Smarter Covid Reviews

 Last week Joe Biden announced that he had asked his secret service to explore the possibility that Covid originated in the Wuhan lab in China. It seems to me that this is a rather pointless exercise, and there are at least five alternative studies that Biden could sponsor that might have more value.

 

The study is one more example of how the world is in the process of fracturing into two competing blocks, manifested as a second cold war. The driver for Biden to become sucked in is mainly political. The Republicans have few credible policy arguments, and they can only win with jingoism. So Fox News carries continuous coverage of the Mexican border and also drums up fear of China, reminding us how “tough on China” Donald Trump was. The tangible benefits of this toughness are hard to discern and the global consequences are dire, but Biden feels he has to dampen the political threat. Publicly implying that China is so incompetent as to release a deadly virus into the world and so devious as to cover it up serves his purpose well.

 

Why is the study pointless? It is political theatre. It is also unlikely to decide the issue at hand, so long after the fact and with few useful trails of evidence. But the many reason for its pointlessness is that essentially it does not matter. It is possible that Covid originated in the Wuhan lab. It is also possible that it transferred from animals, likely involving the Wuhan wet market. Both possible origins offer lessons to minimise the risk of future pandemics, and no doubt China is busy quietly applying those lessons and other countries can too. But whichever cause was to blame, Covid is here and knowing the origin won’t make dealing with it any easier. It would make sense to assume that both causes could have been to blame rather than wasting time, money and diplomatic capital trying to establish which. But that would not be such good domestic politics.

 

So what about the five alternative studies? I would start with a critical review of the US health institutions during the period between December 2019 and February 2020. One quote that has remained with me from my reading during the pandemic was from an epidemiologist who claimed that almost all viruses are circulating for many weeks or months before symptoms appear en masse. This makes sense to me and was obviously the case with Covid, since the virus managed to travel from Wuhan to Italy and New York somehow and then quietly disperse among unsuspecting populations.

 

During this period the US seems to have been asleep at the wheel. To be fair, it was not just the US, but US is the place with the largest budgets and the claims of pre-eminence. Surely some of this resource should have been trying to understand Covid, putting early measures in place while preparing a menu of tougher measures, and briefing politicians. It is too easy to blame Trump. If he wouldn’t listen, others could have been briefed instead. It was usually possible to work around Trump on important issues. It is too easy to blame the WHO as well, or the Chinese.

 

Michael Lewis, he of Moneyball and The Big Short fame, studies the root causes of this inaction in his latest book. I intend to read this book soon, but the reviews and preview material are already clear. The CDC is one of many US agencies that has become bloated and politicised. The leader is a political appointee, so liable to be short-term, under-qualified and in hoc to those with impure motives. The permanent staff become thinned out, disillusioned and risk averse. Bad news does not receive the airtime it needs. Meanwhile by all sorts of role overlaps with other institutions magnify confusion and inactivity. There is the NIH, the Health and Human Services agency, the WHO and many state bodies. It is no wonder that policy in practice is set by political imperatives and the lobbyists for Big Pharma.

 

Such bureaucratic muddle tends to spread over time. Whoever coined the phrase “never waste a good crisis” knew this well. Biden has a rare chance to improve some key institutions. Will he take it? No, of course not, he will bash China instead.

 

A second useful study would review how the guidance changed in light of new information about how the virus spread. Here it has become clear that an early mistake took far too long to correct, indeed parts of the US establishment still stubbornly defend out-dated findings.

 

A limited early study concluded that the primary means of spread was either close contact or from surfaces. Remember how we all feared touching doorknobs early in the pandemic? Slowly we started reading that an alternative means of spread was via aerosols lingering in the air, but the formal advice did not seem to react quickly enough to this new information.

 

A key data point was the early super spreader event involving a choir in Washington State, where one person managed to infect as many as fifty others with fatal consequences for some. As a choir singer, friends of mine made me aware of this event, and it has spooked us all ever since, leading us to be very cautious about singing, for good reasons. It never made sense that this event could have involved spreading via surfaces or very close contact, and surely it was a strong pointer towards aerosols, which linger longer and further after the strenuous exhaling involved in singing. But much guidance continued to emphasise surfaces over airborne spread, to the extent that many officials doubted the efficacy of masks for too long, giving ammunition to the deniers and conspiracy theorists. How experts incorporated new data in a timely fashion, domestically and internationally, would surely make a valuable study.

 

A third study might try to learn from a positive bi-product of Covid. The rapid development of vaccines is a triumph for science, one where the US should share credit and one that even casts Trump in a very good light. One interesting consequence has been that suddenly vaccine development has accelerated in other fields, such as finding an effective vaccine against malaria or dengue fever.

 

My study question is how it took the Covid crisis to spur innovation in areas that cried out for solutions for decades. What were the mechanisms in place? Where were the incentives? And what changes could be made that could accelerate innovation without the kick-starter of Covid? Humanity could have benefited generations ago from a malaria vaccine, and science could probably have developed one if the right incentives had been in place. If malaria were prevalent in the rich world, I suspect it would have been supressed a long time ago, in the same way that if it were men who suffered menopause, mitigating treatments would be a lot better by now. This are is ripe for international study. I am sure Bill Gates would have some useful ideas.

