.) Global Pandemic The Spanish flu that spread across the world in the wake of the First World War killed 50 million people—more people than the war had, although that was partly because the populations were already weakened after four years of war. As a result, global life expectancy fell by ten years, from 33 to 23, as you can see from the dip in the curve here.

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For a fact-based view of a longer list of major risks, see Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years, by Smil (2008). For those who find numbers calming, this is where you will find the big picture of the proportional risks and uncertainties of all kinds of possible fatal discontinuities. See gapm.io/furgr. The risk of global pandemic. A small version of Spanish flu is more likely than a large one; see Smil (2008). While we should work against the obscene overuse of antibiotics in the meat industry—see WHO[14]—at the same time we must be careful not to make the mistake we made with DDT and become overprotective. Antibiotics could save even more lives if they were even less expensive.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

And each element of the intersectional agenda is becoming increasingly more radical. During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights.

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After all, science has a method, a way of distinguishing truth from falsehood; science is designed to uncover objective truths rather than to wallow in subjective perceptions of victimization. Science should have been at the bleeding edge of the pushback. Instead, science surrendered, too. Next, we’ll take a look at why. Chapter 4 How Science™ Defeated Actual Science Two thousand twenty was a banner year for science. In the midst of a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, scientists in laboratories across the world stepped into the breach. They researched the most effective methods of slowing the virus’s spread. They developed new therapeutics designed to reduce death rates, and researched new applications of already-existent drugs.

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But authoritarian leftist politicians could count on members of the public health establishment to back their play, manufacturing anti-scientific narratives in the name of science. More than one thousand “public health specialists” signed an open letter supporting the largest protests in American history in the middle of a global pandemic, claiming that such protests were “vital to the national public health,” and adding, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-at-home orders.” Infectious-disease expert Ranu S. Dhillon of Harvard Medical School told The New York Times, “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

One was the core QAnon followers, whose belief system often became even more profoundly strange. Another formed the global #SaveTheChildren movement – perhaps the most well-meaning and yet malign global trend of the internet era. But it was the third that propelled ideas QAnon had taken on into the stratosphere – a global pandemic, begun in China, which damaged Donald Trump’s electability and saw Joe Biden enter the White House was just the breakthrough any conspiracy theory needed. We might hear the name ‘QAnon’ less than we used to. But that’s just in the same way that it’s easier to see a smaller mountain than a larger one, or to see more of an iceberg that’s far away.

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It is in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, so inescapable that it also funds the global health reporting team at my employer, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and so paid part of my salary as Global Editor there (I was employed by TBIJ while writing this book, but will have left by the time you are reading it).22 That means that if anyone is looking for a Gates Foundation connection to a particular public health issue, they will find it. On a basic level, Bill Gates had publicly warned about the risk of a global pandemic long before Covid-19 happened. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2017, Gates said: Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.

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(The same study revealed that 21 per cent of Republican voters said they had a favourable view of QAnon.)68 A separate US poll by PRRI that same month found a strong and overt connection between QAnon and anti-vaccination sentiment. Forty-two per cent of vaccine refusers told pollsters they also believed in QAnon, while 22 per cent of those describing themselves as vaccine hesitant said they believed Q.69 The digital pandemic had, beyond the point of doubt, become part of a real-world global health emergency. Global pandemic, global radicalisation The levels of oddness and denial among those who come to regularly stage anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine protests can be truly surreal, with an often-familiar cast of characters with tenuous connections to the corridors of power who can then allude to familiarity with the workings of the state to online and offline followers.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Out of Options Epilogue Dwelling in Possibility Glossary of the Housing Crisis Notes Further Reading Acknowledgements Index Copyright Author’s Note This is a work of non-fiction written between 2017 and early 2022, drawn from five years of research. When I began, Britain had just voted to leave the European Union and was embarking on the process of Brexit. As I finished, a global pandemic spread, making people’s homes into a frontline defence amid a major public health crisis and, in doing so, revealed that home was not a very safe place for some people. During that period, it felt at times as though the country was, at once, imploding and exploding. While some British people saw their dream – independence from Eurocracy – realised, others felt that just over half of the country had voted for something they did not want but would have to live with.

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The Chancellor’s support package made no mention of financial assistance for anyone who lost their job and fell into rent debt to their landlord as a result, but instead a flimsy suggestion that landlords – who could access mortgage holidays – should be ‘flexible’ and ‘negotiate’ with renters whose finances were damaged. That is how Anthony – like many others – found himself caught in the crosshairs of two social and economic disasters: a global pandemic and a housing emergency. If you do not own your own home in Britain, precarity is a fact of life. It comes in the form of rent rises, eviction notices and knowing that, ultimately, your landlord has control over the one place in the world you should feel safe. Banking on Housing My grandparents, though they had the chance to, didn’t buy their flat in Dorrington Court through Right to Buy.

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As I moved my thumb across the screen, I noticed that the estate agent in question had borrowed a quote from a philosopher I return to regularly for his human and poetic descriptions of home, Gaston Bachelard: The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. But if they are unaffordable, houses are not places where people can dream, let alone live in peace. We all need somewhere affordable to live, but it is our collective home – the state – which should provide for all eventualities. It took a global pandemic to remind us that human society is a delicate ecosystem: overcrowding spreads disease, bad housing makes people sick. Similarly, the slightest temperature rise in one corner of the housing market risks infecting other parts of the economy – how much we spend on housing dictates how much disposable income we have, how much we can save, how much we can borrow and how well we fare if we fall on hard times.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

But it would not be the kind of opponent that I had in mind during my impeachment testimony. 13 The Horrible Year In the immediate aftermath of President Trump’s first impeachment trial came more vulnerabilities. Without any doubt, 2020 was a horrible year—and not just because of dramatic political upheavals that were bookended by two presidential impeachments. January 2020 saw a novel coronavirus, COVID-19, turn into a global pandemic. It was the worst health crisis in a century, since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Other emergencies exacerbated and magnified its effects. The year was marked by the largest number of hurricanes on record battering the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean. There were widespread wildfires in California, droughts and floods across other parts of the country.

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Lost generations in all three countries foresaw nothing but persistent disadvantage and lack of opportunity and wanted someone, preferably some strongman, to fix things for them with a series of bold moves. The strongmen had arrived, but the rest of the populist dream had gone unfulfilled. And now life was upended. Everyone was imperiled by a deadly disease. The global pandemic was another shock to fragile systems, a negative force multiplier that compounded preexisting problems. If ever there was proof that the decline of opportunity posed an existential threat, this was it. The Populists’ Pandemic Populist governments are, almost by definition, ill-suited to handle complex problems of governance.

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Our inability to get our act together on most major policy issues (the fifth risk of incompetence and the failure of project management) hindered the projection of American soft power, essentially the power of our example. As a result, we reduced our overall global competitiveness with rising powers such as China. Political polarization is ultimately a national security threat as well as a domestic challenge. It is a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes like global pandemics, mitigating the effects of climate change, and, as I saw in my time at the White House, thwarting external threats from adversaries such as Russia. In the Trump administration, every peril was politicized. It was turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount a coherent response or defense to a national security threat in the face of personalized, chaotic, and at times simply opportunistic policymaking at the top.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

By 2016 we were in what the World Economic Forum called the famous ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, which predicted, correctly, a massive realignment in the relationships between humans and machines. This was the era when the concept of mindfulness and the desire to switch off became mainstream; reskilling became a major preoccupation and the idea of well-being at work acknowledged the epidemic of work-related stress. But no one anticipated the black swan event of a global pandemic, let alone prepared for it. Far from it. This made 2019 the last year of modern working life as it had been known since 1945. And so we come to today, to the fourth phase of work, the Nowhere Office Years, which is the subject of this book. Beginning in 2020, it represents the working era in which several shifts are happening at once.

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., ‘The Cost of Work-Related Stress to Society: A Systematic Review’, http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/30155/1/PubSub7909_Hassard.pdf; also Jean-Pierre Brun, ‘Work-Related Stress: Scientific Evidence-Base of Risk Factors, Prevention And Costs’, WHO, 13 March 2007, https://www.who.int/occupational_health/topics/brunpres0307.pdf; see also Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, ‘A Global Pandemic and Its Impact on Global Engagement, Stress and the Workforce’, Gallup, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx; and John M. Ivancevich, Michael T. Matteson, and Edward P. Richards, ‘Who’s Liable for Stress on the Job?’, Harvard Business Review, March 1985, https://hbr.org/1985/03/whos-liable-for-stress-on-the-job 8.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

The NMA project was dropped as part of a broader rethinking of what future product development processes should look like, and PFS was eliminated from the vocabulary of those in supply chain–facing roles. Boeing realized the need to focus on rebuilding trust with the stakeholder groups (regulators, employees, suppliers, the flying public) that had taken a backseat to shareholders for an extended period of time. Sadly, these actions were lost in the noise of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which only two months into Calhoun’s tenure called the company’s future into question. To continue to produce MAX aircraft during the grounding, Boeing took on billions of dollars in debt and swung from a position of net cash to a position of net debt for the first time since the 787 crisis earlier in the decade.

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In hindsight, Boeing’s bet on a quick recovery was incredibly unlucky and ill-advised, and it left the company seeking government support, something unimaginable when the company’s stock was soaring to all-time highs just before the MAX crisis only a year earlier. The swing from the world’s most valuable industrial company to one whose liquidity and solvency were being questioned in such a short period of time is still mind-boggling. While almost no one foresaw the extent of the impact that a global pandemic could have on the market for airplanes, it undoubtedly will redefine how everyone evaluates the future. And just like the crises that preceded it, it will forever reshape how the company and all its stakeholders evaluate risk. POSTMORTEM Over much of the last three decades, Boeing has struggled to effectively balance the needs of key stakeholder groups, overemphasizing the importance of one or two for extended periods of time.

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Drawing the lines on customer data use and weighing them against the pursuit of profit and higher share prices is a similar evaluation. It’s inevitable that the influence of nonfinancial and nonemployee stakeholders will only continue to rise in the future. And the industry is not immune from its own megacrisis. In fact, cybersecurity threats for Big Tech could prove to be the equivalent of a global pandemic for industrial firms and travel-focused companies. Boeing’s task in the 2020s is now unprecedented. Successfully recovering from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic dominates the focus in the short term. Finding a stable financial position and building a sufficient cash buffer for future crises will inevitably be a primary focus for several years.

