12 ms·

Welcome to the 21st Century: How to Plan for the Post-Covid Future

77 points by gHeadphone 6y ago

buboard 6y ago
COVID is an accelerator, not an innovator Travel is the big unraveling. Tourism has ballooned since 2000 but it was no longer tourism: how many tourists even talk to locals anymore? Look at Youtube travelogues - how often do you see locals? Tourism degenerated to fodder for the social media/instagram economy and every holiday is the same packaged experience , just different background. That makes it easy to virtualize. It's also fueled by high density urbanization, tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). In person entertainment, privacy, work from home, remote schooling, all these have been slowly eating the world. There s another one: Biotech. We are now testing things like mRNA drugs and antibody therapies at an unprecedented pace. If one of them proves safe, biomedicine will be next to eat the world. This is not happening at the national level, it's happening at the individual / company level and people are noticing. The overfunded US and China army can't do nothing for the pandemic or the climate, and govt agencies across the world have proven unreliable. The pandemic has been a shitshow for politics / governments and a boon for private initiative, and people are noticing.
- rado 6y ago
  Yes, Biotech will rule this century.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  ", tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). " Whether urban living is preferable is subjective, but urbanites also tend to be richer and have easier access to airports (and trains and buses).
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security. The technology is so attainable for so cheap, it's going to flip the infections disease paradigm. No longer will we be lamenting so much about the end of antibiotics, we will be lamenting about computational screens for neutralizing targets of surface antigens coming up short. Do you want to put your tech abilities toward this problem? Learn about genomics, structural biochemistry, and genetic alignments. So you have a positive clinical hit for an antigen against some organism? What other organism has a homologous gene? Do you need to try and fold the new one to see if the antigen you hit is still solvent exposed? Join-up with David Baker, or any computational structure prediction group. D.E. Shaw will be a big funder of this stuff. Gates foundation. The golden age of biotech is coming, learn the tools today. Just look at the biotech IPO market this year alone.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?
    - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
      Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).
- iagooar 6y ago
  > There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). I don't see how people stop traveling once Covid is gone (or at least reduced to a regular flu level of danger). Why would people ever prefer not to travel? I agree that some paranoid people won't travel until 5 years after the pandemic, but the vast majority of people will do.
  - buboard 6y ago
    tourism is one part of traveling. people from highly urbanized areas tend to travel long distances more (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2) . If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well
    - gspr 6y ago
      > If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well I've never understood this one. Do people really think that work is the only big reason people flock to cities?
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Some people would definitely prefer not to travel if their potential destination still had major restrictions on foreigners entering. Forcing arriving travelers to quarantine themselves for two weeks in a hotel would automatically cut out most tourists, because relatively few people have that much holiday and would want to budget for two weeks of accommodation where they can’t go anywhere. Even softer measures like forcing travelers to install the local government’s app like in China might be a turnoff.
- gspr 6y ago
  > tiny living spaces in insufferable cities Where is this coming from? It may be just anecdotal, but "availability of relevant work" is only one of many reasons the people I know choose to live in cities.
dugditches 6y ago
>So too, when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID19 pandemic took hold Couldn't one argue 9/11 was the 'start' of the 21st century? And all the effects and tone it caused that last to this day?
- randallsquared 6y ago