 

My fourth study is about efficient state disbursement of benefits. Another wonderful side effect of Covid has been to open up the political possibility of direct payments to those who need them. The Biden child support initiative might become his most enduring legacy.

 

But, admittedly acting in haste, Congress probably wasted a lot of money too and misfired with other money. There are stories about small business grants being swallowed by large businesses and those with strong relationships with banks (and therefore good sources of alternative support). No doubt many schemes are open to fraud, or simply too slow to be useful. It is great to offer a total of $3200 in cash, but the eligible member of my family has not seen a cent of his yet. If, as we can hope, that direct transfers will play a bigger role in public policy going forward, then it is important to learn practical lessons from early attempts.

 

There are many candidates for my fifth review. Perhaps somebody could work out how to help Americans understand the concept of probability (rather worrying given how many seem to enjoy gambling). It would be good to avoid debate about whether six feet is a better safe distance than five, or why somebody had a vaccine and still caught the virus. A specific review about how to keep schools open during pandemics would be useful, given what a low priority most states seemed to place on that. Something about state versus federal roles might help too.

 

I expect Biden will call for none of these potentially useful reviews. To be fair, the Republicans would probably try to spike most of them, like they spiked the insurrection review. But I do wish he would not drag himself down to their level with petty, pointless barbs at China. 

Non Solutionism

 This weeks Economist coined a new term – Non Solutionism. More bravely, it did so in the context of promoting a new policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. For the Economist,the dream of a two state solution is now so unrealistic that it prefers focusing on improving the lot of Palestinians on a more immediate basis.

 

Non Solutionism is defined by The Economist more or less by looking at the behaviour of the protagonists in the conflict, most notably Israel under Netanyahu. The parties agree to a rather vague long-term end point to the conflict, that of two states living side by side. Many details are unclear, and a stepwise process nominally seeks to negotiate each of these details so that the end point can eventually be reached. Meanwhile facts are being created on the ground that do not exclude the professed desired end point but make it more difficult to achieve and more likely to skew the details of any negotiated settlement in favour of one side. There is no incentive to accelerate progress towards an end point while these facts are moving the goalposts.

 

Netanyahu’s actions fit this description neatly. Most of the time he professes lukewarm support for a two state solution. He claims a willingness to negotiate but states, reasonably, that there currently is no “partner for peace” on the other side. He gives the impression of moving the process forward when possible, for example with the hopelessly one-sided proposals drawn up with Jared Kushner with no Palestinian input at all. This is generally enough to maintain support from key international allies.

 

Meanwhile the ground is constantly shifting in Israel’s favour. Palestinian rights are eroded step by step, perhaps most notably when Netanyahu declared Israel as a Jewish state despite 20% of its population being Arabs. Settlements spread, taking more and more of the best land and leaving the rump of the potential second state less and less viable. Varying between those living in Israel, the West bank or Gaza, Palestinians have limited rights and very limited economic prospects, all justified by credible imperatives of security. If this is not apartheid, I don’t know what is.

 

The Palestinians and their Arab brothers do not help their own cause. Indeed, The Economist reasonably argues that there is Non Solutionism going on there too. Old man Abbas sits in Ramallah with no legitimacy but an incentive to maintain a status quo with possibly corrupt income for cronies. Hamas has no credible plan either beyond exploiting the exploitation to build support. Egypt is happy to continue to take dollops of much needed US aid in returning for keeping a lid on things.

 

So The Economist says that enough is enough. We hide behind the fig leaf of a moribund peace process, meanwhile tolerating human atrocity and despair. Its recommendation is to call out the peace process for the sham that it is, abandon any thought of a two state outcome for the time being, and instead focus on immediate improvements. That implies demanding that Israel follows international law and principles of human equity in all of the territory it currently controls. Any progress forced upon Israel should also improve the leadership of both sides, and help to give pause to the zealots and voice to those demanding fairness in the US and elsewhere.

 

I am not an expert in the conflict, but I like the courage and the logic of The Economist. My only qualm is that the change of policy in some way seems to reward Israel for its actions in creating favourable conditions until now. But I accept that sort of thinking only perpetuates the status quo, and the opportunity for Israel to create even more favourable conditions.

 

When I thought it through, Non Solutionism is present in many situations; indeed most of us practise it again and again. As a parent, our adolescent child rebels and demands more than we are willing to offer and more than their maturity warrants. What do we do? We procrastinate. We make vague promises for the future. We lock them in to our system while we have most of the power. We are experts in Non Solutionism.

 

Even more simply, how do we behave when we have an impulsive boss throwing tasks around? We say yes, but delay, expecting that the task will be radically changed or even superseded if we wait. If pressed, we might ask questions of clarificationor seek to wrap the task into a more complex context. This is also Non Solutionism.

 

Many businesses follow similar logic. The most notable examples are banks. Banks like it best when their clients teeter along the edge of failure, because that maximises their income. At least in the US, a bank is reluctant to offer a credit card to somebody who pays all their bills on time: that client is gaining free credit at the bank’s expense. They much prefer someone who lets the balance hover near its limit, incurring more and more interest charges. By the time they pull the plug, the client has paid interest much higher than any final bad debt. During this process, of limited demands and apparent tolerance, the bank is using Non Solutionism. It is exactly the same with overdrafts and loans to businesses.