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

She doesn’t find it “helpful” to dwell on feelings. She’s a problem solver. She has the knowledge and research skills to fuel endless cycles of anxiety and planning, so she tries to avoid spiraling. “My rabbit holes are deep,” she says. “But they’re not frequent, because I go places people don’t even know.” But with a looming global pandemic, she had no choice. “I started figuring out—I started playing a game in my mind. How do you quarantine your family from you if you’re positive or even exposed? And I started thinking about the floors of my house and the rooms and the bathrooms—and most specifically I want to protect my youngest.”

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Her two-year-old daughter’s childcare center closed. And her husband’s also working full-time from home. And her mother-in-law kept sort of telling her, oh, you should be enjoying this time with your daughter, this is a special time. This is such a gift to have this extra time with your daughter.” Record scratch. It’s a global pandemic! Not a vacation! “Hearing that from her mother-in-law and hearing that from other people in her life just gave her a sense of doubt and made her feel like a failure as a mother, and then also thinking about the work that she would normally be able to get done, feeling like a failure as a worker as well.”

…

She would sit up in bed for her school’s roll call on the computer, and then go back to sleep. Gradually she filled the wall behind her bed with detailed pencil drawings on paper. One of them shows a girl sitting on her bed with arms crossed, looking out the window. There is a padlock on the frame. “Global Pandemic! Schools Cancelled!” it says. Dayana started talking to the school psychologist over Google Meet. In the morning and the evening she played nature sounds and did breathing exercises. And she wrote, publishing pieces in a student journal. “Writing poetry and stories have been a great help to me.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He called Yaneer Bar-Yam, a friend and expert in complexity theory—the broad, interdisciplinary study of interactions within and among systems ranging from cells to forests to the global climate—and the disturbing dynamics of pandemics in the modern world. “You’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in Wuhan,” Taleb told him. Bar-Yam agreed. Founder of an elite research center called the New England Complex Systems Institute, or NECSI, Bar-Yam had for years been growing progressively worried about the outbreak of a global pandemic. He’d worked with the United Nations on the Ebola virus and saw how it had nearly jumped well beyond Africa’s borders. In 2016, he’d written a report called Transition to Extinction: Pandemics in a Connected World. Highly fatal pathogens tend to spread quickly at first, then burn out as they kill all their hosts.

…

In a March 2020 article about Feigl-Ding’s Twitter post and the backlash it sparked, New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells observed that if the rest of the world had responded to the outbreak with the same measure of fear and apprehension early on, it would have been much better off. “As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed—and raise alarm,” he wrote. “And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late.” Among those who took the new estimate very seriously was Nassim Taleb.

…

Literal flames were frying its forests. I met Litterman in Washington, D.C., hours after his Senate testimony. It would be my last face-to-face meeting for months—as well as his—as lockdowns gripped the country in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Litterman told me he worried the Covid-19 virus would soon become a global pandemic, and he was right. “It’s a perfect example of when you have a risk-management problem—it’s urgent, you don’t know how much time you have,” he said. “With coronavirus, we wasted so many weeks.” The same was true for the climate. “We’ve got to slam on the brakes,” he said, referring to carbon emissions—and his experience with the flaming tanker.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming media services were booming, a welcome distraction from the grim news outside. Bandwidth consumption catapulted to such enormous levels that telecommunications carriers were putting caps on streams and downgrading video quality to ensure the internet didn’t overload. Miraculously, it all hung together, and for that you were grateful. But the global pandemic also accentuated all of social media’s shortcomings. Cybercrime and data breaches also skyrocketed as bad actors capitalized on millions of people working from home, their kitchen routers and jerry-rigged network setups never designed to handle sensitive communications. In spite of efforts by social media platforms to remove misleading information and point their users to credible health sources, disinformation was everywhere, sometimes consumed with terrible effects.

…

Over half of the world’s population is not yet connected to the internet, but that is changing fast. It’s difficult to measure with precision the carbon emissions and overall energy consumption related to our communications ecosystem, but it’s fair to say they’re large and growing. Prior to the global pandemic, I had seen references to estimates that placed the internet’s energy and carbon footprints on a par with, or even exceeding, the airline industry’s. One study suggests that the world’s communications ecosystem currently consumes approximately 7 percent of global electricity, a number that could increase to as much as 21 percent by 2030.344 A study by the American Coal Association (strange, I know) estimated that a smartphone streaming an hour of video on a weekly basis uses more power annually than a new refrigerator.345 Some have tried to break down the energy consumption and carbon emissions by individual digital routines, to make it easier to comprehend.

…

What if everyone quite literally unplugged? How would we then manage ourselves, our social relationships, our problems, and our politics? How would we address, to borrow a phrase from John Dewey, “the public and its problems” if the “public” had no means to exchange information and communicate? And if the global pandemic showed us anything, it is that the “public” is now truly planetary in scope and scale. Thanks to hundreds of years of modern industrial technological development, we now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing).397 There’s no turning back. Complex interdependence binds us together in a single habitat that systems theorist and futurist Buckminster Fuller once aptly called “Spaceship Earth.”398 We’re in this together, for better or for worse.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

I won’t list all the stories told here, all the burdens laid down, but I will say that they span the gamut from the perils of technocracy to the financial implications of transgender identity, from the loss of material inheritance to the discovery of spiritual wealth, from fat as a financial issue to foster parenting as an act of resistance. It is a wonderful and inspiring collection, and I love it more, now that it is finished, than I ever thought I could. I am heartened to imagine how these stories might impact the global discussion of women and money in the shadow of a global pandemic that has hit women, and especially women of color, extraordinarily hard. To all who find themselves here I say: may these essays, these voices, help you write your own story of money, and put to rest forever the thought that you have to carry it alone. REBECCA WALKER Los Angeles, California April 2021 ONLY RICOS HAVE CREDIT DAISY HERNÁNDEZ AT FIFTEEN, I land my first job.

…

I understood the challenges of community violence because I’d seen it myself; of single-parent households and immigration and racism because I’d known them myself; of the incredible opportunity of a good education because I’d been blessed with one myself. But I’d been healthy, had never questioned my very ability to live and breathe. Until suddenly I couldn’t. I’m not 100 percent better. But I’m better enough—and in a global pandemic, when no one’s ability to breathe can be taken for granted, better enough is just fine. I’m better enough to have resumed the activities that bring me joy, including exercise and backpacking trips. I’m better enough to have reengaged with my work—both job and writing—with a renewed sense of purpose.

…

Watching sponsorship inquiries trickle to nothing, I moved my moneymaking endeavors away from social media. And I moved my home from California to the land where I grew up, on Maui, to live in a two-hundred-square-foot studio. Here, I am confronted daily with questions of what it means to be a white settler living (and making money) on occupied Native Hawaiian land, particularly during a global pandemic and financial crisis. What does it mean for me to be a coconspirator in ensuring wellness for all in this place, in this community? I haven’t yet figured out how to dismantle capitalism or white supremacy, but I took on a consulting job for a nonprofit that allowed me to do nothing but be honest about the challenges our human and earth communities were facing.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Watching Nautilus explore online was helpful, but it was not quite close enough. At times, I wanted to sit down beside the ocean mapper and experience it all myself. I kept emailing and calling other organizations and researchers, kept watching E/V Nautilus prowl along the West Coast, and waited for the global pandemic to subside. A year later, just as I was starting to despair that I might never get an inside look at mapping the seafloor, the expedition leader aboard Nautilus called me back. She had an empty berth on a mapping expedition that would be leaving in just over a month. Did I want it? Yes, I said.

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Arviat is a young town with an average age of twenty-five and nearly 40 percent of the population under the age of fourteen.15 Here, the youths serve as the mapmakers and the inspiration for charting the coastlines. New technology, including cell phones and GPS, has brought conveniences to the north, along with a false sense of security. Of course, distracted teens are not a problem only in Arviat. Human society writ large is suffering from a global pandemic of distraction. But on the Arctic tundra around Arviat, something as simple as forgetting to charge a satellite phone could be fatal. Step outside your front door, and the wilderness begins. A polar bear might be foraging in your garbage bins. An ATV might blast past on the dark road. (Just a few days after I left, a drunk driver struck and killed a teenager in Rankin Inlet, the next town over.)16 Venture far outside the hamlet’s grid of streets, and you could get lost on the flat tundra without any obvious land markers.

…

The delegate would begin with some pro forma niceties, such as congratulating the secretary-general on his reappointment or thanking Jamaica for hosting the meeting. Then would come the shit: a pointed observation, criticism, or suggestion that showed a country’s hand. Then the delegate would finish with a congratulation or compliment. After the last three years of living through the chaos of a global pandemic when public health rules had been openly flouted, I enjoyed a bit of rule following these days. But the council felt almost comically divorced from the rough reality of working offshore. There are few people to observe and report crimes at sea, and so more crimes are committed with impunity.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

While the chances of the planet’s entire human population becoming immune to a rare virus such as Ebola were nil, it was possible that an easily transmitted, ubiquitous respiratory virus like influenza would infect billions of human beings in less than five years’ time, kill off all the susceptibles, and leave the world’s survivors completely immune. Global pandemics were, in fact, a hallmark of influenza that spanned recorded human history. Charlemagne’s conquest of Europe was slowed by an A.D. 876 flu epidemic that spread across the continent and claimed much of his army. Many suspected influenza epidemics followed, though history can only vaguely discriminate between ancient accounts of influenza and other respiratory diseases.

…

The greater the number of neuraminidase molecules, Kilbourne argued, the more rapidly viruses could complete their budding process and spread. In essence, Kilbourne had found a possible key to both high transmissibility and virulence, explaining why some epidemics produced viruses that rapidly flooded the bloodstreams of infected people and readily became global pandemics, while others caused fairly localized mild outbreaks.13 He proved his point by quantifying the density of neuraminidase proteins on the surface of the influenza strain responsible for the 1957 flu pandemic, a fairly severe wave that swept the world and claimed an estimated 60,000 American lives.