  All that has faded into the background for Tim O'Reilly, I guess.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  It has been argued that the 20th century ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the 19th century before it ended with WWI. The 20th century was a "short" century. 9/11 was a spectacular event but did not change anything fundamental and was neither the first nor the last Islamic terrorist attack in the West or on the West/US. In fact, the lid had been removed on Islamic extremism in the 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, even if it had been brewing for quite some time before that: Soviet withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 (leading to the Talibans seizing power), Algerian Civil War started in 1991, highjacking of Air France flight by Algerian terrorists in 1994 (said to be the blueprint for 9/11), attack on US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, attack on USS Cole in 2000, etc. I think what 9/11 did is to make the American public catch up with the world they were living in because many of them had not realised yet. I'm not sure whether Covid-19 will change anything in the long term. It's too early to say. At the moment the main effect seems to be a significant economic downturn, which could have long term consequences, or not.
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    9/11 resulted in a 20 year war. That's a big deal. 9/11 resulted in a generation of soldiers returning into civic life with serious physical and mental scars from that 20 years. Equality is worse, two nations have been destroyed. There are multiple failed states all over the middle east and north Africa. 9/11 was a really big deal. Everything did change that day.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The article's comparison of what's shaping up to be a year or two long disease outbreak to a 4yr global conflict that massively altered the global balance of power and spread industrialization across many industries that had thus far resisted it seems a little premature. Wall street, shady billionaires pulling strings, governments and normal everyday people have a massive economic interest in things becoming as normal as they possibly can post-covid and they are all going to work toward furthering that goal in their own ways. Sure some of the things that were trialed during COVID (work from home, mask wearing, etc) may stick around but they are going to go away and if they come back it will be slowly over years/decades and on their own merits.
- hatboat 6y ago
  I think an important point the author is trying to make is that we don't know how this is going to play out, with "scenario planning" being a central theme of the article. We have only experienced a few of the pandemic's direct effects a few months in, and in many parts of the globe the first wave is still in full swing. The second- and higher-order effects are largely unknown at this point, and many will only be fully understood by future historians. While the direct comparison to WWI/II may be hyperbolic, I think it's a fair assessment to say that COVID is the biggest, truly global event since. During each war there were many turning points that may have ended them early, turning them into smaller, regional conflicts. The people who experienced the first six months of them weren't to know they would leave tens of millions dead and society changed forever after. Now I'm not suggesting that COVID will be on remotely this scale, however I believe the author's argument that it will likely trigger large societal change, and to try and prepare accordingly, is a good one.
tekert 6y ago
Dah, like if this is the first pandamic humanity faces, these americans and their fallout really. too much what ifs and yadayada.
mattlondon 6y ago
Hmm. I agree in part, but I am not sure if we can compare COVID-19 against the horrors of two world wars where tens of millions died (15-22,000,000 deaths in WW1 and 70-85,000,000 deaths in WW2 according to wikipedia) and entire cities were literally flattened and millions more left homeless and jobless? The strange thing about COVID-19 is that it is largely invisible (unless you happen to work in a hospital or morgue or something). Apart from people wearing masks and Starbucks only doing takeaway and those unlucky enough to have lost a loved one/friend/colleague (my condolences if so) it is hard for people to actually "see" the impact. For me, the largest impact is I have to plan my grocery deliveries a bit more carefully (since I can't do a top-up shop easily) and I work from home more than I usually did - nothing else has changed in my life really. Will Starbucks re-open their doors and be selling double-tall skinny frap extra-cold within a few days of getting the say-so? You bet - and who can blame them? Nothing will have changed for them - people will still buy the coffee just like they are buying them right now during the pandemic. Did Hiroshima/Dresden/Hamburg/Berlin/Tokyo/Stalingrad/others re-open after VE/VJ day? No - because they were absolutely physically obliterated with the population killed, maimed or displaced (...and even if they weren't, physiologically it must have been absolutely crippling to be a survivor). Were I alive in WW2, would my life only be mildly inconvenienced like