 

Other examples abound. Putin is an expert. Look at how he uses patience and cynicism in his treatment of Lukashenko, and previously in Ukraine. Moldova, bordering the EU, has been a divided country with a frozen conflict for thirty years. In some ways it defies logic: consider the incentives of the protagonists and the use of Non Solutionism as a strategy and it is all too understandable.

 

In the US, Mitch McConnell is a prime exponent of Non Solutionism. His guiding principle is for congress to pass as few laws as possible, since he thinks big government is bad and his pet interests are well served by legal neglect. He has a great ally in partisanship and the filibuster rules. He outmanoeuvred Obama, essentially timing him out after Obamacare and the rescue act after the financial crisis. Biden witnessed this and his determined not to fall into the same trap: expect a lot more use of reconciliation in the next eighteen months.

 

Benign neglect is not always a silly strategy, as we parents can attest. It works when the alternative is impulsiveness, or pandering to a fad, or risking uninvited consequences. But Non Solutionism as a default strategy can also be disastrous. If equilibrium is unstable then the strategy can hamstring action: consider climate change. It can also be judged based on its human effects, such as the never-ending suffering of Palestinians.

 

I have a theory to propose: Non Solutionism will occur more frequently and for longer than logic seems to dictate. If you are betting, bet on Non Solutionism. The theory is similar to my idea that cock-ups are far more frequent than conspiracies.

 

An example of my theory in action is to look at tobacco companies. Logic suggested they were doomed from the 1960’s, when evidence that cigarettes caused cancer became clear. Instead, they thrived until very recently. The reason is Non Solutionism. They made vague promises and participated in a process, all the time delaying and seeking short-term advantage. They had witting and unwitting allies on the other side: which politician wants to lose billions of tax revenue or to upset millions of constituents? The result is that tobacco company shares were great investments for many years, for anybody whose ethics permitted such a cynical bet.

 

For those of us interested in stifling Non Solutionism, the first step is to recognise it. That can be tough: consider that we have all fallen for it in Israel for a generation. Once recognised, the next steps are short-term focus and project management. Rather than allowing people to hide behind vague long-term goals, instead organise behind promoting well-defined short-term targets and actions. Sadly, liberals are not often good at this, as the Guardian proves week after week.

 

I have sold all my oil company shares, but this was premature. At least, if I follow my own logic, it can reduce any anxiety about my primary financial asset, my Shell pension. Non Solutionism usually wins.     

How God has had a great Pandemic

 I don’t believe in God. At least I don’t believe that there is a creator, master controller and judge.

 

I do however find value in a more abstract idea of God. The idea helps me to remember just how insignificant I am and we are and at the same time how powerful.

 

We all sit at the centre of our own little worlds. Those little worlds can seem very big and very important – after all they are all we have. The reality is that I am a tiny speck in history. Viewed as God would, with an overview of all things across all time, I am insignificant. Indeed we collectively are insignificant, when we think about the span of history, the scale of the planet and the scope of possible universes.

 

Not only am I pathetically trivial, I am also hopelessly ignorant. I know nothing, compared with what there potentially is to know. I know a lot more than I did last year, but it is still nothing. That realisation is also true for humanity collectively. We are fondling around in the dark. We know orders of magnitude more than we did a century ago, but that only tells us that in a century’s time we will look back on today and scoff at our ignorance. And even in a century, or a millennium, we will still have barely started on learning what there is to learn.

 

But as well as being small I am also mighty. I am a miracle. How can all those billions of cells be configured exactly as they must be and achieve exactly what is required every second to allow me to breathe, grow, procreate, or think? I am a miracle. You are a miracle. And together we constitute a much bigger miracle and create unimaginable miracles. Indeed that is what we do, all the time, even if those miracles are a tiny fraction of what we could conceivably achieve.

 

I find this God helpful, not least because I don’t have to stretch to believe anything. When I remember this God, I can stay somewhat humble. I am more curious, and judge less. It reminds me of what really matters: love, kindness and thankfulness, as well as what is possible if we work in teams. It also helps me to accept fate and chance: this God has a wicked sense of humour.

 

The pandemic has shown this God in a good light, and also might allow for a legacy with some silver linings. It has been less good for some of those trusting in a more traditional God. If God really is a master controller, how can He cause such suffering? If God really does have a chosen race or people, how come the pandemic has afflicted everybody?

 

Humanity has become so arrogant that we can think we are immune from things like pandemics. Of course we are not. We know nothing. We experiment with the natural world day after day, year after year. Surely things will go wrong from time to time. Most of us live with fresh water out of the tap and constant electricity and phone connection: we didn’t used to have such things, they are not rights, we might lose them at any time and many people don’t have such luxuries. We must be thankful, and humble, and cautious. I am optimistic that one positive legacy of the pandemic is a greater acceptance of the risks of climate change, and more concerted action.