…

The physicians had to treat it without knowing its nature, and it was among them that the greatest mortality occurred.” It was later thought that the epidemic, which Thucydides said caused illness in every Athenian and killed up to half the population, was either typhus, the plague, or smallpox.7 Hundreds of great global pandemics followed. Four diseases that seemed to William McNeill and other medical historians of the 1970s to have gained particular benefit from the urban ecology over the previous 2,000 years were pneumonic plague, leprosy (Hansen’s disease), tuberculosis, and syphilis. As far as could be discerned from historical records, these were rarely—if ever—seen prior to the establishment of urban societies, and all four exploited to their advantage human conditions unique to cities.

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Between 2000 and 2015, U.S. multinational companies alone hired 4.3 million employees domestically versus 6.2 million employees overseas—that means millions of people who need digital technology if they are to communicate with the United States, not to mention the millions of domestic workers who work virtually from home over a distance of a few miles. McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the global labor workforce will reach 3.5 billion people by 2030. Remote work is increasingly here to stay. The future is in remote work. None of these trends or predictions, however, accounted for a global pandemic that would require the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to remote work in a matter of weeks. The remote work revolution, long in coming, was accelerated by the sudden and severe coronavirus outbreak. Chances are you are part of the massive transition that has forced companies to rapidly advance their digital footprint including cloud, storage, cybersecurity, and device and tool usages to accommodate their new virtual workforce.

…

They also tried to anticipate how political leaders might respond, both in Mexico and around the world. However, this first situation framing could only do so much. Molinas admitted that she prefers not to spend all her time trying to pin down what the future will hold, an activity she calls “fortune-telling.” Instead, she found it more productive to simply accept that the global pandemic had “disrupted everything,” and that no one—CEO or entry-level assistant—can be certain of an assessment. In place of certainty, she pursued clarity about what choices could be made and their impact on daily work. To adapt to the new situation, she held virtual town-hall meetings where management addressed employee questions, organizational psychologists spoke about mental health challenges, and senior leaders offered insights.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

One creator and showrunner behind a top Netflix title said Disney’s entry, in particular, triggered a restlessness in the atmosphere and sparked a frenzy to spend lavishly to secure top talent. While the atmosphere changed, though, there was plenty of reason for Hastings to feel confident. As the global pandemic darkened movie theaters, silenced concerts and festivals, and hobbled professional sports, Netflix had only gained momentum, emerging as the entertainment choice of preference for a home-bound, bored world seeking an escape. Its shows had entered the zeitgeist, whether with a lurid obsession like Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness; a goofy reality show based on the game the Floor Is Lava; or an adrenaline-filled action flick such as Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction.

…

It targeted a group of influencers known to be swayed by elaborate promotional campaigns, or dinner and a movie (screening)—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the ninety-member group that awards the Golden Globes. Whatever Apple did worked. The Morning Show received a trio of nominations in 2020—one for best television drama and two for best actress, Aniston and Witherspoon. More than any wining and dining or awards campaigning, the global pandemic changed Apple’s fortunes. As the lights went dark in the nation’s theaters, anxious film studios began seeking out other forms of distribution that could bring in revenue during the box-office drought. Film studios became distressed sellers, angling for a buck. The cash-flush Apple was happy to oblige, though it would do so opportunistically, and with care not to overpay.

…

The summer debut had been timed to coincide with NBC’s exclusive U.S. broadcast of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, though the cornerstone launch programming crumbled beneath it in March, when the International Olympic Committee postponed the games until July 2021 because of the pandemic. “When we targeted April 15th as the launch date we knew we had our work cut out for us,” Strauss and NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell wrote in a joint email to staff. “But we never imagined we would be faced with the challenges that this global pandemic has created.” The nationwide stay-at-home orders, however, created what NBCU recognized as a once-in-a-century opportunity for media companies, as Nielsen reported a 60 percent spike in streaming across the country. Strauss and Shell hoped to meet this demand by throwing open its film and television vaults.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

From refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos to a makeshift shantytown in West Virginia—even in the best of times, living tightly in tent cities without adequate sanitation makes people more vulnerable to all sorts of viruses, bacteria, and harm. That is to say nothing of the kind of risk that staying in cramped temporary housing poses during a global pandemic. In the United States, people without housing are more likely to become positive with hepatitis A or HIV. It also makes them more likely to be arrested and less likely to adhere to HIV medication protocols—meaning their viral load will not become or stay undetectable. According to a 2019 paper published in Social Science and Medicine, people who are unhoused also “had disproportionately higher adjusted risk of opioid-related” overdose deaths “compared to low-income housed individuals treated at the same hospital.”

…

This is part of why lethal health disparities plague queer and trans people at such high rates, and why viruses circulate more often in our bodies. When I heard about Lorena Borjas coughing but not wanting to go to the hospital because she feared what would happen to her there, I thought about that receptionist. My heart hurt for Lorena. * * * By the time Lorena got in the ambulance, the true center of the global pandemic was not just in the United States or in New York City, but in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. You could even argue that the epicenter of the epicenter had moved inside Elmhurst Hospital, where the ambulance took Lorena. Her neighbors, the so-called “essential” workers—day laborers, nursing home orderlies, fast-food workers, and sex workers—had not been able to protect themselves by working from home.

…

And because California’s prisons were among the most powerful COVID-19 hot spots in the nation, so many firefighters were sick or under quarantine that there weren’t enough available to fight the hundreds of fires. It was a moment in which America’s twin epidemics of incarceration and COVID-19 entered into a three-way race with the global pandemic of the climate crisis. This was a disaster of the Democrats’ making. Governor Gavin Newsom, a darling of Gay Inc. since he’d supported same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, slowly began releasing some incarcerated firefighters in the summer of 2020. But he could have done so months or years earlier.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

The social or cultural contract which defines what ‘success’ looks like in today’s society – the one that told us that if we found a good job and worked hard, we would be able to buy a house, pay off the mortgage, and retire with some savings – is breaking down. Instead, post-2008 crash, mid-global pandemic and pre(?!)-environmental crisis, our future seems more uncertain than ever. We’re staring at mass unemployment in the face, many of us are working from home for the first time, and there’s a confusing paradox of both loving this newfound homely freedom and missing the workplace camaraderie (often both at the same time).

…

There’s nothing wrong with having a side-hustle – it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise – but there are significant questions to be asked about the impact of it as a culture. It’s become an illustrious dream that turns any second you’re not earning money into an anxiety, and the mental effects of that are draining. As I write this in the midst of a global pandemic, we’re feeling the fear more than ever. Our isolation within our home-office hybrids has led to viral shame, directly linking our self-worth to our ability, not only to adapt, but also to become some sort of productivity machine so that somehow, when all this passes, we are not only alive and virus-free, but also ten years ahead of our peers, trilingual, oh, and a national hero.

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

In response, Coralie started the “Cats of Delft” Instagram account to share pictures of the many felines we encountered walking through the city, which Etienne then took over, using his COVID-19 walks to hunt for kitties to photograph. Living in a place with low traffic meant that as parents, we never once worried for our children’s safety. Their mental health breaks didn’t negatively affect our own mental health, and that fact is incredibly valuable, not just in times of a global pandemic but on a day-to-day basis as well. Parents inherently worry about their children; it’s normal behavior. Choosing a city that has afforded them incredible freedom and autonomy by creating safe places to travel has taken away one level of stress for them and for us. Coralie and Etienne can enjoy time to themselves, and we in turn can relax in the comfort of knowing they’re relatively safe and happy.

…

(Modacity) By prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists over a fragile car-based system, Delft has positioned itself to deal with the challenges of a twenty-first century city below sea level: including fuel shortages, rising temperatures, and extreme weather. And as it turns out, it was also well placed to deal with a global pandemic. In the months that followed those first days of lockdown, the biggest change to our daily existence was that we were no longer traveling to work or school each day, and had reduced our trips to the grocery store. Without knowing or planning it, we landed in a place where the built environment helped mitigate the physical and emotional impacts of a worldwide catastrophe, a place resilient enough against external stresses that it helped residents take care of themselves and each other under the most difficult of circumstances.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

Having a freezer would allow her to store more food and ultimately serve more families. So that’s what we did. We bought one small five-cubic-foot freezer for our garage and funded the purchasing of a fourteen-and-a-half-cubic-foot freezer for her organization. The timing couldn’t have been better, because at the time we were in the middle of a global pandemic and several families were in desperate need of delicious and nutritious meals. Our intention was to help one family, but our community directed us on how we could help hundreds more. If it weren’t for them, we likely would never have heard of Erica or the amazing work she’s doing right in our own backyard.

…

And for those who prefer visual definitions, memes and GIFs of people guzzling oversize cocktails while crying uncontrollably or simply staring into the abyss of their screens with bloodshot eyes summed up the year spent mostly inside. Our feelings were no different, having spent the majority of the year in a daily battle against the intense sadness forced upon us by a global pandemic. Simple everyday acts like going to the grocery store, taking a walk, or opening mail became matters of life or death. As parents of a toddler, we struggled with the decision of whether to send our son to day care and assume the increased risk of COVID-19 exposure. Having been in day care for only a short while and having just begun to build his first relationships outside home, our son, like most kids, hated having to learn and socialize through a screen.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

California just declared a state of emergency. The tape bombs are flying. Uncertainty is high. Markets hate uncertainty. Crude is getting drilled again. The entire energy space is burned out—and airlines, travel, casinos, hotels—everything is getting pounded. The World Health Organization has just declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. At a press briefing, Trump issues an order to control the spread of the virus in the USA: “My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than ten people. Avoid discretionary travel.

…

It’s too late to hedge. Liquidity is gone. You do your damnedest to fucking just stay alive, maintain fewer positions, figure out where the pain is. Trade small so you can widen stops. Don’t get cute. Don’t try to be a hero. It’s insane how events such as this seem to get multiplied. It’s not just one. It’s global pandemic and oil shock, both unexpected. Today, this combination is exposing our economy’s Achilles’ heel: too much fucking debt. That’s our soft underbelly, our weakest link. We’ve been running this scam for fifty fucking years. We built a world based on a debt bubble of epic proportions. It has tried to pop lots of times, but every time, we just shuffle the deck.