it is today with COVID-19? No way - if I had even survived at all, I'd be happy to have a home to live in (and no doubt without reliable electricity, gas or sewage), even luckier to have a job to work at, and even luckier still to have shops to visit with stock to allow me to even purchase any food. And I'd no doubt have known friends family and colleagues who died in unspeakably horrible ways. Whatever happened I'd be psychologically scarred for life. It just doesn't feel like COVID-19 is in the same league... And this is before we even mention genocide from WW2. That said though I am all for fiscal stimulus only going to green companies though! No government hand-outs to the cruiseline, airline, oil, or shipping industries please! :) . . . . . Aside: ... I note that COVID-19 is now "worse" than the WW2 Blitz in London in that it has killed more people (1). I sincerely hope now that the rose-tinted nostalgia for people citing the "Blitz Spirit" etc in the context of Brexit can go away. London has now faced worse than the Blitz - and when it did it was immigrant nurses (one from the EU, one from the Commonwealth) that literally nursed even our Prime Minister back to health. We are stronger together.</politics> 1 - https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/30/covid-19-is-killing-londoners-at-a-faster-rate-than-german-bombs-did https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/30/covid-19-is-kil...
brakmic 6y ago
TL;DR; One of the arch-neoliberals talking about the future of mankind. If there's one thing that's certain, then it's that neoliberalism always strives to destroy history and prevent any change. Get prepared for more neoliberals talking...about the future.
- buboard 6y ago
  where can we read the other side talking about the future? i cant remember how long since reading a future-looking piece from a leftist intellectual
  - brakmic 6y ago
    It has no time for talking and/or writing long texts, because it's fighting for survival in a world designed by neoliberals.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      and, apparently, a persecution complex. To be fair, when education and information become more universal it may really be that old obsolete conservative precepts are 'under attack', in that, they don't work very well any more. Not trying to be mean; just to rationalize why the theme of being 'under attack' is pervasive.
      - brakmic 6y ago
        And of course, any criticizm of neoliberalism is declared irrational. It's never accepted as being grounded on evidence. Pure neoliberal newspeak: "the problem is you" The ideology of self-optimization.
        JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Criticizing education, advances in theory and social science, are indeed irrational. Wishing that the world of 7B people could be the same as a 50-year-gone world of 2B is not the same as 'evidence-based criticism'. Lots of folks say lots of things. Not defending rabid idealists of any stripe. But there is a better way to operate and work, than an old one based on a situation long gone. There sure better be, because things really sucked 50 years ago in lots of ways.
hootbootscoot 6y ago
This is a great article.
- paulkrush 6y ago
  I agree. Long and well though out.
shashanoid 6y ago
Have you not yet realized the futility of planning?
- lihaciudaniel 6y ago
  Failing to plan, is planing to failure.
pmorici 6y ago
This all strikes me as extremely alarmist and far-fetched. The chances of COVID causing an indefinite pandemic that alters the nature of human behavior and the course of history forever in my estimation is zero. Business and economic difficulties for a few years, yes. Total destruction of the travel industry for all time? Not a chance. Some of the stuff just makes no sense, for example; "There's already talk of a race to produce vaccines, where a country that has the vaccine will use the vaccine for itself in order to gain advantage rather than spreading it around the world." I could imagine the country that discovers it giving priority to their citizens when there is, at first, limited supply but withholding it indefinitely for advantage seems like it would not happen because of the incredible profit motive.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  > I could imagine the country that discovers it giving priority to their citizens when there is, at first, limited supply but withholding it indefinitely for advantage seems like it would not happen because of the incredible profit motive. Turns out that those doing vaccine trials have actually thought of that, and most of them are making partnerships in different countries to prevent "bad side effects" from this (such as forced seizure).
biolurker1 6y ago
There is a lying madman at the top superpower, none of these words matter as muchas getting him voted out. The single most important thing in human history could be to make Americans go and vote in November.