 

There has been some schadenfreude in observing how the pandemic has brought down the mighty from their seats. Various clerical soothsayers have been left looking rather dumb. Any nation that has declared itself beyond the pandemic has been struck down soon afterwards, especially those that claimed victory through their own brilliance. Modi is the latest victim of this. Trump would have won the election but for the pandemic, and of course it felt so fitting when he was struck down himself.

 

But Sometimes I think I know better as well, and it is good to be taught some tough lessons. It pains me to acknowledge some pandemic heroes among people I typically despise. Trump himself had two big calls to make as president. With the first, sounding the alarm in January 2020, he failed. The second call was to mobilise maximum resources behind vaccination, and he did that brilliantly, to the benefit of all Americans and ultimately of all humanity. All the rest, the behaviour we scoffed at daily, in practice made little difference. Blue states and red states were affected more or less to the same extent despite their wildly different approaches.

 

Boris Johnson, another personal victim, also made great calls about the vaccines, and I also applaud his signalled, phased reopening. That contrasts with Wallensky and Fauci over here. According to those experts, one day two weeks ago I could safely do almost nothing, and the next day I could do almost anything. Both statements could not be right. It is no surprise that we end up believing neither.

 

Finally, Netanyahu, a man not beyond starting a war to save his skin for a few months, made great calls with the vaccine and his passport programme, which served to nudge sceptics to take the shot. Why others seem so reluctant to follow his lead escapes me.

 

While on the subject of uncomfortable heroes, how about Xi Jinping? That picture of thousands frolicking in a swimming pool in Wuhan last summer is testament to a brilliant programme to control the virus, and must give pause to those of us convinced that our way is always superior. The truth is always more nuanced.

 

There have been many other heroes it has been more comfortable to get behind. Dr. Leana Wen has been clear and brave throughout, including recently when she berated the CDC for their slow relaxation of advice. Tsai Ing Wen and her Taiwanese leadership team were the only ones who really reacted quickly enough at the start. Adar Poonawalla of India’s Serum Institute worked on vaccines before he had funding, to the benefit of all of us.

 

The Economist, bless its heart, has been outstanding throughout, including last week when it published a credible model for the true scale of the pandemic. That recalled an interview at the start of the pandemic with Bill Gates. Gates calmly predicted that the pandemic would probably kill 10 million or more, over 3-5 years, concentrated in the poor world. He was spot on, but few listened, and those who listened and could have acted did nothing helpful. Do we learn? Gates recently published a book with a practical plan to alleviate climate change. The Guardian, amongst others, was rather scathing, its main complaint being that Gates is rich.

 

Gates’ foundation shows the sort of miracles humanity is capable if we only pull together. The pandemic has also spurred wonderful innovation, not least via the vaccines. It is wonderful, but also sad, that it took a pandemic in the rich world to accelerate development of a malaria vaccine. We have all changed behaviour, and have tamed the flu as a result. 

 

The pandemic also accelerated advances in telemedicine and IT enabled education. It has also been partly responsible for a significant positive shift in prevailing economic policy, finally casting aside the damaging Thatcher/Reagan era.

 

So my God has achieved many miracles at the level of humanity over the time of the pandemic. But the personal miracles are wonderful as well. Who has not woken up one or more days of the last fifteen months with a tell tale deep cough, and wondered if the end might be nigh? I certainly did, and, horrible though that experience is, it does help me to remember to love and be kind (at least occasionally), to be thankful, and to savour all the miracles offered in my life, taking nothing for granted ever again (until I do). Last Saturday I sang once again in public performance while not wearing a mask. What a joy that was.

Learning Discernment

 I am still sometimes troubled by the 70 million conundrum, namely that last November 70 million American adults voted for Donald Trump to be their president, despite the overwhelming evidence of his rank unsuitability for the role. It is discomforting to consider that so many could be so misled; 70 million is not a small number of human beings, a cadre that will largely have completed a high school education and have a lot of influence over the functioning of an effective society.

 

The classic argument is that the nation has divided into bubbles that are almost mutually exclusive. Some of us read the New York Times, watch PBS and have a Facebook feed populated by thoughts from similar people to ourselves. Others read the New York Post, watch Fox News and reside in a wholly different bubble.

 

This helps, but it is not enough. How can so many people fall for such nonsense? True, they don’t all believe all of it. In congress, nobody believes the election was stolen. Heck, Trump does not believe it himself. But Liz Cheney shows what happens if you tell the truth. In the same way, not all of the 70 million think that most Mexicans are rapists and all the other claptrap. Some accept the nonsense as part of an overall package that feels better than the alternative.

 

But quite a few believe it all. Whatever bubble they are living in, how can they so lack any discernment?

 

My sister, as often happens, said something interesting last week when I posed this question. She said that perhaps it was not surprising when there is so much else we are expected to believe. Her reference point was God.

 

From an early age most of us are led to believe that the world has a single creator, and that this creator will judge all of us at the end of our lives and send us either to paradise or hell. In some religions we will be reincarnated, moving up or down a perpetual league table each time. Various ancient books have been bequeathed by an unlikely series of prophets, not just telling us what is right and wrong, but more dangerous stuff about one race being chosen over another and the need to treat clergy as if representatives of the divine. The pope is infallible and a descendent of St. Peter. That wafer I am handed on a Sunday morning really is the body of Christ. Heck, God even appointed the Queen.