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan by Murong Xuecun

Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, global pandemic, lockdown, megacity, Ponzi scheme, QR code, social distancing, TikTok

While this Kafkaesque story reveals how the Chinese government works, Communist Party propaganda will boast about ‘the superiority of our system’ and how this superior system helps China to defeat the virus. But that patient almost died from their superior system. This superior system allowed a controllable epidemic to become a calamitous once-in-one-hundred-years global pandemic. Lin’s isolation station is a dull grey building – a hastily repurposed hotel. All the windows are sealed and several security officers guard the tightly locked main entrance. In a car outside the station, a senior leader sits nonchalantly, and in the command centre further on, the big boss looks like he’s on holiday.

…

But in China countless people, including Xi Jinping, believe in this ‘wisdom of our ancestors’. Mr Xi frequently praises TCM, at home and abroad. In the eight years of his reign, this medical mysticism has been promoted as never before. In May 2020, Beijing publishes a draft law for public comment that virtually criminalises ‘vilification or slandering TCM’. During the global pandemic, the Chinese government continues to promote TCM. According to its White Paper published on 7 June, ‘In Hubei province, more than 90 per cent of confirmed cases received TCM treatment that proved effective.’ Such statistics put Lin Qingchuan in a quandary. ‘You can’t say these numbers are incorrect.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

“They may be doing quite a bit,” she said, but the company “is also profiting every step along the way on the backs of their employees, who are not being protected, and neither are their families being protected.” She couldn’t help but feel some regret for having goaded Hector there in the first place. “They call themselves a technology company, but it’s really a sweatshop,” she said. “They have such a hold on our economy and our country.” * * * Like all great crises, the global pandemic of 2020 revealed the weaknesses of nations it attacked. In the case of the United States, that weakness was the extraordinary inequality across different places and communities. When it reached the country, the coronavirus first struck its upper echelons, the highly prosperous precincts that had tighter connections with their global peers than with scruffier places in their own backyard: Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, Manhattan.

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By late 2019, it had more than 750,000 employees worldwide and 400,000 employees in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them in the company’s more than two hundred fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and other delivery facilities. In 2017 alone, the company grew by 130,000 worldwide; in the summer of 2019, it hired 97,000, nearly the entire workforce of Google. And this was before the hiring spree that would arrive with the global pandemic of the spring of 2020. Warehousing and distribution used to be considered somewhat higher-skilled jobs: one could make over $20 per hour and stay years at a time. At Amazon, it was a more fleeting existence. Workers tended to be younger. Turnover was exceedingly high. And the seasonal workforce was often literally transient, in the form of the CamperForce of retirees traveling the country in RVs that Amazon deployed for its holiday rush.

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And the trend was self-reinforcing—the fewer opportunities one had to meet one’s needs in a physical space, buying goods face-to-face from another person in one’s own town or city, the more likely one was to turn to the other option: shopping, often alone, from the comfort of home. Even before a global pandemic forced Americans to shop from home, they had increasing reason to do so: online shopping was appealing because it was more convenient than the competition. And it became even more relatively convenient as the competition vanished, leaving one with no other options in close proximity. * * * Jared’s death left Taylor stunned and engulfed in self-reproach.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Aside from helping to cause the 2008 financial crisis, capital mobility has sucked money out of the Global South and into financial vortexes such as Wall Street and the City of London. Now it is threatening the solvency of governments responsible for providing healthcare for billions of people in the midst of a global pandemic. The first and most pressing priority must be a debt write-off for the Global South. Longer-term, the kind of state intervention required to tackle climate change – democratic public ownership over most of the economy, dramatic increases in state spending and the controls on capital mobility required to achieve this – are not merely frowned upon by the World Bank and the IMF, they are actively prohibited.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

We can’t rule out the loss of more than 90 percent of the population of the Americas during that century, though the number could also be much lower.12 And it is very difficult to tease out how much of this should be attributed to war and occupation, rather than disease. As a rough upper bound, the Columbian exchange may have killed as many as 10 percent of the world’s people.13 Centuries later, the world had become so interconnected that a truly global pandemic was possible. Near the end of the First World War, a devastating strain of influenza (known as the 1918 flu or Spanish Flu) spread to six continents, and even remote Pacific islands. At least a third of the world’s population were infected and 3 to 6 percent were killed.14 This death toll outstripped that of the First World War, and possibly both World Wars combined.

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Yet the virus escaped from a badly maintained pipe, leaking into the groundwater at the facility. After an investigation, the lab’s license was renewed—only for another leak to occur two weeks later.30 In my view, this track record of escapes shows that even BSL-4 is insufficient for working on pathogens that pose a risk of global pandemics on the scale of the 1918 flu or worse—especially if that research involves gain-of-function (and the extremely dangerous H5N1 gain-of-function research wasn’t even performed at BSL-4).31 Thirteen years since the last publicly acknowledged outbreak from a BSL-4 facility is not good enough. It doesn’t matter whether this is from insufficient standards, inspections, operations or penalties.

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They attracted several thousand members, including people with advanced skills in chemistry and biology. And they demonstrated that it was not mere misanthropic ideation. They launched multiple lethal attacks using VX gas and sarin gas, killing 22 people and injuring thousands.50 They attempted to weaponize anthrax, but did not succeed. What happens when the circle of people able to create a global pandemic becomes wide enough to include members of such a group? Or members of a terrorist organization or rogue state that could try to build an omnicidal weapon for the purposes of extortion or deterrence? The main candidate for biological risk over the coming decades thus stems from our technology—particularly the risk of misuse by states or small groups.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Ebright even claimed that because of the sudden, massive expansion in US research in the area, ‘the NIH was funding a research and development arm of al-Qaeda’.60 The underlying political context of this research changed over time as the face of the enemy perpetually shifted – from Iraq and its non-existent links to al-Qaeda in 2001–2003, through the fear of Islamist terrorist groups flourishing in the ashes of Iraq, Afghanistan and then Syria, to ever-present and legitimate concerns about the near-inevitability of a natural global pandemic. The only thing that was constant was the research itself and the growing likelihood that something might go terribly wrong, either deliberately or by accident. A whole generation of researchers matured and flourished in this atmosphere, using their brilliance and mastery of genetic engineering to carry out experiments that would have horrified the delegates at Asilomar, but which were now an accepted part of the scientific landscape.

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The sequencing work, which involved extracting viral DNA from body parts kept in formalin and from an Alaskan victim who had been buried in the permafrost in November 1918, was carried out at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Scientific and public awareness of the possibility of a natural global pandemic was high, given that the world had dodged a bullet in 2002–2003 when a SARS coronavirus epidemic emerged in southern China. The origin of this coronavirus was a spillover event from bats (it took fifteen years to identify the source) – the outbreak resulted in over 8,000 infections with an alarming 10 per cent mortality rate before being stifled by basic public health measures.64 Whereas sequencing the influenza virus was dangerous but could be justified, resurrecting it seemed dangerous but pointless.

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The data point to a natural spillover event such as we have seen in the past and will almost certainly see again.112 The long, painstaking research that was required before the bat origin of SARS was identified explains why there was no immediate agreement on which animal species was the original host of SARS-CoV-2 – such things take a long time even in the absence of a global pandemic.113 One possible solution to concerns about identifying manipulated pathogens, and indeed a potential resolution to some of the more outlandish speculation about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, may lie in the use of genetic engineering forensics – complex bioinformatic analyses – to determine whether an organism involved in a disease outbreak has been genetically modified and, if so, to infer its likely origin.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Then COVID-19 happened. During the first month of the outbreak in China, the smartphone telemedicine app Ping An Good Doctor increased its virtual visits by more than one billion.12 It was much the same with other tech players in China, like Tencent’s WeDoctor, Ali Health, and JD Health. When the virus became a global pandemic, Western telemedicine providers like Teladoc, iClinic, and Doctor on Demand were also swamped with new patients. Medicare approved telemedicine, and US laws were quickly relaxed to allow doctors to practice across state lines. Each of these remote diagnosis companies provides services like consultations, high-definition video examinations, and pharmaceutical prescriptions through apps, websites, and special videoconference links.

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Your mechanical organs will constantly transmit their working status to external monitoring devices and AI algorithms that keep them in perfect repair. Software updates and maintenance notifications will be issued as reliably as you would expect for the most advanced of twenty-first-century automobiles. When a new infectious disease emerges, there will be no global pandemic. Quantum computer–powered AGI will identify the correct response required to eliminate the invader and download instructions to pharmacies-on-chip in your embedded immune system the way that software patches for new computer viruses are automatically installed today. Data from your nanorobots and microchip checkpoints will be compared against the most current medical and epidemiological knowledge.

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night by Henry Nicholls

A. Roger Ekirch, confounding variable, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, global pandemic, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, traumatic brain injury, web application, Yom Kippur War

By then, geneticists had identified the strain of the virus as H1N1, the very same as the Spanish influenza responsible for the global flu pandemic in 1918, estimated to have killed somewhere between 50 to 100 million people. With cases of swine flu being confirmed across the world, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic in June. In short, in the middle of 2009 there was intense institutional fear that the swine flu could bring about a repeat of the Spanish flu. Pharmaceutical companies were soon bidding for multimillion-dollar contracts to rush out a vaccine before the flu season really got under way in the winter months of the northern hemisphere.

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p. 145 every November there’s a trough Fang Han and others, ‘Narcolepsy Onset Is Seasonal and Increased Following the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic in China’, Annals of Neurology 70.3 (2011), 410–17. p. 147 84 deaths ‘Outbreak of Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infection – Mexico, March–April 2009’, Press Release from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 April 2009 <http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0430a2.htm> [accessed 24 October 2017]. p. 147 global pandemic Declan Butler, ‘Flu Pandemic Underway’, Nature News, 11 June 2009 <https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2009.564>. p. 148 that was really the key Markku Partinen, Interview with author, 5 January 2016. p. 150 near-permanent somnolence Josh Hadfield and Caroline Hadfield, Interview with author, 14 August 2015.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.” But wildfires are not an American affliction; they are a global pandemic. In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn ten times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames. Fires that far north may seem innocuous, relatively speaking, since there are not so many people up there. But they are increasing more rapidly than fires in lower latitudes, and they concern climate scientists greatly: the soot and ash they give off can land on and blacken ice sheets, which then absorb more of the sun’s rays and melt more quickly.