77 points by gHeadphone 6y ago

COVID is an accelerator, not an innovator Travel is the big unraveling. Tourism has ballooned since 2000 but it was no longer tourism: how many tourists even talk to locals anymore? Look at Youtube travelogues - how often do you see locals? Tourism degenerated to fodder for the social media/instagram economy and every holiday is the same packaged experience , just different background. That makes it easy to virtualize. It's also fueled by high density urbanization, tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). In person entertainment, privacy, work from home, remote schooling, all these have been slowly eating the world. There s another one: Biotech. We are now testing things like mRNA drugs and antibody therapies at an unprecedented pace. If one of them proves safe, biomedicine will be next to eat the world. This is not happening at the national level, it's happening at the individual / company level and people are noticing. The overfunded US and China army can't do nothing for the pandemic or the climate, and govt agencies across the world have proven unreliable. The pandemic has been a shitshow for politics / governments and a boon for private initiative, and people are noticing.

rado 6y ago
Yes, Biotech will rule this century.
CalRobert 6y ago
", tiny living spaces in insufferable cities (urbanites travel more). " Whether urban living is preferable is subjective, but urbanites also tend to be richer and have easier access to airports (and trains and buses).
DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
Completely agree. Imagine if an mRNA vaccine hits? Every government in the world will be clambering to start their own vaccine defence arm for national security. The technology is so attainable for so cheap, it's going to flip the infections disease paradigm. No longer will we be lamenting so much about the end of antibiotics, we will be lamenting about computational screens for neutralizing targets of surface antigens coming up short. Do you want to put your tech abilities toward this problem? Learn about genomics, structural biochemistry, and genetic alignments. So you have a positive clinical hit for an antigen against some organism? What other organism has a homologous gene? Do you need to try and fold the new one to see if the antigen you hit is still solvent exposed? Join-up with David Baker, or any computational structure prediction group. D.E. Shaw will be a big funder of this stuff. Gates foundation. The golden age of biotech is coming, learn the tools today. Just look at the biotech IPO market this year alone.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Thanks. Any books, blogs, Twitter accounts you'd recommend?
  - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply, it made me think about the book idea. The topic is still too new for a book, but it's a good idea; maybe more of a treatise needs to be written on the subject right now. Regardless, the parents of modern mRNA vaccinology are Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, follow his publications. Here are a couple good reviews to get you started (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3812). I say modern, because the idea of using modified chemistry is likely going to be key to a successful mRNA vaccine. Without it, the immunogenicty leads to safety concerns and a reduction in transcript expression--it's just too hot. CureVac founder and arguably the first person to really drive the idea of an mRNA vaccine into the clinic is Ingmar Hoerr, but his company started before the idea of modified chemistry. He is a fantastic scientist, but ultimately CureVac came too soon and has triple-downed on canonical uridine. Another issue is they likely can't get FTO so they don't really have a choice. As for blogs/twitter accounts, none of the mRNA people are active on social media likely because the stakes are just too high right now. If you're interested in mRNA beyond vaccines, check out Sek Kathiresan on twitter. He's active. He's the CEO of Verve. Worst kept secret of the gene editing (e.g., CRISPR) world is that everyone is pivoting to using mRNA for expression of the editing enzymes (e.g., CAS9, ADAR, APOBECs).
iagooar 6y ago
> There are entire countries and world regions that rely on tourism, and for them this is going to be the most consequential long-lasting change (also for environmental reasons). I don't see how people stop traveling once Covid is gone (or at least reduced to a regular flu level of danger). Why would people ever prefer not to travel? I agree that some paranoid people won't travel until 5 years after the pandemic, but the vast majority of people will do.
- buboard 6y ago
  tourism is one part of traveling. people from highly urbanized areas tend to travel long distances more (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2) . If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well
  - gspr 6y ago
    > If this density drops (due to convenient remote work) tourish would drop as well I've never understood this one. Do people really think that work is the only big reason people flock to cities?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Some people would definitely prefer not to travel if their potential destination still had major restrictions on foreigners entering. Forcing arriving travelers to quarantine themselves for two weeks in a hotel would automatically cut out most tourists, because relatively few people have that much holiday and would want to budget for two weeks of accommodation where they can’t go anywhere. Even softer measures like forcing travelers to install the local government’s app like in China might be a turnoff.
gspr 6y ago
> tiny living spaces in insufferable cities Where is this coming from? It may be just anecdotal, but "availability of relevant work" is only one of many reasons the people I know choose to live in cities.

dugditches 6y ago

>So too, when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID19 pandemic took hold Couldn't one argue 9/11 was the 'start' of the 21st century? And all the effects and tone it caused that last to this day?