 

St Thomas on Fifth Avenue not only offers wonderful music, but I also enjoy many of the homilies. I remember one from Christmastime a few years ago. A rather honest homilist shared that many times he had doubted the literal truth of the virgin birth. He added that the logic he used to assuage his doubt was to consider everything else that he believed. Against all of this, a virgin birth feels not just possible but almost humdrum.

 

My sister is on to something. Set against typical religious beliefs, conspiracy theories are eminently believable. If Moses and his army really did walk across the red sea, surely a few thousand officials could easily conspire to steal an election, and a paedophile ring probably is being operated by the Clintons from a Washington pizza joint.

 

Think about the reasons we choose to believe our various religious doctrines. People we respect, starting with our parents, taught us to. Most of our friends believe. We want to fit in, and don’t want to be discriminated against. It is too much hassle to change. It makes us feel good. We don’t believe all of it but the overall package seems better than the alternative. Lots of the other tenets that help us live our lives might fall apart if we challenged this belief.

 

I think the list above is very similar to the list of reasons in the heads of the 70 million. If we think about it this way, perhaps it is easier to understand how the 70 million came about.

 

It also engenders other humble thoughts. If I lived in Wyoming, I would probably be among the 70 million. If I had lived in Germany in the 1930’s I would probably have been a Nazi. If I lived in Mississippi and had money in the 19^thcentury I would probably have employed slaves. If I needed a house in a nice area in the 1950’s I certainly would not have condemned redlining.

 

It also makes me think of other things we are led to take on trust. Do nuclear weapons really keep us safer, and is it justifiable to go to war to stop one country developing them when our own country has them already and some of our allies have too even if treaties say they should not? Is lifetime heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family the natural way of things, even now we live for forty years after our kids have grown up? Is maximising work a good goal for humanity? Is it defensible that I could move to live relatively easily almost anywhere, but that most of humanity could not choose to live in my country? Do I really deserve my status, even though 90% of it came from having wealthy, white parents in a developed country and 90% of the rest because I happened to inherit an intelligent brain and few physical disabilities? Did most Russians really want to destroy me, is communism an ideology seeking to rule the world, is capitalism and what passes for democracy always better, and is it unreasonable for the Chinese to challenge a “rules based” world order when others define all the “rules”? Is euthanasia such a terrible idea, given that 50% of all health care resources are spent keeping very old people alive?

 

Functioning society seems to rely on many other doubtful premises. Can I trust my bank? Should I hoard gasoline because a pipeline went down? How can it be that yesterday it was unsafe for me to sing without a mask and being far from others and in an airy space, whereas today I can blast away without any such limitations?

 

Viewed this way it becomes easier to understand the 70 million. I can also understand how I can act as a part of the smug elite, imposing dubious beliefs on others while pretending I am more enlightened.

 

We can also see how far humanity has still to travel. Than be an optimistic realisation, since surely with education and global thinking we can unlock so many possibilities. Or it can be depressing, when we realise just how inadequate our education has been to prepare us for life.

 

I can see a space for a high school course on the subject of discernment. In the olden days posh kids studied classics and philosophy – this would be a more practical approach to those subjects. Modules could be designed to cover estimation, causation, research and media, scepticism and dialectics.

 

It is interesting to note that the only societies to have made meaningful progress down this path are in Scandinavia and perhaps the Netherlands. These tend to be small, rich countries where the church has little influence. Here is it harder to build feelings of being a chosen people or a militaristic philosophy.

 

It is also easy to see the barriers to such a radical education. Society needs collective assumptions to be stable. Who would lose if basic tenets were challenged? I could start with the wealthy, the church, the military and others with power to defend. Those are the groups that tend to set the agenda.        

The Future of Work

 A recent special in The Economist painted a notably optimistic picture about the future of work. Largely limited in its scope to developed countries, it pointed to a number of trends and data points to support a theory that before the pandemic things were getting better for most workers and that the pandemic, while disastrous for many, might accelerate some even more beneficial changes. By and large I found the report quite compelling, and a few of its insights very helpful.

 

One starting point of the report was to look at employment trends in the years immediately before the pandemic. In most industrialised countries unemployment was low and falling, real wages were rising at all levels but especially at the bottom of the wage ladder, and job satisfaction was increasing.

 

While this is true and encouraging, one of my main problems with the report is its choice of starting point, a favourite trick of all statisticians wishing to make an argument. Inequality was indeed falling in 2016-19, but this can be as a minor correction after years of rising inequality. Whether you start around the financial crisis or go back as far as 1980, it becomes less tenable to point to a gain of a percent or two as a triumph for unbridled capitalism and trickle down theory.

 

Even so, we on the left have to acknowledge that capitalism is the force that creates innovation that leads to opportunity for many and the chance for more fulfilling lives for most of us. It is galling to admit the truth that the best recent years for the low-waged came under Trump and May/Johnson and despite regressive tax policies.

 

To its credit, the report does acknowledge that leftist policies may have played a part in the revival, notably minimum wages, long derided as job killers on the right but now accepted as smart by all but the most rabid.