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For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” “An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way: I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

A collapse in one small European nation also takes down the many overseas banks that have leveraged its debt. There’s nowhere to invest that’s insulated from any other market’s problems. Likewise, thanks to the interconnectedness of our food supply and transportation networks, the outbreak of a disease on the poultry farms of China necessarily threatens to become a global pandemic. A connected world is like a table covered with loaded mousetraps. If one trap snaps, the rest of the table will follow in rapid, catastrophic succession. Like a fight between siblings in the back of the car on a family trip, it doesn’t matter who started it. Everybody is in it, now. Along with most technology hopefuls of the twentieth century, I was one of the many pushing for more connectivity and openness as the millennium approached.

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“I don’t mean apocalypse in the religious way,” Dan explains as he escorts me down the single spiral metal staircase leading to the living quarters. (Hard to get out in a fire, I suppose, but easier to defend if attacked.) “I’m thinking Contagion, Asteroid, even China Syndrome,” he explains, using movie-title shorthand for global pandemic, collision with an asteroid, or nuclear meltdown. He is used to being interviewed. “What about The Day After Tomorrow?” I suggest, bringing climate change into the mix. “Not likely,” Dan says. “That’s been debunked.” Dan is a former real estate assessor who now makes his living selling information online to “preppers” like himself, who have assumed that catastrophe is imminent and that the best way through is to prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization as we know it.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Complex system researchers Dirk Brockmann, Lars Hufnagel, and Theo Geisel simulated the effects of a single individual infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) placed anywhere in the world using data that accounted for 95 percent of the entire global civil aviation traffic and assuming virulence equivalent to that of SARS.32 Whereas in previous centuries the insular nature of parochial communities would contain such an infection and give the authorities time to consider their options, now two plane journeys on average would require the vaccination of 75 percent of the world’s population to avoid a global pandemic. After three flights, global vaccination would be required. This simulation illustrates an inevitable consequence of increased integration, but its message is not simply theoretical. SARS reached 30 countries and affected 8,400 people within only nine months of its detection in November 2002.

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Scientific studies indicate that migratory wildfowl have the potential to carry H5N1 but suggest that “the likelihood of … virus dispersal over long distances … is low” and “estimate that for an individual migratory bird there are, on average, only 5–15 days per year when infection could result in the dispersal of H5N1 virus over 500 km.”52 The transfer of live birds and animals by airfreight and ships, however, means that these pathogens can now travel faster and farther than before and do not have to rely on the long-distance migration of birds. In short, modern technologies significantly heighten the risk of global pandemics. Figure 6.3. Destination cities and corresponding volumes of international passengers arriving from Mexico, 1 March–30 April 2008. Kamran Khan et al., 2009, “Spread of a Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus via Global Airline Transportation,” New England Journal of Medicine 361 (2): 212–214. © 2009 Massachusetts Medical Society.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Among the Igbo of Nigeria, for example, those born between 1919 and 1921 were known as ogbo ifelunza, the influenza age group. ‘Ifelunza’, an obvious corruption of ‘influenza’, became incorporated into the Igbo lexicon for the first time that autumn. Before that, they had had no word for the disease. As time went on, and it transpired that there were not many local epidemics, but one global pandemic–it became necessary to agree on a single name. The one that was adopted was the one that was already being used by the most powerful nations on earth–the victors in the Great War. The pandemic became known as the Spanish flu–ispanka, espanhola, la grippe espagnole, die Spanische Grippe–and a historical wrong became set in stone. 6 The doctors’ dilemma The flu had been named; the foe had a face.

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Individual social class, household wealth and mortality from Spanish influenza in two socially contrasting parishes in Kristiania 1918–19’, Social Science & Medicine, February 2006; 62(4):923–40. 2. C. E. A. Winslow and J. F. Rogers, ‘Statistics of the 1918 epidemic of influenza in Connecticut’, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1920; 26:185–216. 3. C. J. L. Murray et al., ‘Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918–20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis’, Lancet, 2006; 368:2211–18. 4. C. Lim, ‘The pandemic of the Spanish influenza in colonial Korea’, Korea Journal, Winter 2011:59–88. 5. D. Hardiman, ‘The influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Adivasis of Western India’, Social History of Medicine, 2012; 25(3):644–64. 6.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

Solo’s link to Degen proved critical in getting Credit Suisse’s backing for Greensill. (Systematic Investment Management, known as SIMAG, was supposed to conjure up investment ideas that could survive any market crisis, using physics, complex self-organizing systems, and behavioural science. Instead, it struggled to cope with the turmoil of the global pandemic. In October 2020, Solo left the business and Credit Suisse folded it into another fund.) There were Greensill sceptics at Credit Suisse, for sure. Bankers who worked with insurance companies who had dealt with Lex had heard of his reputation for pushing the boundaries and for lending to borrowers who defaulted all too often.

…

He texted the top civil servant there, Sir Tom Scholar, saying he was ‘genuinely baffled’ that Greensill wasn’t given access to CCFF, and that he would call Sunak, and ‘everyone’. Minutes later, he went straight to Sunak, though the details of their conversation have never been made public. Pretty soon, Cameron was back at Cunliffe, asking for him to speak with Lex in person. Lex’s belief in his own abilities as a salesman was unshaken, even by a global pandemic. Eventually, in late April, Cunliffe finally relented and agreed to hear him out. Greensill delivered his pitch, but Cunliffe was unmoved. The lobbying effort went on, through April, May and into June. During that period, Cameron blitzed his former government colleagues with messages. In one early April dialogue, Sunak had told Cameron he was ‘stuck back to back on calls’ and promised to talk later.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Most workers I met and interviewed derived a sense of pride from being a frontline worker. They saw how public sentiment favored them, probably for the first time, and got a renewed sense of satisfaction and purpose from their roles. Many remarked on the ways they were treated with greater levels of respect on the job yet regretted that it took a global pandemic for customers and policymakers and the general public to see service workers as deserving of appreciation. Early in the pandemic, this positive change in the public’s perception of them led many essential workers to feel a stronger sense of solidarity and community with each other. In March 2020, Bailey Delaplaine was relieved to learn that her job as a welder would be declared a nonessential service.

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29 What if our workfare programs push millions of poor people into the labor market just so they can collect benefits, even when they have competing obligations to children or elders in their home? What if we pay home care workers such shoddy wages that they leave their industry for fast-food jobs that pay slightly more, creating a massive care worker deficit just when we need them more than ever? What if—stick with me here—a deadly global pandemic throws the economy into free fall and costs us our healthcare and our job, and we’re sick with a virus that no one knows how to cure? The pandemic put us face-to-face with these impossible questions. It profoundly disrupted our ability to work for a wage while performing the usual amount of home-based labor.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Unless and until we evolve into creatures that have no such needs, and have erased the desires to hunt and gather from our nature, there will be a Clapham omnibus, or its latter-day equivalent, ferrying people between their places of labour and rest. Unless, of course, we won’t have to work in the future, or companionship goes out of fashion after, say, a deadly global pandemic. Would we then commute for nostalgia, or even pleasure? Has commuting worked its way so deep into our culture that we’d find it hard to give up absolutely? Or would we frown on it, as we do slavery and burning witches, as belonging to an ignorant, violent and primitive past? People have been predicting both the imminent demise and the perpetual rise of commuting almost since it started.

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But there’s no need to fear 9 billion, or indeed 9,000 billion. In a 1964 essay, ‘How Many People Can the World Support?’, John Heaver Fremlin, an English physicist, argued that limitations on human population growth were determined by physics rather than biology. Barring catastrophes such as a meteorite strike, an apocalyptic war or a deadly global pandemic; and assuming that the entire surface of the planet, ‘land and sea alike’, was covered with 2,000-storey buildings; that people ate their dead and their sewage; that both the north and south poles had been melted on purpose; and there was absolute and eternal world peace; then mother earth could carry up to 60,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty thousand trillion) people by around the year 2964.

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Finally, we saw how a counterintuitive strategy to stop more often during a Formula 1 race proved to be the right use of our most precious commodity: time. While timing is, in all cases, important, the political courage to act coupled with effective levers of management is essential. In the case of COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina, HHS and FEMA conducted two separate exercises that predicted the risks of an imminent global pandemic on the one hand (Crimson Contagion) and a hurricane that would hit and devastate New Orleans on the other (Hurricane Pam). Both exercises were conducted before the respective crises occurred—and eerily predicted the circumstances that would later arise when COVID-19 droplets dispersed across the globe, and when Hurricane Katrina’s winds whipped on New Orleans’s famous Bourbon Street.

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And rather than gathering the leaders and stakeholders in city hall to hash out the details, almost everything had to be done virtually—in many cases, by people who required the help of their teenage kids to coax home videoconferencing systems into working. Simply put, Mayor Walsh and his team had to govern faster and more collaboratively than ever before—and do it under the challenges of COVID-19. “Let’s Kick Some Ass Today” Kathryn Burton hadn’t expected to start her job in the middle of a global pandemic. Burton, born in Canada but experienced in Massachusetts government, began her role as Mayor Walsh’s chief of staff on March 9, 2020. She’d jumped into the whirlwind of a new position in a city government about to undergo some dramatic changes. Just over two weeks later, she was tasked to lead Boston’s daily Crisis Response Forum meeting.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The day we all hear of reliable human-to-human airborne transmission of H5N1, the world will come to a sharp stop. Would you get on a plane, knowing that a highly infectious virus with a 60 percent kill rate might be on board with you? In reality, you won’t face this choice: protocols already in place will shut borders and halt air traffic globally. Pandemic models show that a human H5N1 virus could easily surpass the Black Death of 1348–1350 as humanity’s deadliest known extinction event. Depending on how early the pandemic is detected and how quickly a vaccine can be deployed, epidemiologists estimate that an H5N1 outbreak could infect up to one billion people and directly cause up to 150 million deaths.*** Panic, riots, looting—in general, a fear-fueled breakdown of social order—could push the death toll even higher.