randallsquared 6y ago
All that has faded into the background for Tim O'Reilly, I guess.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
It has been argued that the 20th century ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the 19th century before it ended with WWI. The 20th century was a "short" century. 9/11 was a spectacular event but did not change anything fundamental and was neither the first nor the last Islamic terrorist attack in the West or on the West/US. In fact, the lid had been removed on Islamic extremism in the 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, even if it had been brewing for quite some time before that: Soviet withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 (leading to the Talibans seizing power), Algerian Civil War started in 1991, highjacking of Air France flight by Algerian terrorists in 1994 (said to be the blueprint for 9/11), attack on US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, attack on USS Cole in 2000, etc. I think what 9/11 did is to make the American public catch up with the world they were living in because many of them had not realised yet. I'm not sure whether Covid-19 will change anything in the long term. It's too early to say. At the moment the main effect seems to be a significant economic downturn, which could have long term consequences, or not.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  9/11 resulted in a 20 year war. That's a big deal. 9/11 resulted in a generation of soldiers returning into civic life with serious physical and mental scars from that 20 years. Equality is worse, two nations have been destroyed. There are multiple failed states all over the middle east and north Africa. 9/11 was a really big deal. Everything did change that day.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

The article's comparison of what's shaping up to be a year or two long disease outbreak to a 4yr global conflict that massively altered the global balance of power and spread industrialization across many industries that had thus far resisted it seems a little premature. Wall street, shady billionaires pulling strings, governments and normal everyday people have a massive economic interest in things becoming as normal as they possibly can post-covid and they are all going to work toward furthering that goal in their own ways. Sure some of the things that were trialed during COVID (work from home, mask wearing, etc) may stick around but they are going to go away and if they come back it will be slowly over years/decades and on their own merits.

hatboat 6y ago
I think an important point the author is trying to make is that we don't know how this is going to play out, with "scenario planning" being a central theme of the article. We have only experienced a few of the pandemic's direct effects a few months in, and in many parts of the globe the first wave is still in full swing. The second- and higher-order effects are largely unknown at this point, and many will only be fully understood by future historians. While the direct comparison to WWI/II may be hyperbolic, I think it's a fair assessment to say that COVID is the biggest, truly global event since. During each war there were many turning points that may have ended them early, turning them into smaller, regional conflicts. The people who experienced the first six months of them weren't to know they would leave tens of millions dead and society changed forever after. Now I'm not suggesting that COVID will be on remotely this scale, however I believe the author's argument that it will likely trigger large societal change, and to try and prepare accordingly, is a good one.

tekert 6y ago

Dah, like if this is the first pandamic humanity faces, these americans and their fallout really. too much what ifs and yadayada.

mattlondon 6y ago

Hmm. I agree in part, but I am not sure if we can compare COVID-19 against the horrors of two world wars where tens of millions died (15-22,000,000 deaths in WW1 and 70-85,000,000 deaths in WW2 according to wikipedia) and entire cities were literally flattened and millions more left homeless and jobless? The strange thing about COVID-19 is that it is largely invisible (unless you happen to work in a hospital or morgue or something). Apart from people wearing masks and Starbucks only doing takeaway and those unlucky enough to have lost a loved one/friend/colleague (my condolences if so) it is hard for people to actually "see" the impact. For me, the largest impact is I have to plan my grocery deliveries a bit more carefully (since I can't do a top-up shop easily) and I work from home more than I usually did - nothing else has changed in my life really. Will Starbucks re-open their doors and be selling double-tall skinny frap extra-cold within a few days of getting the say-so? You bet - and who can blame them? Nothing will have changed for them - people will still buy the coffee just like they are buying them right now during the pandemic. Did Hiroshima/Dresden/Hamburg/Berlin/Tokyo/Stalingrad/others re-open after VE/VJ day? No - because they were absolutely physically obliterated with the population killed, maimed or displaced (...and even if they weren't, physiologically it must have been absolutely crippling to be a survivor). Were I alive in WW2, would my life only be mildly inconvenienced like it is today with COVID-19? No way - if I had even survived at all, I'd be happy to have a home to live in (and no doubt without reliable electricity, gas or sewage), even luckier to have a job to work at, and even luckier still to have shops to visit with stock to allow me to even purchase any food. And I'd no doubt have known friends family and colleagues who died in unspeakably horrible ways. Whatever happened I'd be psychologically scarred for life. It just doesn't feel like COVID-19 is in the same league... And this is before we even mention genocide from WW2. That said though I am all for fiscal stimulus only going to green companies though! No government hand-outs to the cruiseline, airline, oil, or shipping industries please! :) . . . . . Aside: ... I note that COVID-19 is now "worse" than the WW2 Blitz in London in that it has killed more people (1). I sincerely hope now that the rose-tinted nostalgia for people citing the "Blitz Spirit" etc in the context of Brexit can go away. London has now faced worse than the Blitz - and when it did it was immigrant nurses (one from the EU, one from the Commonwealth) that literally nursed even our Prime Minister back to health. We are stronger together.</politics> 1 - https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/30/covid-19-is-killing-londoners-at-a-faster-rate-than-german-bombs-did https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/30/covid-19-is-kil...