 

The Economist report discusses automation extensively, referring to the many times in history that pessimists have predicted the collapse of employment prospects owing to various technological advances, most recently AI and robots. We are reminded that new generations machines do indeed remove jobs, but that so far new jobs have been created elsewhere in the economy to compensate. Sometimes the new jobs are made possible by the machines. Usually the new jobs are more fulfilling than the jobs they replace.

 

If we were not so wedded to the idea of work as always a good thing and full employment a key policy goal, then I think we would be able to celebrate automation even more. Who wants to spend forty hours of every week flipping burgers or stacking boxes? In earlier days, a lot of work was downright unhealthy, such as mining, and led generations to early graves.

 

The only reason people flip burgers is to earn enough money to live a decent life. Well, can we not let a machine flip the burgers and either find different work, divide the remaining work more equally or find alternative compensation for those displaced?

 

The same argument can be used to defend offshoring. Trade is all about specialisation. If workers in a less developed country can improve their life with work that is no longer viable in a developed one, then everybody can gain.

 

The report is clear that the pandemic has been a catastrophe in any aspects of work. Many lost good jobs and are still out of work. Some are fearful of returning to work or have been partially disabled by long covid. Many others have been forced to continue working at great risk to their health, and indeed many have died.

 

There is also a widened cleavage in society between those forced to work at dangerous jobs and those now able to be well paid working safely in their homes, many of whom now rarely see their less fortunate brethren. Historically such shifts have presaged civil unrest.

 

But the report finds evidence that the good jobs have improved. People are saved commutes and many like a hybrid experience. The trend for improving job satisfaction has accelerated. A hypothesis is that the pandemic have forced manages to do a better job, being more diligent about communication and engagement. Seeing each other in our homes may have humanised us too.

 

Taking a longer perspective, I would also argue that many lower paid jobs have improved as well. On the left we love to hate Amazon, with its pay by the hour and defined expectations. But Amazon pays fairly and clear expectations are good. Keeping a job with Amazon does not require accepting leers from peers or other abuse from a boss or having to do the well-connected long-serving guy’s shift for him, or accepting cash so the bosses can fiddle the taxman.

 

Another radical shift I would advocate is that all jobs be like gig jobs. We can all negotiate our hours week-by-week and year by year. We would not have any tenure, but could also have more autonomy over our careers. This would help people build families and be better for women and working pensioners.

 

A gig approach would also be a great way to engineer mobility. One issue in today’s economy is that people struggle to move quickly enough where the jobs are. People will not risk moving when in a unionised, tenured, protected job, but are in the wrong place with the wrong skills when that job vanishes. The report highlights Denmark, where a tough regime with low employee tenure is matched by generous support for the jobless seeking new work.

 

The Economist reportalso comments on public policy. Even in the few weeks since publication, its main claim has been vindicated. The claim is that the pandemic has opened up possibilities that had been closed for forty years. The vindication has come in the series of transformative policies now with a chance of progress in the US congress. The cash payments and the infrastructure plans have drawn most comment and are welcome enough, but for me the biggest news is elsewhere. The child tax credit, family leave and subsidised childcare and boost for carers would move the US at least some of the way towards European good practice and might signal a welcome new normal in family and welfare policy.

 

Excited as I am about this, part of me wonders why Clinton and Obama did so little. With one party committed to an absence of government, the inaction of Clinton and Obama has led to forty years of regression. The pandemic is part of the answer, because it has awakened the general population and spurred innovation by economists. But another enabler has been the era of ultra-low interest rates, making debt less of a constraint to central bankers. It is neat, because in a way the corporates and bankers have been hoist by their own petard. Having created a debt-lenient environment for their own benefit, central bankers have belatedly caught up.

 

I do wish the Biden team were rather more imaginative. To be fair, they probably only have two years to make a difference. But old-fashioned protectionism, support for restrictive unions and hurling cash at sectors is not ideal. Much of the cash for the care sector may be wasted or purloined by suppliers. I still believe Reimbursement for Care would work better. It would target precisely the same goals, but use the market and individual incentive to drive radically improved outcomes.

 

Despite my reservations, I was encouraged by the Economistreport. Perhaps the generation entering the workforce really do have fulfilling careers to look forward to, and not just the privileged few who can saunter through college and into protected professions. Such progress is not before time.           

The Football Fiasco

 It has been a dramatic week in the world of European soccer. On Sunday twelve of the biggest clubs announced a breakaway league, but the adverse reaction from fans and everybody else led their plan to collapse by Wednesday.

 

The background is evergreen tension between the wishes of the biggest clubs and the various governing bodies. Fans and governments tend to prefer stability and tradition, and also have to ensure that the game is nurtured at grass roots level. The big clubs and star players want money; an entertaining competitive product for TV with familiar teams is the recipe to maximize revenue.

 

This has always been a messy compromise. National leagues have so far been sacrosanct. Rules and marketing practices have evolved slowly. The European dimension beloved of the biggest has been addressed via a midweek tournament called the Champions League, which is neither a league nor for exclusively for champions. The result has been too many matches, jeopardising player health and squeezing international schedules and domestic cups.