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Recent simulations have shown that a contagious airborne pathogen (like H5N1) carried into any major airport, on any continent, would be global within three days at most.41 If the infected individual took just two plane journeys prior to a public health quarantine, more than 5 billion people (75 percent of humanity) would need to be vaccinated to prevent a global pandemic. After three flights, global vaccination would be required.42 The concentration dilemmas are getting thornier. It is not a question of if, but when, a pandemic will strike a major political, financial or industrial center and force its complete (albeit temporary) isolation from all physical flows in the global system—with hard-to-predict consequences for infrastructure services like energy and IT.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Similarly, the British government sent convicts to Australia rather than Gemane Island on the Gambia River, because of the high risk of disease in the Gambia.26 The inhospitality of West Africa provided opportunities for the relatives of African slaves to later move to Sierra Leone and Liberia.27 Ending the biological isolation of parts of the world would eventually make it possible for people to travel easily between countries and climates—and it would also enable the rapid spread of global pandemics—but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the devastation wrought by disease had wide-ranging consequences. The traumatic depopulation of the Americas opened the way for the gradual European settlement and domination of the continent. In Africa, the lower indigenous susceptibility to European diseases (because of historical contact) and the inhibiting presence of yellow fever and malaria meant that African populations and culture retained their integrity in the absence of overwhelming European domination.28 However, it also meant that African slaves were preferred to European convict and indentured labor in the Caribbean, because of their resistance to tropical diseases.29 Until the 1830s, forced African migrants outnumbered both free and indentured Europeans in the Americas.30 Between 500 BCE and 1200 CE, Eurasia experienced a process of what epidemiologists term “viral reservoir integration” as contact between civilizations intensified; most of the “historically significant biological exchange” in Afro-Eurasia had occurred by 1400 CE.31 The “pathocenosis” (or the codevelopment of disease and populations, including their immunity) in Eurasia was quite separate from that which occurred in the Americas centuries later.

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In the early nineteenth century, Britain banned the emigration of skilled workers as it was industrializing, but many left anyway—recruited by employers in France, Germany, Russia, and America.2 More recently, some academics have argued for severe limitations on immigration to avoid unsustainable population growth (although most have stopped short of advocating zero immigration).3In the UK, David Cameron, the Conservative Party prime minister, has indicated his support for limiting the population to below 70 million to contain the “very great pressures on public services.”4 There is also a growing chorus calling for limits on immigration for environmental reasons.5 Stephen Nickell highlights the need for more research into how the environmental and other costs associated with more migration may be offset by the longer term benefits and suggests that a case may be made for limiting migration on environmental grounds particularly where space is limited.6 A country may close its borders temporarily to prevent the spread of disease, as some analysts have speculated would occur in the case of a global pandemic.7 In our globalized world, it would be unusual for border closure to be more than a short-term response to particular threats or political pressures. Globalization has knit countries together in a dynamic network of cross-border exchange, of which migration is a constituent element. Most countries rely on global networks for a significant share of their GDP.

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

There is no such thing as a “degree in Neurodiversity” for HR and D&I professionals, but for anyone looking to expand their knowledge in this field, this book is as close as you are going to get to it!’ Aidan Healy, Chief Executive Officer, Lexxic Neurodiversity at Work Drive innovation, performance and productivity with a neurodiverse workforce Theo Smith Amanda Kirby We have written this book through a global pandemic, for our families, children, and all those who each and every day get up and swim against the tide. This book is for you. May you no longer have to swim so hard so often, with so little support and recognition for how truly brilliant you are. Together, we shall overcome... Contents About the authors Preface Introduction 01 Why neurodiversity is important Introduction Why do we exclude some people from the conversation?

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Partly inspired by Shelley’s journey after seeing her present at a SmartRecruiters Hiring Success conference, and with an interest in employability in prisons, he went on his own journey to help others in need. During the entire lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, from his home in Northampton, he, his wife and family cooked well over 6,000 meals for rough sleepers. Not the plan, but a response to a global pandemic in his local area. What started out as a small volunteer programme supporting a homeless charity, Project 16:15, turned into their own mission, TRUFeeds, where Bill and Fran Boorman tirelessly worked to raise funds from the recruitment community and beyond to feed those in need. This journey has gone from feeding and supporting 100 rough sleepers on the streets, to helping them connect to the key support services that can give them access to work and housing.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

not to be SARS: www.who.int/​docs/​default-source/​coronaviruse/​transcripts/​who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-20apr2020.pdf. strikingly low rate: Yu-Jie Chen and Jerome A. Cohen, “Why Does the WHO Exclude Taiwan? Council on Foreign Relations, April 9, 2020. Chinese technology companies: “The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic Including the roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Interim Report, June 12, 2020. “damage stability”: Kristin Huang, “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor says officials muzzled her for sharing report on WeChat,” South China Morning Post, March 11, 2020.

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Translated by Mollie Saltskog. “If I had known:” Lily Kuo, “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor speaks out against the authorities,” Guardian, Mar. 11, 2020. “severely disturbed”: Congressional Research Service, “COVID-19 and China,” May 13, 2020. His punishment: “The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Report, Sept. 21, 2020. “How can the bulletins”: Congressional Research Service: COVID-19 and China, May 13, 2020. forced reporters into detention: Vivian Wang, “They Documented the Coronavirus Crises in Wuhan.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

We don't need to go full Spengler to wonder whether there is something of Vienna about the entire Western world, a Viennaification of our ideational environment; not so much the fall of Rome as a mix of self-satisfied embourgeoisement, timidity, complacency and pointless rancour – even in the face of, say, a global pandemic. Like Bell Labs, blessed with a glorious legacy, a great foundation and much forward momentum; like Bell Labs, like Vienna, slouching past its most revolutionary phase into something altogether more ‘decadent’, more comfortable, more indulgent. It's still probably better to do almost anything today than in the great age of Bell Labs or the Viennese heyday, let alone the seventeenth century.

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Across the Atlantic, the message, and the impact, was the same: ‘The experts are terrible,’ said then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Just as we had reached new peaks of complexity and difficulty and required expertise more than ever, the very notion had become toxic, the emblem of a self-interested and pompous elite; the problem, not the solution.74 This was hardly the best preparation for a global pandemic. A barrage of populisms means that ideas are adversely re-politicised. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the exploration of new ideas had never felt less controversial. This now looks like a chimerical interlude. While populism is typically taken to be the wave of broadly nationalist sentiments that has surged since the 2010s, I take it here in the widest sense, as shorthand for a spectrum of intersecting social pressures.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

And while black boys experience less social mobility than white boys, black girls have a higher chance of moving up the socioeconomic ranks to lower middle class or middle class than white girls. Data on absolute income paints a similar picture. According to the United States Census Bureau, the inflation-adjusted income of African Americans has, with brief interruptions during recessions, increased for every quintile of the income distribution. Despite the Great Recession and the global pandemic, this progress has continued over the past two decades. The income of an African American household at the twentieth percentile of the distribution has increased from about $11,000 to $17,000 since 2002; that of the fortieth percentile from $22,000 to $35,000; that of the sixtieth percentile from $36,000 to $60,000; and that of the eightieth percentile from $60,000 to $100,000.

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Of late, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the songs of Manu Chao. There is something compellingly joyous about his music. His is the sort of beat that helps get you out of bed in the morning, the sort of sound you want to have playing on a road trip. During the isolated months of the global pandemic—months during which the compelled loneliness of the shutdowns was, in my case, deepened by the self-imposed discipline required to write a book—I found myself comforted by its promise of adventure to come in the near future. But there is, I now realize, also a deeper reason why I have found myself drawn to albums like Próxima Estación: Esperanza (Next Station: Hope).

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

But feeling pity for America? That one is new.”95 The loss of American economic power and the lack of U.S. leadership could create an opening for China to exert more influence, particularly in the developing world, where many countries desperately need help to cope with the virus and where American responses to the global pandemic have not been up to prior standards (though there will also be a backlash against China as the country of origin of the virus and especially given its initial lack of transparency). A lot of power will also flow to those countries that successfully develop a good vaccine or effective medicine.

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., “The Case for Universal Cloth Mask Adoption and Policies to Increase the Supply of Medical Masks for Health Workers,” Covid Economics, April 6, 2020. 35 J. Howard et al., “Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review,” preprint July 10, 2020. 36 Anonymous, “Czech Video Inspires the World to Wear Face Masks during the Global Pandemic,” Czech Universities, April 6, 2020; R. Tait, “Czechs Get to Work Making Masks after Government Decree,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020. 37 D. Greene, “Police in Czech Republic Tell Nudists to Wear Face Masks,” NPR, April 9, 2020. 38 L. Hensley, “Why Some People Still Refuse to Wear Masks,” Global News, July 9, 2020. 39J.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

The distribution center or warehouse job has become synonymous with misery these days: stories abound of workers having to urinate into bottles because they’re not allowed enough restroom breaks, being tracked around the facility via GPS, or popping Advil like candy to deal with the aches and pains. Yet even Amazon, in denying the reports of hellish conditions written up by journalist Emily Guendelsberger, touts its “passionate employees, whose pride and commitment are what make the Amazon customer experience great.” 9 The global pandemic in 2020 just made the brutality of the workplace more visible. The amount of people employed in manufacturing worldwide has shrunk, but still the work is done, and more and more of it for pennies and without union protections. Women and children labor in deadly conditions in factories in places like Bangladesh, where the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 killed 1,132 workers and injured more than 2,000 more.

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It was shuttered in April 2018, and the company was liquidated shortly thereafter. Private equity buys up firms that are wobbly through leveraged buyouts that put the debt used to buy them back on the company’s balance sheets; if any more trouble hits a company, whether it be increased competition, in the case of Toys “R” Us, or, more recently, the global pandemic, things can unravel quickly. Once iconic brands like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus have fallen into bankruptcy in this way. 1 What that meant for Reinhart was the loss of a job she’d had for twenty-nine years, with no severance. “It was almost my entire adult life,” she said, shaking her head. “What was I thinking?”

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Other countries are wrestling with the choice to allow Huawei to build their 5G networks, torn between the sticker price (low) and security risk (high). Many European countries already use Huawei technology in their 4G networks, making it expensive to switch—especially as they grapple with the fallout from a global pandemic. And then there are the strategic calculations. Reflecting on a visit with high-level European defense officials, one Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me he was shocked by their attitude toward China. “Mainland Europe doesn’t feel like the U.S. is anything near the hegemon we once were,” he said.

