The US leads the world in science, and it also leads the world in opposition to science
were a courageous leader as are the governors of California, New York, Montana and some other states, such a president could lead our country and call on all Americans to focus on what we share in common, and to join in combating the current enemy of the epidemic.
Q: That makes you think. Especially when taking into consideration that many of your predictions in the past were correct. In “Upheaval” you wrote that the lack of government investment in human capital, i.e. in education, infrastructure and health care, threatens the US technological leadership. Currently, it looks like you were right: The American system seems to be hit harder and faster by the spread of a virus than most European countries, for example. What is your outlook in this situation?
A: There are several reasons. One is that the United States is strongly connected to the rest of the world ... Another factor is our federal system that I mentioned above: Authority is diffuse in the United States, so it isn’t possible for one leader to order a lockdown, as is the case in some other countries. Still a third reason is our large population, the third most populous country in the world.
Q: Yet, the biggest problem of American society, as you wrote, is the refusal to learn from others. Instead of taking responsibility and honestly assessing oneself, one seeks blame on others.
A: Years from now in the future, readers of my recent book may think that I wrote the book after the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.
Q: Let’s briefly go through the steps of crisis management you identified in “Upheaval.” What do they actually mean in the face of the current crisis?
A: The COVID-19 crisis illustrates well that list of a dozen outcome predictors.
The first step in dealing with either a personal crisis or a national crisis, familiar to all of us who have gone through a personal crisis — which means every one of us — is to acknowledge that oneself or one’s country is in a crisis.
The second step, also familiar to all of us from personal experience, is to accept responsibility that one has to do something about the crisis oneself, and that blaming others or indulging in selfpity gets one nowhere.
Again, COVID-19 illustrates both good and bad examples: My own president provides a bad example, in focusing on blaming China, while Vietnam and Australia and New Zealand focused on doing something about the crisis rather than assigning blame elsewhere.
Q: This step is of great importance for the third, decisive one, right?
A: Yes. It’s crisis resolution, again familiar to all of us from personal experience: Look for models of how other people have solved, or have refused to solve, a similar problem. Nations also learn from models, or refuse to learn from models ... Already in January, before there had been any case of COVID-19 in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government remembered 2003 and imposed lockdown and tracking. This crisis perspective of my book leaves me cautiously optimistic about the outcome of our current global COVID-19 crisis.
Q: All this sounds like we reached a “tipping point” that is likely to change the future of our societies.
A: The unique feature of the COVID19 crisis in history is that it is the first world crisis that the world acknowledges as a shared crisis. Of course, the world faces other crises, notably climate change and resource depletion and inequality. But climate change doesn’t kill people within two days, and the deaths of people who die of respiratory diseases and food shortages and other long-term consequences of climate change don’t say to themselves, “I’m dying of climate change!” They instead say that they are dying of a respiratory disease or of starvation. But COVID-19 kills quickly, and if you are dying of COVID-19, there is no doubt that you are dying of COVID-19.
Hence the world is being forced to acknowledge that COVID-19 is a world crisis, one that affects every country, and no country can solve it by itself.
Even if Germany stamps out COVID19 completely within its own borders, but if the virus survives in Moldova or Libya or any other country, it will be only a matter of time before Germany gets reinfected.
Q: So, what makes you optimistic for the rest of the year — and the following?
A: It will at first seem ironic, cruelly ironic, to say that a pandemic that will kill millions of people provides any cause for optimism. But I predict that it will give us cause for optimism.
I hope that, just as COVID-19 will motivate the world to adopt a global approach to this world problem, it will also serve as a model by motivating the world to adopt a global approach to solving the world crises of climate change and resource depletion and inequality.
If that prediction of mine proves true, then the COVID-19 crisis will have a silver lining: For the first time in world history, a global pandemic will have created a model of shared motivation among the world’s people to solve a world problem.