 

The big clubs have been angling for more, and a long negotiation has been reaching a unsatisfactory conclusion through a further expansion of the Champions League. The big clubs, considering themselves untouchable, were using brinkmanship to get the best deal. At the last minute somebody stood up to them and that caused them to injudiciously play their nuclear card. It blew up in their faces. Billionaires have been humiliated for ridiculous comments such as that they were “saving football”.

 

Interestingly, the part of the plan that riled everybody else was that the new league would be a closed shop with limited promotion and relegation. It is no coincidence that Americans now own many of the big clubs, a place where the practice of franchises without relegation is normal. Owners argue that they cannot invest for long-term development without certainty of their place. This is poppycock. Did Nokia and Blackberry have guaranteed positions in the mobile phone industry? Would there have been more investment and innovation if that had been the case? Of course not.

 

As a keen watcher of sports on both sides of the Atlantic, I can see advantages in both sets of practices. It is shame that neither seems to learn from the other. American sports benefit from rules to create parity and from innovative ways to make games more entertaining such as playoffs and a bias for offence. The young do like shorter games with more click bait highlights. The European practice of promotion and relegation is its strongest aspect, because it gives everybody hope and fear and because it makes more games meaningful. In Europe we do not see the ugly practice of “tanking”.

 

I think soccer has the opportunity to embrace most of these good practices without sacrificing its core. Rather than bastardising the Champions League further, I think the time has come to make the top primary weekend leagues European. At the same time the game can embrace rule changes and structures to add entertainment.

 

My European structure would create three leagues of eighteen teams to be played on a home and away basis on weekends from September until April. Those fifty-four teams would no longer play in domestic leagues, which would become like lower divisions. Extensive play offs in April and May would allow a second champion to be crowned (and more high profile games for television), but also engineer promotion and relegation between the European league division and between the third European division and national leagues.

 

The midweek schedule immediately becomes lighter, giving space for winter breaks, rest and international matches, as well as national and European knockout cup tournaments like a revived FA Cup and the former European Cup.

 

The big boys would have high profile and meaningful games every week, but without guarantees against relegation. TV would happily pay for an attractive slate of games but should be forced to cover the lower European leagues as well, just as they now agree to cover women’s leagues.

 

For the strong countries like England, more than half of the current premier league would usually qualify for one of the three European leagues, and the top national league would be an upgraded version of today’s Championship. For lower profile countries like Belgium or Romania, only the top few teams would qualify and the national leagues would look much as they do today, but with an extra incentive at the top end, helpful for teams like Celtic or Porto, who currently play in leagues with little competition.

 

The only downside that I see is that fans will have to travel further for matches, but with Ryanair and Easyjet perhaps that is not an issue. An alternative would be to split European leagues two and three as 2A and 2B on a regional basis to reduce long distance travel.

 

Then the new European leagues should embrace the idea of entertainment over tradition. One reason this does not happen is that traditionalists like to compare statistics historically. Baseball is so obsessed with this that it changes more slowly than other US games, and its audience has diminished as a result. For baseball the pandemic was a godsend: it enabled smart changes such as shortening extra innings games and seven innings double headers. Only the diehard would relish games of six hours and 18 innings, and thankfully they don’t happen any more.

 

I would fractionally increase the size of goals to favour the offence: the goalless draw is the single biggest impediment to the take up of soccer in the USA. I would have a shortened penalty shoot out at the end of each draw too and bonus points for goals. An example could be: six for a win plus a bonus for three goals; two for a draw plus one for winning the shootout plus one each for two or more goals; one point for scoring a goal in a loss.

 

Next I would have a stopping clock to reduce time wasting, and even a rule stipulating that there must be a shot after a full two minutes in possession. Four quarters of thirty minutes each would please the TV companies anxious to show advertisements.

 

In a different innovation, I would introduce a salary cap. Currently in the English premier league the top teams have a wage bill that is 8-10 times that of the minnows: it is no wonder so many games are mismatches. As well as parachute payments to cushion the blow for relegated teams, I would have “expansion” subsidies for promoted ones, to ensure some sort of parity.

 

Fewer games, more quality, more meaningful games between closely matched teams, more match ups between giants, fewer injuries, more goals, less passing for minutes on end around the half way line, the excitement of shoot outs and play offs, retention of hope for the smallest and fear for the largest. Who could complain at that delightful menu? It might even be enough to “save football”, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see Real Madrid relegated every so often?

We Deserve Nationalism

 For a family living in the US, we view a surprisingly large number of BBC programmes. For the most part these are cheap imports bought by PBS, who stick to their format of having no adverts but as a consequence have no money either, so make pitifully few programmes of their own, and spend nearly as much time begging as mainstream channels do on advertising.

 

Sadly, the British imports are about as good as it gets here, if you discount sport and platforms like Netflix or Hulu. We may choose to watch an episode of As Time Goes By from 1990 for the tenth time, but that is an improvement on America’s Got talent or Yet Another Routine Terribly Acted Crime Show with no Character Development. Sometimes it does feel as though we are living in a time warp – I think we may be about five years behind on Midsummer Murders.

 

One bright spot on PBS is a one-hour evening news programme, though I do think it is time for Judy Woodruff to retire and hand over to the excellent Amna Nawaz. The news hour avoids sensationalism and covers foreign stories in some depth. In the Trump era they did occasionally fall into the trap of focusing on his daily horror show, but Trump made that trap hard to avoid. Sometimes it feels as though there is no news nowadays, deprived as we are of Trump’s one-man show.

 

To its credit PBS also shows a half hour world news bulletin from the BBC, a strong programme that complements the news hour well. But last Friday night a strange thing happened. I tuned in, expecting to see the perennially chirpy Katty Kay, but instead found a sombre broadcast from several dull old white men in dark suits and black ties. Prince Philip had died.

 

Even half an hour of this coverage was too much for me. It was like being transported fifty years, before even As Time Goes By and more like Pathé news. All other news was blacked out. Long fawning obituaries followed long platitudes about how sad the Queen must be feeling. Had these people never seen The Crown? What about all Philip’s love children: weren’t they sad as well?

 

Apparently the BBC received a record number of complaints about its coverage, and quite right too. I suppose they were caught by Catch 22, because anything lighter would be attracted the ire of Colonel Blimp, and Colonel Blimp often writes to his Tory MP.    

 

The experience made me reflect about how far we have come as humanity and how far we still have to travel. Twenty years ago few would have complained, because the alternative TV fare might have been equally bland. We have been watching Peaky Blinders and The Great recently, and the crude and irreverent portrayal of history is so refreshing compared with Pride and Prejudice and its ilk. But Prince Philip dies and we are thrust back into the past. We hear of a lifetime of service and the grace of God and all the propaganda that used to be in our history books and brought back memories of singing the national anthem and Onward Christian Soldiers in freezing school halls.

 

Somehow we are supposed to still accept this guff. Life is simple. The British are good and everybody else tries hard but doesn’t reach our standards. We are known around the world for our sense of fair play. The old days were wonderful. Our army would never commit atrocities. Churchill is only a hero. Slavery was mainly about others and it was we Brits that got rid of it. The empire developed the world. The British Isles are a natural union of like-minded nations of shared values and mutual respect (except, temporarily, for the Irish).

 

Somehow all this persists. It seems to be a good substitute for serious thought, rather like a Hollywood blockbuster. It seems to win votes, and sell papers. It might feel like a threadbare coat, one where we must be careful to pick the frayed edges in case it falls apart but one that still keeps us cosy and reminds us of mum.

 

Of course we Brits think we are unique in all this, in fact we have to think that or it would all be exposed as ridiculous. But here is a secret. It is the same everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent.

 

In the US, no politician can wear a suit that does not have the flag displayed on its lapel. The most respected institution by far, admittedly among an unappetising bunch, is the military. Nobody stops to consider just how truly dreadful the track record of the military has been since 1945, both in its commanders’ choices and its execution. This week the announcement of an Afghan pull out, after twenty years of death and destruction and waste of precious treasure, was greeted with a collective shrug, even though nobody could think of anything positive the escapade had actually achieved. I have no problem with lauding veterans, as long as we remember to laud care workers as well, which we never do except for a few weeks in a pandemic.

 

There are still no go areas for the media. The Economist, brilliant in every other respect, still publishes its monthly rubbish from MI5. The news hour, balanced in most fields, did not pause to consider just how shameful it is that an ally, one that receives more aid than anybody else despite being quite rich, should brazenly raid a facility of another country, and then show off about it. How can the US lecture China about values and a rules based world when that is not challenged at all?

 

It is not just nation states; it is the churches as well. We listen to a gospel in which the primary message to love all others, and ten minutes later we pray, but only for our own tribe. How the Evangelicals can attend church with any sort of clear conscience is entirely beyond me. Yet on balance the Christians are probably less hypocritical than most others. Going back to Prince Philip, tomorrow his funeral service will make some very dodgy claims indeed about Britain and its royalty.

 

Does all this matter? Surely it is harmless, even good, if we all feel a bit proud of our nations and show respect for historical tradition? I believe it matters a lot. How can we learn across cultures if we are all stuck in our complacent bubbles? How can we take the best from different systems if each frames the other as an evil mortal enemy? How can we respond rationally to a shift in prevailing power? How can we disarm and stay safe while we glorify a militaristic approach? How can we effectively deal with the increasing list of issues that span the globe, such as economics, climate, cyber regulation and pandemics?

 

There I another specific risk. One large part of the political spectrum is tempted to build a platform around this stuff. It is far from coherent, and a situation develops where it becomes the entire platform. They then have no choice but to amplify it and stick with it. This is called nationalism. We have seen in the 1930’s how this can spread like a cancer, and it is happening again. This is how world wars happen.

 

There are reasons for optimism. Firstly, we can celebrate the EU a truly extraordinary human achievement and something to build on. Then there are many trends that work against nationalism, including education, the end of blind deference and reduction in class barriers, globalisation, mass mingling via migration, social media and sharing of cultures. Going back to PBS, we see more and more thoughtful series with subtitles, opening windows onto other viewpoints and cultures.

 

The nationalists are loud and proud and dangerous. The rest of us must counter this with our own pride, pride in humanity. We have ample weapons if we pause to notice them. If we stay lazy and smug and silent, we deserve the ugly consequences.