brakmic 6y ago

TL;DR; One of the arch-neoliberals talking about the future of mankind. If there's one thing that's certain, then it's that neoliberalism always strives to destroy history and prevent any change. Get prepared for more neoliberals talking...about the future.

buboard 6y ago
where can we read the other side talking about the future? i cant remember how long since reading a future-looking piece from a leftist intellectual
- brakmic 6y ago
  It has no time for talking and/or writing long texts, because it's fighting for survival in a world designed by neoliberals.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    and, apparently, a persecution complex. To be fair, when education and information become more universal it may really be that old obsolete conservative precepts are 'under attack', in that, they don't work very well any more. Not trying to be mean; just to rationalize why the theme of being 'under attack' is pervasive.
    - brakmic 6y ago
      And of course, any criticizm of neoliberalism is declared irrational. It's never accepted as being grounded on evidence. Pure neoliberal newspeak: "the problem is you" The ideology of self-optimization.
      - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Criticizing education, advances in theory and social science, are indeed irrational. Wishing that the world of 7B people could be the same as a 50-year-gone world of 2B is not the same as 'evidence-based criticism'. Lots of folks say lots of things. Not defending rabid idealists of any stripe. But there is a better way to operate and work, than an old one based on a situation long gone. There sure better be, because things really sucked 50 years ago in lots of ways.

hootbootscoot 6y ago

This is a great article.

paulkrush 6y ago
I agree. Long and well though out.

shashanoid 6y ago

Have you not yet realized the futility of planning?

lihaciudaniel 6y ago
Failing to plan, is planing to failure.

pmorici 6y ago

This all strikes me as extremely alarmist and far-fetched. The chances of COVID causing an indefinite pandemic that alters the nature of human behavior and the course of history forever in my estimation is zero. Business and economic difficulties for a few years, yes. Total destruction of the travel industry for all time? Not a chance. Some of the stuff just makes no sense, for example; "There's already talk of a race to produce vaccines, where a country that has the vaccine will use the vaccine for itself in order to gain advantage rather than spreading it around the world." I could imagine the country that discovers it giving priority to their citizens when there is, at first, limited supply but withholding it indefinitely for advantage seems like it would not happen because of the incredible profit motive.

lbeltrame 6y ago
> I could imagine the country that discovers it giving priority to their citizens when there is, at first, limited supply but withholding it indefinitely for advantage seems like it would not happen because of the incredible profit motive. Turns out that those doing vaccine trials have actually thought of that, and most of them are making partnerships in different countries to prevent "bad side effects" from this (such as forced seizure).

biolurker1 6y ago

There is a lying madman at the top superpower, none of these words matter as muchas getting him voted out. The single most important thing in human history could be to make Americans go and vote in November.