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But why wouldn’t he read an email that appeared to come from his spouse, referenced an inside joke, and asked him to click a link to put their three-year-old daughter on a pre-K waiting list? It’s bad enough that so many Americans get their news from distinct media ecosystems, with major consequences for everything from our political discourse to undermining our ability to combat a global pandemic. In the future, we could see news personalized far beyond the Fox/MSNBC divide. A conspiracy theorist who believes that windmills cause cancer might see nothing but article after article reinforcing that idea. An aunt who implicitly trusts what Barack Obama says might be presented with a deepfake calling a Republican president’s election illegitimate and urging supporters to protest.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

When the viral respiratory disease SARS appeared in southern China in November 2002, the government kept it secret for months, delaying both its own and the world’s response. You would think it had learned the lesson. But history repeated itself with the new coronavirus. Chinese authorities could have stopped it from becoming a global pandemic if they had acted the moment the first cases were discovered, but instead they instinctively silenced whistle-blowers and denied human-to-human transmission. Medical professionals who sounded the alarm about the outbreak were detained by the police. State-run media did not mention the risks for weeks, but warned netizens not to spread rumours about it.

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London, Granta Books, 1992, p. 394. 4 ‘ASHG denounces attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy’, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 103, 2018, https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(18)30363-X (accessed 9 March 2020). 5 R. N. Thompson, C.P. Thompson, O. Pelerman, S. Gupta and U. Obolski, ‘Increased frequency of travel may act to decrease the chance of a global pandemic’, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society of London, 374 (1775), 2019. C. Wilson, ‘Why air travel makes deadly disease pandemics less likely’, New Scientist, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2184266-why-airtravel-makes-deadly-diseasepandemics-less-likely/(accessed 9 March 2020). 6 M.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

Southwick, “Association of Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with Posttraumatic Psychological Growth among US Veterans During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 4 (April 2021): e214972, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.4972. 6 Leah Zaidi, “Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design” (master’s thesis, Ontario College of Art and Design, 2017), 2, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321886159_Building_Brave_New_Worlds_Science_Fiction_and_Transition_Design. 7 Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 194. 8 Marina Gorbis and Kathi Vian, “Post-COVID-19 Futures: What Can We Build after the Global Pandemic?,” Urgent Futures, Institute for the Future, May 6, 2020, https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/post-COVID-19-futures-what-can-we-build-after-the-global-pandemic-3cac9515ef20. 9 “After the Pandemic: A Deeper Disease,” Institute for the Future, September 15, 2020, https://www.iftf.org/whathappensnext/. 10 Molly Kinder and Martha Ross, “Reopening America: Low-Wage Workers Have Suffered Badly from COVID-19 so Policymakers Should Focus on Equity,” Brookings Institute, June 23, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/reopening-america-low-wage-workers-have-suffered-badly-from-COVID-19-so-policymakers-should-focus-on-equity/; Alyssa Fowers, “Concerns about Missing Work May Be a Barrier to Coronavirus Vaccination,” Washington Post, May 27, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/27/time-off-vaccine-workers/. 11 Oxfam International, The Inequality Virus: Bringing Together a World Torn Apart by Coronavirus through a Fair, Just and Sustainable Economy (Cowley, Oxford: Oxfam GB, January 2021), https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-the-inequality-virus-250121-en.pdf. 12 International Labor Organization, ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the World of Work, 5th ed., June 30, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_749399.pdf; Courtney Connley, “Women’s Labor Force Participation Rate Hit a 33-Year Low in January, According to New Analysis,” CNBC Make It, February 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/womens-labor-force-participation-rate-hit-33-year-low-in-january-2021.html; Catarina Saraiva, “Women Leaving Workforce Again Shows Uneven U.S.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Tribalism, then, can endanger the citizens’ national security. During the pandemic itself, Americans were apparently either to agree with the Chinese charge or to cede leverage to Beijing in terror of being called racist again. A Chinese daily newspaper adroitly attacked legitimate American complaints that Chinese laxity had led to a deadly global pandemic with boilerplate charges of racism: “The U.S. and other Western countries’ overreactions to the outbreak in China smack of a ‘segregation’ policy laced with extreme racism.” At a time when African students and visitors were being systematically barred from entering some Chinese stores and restaurants, the China Daily was urging their home governments “to reject the triple Western diseases of xenophobia, ideological bias and the fear of China’s rise.”

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Not much later, congressional Democrats and the media advanced the argument that Trump’s presidency indeed should be terminated due to his mental incapacity. As a result, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee organized a conference at Yale where she met with members of Congress and diagnosed Trump as dangerously unfit. Indeed, Lee deemed the president an existential threat to the planet comparable to some sort of global pandemic. “Our survival as a species,” she insisted, “may be at stake.” When during the primary campaign of 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden seemed to exhibit confusion at times about names, dates, and places, Dr. Lee was asked whether she might offer another in absentia analysis but refused. Nonetheless, her idea of removing a president by claiming he was non compos mentis without a physical or mental examination persisted—and took on even stranger manifestations.45 In 2019, fired former deputy and acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe admitted that he and then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had earlier discussed the possibility of removing the president from office.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

We hope that you will embark on this journey with curiosity, an open mind—and an open heart, too. One last thing: For me, the greatest value of science fiction is not providing answers, but rather raising questions. After you close the book, our hope is that lots of new questions will enliven your mind: For instance, can AI help humans prevent the next global pandemic by eliminating it at the very root? How can we deal with future job challenges? How can we maintain cultural diversity in a world dominated by machines? How can we teach our children to live in a society where humans and machines coexist? We hope our readers’ questions will help take us further down the path as we shape a happier and brighter future.

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Jennifer forced herself to refocus on the task at hand. Floating in midair, Michael was still talking, while gracefully waving his hands, like a conductor. The video window obeyed his gestures and fluctuated, growing, shrinking, and tilting in concert with Saviour’s movements. “As you have seen, signs of change were already manifest before the global pandemic. The virus merely accelerated things. A large amount of previously offline economic activity went online as people maintained social distancing. The traditional service and manufacturing industries suffered heavy losses. Both were spheres where machines had an advantage.” As Michael gestured, an array of people from different professions appeared and vanished in the midair scroll: cashiers, truck drivers, seamstresses, factory workers, fruit pickers, telemarketers, well-dressed office workers, even doctors.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A case can be made that oil companies like Chevron need the smart cadre of McKinsey consultants to guide them through an existential threat to their business model: the global push to move away from fossil fuels. BP and Shell, for example, are scrambling to expand their clean energy businesses. So with an army of McKinsey consultants advising them on strategy, what approach did Chevron choose? Drill, baby, drill. In July 2020, just as the global pandemic was decimating demand for Chevron’s gasoline, the company’s CEO, Mike Wirth, speaking to the Texas Oil & Gas Association, said that the global push for clean energy “doesn’t mean the end of oil and gas,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Wirth said that Chevron would “find ways to make oil and gas more efficient, more environmentally benign.”

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Other top McKinsey fossil fuel clients: List of companies from McKinsey internal records. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT If McKinsey was advising: Details on McKinsey’s work with Chevron from McKinsey internal records. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In July 2020, just as the global pandemic: Kevin Crowley and Bryan Gruley, “Chevron’s Answer to Climate Change Is to Keep Drilling for Oil,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 13, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Teck, one of the world’s biggest exporters: For the size of Teck compared with other steelmaking coal exporters, see “Teck: Fact Sheet: Steelmaking Coal.”

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

When the interview ended, one YouTube staffer in attendance privately felt relieved that the Wired editor didn’t pull up searches on YouTube like “flu vaccine,” which were rife with conspiracies. Another person on YouTube’s policy team later said that Wojcicki argued against limiting such videos, citing friends of hers who subscribed to alternative health beliefs that shunned vaccines—a stance she changed once a global pandemic struck. Still, Wojcicki ended the interview on high notes. YouTube had implemented a series of updates she said would purge bad actors abusing its systems. Videos like the Parkland Trending clip were removed for breaking rules against harassment. With new ad filters and controls in place, Wojcicki had persuaded nearly all boycotting brands to spend again.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT said it had not been informed: Megan Farokhmanesh, “YouTube Didn’t Tell Wikipedia About Its Plans for Wikipedia,” The Verge, March 14, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/14/17120918/youtube-wikipedia-conspiracy-theory-partnerships-sxsw. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT global pandemic struck: A YouTube spokesperson said the company “took a strong supportive stance on vaccines from the very beginning” of the COVID-19 pandemic “and was one of the first companies to implement a COVID-vaccine misinfo policy.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 29: 901 Cherry Avenue or Green Nasim: Daisuke Wakabayashi, Thomas Erdbrink, and Matthew Haag, “ ‘Vegan Bodybuilder’: How YouTube Attacker, Nasim Aghdamn, Went Viral in Iran,” The New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter.html.

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term by Torkell T. Eide, Lawrence A. Cunningham, Patrick Hargreaves

air freight, Albert Einstein, asset light, backtesting, barriers to entry, buy and hold, carbon tax, cashless society, cloud computing, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, global pandemic, haute couture, hindsight bias, legacy carrier, low cost airline, mass affluent, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, price elasticity of demand, proprietary trading, shareholder value, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, vertical integration

Both companies grew significantly and at the time of the reunification, which brought an end to over 60 years of competition, they were the second and third ranked players in the diabetes space, behind Eli Lilly. Diabetes treatment now accounts for around three-quarters of Novo Nordisk’s profit. The incidence of diabetes globally has increased rapidly in the last decade, driven by the global pandemic of obesity – now numbering more than 600 million people and forecast to continue rising. Demand for diabetes treatment will, we believe, increase more rapidly due to rising diagnosis rates; as will the continued need for better treatments and broader reach of care (fewer than 10% of afflicted people receive effective care).

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

The average retail investor cannot just load up their portfolio with bonds and ignore equities. The traditional advice when investing is to spread risk across various asset classes as well as sectors, on the assumption that they won’t all fall in value at once – except in exceptional circumstances, such as the global pandemic experienced in 2020. Private equity Private equity investors take a stake in an unlisted company: one that is still private and hasn’t floated on the stock market. While equities and bond funds form part of a normal portfolio for an average retail investor, private equity is often only advised for those with more money to invest.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

It tends to attract engineering students looking for a humanities elective, despite—or because of—the disturbing subject matter. When I designed the course, I knew that it would be a major draw because, even if a person might not wish for bad things to happen, when bad things do happen, it’s often difficult to look away. I never imagined that I would be teaching the course in the middle of a global pandemic. As we shifted our class online in March 2020 in order to safeguard our health, our lives, and the lives of those around us, and to try to slow a deadly and highly transmissible virus, I found myself thinking about other types of destructive virality, and about October 2019, when I watched Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress.

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The larger lesson, however, is that regulatory agencies that should have prevented disasters like the 737 Max tragedy had been stripped of their ability to do so, and whole sectors that require regulation, like web technologies and online communication platforms, effectively have no external oversight bodies. In the US since 2016, instead of more regulatory safeguards put into place by a democratically elected government, we have seen runaway centralization and the destruction of regulatory and safety agencies under an increasingly authoritarian federal government. During a global pandemic this has meant that even healthcare supplies and vital public information have been withheld from citizens and state governments. Scientists and epidemiologists at the CDC and NIH have been increasingly forced out or muzzled, and many of the teams dedicated to pandemic response had been dissolved prior to the COVID-19 crisis, leaving a gaping hole of expertise where our disaster response should have been.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Ensuring the next big outbreak never happens could be the greatest gift of the biotracking revolution. Individually, of course, real-time monitoring of vitals and body chemicals offers incredible benefits for optimizing health and preventing emergencies. Collectively, though, it could help us get ahead of a global pandemic. CHANGE IN LIFE EXPECTANCY DURING THE 1918 FLU EPIDEMIC. Source: S. L. Knobler, A. Mack, A. Mahmoud, and S. M. Lemon, eds., The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? Workshop Summary, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.17226/11150, PMID: 20669448.

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And today, with each new human life, our planet becomes more crowded, hurtling us toward, or perhaps further beyond, what it can sustain. How many is too many? One report, which examined sixty-five different scientific projections, concluded that the most common estimated “carrying capacity” of our planet is 8 billion.7 That’s just about where we’re at right now. And barring a nuclear holocaust or a global pandemic of historically deadly proportions—nothing anyone in his or her right mind would ever wish for—that’s not where our population is going to peak. When the Pew Research Center polled members of the largest association of scientists in the world, 82 percent said that there isn’t enough food and other resources on this planet for its fast-growing human population.8 Among those who held that opinion was Frank Fenner, an eminent Australian scientist who helped bring an end to one of the world’s deadliest diseases as the chairman of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Since 1 976, when Ebola first appeared in Zaire, there have been intermittent outbreaks of the disease, often along Sub-Saharan African rainforests where the virus is transmitted from other primates to humans. The remoteness of these regions, and the rapid pace by which these viruses kill their human host, have thus far precluded a global pandemic. H owever, if these pathogens were procured, aerosolized, and released in busy urban centres or hubs, a catastrophic pandemic might ensue - particularly because attempts to generate vaccines to Ebola have, thus far, proven unsuccessful. In 1992, the Aum Shinrikyo sent a medical team to Zaire in what is believed to have been an attempt to procure Ebola virus ( Kaplan, 2000) .

…

(January 2003). Enhanced: Moore's law forever? Science, 299(5604), 2 1 0-2 1 1 . Moore, G . ( 1 9 April 1965). Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics Magazine, 1 14-1 17. Murray, C.)., Lopez, A.D., Chin, B., Feehan, D., and Hill, K. H . (23 December 2006). Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918-20 pandemic: a quantitative analysis. The Lancet, 368(9554) , 2 2 1 1-22 18. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. (2004). The 9/1 1 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton). National Research Council. (2003a).

…

103 Gilovich, T. 99 GIRO 1 74, 182 GISP2 ice core, effect ofToba eruption 207 glaciation cycles 268, 358 effects on biodiversity 256 Milankovitch theory 240-1 relationship to cosmic ray flux 2 5 1 -2 Global Brain scenario 80 global catastrophic risk study as a single field 1-2 taxonomy 2-6 global cooling after asteroid impact 2 3 1 nuclear winter 208, 381, 390-2 as result of dust shower 2 3 3 volcanic eruptions 2 0 5 , 207-9, 2 10, 2 1 3 , 269-71 globalization, pandemic risk 1 7 global nuclear war 388-9 nuclear winter 390-2 Global Outbreak and Response Network (GOARN), WHO 471 Global Public Health Information Network ( G P H I N ) , WHO 470, 471 global totalitarianism 26, 67, 509-10 probability 5 16-17 risk factors politics 5 1 2-14 molecular manufacturing 492-4, 498 technology 5 1 1-12 risk management politics 5 1 5-16 technology 5 14-1 5 global war, risk from molecular manufacturing 489-92, 496-7, 498-9 global warming viii-ix, 5, 1 5 , 185, 243-4, 258 after asteroid impact 2 3 1 agricultural consequences 6 5 cost-benefit analysis 192-200 due to brightening of Sun 34 historical 1 91-2 public policy 191-200 Kyoto Protocol 190-1 relationship to solar activity 250-1 sea level rise, evolutionary consequences 5 5 gluons 350 Index 540 God, anthropomorphic bias 3 1 0 Goiania radiological incident (1987), psychological consequences 430 Goleman, D. 62 good cause dump 106 Good, I .

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The more our elites call for ‘thought leadership’ and ‘disruptive thinking’, the less they seem to mean it. Buzz terms, such as resiliency, global governance, multi-stakeholder collaboration and digital public square, are the answer to every problem, regardless of its nature. Too many wars happening? We need more collaboration. High risk of another global pandemic? More stakeholder participation. Populist revolts convulsing the Western world? We must rebuild trust in global governance. For every risk, Davos offers an identikit fix. Most of its Latinate prose sounds innocuous. But the lexicon betrays a worldview that is inherently wary of public opinion.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

In our own day we have witnessed the extension of the concept of natural selection from the genetic level of analysis, of interest in the study of biological evolution, to the “memetic” level, of interest in the study of communication networks. The fact that the idea of the meme has caught on so succesfully is itself an instance of memetic selection. Viruses are another example of the cross-fertility between information science and life science. The current global pandemic is in the course of revolutionizing our language in profound ways. One of the most significant changes however is not so much a revolution as a restoration: at just the moment in history when a derived and secondary sense of “virus” (as in “computer virus,” “viral meme,” “viral celebrity,” “to go viral”) was poised to move into first place, a real virus, a harmful biological agent, came roaring into history to remind us of its enduring primacy.

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, Gary Taubes, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, placebo effect, Upton Sinclair

An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime; the risk is even greater for a Hispanic American or African American. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts roughly twelve years from one’s life and living with the condition incurs medical costs of $13,000 a year (compared with $2,500 for someone without diabetes). This is a global pandemic in the making, but a most unusual one, because it involves no virus or bacteria, no microbe of any kind—just a way of eating. It remains to be seen whether we’ll respond by changing our diet or our culture and economy. Although an estimated 80 percent of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented by a change of diet and exercise, it looks like the smart money is instead on the creation of a vast new diabetes industry.

Half Empty by David Rakoff

airport security, Buckminster Fuller, dark matter, double helix, gentrification, global pandemic, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, phenotype, RFID, subprime mortgage crisis, twin studies, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave, Wall-E, Y2K

Eventually it would be taken off the market when it came to light that the bacon bits were nothing more than highly salted, air-puffed balsa wood, but before all that there would be television commercials showing happy couples sprinkling their Seasons of Love® over salads, or laughingly feeding one another bites of baked potato festively speckled with the stuff, like someone had just celebrated New Year’s all over your food. In Rent, the characters live out their Seasons of Love in huge Manhattan lofts. Some of them have AIDS, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a dreaded global pandemic that is still raging and has killed millions of people worldwide. In Rent, AIDS seems only to render one cuter and cuter. The characters are artists. Creative types. Some of them are homosexual, and the ones who aren’t don’t seem to mind. They screen their calls and when it is their parents they roll their eyes.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Moreover, the USA has a track record of successfully assimilating immigrants. As a result it’s likely to see a rise in the size of its working-age population and to witness strong economic growth over the longer term. Of course, all these estimates could be wildly off the mark. Perhaps another great famine, global pandemic or a world war could kill off billions of people, or maybe people will suddenly start having much larger families for reasons of economic survival or for status. In theory, demographic forecasting is a relatively scientific field, but in reality it can be subject to the vagaries of the future just like anything else.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

And thank you, Helen Mirra, for your wisdom and walks, which teach me to “let go, let go, let go.” This book would not be possible without my aunt and uncle, Victor Wang and Jacqueline Chen, who gave me their unwavering support and a home in Guangzhou. Thank you to my mother, who continues to diligently feed people in the middle of a global pandemic, and to my grandmother, who remains ever present in my life. And Ian Pearce: I am always grateful for your patience, support, and endless good humor. The intellectual and spiritual influences of this book are many. Yet it all began with the cookbooks and food writings of Buwei Chao, M.F.K. Fisher, Jessica B.

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

Discovering electricity—then bringing it to every home in America in the twentieth century Ending slavery in America Engineering a flying vehicle that weighs hundreds of tons and can soar through the air at hundreds of miles an hour while carrying hundreds of people Measuring the size of the universe using only math and telescopes Eradicating diseases that had killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide Climbing Mount Everest and skiing to both the South Pole and the North Pole in a single lifetime Walking on the moon and returning to Earth Taking a heart from one person and putting it into the body of another person to save a life Discovering DNA, sequencing it, then figuring out how to modify it letter by letter Creating a supercomputer that fits in your pocket Turning an online bookstore into a trillion-dollar company Searching all of the world’s information in less than a second Building a map of the entire world that knows where you are and how to get anywhere you want to go Creating “meat” without animals Lifting a billion people out of abject poverty in the last twenty-five years Battling a global pandemic Look back at your to-do list now. Do you see anything that still looks impossible? Spend your time with people who give you energy Why I love young people who are the first in their family to go to college There’s no way I’d be where I am today if it hadn’t been for the mentorship, professional development, summer internships, and support I received in high school and college.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

The added stresses of winter and seasonal flu are enough to tip us annually into full-blown crisis. Patients on trolleys lining hospital corridors are now grimly iconic of an NHS pared to the bone. And this is categorically not a sign of NHS robustness. Quite the opposite. How can a health service so stripped of spare capacity cope with the demands of a once-ina-lifetime global pandemic? I bite my lip and think longingly of Germany’s twenty-nine intensive care beds per 100,000 people – four times the number of ICU beds in Britain. It gets worse. The Channel 4 News health and social care editor, Victoria Macdonald, asks the Prime Minister if he has yet to develop his own personal policy on shaking hands.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes