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Write the 5 pages as the instructions attached. And you need to write each of the perspectives in separate paragraphs. I will also attach all the info you need to finish this essay, or to cite in your content. So do not use the website and do not just paraphrase the sources you see.IR 90 Final Exam Due date May 13, 2021 4 PM Please submit your responses in Microsoft Word format. This is an exam on what we studied this year. I am looking for you to have integrated the readings, read and understood them. You are not allowed to collaborate with each other. The answers have to be your work and your work only. Please discuss the following: What do you think the world will look like two years from now, assuming the pandemic has been defeated? What will be the pandemic lasting effects? Your answer should include all aspects, from technology to societal arrangements to geopolitics. You are free to use your individual case studies or those of your colleagues discussed in class as examples or data points. What is important is that you take into considerations all of your readings and try to answer the question comprehensively. There is no upper limit to the length of the answer but a minimum ought to be around 5 pages. Please make sure to cite your sources. 1/26/2021 The Pe il of Fo eca ing - ScienceDi ec Download Orbis Volume 65, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 3-7 The Perils of Forecasting Robert D. Kaplan Sh e Outline Share Cite https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2020.12.002 Pe i Get rights and content Ne In 2004, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington published his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identit . The book received virtuall all bad, in some cases scathing, reviews. Its broad theme was that the continued rise of Me ican immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States, coupled with the ascent of multiculturalism even while America's polic elites were turning awa from America and becoming more cosmopolitan and global augured for an epic internal crisis in America. Huntington was startling clairvo ant, of course: foreseeing the battle lines of Donald Trump's presidenc . But 16 ears ago, because man of those trends were relativel undeveloped, the book was considered simpl alarmist. Because the book's reviewers were members of the same global elite that the author was critici ing, the were particularl incensed. The book was not a publishing success. B the time Huntington's themes did achieve a heightened realit , he was dead. Huntington was true to his calling right up to the end of his life. As he once told me, the job of a political scientist is not to improve the world, but to sa what he or she thinks is going on in it. h p :// . ciencedi ec .com/ cience/a icle/pii/S0030438720300600 1/6 1/26/2021 The Pe il of Fo eca ing - ScienceDi ec There is a disturbing lesson here. Outside of the intelligence and business communities, which Download activel appreciate hard-nosed, non-linear thinking in the Huntington manner, being too far ahead of the curve can be problematic to an academic or journalistic career. For even the most clairvo ant theor can be onl , sa , 80 percent accurate, and colleagues inevitabl will concentrate on the 20 percent that is wrong. That is how reputations su er. And precisel because the pathologies that the theorist has described are onl in their earl stages at the time of his or her writing, the lack an obvious conte t, so that the audience reacts with o ense or sheer disbelief (or both) to his work. It gets worse, actuall . A da ma arrive when our theor is vaguel legitimi ed b events, at which time our views, rather than be celebrated, are merel consigned to the conventional wisdom, and thus are of rapidl diminishing relevance. If ou protest that such trends as ou predicted were not obvious at the time that ou wrote about them, nobod is interested. For e ample, when I mention to people that m book, Balkan Ghosts,1 was actuall e cerpted in The Atlantic in 1989, long before the Balkan wars began before the Berlin Wall fell even I am usuall met with blank stares. The fact is, it is a ver bus world. People are bombarded with information. Even critics have no room in their memories for such details. The theories that gain the most notoriet are those that are anti- eitgeist; or non-linear. That is, the do not proceed from current trends, and as a consequence, the create literall scores of enemies. Huntington's essa , The Clash of Civili ations? (Foreign A airs, Summer 1993),2 m own essa , The Coming Anarch (The Atlantic, Februar 1994),3 and Universit of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer's book, The Traged of Great Po er Politics (2001) fall into this categor . Keep in mind that the 1990s and the ver earl -2000s when these writings appeared were a time of barel restrained optimism. Despite the con icts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the opinion-setting cosmopolitan elite subscribed to the notion that the world was unif ing, markets and free elections constituted the onl authentic future for developing nations, and growing middle-classes whether in China or America would all have the same values. Then in marches Huntington, announcing that civili ations were coming into con ict; not harmon . I then arrive, announcing that the natural environment would constitute the greatest securit threat of the future, especiall in developing nations where institutions were weak. And later on, Mearsheimer proposes that the more China develops economicall , somewhat counterintuitivel , the more likel that it will come into con ict with the United States. All of these theories had problems and inconsistencies, and all were wrong in parts. The criticism was thus painful, I can attest. But it is b constructing a theor and then having it taken apart that knowledge accumulates, until a new and perhaps better theor emerges to take its place. The late Thomas S. Kuhn, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog , e plained that useful paradigms make us see the world di erentl , but because paradigms are b nature imperfect, most of science is a mopping-up operation. Kuhn approvingl quotes Francis Bacon that, Truth emerges more readil from error than from confusion. h p :// . ciencedi ec .com/ cience/a icle/pii/S0030438720300600 4 2/6 1/26/2021 The Pe il of Fo eca ing - ScienceDi ec It is not onl pessimistic theories that come in for assault. So do optimistic ones. Stanford Download Universit 's Francis Fuku ama published The End of Histor ? 5 in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, shortl before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essa claimed that liberal democrac , with all of its faults, was the onl s stem left standing after the failure of fascism and communism, because no other form of government carried the potential to make individual men and women happ in their lives. Therefore, histor in a philosophical or Hegelian sense, had reached a sort of clima . Cries of outrage arose at this happ vision of eventual democratic peace. There were the postmodernists, who believed that the world was becoming a contest of narratives in which Western political thought held no particular advantage. And there were the fools, who took the title of the essa quite literall , even though Fuku ama was careful to acknowledge that wars and insurrections would continue as before: it was onl the historical debate over which s stem of governance produced the best results that had ended. Of course, one easil could argue, as I did, that places in the developing world where institutions were weak constituted fertile ground for enlightened or unenlightened authoritarianism, and, therefore, Fuku ama's vision was too American and European-oriented. But that line of criticism accounted for onl a limited number of the attacks on The End of Histor ? For in large part, Fuku ama was misunderstood, a common fate for philosophers of his high caliber. In addition to taking titles too literall , critics also tend to lack historical memor . For e ample, The Coming Anarch appeared in 1994, and the two West African countries that I concentrated on earl in the essa , Sierra Leone and Cote d Ivoire, did indeed fall into utter anarch in the late1990s and continued thus for man ears to come. Now, more than a quarter-centur since the essa was published, a relativel benign news c cle has led some critics to claim that I was wrong all along. As mentioned earlier, the intelligence and business communities tend to be much more seasoned and thorough in their anal ses of ground-breaking paradigms. That is the case because the are not involved in public grandstanding about their own cleverness to the degree that some journalists and academics are. It is also because intelligence agencies and corporations are on a mission to tr to get the future right: whether for reasons of national securit or the commercial pro t motive. Intelligence services and businesses also know that forecasting a middle-term future of ve-to-15 ears is essential, and et the are aware just how di cult it is. The know that linear thinking is hard to escape from, since e trapolating from current trends is often all one ever has to go on. So, the are understanding of attempts at non-linear anal sis, even when awed. And because corporations and businesses meet behind closed doors, the are more willing to countenance blunt, hard-nosed assessments about such things as national cultures than journalists and academics are. In fact, culture, an understanding of which is critical to useful paradigms, is the ver word that makes political scientists uneas . To raise the issue of culture as a factor in geopolitical anal sis in such circles is to risk being accused of determinism and essentialism, academic terms for h p :// . ciencedi ec .com/ cience/a icle/pii/S0030438720300600 3/6 1/26/2021 The Pe il of Fo eca ing - ScienceDi ec fatalism and stereot ping. But not to consider culture as a factor in the fate of nations is a contradiction in terms. Nations, ifDownload the are an thing, are cultural entities. For culture is the sumtotal of a people's e perience inhabiting a particular landscape for hundreds or thousands of ears. To dismiss the relevance of culture in politics is, in essence, to dismiss the whole eld of anthropolog , which is the stud of the cultures of whole peoples and ethnic groups, and their social meaning. The polic elite is uncomfortable with all this because in man cases it does not concur with its own life e perience: that of having grown up in international settings among a global class that has transcended national and ethnic culture. But since most of the world has not transcended culture, it must remain a vital element of political anal sis. To be sure, forecasting is not polite. The most insightful forecasting I have encountered has been centered around culture; not economics or politics. For e ample, a decade ago the debt crisis in Europe was not seen for what it reall was: a profound cultural crisis in which the southern Mediterranean countries, whose cultures are somewhat more eas -going than those of northern, Calvinist Europe, simpl could not adapt to the disciplinar rigors of the Euro one. The borrowed vastl more than the could pa back. The conventional wisdom, at the time, was still that the European Union somehow would weather what was strictl a nancial storm. But now the ver idea of Europe is more demonstrabl in danger for the ver reason that outside of the technocrats in Brussels no one people in Europe in the nal anal sis care su cientl about the fate of the other peoples in Europe. And the reasons are cultural. Indeed, the northerners are sick of pa ing for the southerners. This is a legac , b the wa , not onl of geograph , but of di erent empires and development patterns: Carolingian and Prussian in the north, and B antine and Ottoman in the southeast. Sevent - ve ears after World War II, European politics remain more national than pan-national. And European unit thus rests at a tipping point. At the time I write, it appears that northern Europe will indeed cough up the mone for southern Europe. But it has been a close-run a air. Huntington's Clash was so powerful and prescient precisel because the author, too, was unafraid of the whole subject of culture and civili ations. Intelligence services and corporations, besides having a willingness to listen to arguments about culture, also harbor historical memories, and so the keep tabs on whether theories vaguel work out as advertised or not. The are not impressed with elegant and engaged writing merel for its own sake. Journalists, contraril , are consumed with presentness. The tend to judge ever thing from the vantage point of the current news c cle. And it is this obsession with presentness that obscures historical conte t, from which the future can be discerned, however imperfectl . For e cepting the hard sciences, often the best that a theor can do is to make people a bit less surprised about the future. Interestingl , at a time when even the nest elite publications do not cover foreign a airs as seriousl and as disinterestedl as the once did, corporations have been reaching out to private forecasting companies to get a cold-blooded sense of the middle-term future in man places. h p :// . ciencedi ec .com/ cience/a icle/pii/S0030438720300600 4/6 1/26/2021 The Pe il of Fo eca ing - ScienceDi ec Having worked for two such rms Stratfor and Eurasia Group over the course of the recent Download rm that even when wrong, what such decade, I can con rms reall bring to the table is an oldfashioned and comprehensive seriousness about the news of the world and where it is headed, regardless of its human interest value. The also are deliberatel amoral: whether an outcome is good or bad does not interest them as a rm. The point is whether the predicted it or not. Such rms are interested in the economic and political behavior of the mass; more so than in the particular stor of individuals. After all it is the mass, the vast average, that drives histor , perhaps more often than the e ceptional few, of whom the media makes heroes and villains. And the more that the media as a whole declines tra cking in the trivial and remaining within predictable philosophical comfort ones the more necessar such rms will be. Indeed, the media is dominated b liberal arts majors, who are driven b the need to turn the stories of individuals into narratives; whereas anal sis the weighing of harsh, unpleasant truths that require abstractions and generali ations is often the pursuit of math minds. In sum, true ideas certainl do not win universal praise. True ideas cause anger, argument, resentment, and debate. Forecasting is not for the timid. Recommended articles Citing articles (0) R be D. Ka a holds the Robert Straus -Hup Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Polic Research Institute. He is the author of 19 books on foreign a airs, including: The G d A e ica , The Re e ge f Ge g a h , The C i g A a ch , Balka Gh , A ia' Ca ld , and M . 1 Robert D. Kaplan, Balka Gh 2 Later e panded into a book, Samuel Huntington, The Cla h f Ci ili a i Simon & Schuster, 1996). 3 Later e panded into an essa collection, Robert D. Kaplan, The C Wa (New York: Random House, 2000). 4 Thomas S. Kuhn, The S and 111. 5 Later e panded into a book, Francis Fuku ama, The E d f Hi c :AJ e Th gh Hi e f Scie i c Re l i (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). a d he Re aki g f W ld O de (New York: i g A a ch : Sha e i g he D ea f he P -C ld (The Universit of Chicago Press, (1962) 1970), pp. 18, 23-24, a d he La Ma (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 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ScienceDirect is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. h p :// . ciencedi ec .com/ cience/a icle/pii/S0030438720300600 kie . 6/6 2/21/2021 The perverse political effects of Covid-19 | Financial Times Opinion Coronavirus pandemic The perverse political e?ects of Covid-19 Both the US and EU may end up being politically strengthened by the pandemic GIDEON RACHMAN © Ellie Foreman-Peck Gideon Rachman DECEMBER 28 2020 Be the ?rst to know about every new Coronavirus story Get instant email alerts Nothing, it seems, can get in the way of geopolitical rivalry. Not a pandemic, not the https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f 1/4 2/21/2021 The perverse political effects of Covid-19 | Financial Times collapse of international travel or a worldwide recession. In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence. The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China. The PRC’s success in largely suppressing the disease stands in marked contrast with the terrible toll that Covid-19 has taken on the west. But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19. In America, the year started with Donald Trump in a strong position to win a second term in the White House. But the US president’s manifest incompetence in dealing with Covid-19 (an injection of disinfectant, anyone?), probably put paid to his chances of re-election. As a result, Covid-19 may indirectly have saved American democracy. And by helping to remove an erratic isolationist from the White House, the pandemic has also given the US a much better chance of preserving its status as the world’s most powerful nation. Covid-19 has also taken a terrible human and economic toll in Europe. But, in political terms, the EU followed a similar arc to the US — with near disaster giving way to an unexpected upside. When the pandemic first hit the European continent, it looked like the latest demonstration that, under severe pressure, European unity collapses. This is what happened during the Iraq war, and throughout much of the euro crisis. In the first days of the pandemic, some frontier controls were reimposed and there was bitter recrimination between northern and southern Europeans. But, over the summer, this narrative changed dramatically. The EU agreed to the creation of a €750bn solidarity fund to be used for Covid-19 relief. In a break with its longstanding policy, the Merkel government in Germany agreed that the money would be raised by the issuance of common EU debt. This was a historic advance for European integration — potentially the biggest since the creation of the euro itself almost 30 years ago. And the breakthrough was brought about by Covid-19. It will take a while for the full political impact of Covid-19 on the US and the EU to sink in. When the clocks strike on New Year’s Eve, the conventional wisdom is still likely to be that the year of the pandemic was one which saw real geopolitical gains for China https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f 2/4 2/21/2021 China. The perverse political effects of Covid-19 | Financial Times This, too, was an outcome that could not have been foreseen at the beginning of 2020. The pandemic originated in China and initially looked like a disaster for President Xi Jinping. But, over the course of the year, Mr Xi and his cohorts have turned the narrative around. There have been a reported 4,770 Covid-19 deaths in China, compared with over 330,000 in the US. The UK, Italy and Spain have all suffered from even higher per-capita death tolls than the US. The Chinese economy will grow this year, while the major western economies have suffered deep recessions. Estimates of when China’s economy will surpass America’s in size have been brought forward. China’s relative success in handling the pandemic has also handed Mr Xi a propaganda bonus — both at home and abroad. China looks more advanced, more organised and better able to look after its citizens. But there is a catch. The increased global prestige that China might have expected to enjoy as a result has not shown up in international polls. On the contrary, a recent survey of 14 countries for the Pew Research Center showed that in nine of them — including the UK, Germany and South Korea — negative views of China have reached their highest levels in more than a decade. Latest coronavirus news Follow FT's live coverage and analysis of the global pandemic and the rapidly evolving economic crisis here. Thi l i Chi f https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f h l i h i ll d 3/4 2/21/2021 The perverse political effects of Covid-19 | Financial Times This slump in Chinese soft power suggests that people in the countries polled are more impressed by the fact that the virus originated in China, than by Beijing’s subsequent success in stopping its spread. China’s aggressive response to any hint of international criticism — through its so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy — has also probably been counter-productive. Geopolitical strategists in Beijing may comfort themselves with the thought that, whatever the collateral damage Covid-19 has inflicted on China, the damage to western standing has been worse. But if the US and the EU now roll out vaccine programmes with reasonable speed and efficiency, they will begin to repair some of the economic and reputational damage they have suffered because of their handling of Covid-19. If President-elect Joe Biden is lucky and skilful, he will also benefit from a postpandemic economic bounce, while being able to pin the blame for previous missteps on his incompetent predecessor. America’s allies will be all too eager to embrace this narrative and to give the US a second chance. In reality, the country’s international standing has been deeply damaged both by the Trump presidency and by Covid-19. But, with a new president in the White House, America will be back in the geopolitical game. gideon.rachman@ft.com This article has been amended to remove France from a list of countries with higher per capita death tolls than the US Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021. All rights reserved. https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f 4/4 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future H N S R W T F M Menu COMMENT & ANALYSIS The Co id-19 change ha co ld la long- e m (Image c edi : Ge Image ) By Le is Dartnell 29th June 2020 F om he e inc ion of he dail comm e o an fo ming o food, Co id-19 i changing o o ld al ead – and in ome ela ion hip a , i look ih e o ge be e . A icle con in e belo https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay 1/16 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future B L 14 -C D E ,C -19 S Menu C R : ? . A 14 C , . A – – ? . I ? , .C -19 , - , ? . Yo migh al o like: I C -19 W H C -19 ? ? ' P B D ? 1918 ? .T , .B ?T . O I ’ , ’ ' , , – B .A – , . , ’ ? .S .T – - . S o y con in e below PAID AND PRESENTED BY The tech reshaping air travel From safeguarding cabin crew and passengers, to modernising flight operations. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay 2/16 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future Menu Lockdo n ha e ed people' c ea i i (C edi : Ge Image ) – pa ic la l W ha of pa en keeping hei kid b , , , , .S .A , ? , , . T ? .M .N ? , , – , – . O , – : ? . A , https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay 3/16 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future .P ? , M - Menu . , , – , ? . O – .T ? .T ? , ? . T T , ? - .W - ( ? ). A - .B - ? .M ’ ? .T ? , . Some chool , hop and o kplace ha e p e en an mi ion i ho E , ned o empe a e e o he in e en ion (C edi : Ge - –b he migh no Image ) ’ , 15% .I , ? .S , – – .E UK, . (Read mo e abo ela ion hip i h elec ic coo e – and ho ? o ainable he , collec i e lo e-ha e eall a e – he e). T , . B , ? ? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay , ? 4/16 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future .S , .T Menu , , ? .S ? , 9-5 . The knock-on effec of hi o ld be e iden ial p ope al e d opping in majo ci ie and mo e people mo ing o in o he b b W , – , ? – . M ? , - . W ? .A - , ? , : I R . C B ? , : .C , " ?M – " - , , – ? . De e ed ai po I migh be he no m fo ome ime o come (C edi : Ge Image ) , ( ) E A ? – 30-40% .L , – .S – , , . I ’ 1.5C ’ CO2 - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay 2020 8%. I , P A , 5/16 2/28/2021 The Covid-19 changes that could last long-term - BBC Future abo ho he pandemic ha been a ‘ma . (Read mo e Menu e pe imen ’ fo he clima e he e). Wha i needed o co n e he h ea po ed b bo h he co ona i pandemic and clima e change i a kind of an ia econom – o ed ce ind ial p od c ion and ene g e N .T , .T - ? , .B , , - – . N , - , .B , ? .B , .F , , , .B , . C ? ? * Le i Da nell i a p ofe o a he Uni e i KNOWLEDGE: Ho o Reb ild O of We min e , and a ho of THE Wo ld f om Sc a ch. -Join one million F If o liked hi e fan b liking o , ign p fo on Facebook, o follo he eekl bbc.com fea E en ial Li ”. A handpicked elec ion of and T a el, deli e ed o o inbo e e o ie f om BBC F on T i e o In ag am. e ne le e , called “The e, C l e, Wo klife, F ida . SHARE HEALTH Why mo Co id-19 dea h on’ be f om he i (Image c edi : EPA) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200629-which-lockdown-changes-are-here-to-stay 6/16 IDEAS The Coronavirus Is Demonstrating the Value of Globalization We are experiencing a painful introduction to anti-globalism and its consequences. MARCH 27, 2020 David Frum Staff writer at The Atlantic BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY To fight a pandemic, governments are erecting barriers to the movement of people and goods unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. In some ways, the new barriers are even tighter. America’s borders with Canada and Mexico remained open during the war, but they are closed now. These interventions have been introduced as temporary measures. Globalization is suspended only for the duration, governments insist. But if we are not very careful now, during the crisis, the duration will extend itself indefinitely. In the crisis, even the ideal of global cooperation is dying. The Trump administration did not consult with European allies—if allies remains the right word—before effectively suspending transatlantic air travel. The German government accused the Trump administration of trying to gain exclusive rights to Germany’s vaccine research, again without consultation. France and Germany forbade the export of protective medical gear to Italy. Hungary and Poland unilaterally closed their borders. Back in January, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business of a silver lining to the epidemic: “It will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America,” he said. What we are in fact seeing is a collapse of world trade on a pace and scale never before seen in peacetime. Shanghai, the world’s largest port, suffered a 20 percent drop in traffic in the single month of February compared with the previous year. America’s second-largest port, Long Beach, suffered an 11 percent decline in February. And March is poised to be much, much worse than February. • During the crisis, it’s hard to think of the long term. But during a crisis is precisely when you must think of the long term—otherwise, we may stumble into a future of perpetual national selfishness. Against the short-term preference of so many of today’s national governments, it’s vital to keep in mind the future we should want: the fastest possible return to open trade, travel, and investment. “The future does not belong to globalists,” President Trump declared at the United Nations back in September 2019. We are now experiencing a painful introduction to anti-globalism and its consequences. Autarky—national self-sufficiency—was an ideal of the authoritarians of the 1930s. It failed then, and it is failing again now. This pandemic is daily proving that border guards and travel restrictions are futile protections against pathogens. Post-coronavirus, the world will need stronger international organizations and closer international cooperation. As so often, the worst offender against the ideals of global cooperation has been the government of China. Before the crisis, China manufactured half of the world’s medical masks. China has expanded production since December, but hoarded its supply and banned exports. China’s coverup of the outbreak of the disease cost other countries—even countries governed by more responsible leaders than the United States at the moment—precious days and weeks of preparation. Through December, Chinese police harassed and detained doctors who shared information about the virus. China had mapped the virus by January 2, 2020, but did not publish that information until January 9. As late as January 14, China insisted to the World Health Organization that the disease could not be spread from one human to another—information that the Chinese authorities knew to be false. It was the next day, January 15, that the first person is known to have departed Wuhan for the United States carrying the disease. But China found ready imitators. The European Union also embargoed exports of medical gear, cutting African nations off from their previous suppliers. With characteristic self-harm, the United States under President Trump had already embargoed itself. As Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has written, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese medical products in early 2018 and more in 2019. Higher prices on imported equipment resulted in lower purchases and depleted inventories. Reluctance to “buy Chinese” may partly explain why the Trump administration ignored advice to increase stockpiles of protective gear well in advance of any crisis. The risk is huge that today’s emergency measures will harden into tomorrow’s institutionalized rules: enduring barriers to travel, trade, and investment. Countries may decide they dare not rely on imported medical equipment, or imported antibiotics and vaccines, or other people’s air carriers. Soon we may revert to the day when each country tried to do as much as possible for itself, regardless of cost and rationality. A fenced-off world will be a poorer world. But the economic costs are the least of the dangers ahead. A fenced-off world will also be a more mutually suspicious world, a world more prone to conflict. Perversely, it will also be a world more exposed to pandemic disease, because a fencedoff world will also be a world of diminished cooperation and censored information. If China had been a freer country, the ruling regime would not have been able to suppress the news of the outbreak as long as it did. Free and independent media are among the most important tools of disease prevention. Yet in the direction we are moving, authoritarian governments are trying to use the pandemic to assert greater control over the media. Trump obviously would like to do so, if he could. Compare and contrast the coronavirus pandemic with the Ebola eruption of 2014. The 2014 Ebola outbreak is thought by experts to have originated with a bat bite in the West African country of Guinea. The World Health Organization declared an outbreak on March 23, 2014. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deployed teams to West Africa in July. The outbreak was swiftly limited; by September 2015 it was almost entirely eradicated. Ebola is not as contagious as the coronavirus. But it was different in another way, too. It first appeared in countries that are small, poor, and dependent on international help. It simply was not feasible for Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to defy the rest of the world in the way that China defied the world with the coronavirus. The novel coronavirus appeared in China in early December. The disease was raging virulently by end of December. Yet only in January did China agree to admit international medical teams into the country—and not until early February did China honor that promise. Although Chinese scientists had successfully mapped the virus by early January, they delayed sharing their information with the world for a week. China is simply too big and too powerful to be constrained by any other country, even the United States. But it’s not so big and so powerful as to evade all constraint entirely. If the United States could have acted jointly with the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Canada, Australia, and other partners, that assemblage of states might have swayed China. If, for example, all those countries had cut their air links to China when China began stiffing the WHO in mid-December, that might have shocked China into more cooperative action. But the pressure would only have worked if it was multilateral. And the only way a multilateral group of nations can act fast is if they have their multinational organization in place in advance. Instead, the only multilateral health organization is the World Health Organization. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, thoroughly contaminated by the usual UN vices: overbureaucracy, overspending, over-deference to corrupt and dictatorial regimes. In 2017, the WHO named the former Zimbabwean ruler-for-life Robert Mugabe a “goodwill ambassador.” Even as China brushed off the WHO in December and January, the WHO’s director general obsequiously praised China’s cooperation and transparency. But of course, there was no multilateral response. The Trump administration has poisoned American relationships with almost every historical U.S. ally, to the point where it’s a question whether these relationships can still meaningfully be described as alliances at all. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conceives of leadership as barking orders at other countries, and then complaining on Fox News when his orders are disregarded. The American approach to the coronavirus has been nearly as dishonest and selfish as China’s own. Trump-led America is not even trying to cooperate with former partners; by now, it’s doubtful that the former partners would trust an offer of cooperation if it were extended. Trump and his media partners at Fox News have recently pivoted from denying the crisis to blaming it on China. They want Americans to call the coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Their motive is obvious: to shift blame from a negligent president onto sinister foreigners. (Trump and Fox’s preference for “Chinese virus” over “China virus” subtly shifts the blame from the state of China to Chinese people, including people of Chinese descent living in the United States.) At any given moment, the world is either moving forward to cooperation, trade, and peace, or regressing toward protectionism, isolation, and conflict. We have experienced cooperation and know its benefits. We have experienced isolationism and have suffered its miseries. The circumstances may change. The choice does not. Let’s choose wisely. Let’s also face facts. To convert our choices into reality, we must take into account the adverse truths revealed by the present crisis. Here are three of them: The paranoia and secretiveness of the rulers of China horribly worsened the pandemic, and the Western world's dependence on China for medical supplies made Western countries more vulnerable to the pandemic when it escaped China. The Trump administration wants to exploit the first of these facts as a political excuse for its own indifference and incompetence. It hopes to use the second as a justification for its inward turn and its selfish economic policies. Trump’s bad use of facts does not, however, alter the facts. They are facts—and if you want to build a better world than Trump intends for you, you must yourself account for those facts in your plans. So we must face the first of these facts. The West cannot change China. China is too big, and too strong. The West should wish those Chinese people, including many in Hong Kong, who seek a freer future for China, well. But as they wish them well, Western countries need to keep in mind that the present Chinese state is not like the former Soviet Union. It is not as aggressive, not as expansionary, and not as ideological. The Chinese state is more dangerous for the harm it incubates inside itself than for the harm it schemes against others. China’s currency manipulations and predatory trade policies were adopted to protect the state from its own people; they are only incidentally harmful to others. The same is true of China’s pandemic cover-up: That was an act of regime self-preservation. The harm to the rest of the world was collateral damage, not a malign plot. But we must also face the second of these facts. When the West bought cheaply from China, it did so to help itself. If a Chinese-made antibiotic costs 50 cents a unit, and a locally made antibiotic costs $1, that difference liberates 50 cents for other important purposes. Substituting $1 antibiotics for 50-cent antibiotics may create jobs, as the Trump administration promises. But those jobs will be bought at the expense of severe consequences just beyond the frame of vision. The difference between the insecure Chinese antibiotic and a more secure alternative can, however, be shrunk. The more widely we trade in medical goods with nations other than China, the better the price of those goods will become, even if we do not rely on China. “Made in USA” will cost a lot more. “Made in the NAFTA zone” will cost less. "Made in the NAFTA zone, the European Union, the UK, Japan, Australia, or other trustworthy Indo-Pacific nations" will cost less than that. By widening the zone of non-China medical sourcing beyond "America First" to a billion-person market of proven and trusted partners, we can capture almost all the benefits of secure supply at significantly lower cost in wasted resources. We can then use some of the saved resources to create stockpiles in advance of the next crisis—as the Trump administration was urged, but neglected, to do. Finally, here is the third fact to face. The concept of globalization joins together many forms of international connection: trade, investment, health, the environment, travel, and immigration. Some of these are more difficult for democracies to accept than others, most especially mass immigration. Some of these are less essential than others, again, especially mass immigration. To revive and preserve the most essential forms of international cooperation, wise leaders should recognize that mass immigration belongs to its own political category. If we are to return rapidly to international cooperation and trade, mass immigration must be treated differently. The lesson of the present crisis is exactly the opposite of the “America First” approach urged by the Trump administration. It is the need to lower barriers between trusted partners, to build stronger international health organizations outside the moribund structure of the United Nations, to encourage European unity as the U.S. did from 1946 until 2016, and to return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership jettisoned by Trump. Instead of reviling China—or, worse, stoking bigotry against people of Chinese descent—we should work around China, not only on medical safety but on climate change and other issues, too. We need more transnational agreements, not fewer; wider zones of trust, not narrower. If we build a world of trust that’s efficient and attractive enough, we may find that we can inspire better behavior from China too. Great nations do not react well to threats, and they react even worse to insults and name-calling of the empty Trumpian kind. But they do sometimes respond to positive incentives. Just as the European Union sways would-be members to act more democratically and liberally in order to join, so a partnership of trusted partners in global health might inspire better behavior in China. The Chinese state, by virtue of its size and power, is inherently a problem, a challenge, a rival. In the early part of his administration, Trump treated the Chinese state as an adversary. Now, in political desperation, Trump is treating the Chinese nation as a racial menace. Soon, we may find that Trump has goaded it into outright enmity. Meanwhile, Trump is alienating former friends— and pushing many of them in China's direction. Trump seeks to taint the United States with his own lonely malice, making us a friendless giant in conflict with other giants as friendless as we. Amid the devastation of the Second World War, Secretary of State Cordell Hull looked backward at the path to ruin. “Nationalism,” he said, “run riot between the last war and this war, defeated all attempts to carry out indispensable measures of international economic and political action, encouraged and facilitated the rise of dictators, and drove the world straight toward the present war." Hull was 70 when he spoke those words—old by the standards of his time. Some of the younger New Dealers dismissed him as an anachronism. His ideas about free trade, they said, should be consigned to the dead past, not the exciting new future of national planning and state control. The old man was right, though, and the bright young New Dealers were wrong. Hull’s memory of how things had been proved the opposite of reactionary. Adapted to the new conditions of the postwar world, the old ideas delivered even more abundant prosperity and an even more secure peace than they had before. We need Cordell Hulls for our time. Instead, our present leadership is hurtling us toward a future in which nations will self-isolate and self-quarantine, producing similarly miserable consequences for themselves collectively as today’s pandemic imposes on us as individuals. A better future is possible. But it won’t happen on its own, and it certainly won’t be achieved by this administration—which also chooses the worst option without understanding the menu or the prices. is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. DAVID FRUM Geopolitics After COVID 19: Conflict or Cooperation? - The Globalist Global Pairings 1/25/21, 9:56 PM Previous Next Geopolitics After COVID 19: Conflict or Cooperation? In absolute terms, all states or groups of states around the globe are going to emerge weakened from the 2020 coronavirus crisis. By Andrés Ortega, June 21, 2020 Geopolitical rivalry, and the reasons that sustain it, has not stopped with coronavirus. Depending on its depth and duration, the crisis could lead to a more cooperative or a more divided world. Or it could lead to ongoing tension between these two alternatives for an indefinite period. The current geopolitical environment Here are some core tenets of the current geopolitical environment: • In absolute terms all states or groups of states are going to emerge weakened from this crisis. Takeaways All states or groups of states are going to emerge weakened from the coronavirus crisis. Tweet The coronavirus crisis could lead to a more cooperative or a more divided world, depending on the pandemic’s depth and duration. Tweet We may witness greater or lesser geopolitical rivalry, but based on weaker powers. This could possibly result in temptations to overreach. However, they come along with reduced abilities to act upon them. • The UN has been completely absent during the crisis. Only a restoration of trust among the great powers will be capable of establishing the centrality of the UN Security Council. The WHO has proved inadequate. A much better equipped global health system is needed. • The G20 worked in 2018 because there was U.S., British and French leadership. Now, with the Saudis in the chair not so much. At the present time, the G20 is being reduced to a framework lacking genuine capacity for coordination. The existing structures do not work. Here are some of the most likely structural developments: https://www.theglobalist.com/coronavirus-pandemic-covid19-geopolitics-united-states-europe-china/ Page 1 of 4 Geopolitics After COVID 19: Conflict or Cooperation? - The Globalist A much better equipped global health system is needed. The UN has been completely absent during the coronavirus crisis and the WHO has proved inadequate. Tweet US global leadership has been completely absent during the coronavirus pandemic -- in contrast to the Obama administration’s reaction to the Ebola epidemic. Tweet China sees the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to bolster its international image. The world’s center of gravity will continue shifting East -- including in ideological terms. Tweet 1/25/21, 9:56 PM Acceleration of the process of de-Westernization This was already underway owing to the rise of the East (which could, nonetheless, be slowed down, although not reversed by the crisis) as well as because of the internal divisions within the West. One of the intriguing questions: Will we become more “Asiatic” in terms of a general mindset, and therefore more community-minded and less individualistic? Accelerated de-Europeanization The decline of Europe has been described for a long, long time. Currently, there are even real concerns about the collapse of the EU if it is not able to react in a concerted fashion post-COVID 19. Conversely, the reality shock of, and the pressures from, the COVID 19 crisis may be strong enough to bring about new economic and geopolitical progress towards European integration. U.S. absenteeism: How much longer? During the pandemic, U.S. global leadership has been completely absent, in marked contrast to the Obama administration’s reaction to the Ebola epidemic. One factor that will weigh decisively on scenarios over the medium term is whether Donald Trump is re-elected in November. A Democrat such as Joe Biden in the White House from January — likely with a female Vice President who could replace him at any time, if needed — could drive a more multilateral approach. That would imply more attention being given to the importance of allies to the United States, while the U.S. distancing to Russia and China would be maintained. The U.S.-Chinese rivalry will continue This rivalry will become a structural factor in the (new) world order, especially with regard to the struggle for technological and ideological domination. China, following its management of the health crisis, has seen an opportunity to bolster its international image (and utility). However, as more becomes known about what actually happened with the outbreak, China’s currently rather good image may change. In addition, China has major internal economic and social problems, which may undermine the financial capabilities it has earmarked for some of its geopolitical instruments, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. Even so, the world’s center of gravity will continue shifting towards the East, including in ideological terms. A very full global agenda https://www.theglobalist.com/coronavirus-pandemic-covid19-geopolitics-united-states-europe-china/ Page 2 of 4 Geopolitics After COVID 19: Conflict or Cooperation? - The Globalist 1/25/21, 9:56 PM There are many other pressing issues to be dealt with. On most of them, trendlines are not moving in a positive direction. For example, the need to prioritize national aid for the underprivileged will reduce development aid even further and also cast even greater doubt on the attainment of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. And, of course, we are back at a time where countries only a short while ago being deemed as emerging may well be submerging. That isn’t just true for Africa and Latin America. Due to the steep fall in the oil price, Russia faces severe problems. Three scenarios for the path ahead Amidst this convoluted and heavily burdened global landscape, let me set out three illustrative examples as base scenarios. In doing that, I am fully aware of the dangers of simplification. But one way or another, we need to attempt to get a grasp of a reality that is enormously complex. Scenario 1: Each for himself The United States, the self-ascribed richest country on earth, has already reached a staggeringly high unemployment levels. But it certainly isn’t just there that the lure of deglobalization (“my country first”) is offered up as a way out. Social unrest can further strengthen the populists and authoritarian regimes. Presumably well-established democracies will possibly have to contend with the collapse of the middle classes. If not global chaos, the forces of deWesternization and de-Europeanization will find further fuel. Scenario 2: Collective international intelligence This is the rosy scenario. While the health crisis persists over the mid-long term, the spirit and logic of real international cooperation kicks in, both in the fight against the virus and in the recovery from the economic crisis. The G20 provide useful fiscal stimulus measures and there are moves toward a global health system. There is a gentle reform of capitalism, providing for a greater role for the public sector. Social protests are limited thanks to direct aid and lines of credit for companies. Thus, there is limited de-globalization. We even see greater European integration, with the financial and political institutions working in the same direction. Trust in governments recovers. Geopolitical confrontation between the United States and China, and with Russia, is considerably lowered. At times, it seems as if the spirit of a single humanity could thrive. Scenario 3: Step by step muddling through https://www.theglobalist.com/coronavirus-pandemic-covid19-geopolitics-united-states-europe-china/ Page 3 of 4 Geopolitics After COVID 19: Conflict or Cooperation? - The Globalist 1/25/21, 9:56 PM Here is the middle scenario: The crisis persists over the short-medium term. There is a degree of international cooperation in the healthcare field, but there is no coordination in the fiscal-economic realm. The economy in the EU as a whole starts to recover slowly, but it does not revert to its position prior to the crisis, remaining for a time in depression. Social protests rise due to the high levels of unemployment which show no sign of abating, but the system does not collapse. While there are localized coronavirus events, we do not see a reactivation of global flows. What we see is more nationalism and protectionism. The EU remains half-built. The ECB, the EIB and the Commission all function, but the European Council does not succeed in coordinating itself and acting in an integrated way on the joint fiscal stimulus issue. Conclusion It is clear that the second scenario is the most advantageous, while the first is the least advantageous. The likely outcome of a “new normality” is a mix. Editor’s note: This article is based on an analysis published at Elcano Royal Institute: Coronavirus: trends and landscapes for the aftermath. More on this topic How COVID 19 Hits Bad Governments Time for China and the WHO to Fess Up Trump Threatens China Tags: China, latest, Europe, United States, geopolitics, pandemic, Coronavirus, COVID-19 About Andrés Ortega Andrés Ortega is senior research fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, a major Spanish foreign affairs think tank. Full bio → | View all posts by Andrés Ortega → https://www.theglobalist.com/coronavirus-pandemic-covid19-geopolitics-united-states-europe-china/ Page 4 of 4 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum The Davos Agenda 1/25/21, 8:25 PM Learn more We use cookies to improve your experience on our website. By using our website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our updated Cookie Notice. I accept A science journalist explains how the Spanish flu changed the world It's estimated that the Spanish Flu killed around 50 million people in between 1918 and 1919. Image: via REUTERS 30 Apr 2020 Kate Whiting Senior Writer, Formative Content Over three waves of infections, the Spanish flu killed around 50 million people https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 1 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM between 1918 and 1919. Science journalist Laura Spinney studied the pandemic for her 2018 book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. Here, she explains the impact the disease had on 20th-Century society – and talks about the lessons for the COVID-19 pandemic today. Listen to more free podcasts on Spoti!. All at sea - the countless ship workers stranded by COVID S TA R T L I S T E N I N G World vs Virus Follow 21:27 A couple of years ago, journalist Laura Spinney could hardly believe how little people thought about the Spanish flu pandemic, which swept the globe in three deadly waves between 1918 and 1919. So she wrote a book – Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World – to bring the tragedy that claimed 50 million lives back into our consciousness, “It seemed to me there was this huge hole in our collective memory about the worst disaster of the 20th Century. It’s definitely not remembered in the same way as the two world wars – there is some different way we remember pandemics. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 2 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum Laura Spinney, journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. 1/25/21, 8:25 PM Image: Studio Cabrelli “One of the ways I tried to explain it in my book was that, to me, that pandemic is remembered individually as millions of discrete tragedies, not in a history book sense of something that happened collectively to humanity.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 3 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM Here she explains what the world was like a century ago and how society changed as a result of the Spanish flu. What was the Spanish flu? It was a pandemic of influenza that struck in three waves. The first, mild wave in the Northern hemisphere's spring of 1918 receded in the summer or late spring. A much more lethal second wave erupted in the latter part of August and receded towards the end of that year, and the third wave emerged in the early months of 1919. We think it infected about 500 million people – so one in three people in the world alive at that time, and it killed 50 million of them. The death toll could have been even higher because there was a big problem with under-reporting at the time. They didn't have a reliable diagnostic test. The death toll from Spanish flu in the US alone was 675,000. Image: CDC/Statista Why was it so deadly? Pandemic flu is much worse than seasonal flu, and we think there have been 15 flu pandemics https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 4 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM in the past 500 years. Every seasonal flu started out as a pandemic flu, which was much more virulent because it was new in the human population. Gradually over time, it evolved to become more benign and to live in a more harmonious relationship with humanity. There are lots of theories for why the Spanish flu was so virulent and they're not mutually exclusive. Some of them have to do with the inherent biology of that virus, and some of them with the state of the world at the time. That pandemic obviously emerged when the world was at war; there were extraordinary circumstances. Lots of people were on the move, not only troops, but also civilians: refugees and displaced persons. And there was a lot of hunger. All of these factors may have fed into the virulence of the virus. There was definitely something very abnormal about 1918. If you think about the five flu pandemics we've had since the 1890s, none of them has killed more than about 4 million people maximum, whereas we think Spanish flu killed 50 million. How different was the world in 1918? There are a lot of similarities, but also a lot of really fundamental differences. The population was about a quarter the size of what it is today and infectious diseases were still the main killer of people. It was a world that didn't know viruses very well. The first virus had been identified at the end of the 19th Century. So we had germ theory and people understood that microbes caused infectious diseases, but almost every doctor in the world thought they were dealing with a bacterial disease – and that shapes the whole story. It means they had no reliable diagnostic test and no really good treatments. It was called many different things, which meant we had a problem counting the dead as well. There were no commercial aeroplanes, so the fastest way you could get around was by ship or by train. Henry Ford had invented his Model T motor car, but they were still the preserve of the rich, as were telephones. And illiteracy was much higher than it is now, which had an impact because the main way that news was transmitted was by newspapers. In illiterate populations news travelled much more slowly and was often distorted. World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO · Apr 29, 2020 Replying to @WHO https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 5 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM Replying to @WHO FACT: #COVID19 IS NOT transmitted through houseflies More: bit.ly/COVID19Mythbus… #coronavirus #KnowTheFacts World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO FACT: Exposing yourself to the sun or to temperature higher than 25C degrees DOES NOT prevent nor cure #COVID19 More: bit.ly/COVID19Mythbus… #coronavirus #KnowTheFacts https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 6 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM 6:15 PM · Apr 29, 2020 1.1K See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter Why is it called the Spanish flu? It's a historical accident and unjust because we know for sure that it didn't start in Spain. We don't know where it did start, but there were cases in at least the US, Britain, France and probably some other European countries before it was in Spain. But Spain was neutral in the war so it didn’t censor its press. And when the first cases broke out there in the spring of 1918, the newspapers reported on them, whereas in these other countries, it was kept out of the news. Those first Spanish cases included Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain, which made it very visible. So that name kind of stuck, unfortunately, with the encouragement of the other warring nations who were quite happy to point the blame at somebody else. There is a parallel with today because pandemics have always gone hand-in-hand with xenophobia. There's always this human instinct, unfortunately, to point the finger at another country and say it came from there. How did the Spanish flu change society 100 years ago? In the short term, there was a jump in life expectancy, because a lot of people who were very ill with, for example, TB, which was a massive killer at that time, were purged from the population. They were probably the first to die of the Spanish flu because they were already in a weakened state. The people who were ill died and the people who were left behind were healthier. There was also a baby boom in the 1920s, which has always been put down to the war and the men returning from the front. But there is an argument that the flu could have contributed because it left behind a smaller, healthier population that was able to reproduce in higher numbers. Norway, for example, had a baby boom even though it was neutral in the war. Among those very vulnerable to the Spanish flu were the 20 to 40-year-olds. Normally flu is most dangerous to young children and to the very old, but in 1918, bizarrely, it was this middle https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 7 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM age group. There wasn't much of a social welfare net, even in wealthy countries, so lots of dependents were left without any means of support because the breadwinners were taken out by the flu. What is the World Economic Forum doing about the coronavirus outbreak? Show One of the great tragedies of 1918 is that those dependents just vanish into the cracks of history. We don't really know what happened to them but we get the occasional glimpse, for example, from a study in Sweden we know that a lot of old people moved into workhouses and a lot of the children became vagrants. Men were more vulnerable than women overall globally, though there were regional variations. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable and had miscarriages at frighteningly high numbers because, to fight the virus, the body took resources away from the womb and the growing foetus. Some of those babies survived and we know now there's a lifelong effect called foetal programming. That generation was physically and cognitively slightly reduced. They were more likely to suffer from heart attacks and to go to prison – and came of age just in time to go and fight in the Second World War. How did healthcare change after the Spanish flu? In many Western countries, there was a turning away from science after the pandemic because people were disillusioned with it. From the 1920s, for example, in America, alternative medicine took off in a big way and spread around the world. But at the same time, in countries that had not really embraced the scientific method, you see the opposite effect. So China becomes a little bit more scientific after the pandemic. There's a move to better disease surveillance, better public health, more organized collection of healthcare data, because they saw that to prevent future pandemics they needed to turn towards science. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 8 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM It gave a big boost to the concept of socialized medicine and healthcare, which no country had really got around to organizing yet. The pandemic is what gave the stimulus to do that because there was a realization that a pandemic was a global health crisis you had to treat at the population level. You couldn't treat individuals and there was no point in blaming individuals for catching an illness or treating them in isolation. Russia was the first, followed by Western European nations, to put in place socialized healthcare systems. Along with that comes epidemiology, the search for patterns and causes and effects of patterns in healthcare. The baseline health of populations started to become much more transparent, and much more visible. What parallels are there with today’s coronavirus? The Spanish flu was democratic on one level. It could infect anyone: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George came down with the flu and Boris Johnson has had COVID-19 today. Nobody is, in theory, spared. If you look at the population level though, there's a very clear disparity and basically the poorest, the most vulnerable, the ones with the least good access to healthcare, the ones who work the longest hours, who live in the most crowded accommodation, and so on, are more at risk. But in 1918, it was a time of eugenics-type thinking and it was perceived that those people who were more prone to the flu were constitutionally somehow inferior, that it was somehow their fault. Of course eugenics was completely discredited after the Second World War. Today, we understand that the reason those poorer groups in society are more vulnerable is because of the environment they inhabit and the fact that they don't have access to better healthcare. That effect is strong in every pandemic and, unfortunately, it's likely that developing countries are the ones that are going to bear the burden of this pandemic. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 9 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson This morning I took part in a minute’s silence to remember those workers who have tragically died in the coronavirus pandemic. The nation will not forget you. 6:43 AM · Apr 28, 2020 39.5K See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter What protective measures were put in place in 1918? We've always understood that in order to contain contagion you have to separate sick and healthy people. Concepts like isolation and quarantine are very old and they predate germ theory. So we didn't have to understand that diseases are spread by microbes to understand how to rein them in. Public health measures were put in place in some parts of the world. America did very well, Europe didn't do too badly, but there was a war on and it wasn't possible to keep those things in place very effectively, or for long enough. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 10 of 12 COVID-19: How did Spanish flu change the world? | World Economic Forum 1/25/21, 8:25 PM The dates of the waves were dependent on where you were in the world. They came later in the Southern hemisphere, which meant Australia had the luxury of seeing this thing approach in space and time from the north, and took advantage of that to put in place maritime quarantine. It managed to keep out the lethal second wave in October 1918, which is one of the rare exceptions of public health measures really working that year. But they lifted it too soon and the third wave of infection of early 1919 came into the country and killed 12,000 Australians. But it would have been much, much worse if they had not put the quarantine in place when they did. Will COVID-19 be remembered in history? It's too early to know if we’ll remember this one, but the precedents suggest we won’t. There were two other flu pandemics in the 20th Century: the 1957 Asian flu and the 1968 Hong Kong flu. They killed about 2 million and 4 million people, respectively. We are nowhere near those numbers yet and yet we don't compare this pandemic to them. We immediately head for the enormous one in 1918, which is strange in itself. But they were much worse than this one to date, and we don't remember them. License and Republishing World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. Written by Kate Whiting, Senior Writer, Formative Content The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. UpLink - Take Action for the SDGs Take action on UpLink https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world Page 11 of 12 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM Annals of Architecture February 1, 2021 Issue Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? Companies are !guring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace. By John Seabrook January 25, 2021 What’s an o?ce for? The COVID-19 pandemic has presented companies with an unprecedented https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 1 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker opportunity to rethink the fundamentals of the physical workplace. 1/25/21, 1:53 PM Illustration by Maxime Mouysset 0:00 / 44:19 Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download Audm for iPhone or Android. D avid Corns, the California managing director of R/GA, a global advertising and marketing agency, needed to decide whether to renew the lease on the company’s o?ce in downtown San Francisco. It was spring, 2020, and the lease was set to expire on August 31st. Before the covid-19 pandemic, commercial real estate was pricier in San Francisco than it was anywhere else in the country, including New York, where R/GA has its headquarters. Since leaving the o?ce on March 13th, the hundred-person S.F. sta?—the creatives, designers, strategists, account execs, and technologists who make digital products and services for Slack, Reddit, and Airbnb, among many other brands, along with support teams—had been working from home. “We have seen productivity go through the roof,” Corns told me. So why did the sta? require so much expensive o?ce space? Did they need any at all? In the past three decades, a series of quiet revolutions in design have changed the way o?ces are used, erasing former hierarchies of walls and cubicles and incorporating workplace methodologies from the technology industry into teambased, open-plan layouts. At the same time, digital tools such as e-mail, Excel, Google Docs, video conferencing, virtual whiteboarding, and chat channels like Slack have made a worker’s presence in those o?ces less essential. The pandemic has collapsed these divergent trends into an existential question: What’s an o?ce for? Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? It turns out that work, which is what the o?ce was supposed to be for, is possible to do from somewhere else. The pandemic has presented R/GA and countless other large enterprises with an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the importance of presence, proximity, and place in workspace planning. Twenty-seven per cent of the American workforce will be remote in 2021, according to a recent survey by Upwork, a freelancing marketplace. About twenty million workers have moved—many of them out of major cities—or are planning to. O?ce vacancies continue to rise: CBRE, the world’s largest commercial-real-estate-services (rm, recently estimated a San Francisco vacancy rate of more than sixteen per cent, the highest on record. Major real-estate companies such as Boston Properties and Vornado Realty Trust, which, owing to long-term commercial leases, have traditionally been recession-proof, have lost more than a third of their stock-market value in the past year. Managers—and workers—are struggling to (gure out what their post-pandemic o?ces will look like, and how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the advantages of the physical workplace. Before the pandemic, the physical and virtual workspaces often seemed to be at odds. The digital resources that now https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 2 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM allow many workers to do their jobs from home had made it possible to come into the o?ce and spend all day online. Although these tools claim to enhance the physical workspace by improving communication, they can undermine o?ce culture by reducing the face-to-face encounters that open-plan layouts purport to promote. “Digital technology should not be a substitute for human connection,” Microsoft’s C.E.O., Satya Nadella, told me. (It is sometimes, of course, used for precisely that reason in open-plan o?ces—you can’t concentrate on your own work if someone next to you is talking, and there are few spaces in which to speak privately with a colleague.) “Digital technology should help human connection when there are constraints of space and time,” Nadella added. Corns discussed options with R/GA executives in New York, including Sean Lyons, the C.E.O.; Wes Harris, the global C.O.O.; and David Boehm, who oversees the company’s real estate and facilities. The New York executives also had to decide what to do about the company’s two-hundred-thousand-square-foot Manhattan base, an o?ce, at 450 West Thirty-third Street, that was designed by the celebrated British architecture (rm Foster + Partners. The design process is depicted in Gary Hustwit’s 2016 documentary, “Workplace,” which charts the evolution of the twenty-(rstcentury o?ce. R/GA’s headquarters used to be a stop on design tours of cutting-edge New York City o?ces. Another must-see workspace was Campari America’s o?ce, done by Gensler, the world’s largest workplace-design (rm, and situated in the Grace Building, overlooking Bryant Park. But, as the pandemic dragged on, an expensive showplace o?ce in Manhattan, where rental costs in a Class A high-rise can amount to twenty thousand dollars per employee per year, began to seem like an albatross of costly, unused space. In San Francisco, Corns’s decision was relatively simple: “We said, ‘Let’s pull ourselves out of this lease, go fully virtual, and treat the o?ce like we would treat any client project, where we start from a blank slate.’ ” D uring the (rst six months of the pandemic, R/GA’s Talent Experience Team conducted a series of surveys and workshops with the agency’s sixteen hundred employees around the world. Wes Harris told me, “The (rst one was just: Are you able to get any work done? Are your clients satis(ed? How are you feeling?” Results were positive. Remote work was working, by and large. Thirty per cent of supervisors said that their workers were more productive at home; only seven per cent said people were getting less done. Two months into the pandemic, it seemed likely that working from home would be a permanent change, rather than a temporary stopgap. The next set of surveys, conducted in June and July, asked, Harris said, “Now that we are successfully working in a virtual world, what should the future post-covid o?ce look like, and how do you blend the physical and the digital in this new paradigm?” Everyone said that they missed seeing their colleagues in person, but very few workers envisaged returning to the o?ce (ve days a week. One to three days was more appealing. “People want to be able to work from anywhere, but there are times they want to collaborate,” Harris told me. Instead of a big central o?ce like 450 West Thirty-third Street, with seating for twelve hundred and (fty employees and a https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 3 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM two-hundred-person conference room, it might be better to have smaller satellite o?ces nearer to workers’ homes. Sean Lyons referenced “Dunbar’s number,” the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory, derived from studies of Neolithic villages and tribes, that humans can maintain stable social relationships with no more than a hundred and (fty people at any one time. R/GA was planning to open a hub o?ce in Brooklyn, Lyons said, because so many of their New York people lived there. Six months in, the (nal round of surveys showed that employees—driven by adrenaline and anxiety about underperforming, and because there wasn’t much else to do while sheltering in place—were working all the time. The surveys turned up a number of “pain points,” including a lack of spontaneous interactions with colleagues, di?culty integrating new hires into company culture remotely, Zoom fatigue, and ergonomically incorrect seating. But the sorest was felt by R/GA sta? who had young children. For a stressed-out parent, W.F.H. can quickly turn into W.T.F.! But, for many of the company’s employees, fewer opportunities for collaboration and the erosion of company culture weren’t major drawbacks. A summary of the survey results reported that conducting meetings over Zoom meant “more voices are being heard and there is better meeting etiquette.” One respondent wrote, “People tend to wait for others to (nish their thoughts before speaking.” Another observed, “WFH actually forces our entire team to work more closely.” Early in the pandemic, Microsoft’s Nadella suggested in a conversation with editors of the Times that e?ective remote collaboration relied in part on “social capital.” The concept that communities grow out of personal interactions was popularized in Robert Putnam’s 2000 best-seller, “Bowling Alone.” In a job setting, social capital is accumulated by working in the presence of others, and depleted during virtual interactions. Nadella told the Times he was concerned that “maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?” But when I spoke to Nadella he allowed that when you see people in their homes, with their noisy children and importunate pets, struggling to stay focussed and upbeat, “you have a di?erent kind of empathy for your co-workers.” At R/GA, the survey also revealed that, without the company’s New York headquarters, people who worked in other cities and countries felt much more involved. One worker wrote, “New York has stopped acting like it’s New York and everyone else.” Finally, the survey asked the sta? to imagine the o?ce of the future: “More spaces for collaborating. Less individual desk space”; “Would love to see more team-oriented spaces like a table, screen, and partial privacy that a team can use and have informal meetings instead of everything requiring a conference room”; “The o?ce can be very overwhelming and very hard to concentrate, that’s been the best part about working from home, being able to focus”; “I feel very wary of big open )oor plan spaces, which have always made it easy for bugs and viruses to travel.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 4 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM In all, R/GA gathered (fty-(ve hundred comments from seven hundred and (fty workers. Harris and his colleagues incorporated these (ndings into briefs that they would share with architects and designers as the company made its post-pandemic plans, beginning with the San Francisco o?ce. David Boehm told me that he hoped the resulting design would serve as a prototype for the R/GA o?ce of the future. In August, Corns took out a lease on a new, smaller space in a high-rise on Fremont Street, in San Francisco’s (nancial district, at a much lower rent. “We had talked about getting three smaller spaces—in South Bay, Oakland, San Francisco—to cut people’s commute times,” he told me. “I thought we would actually go that route, but people said, ‘We want to be together.’ ” Corns then sought out a designer to help create a workspace. After a brief search, he chose Primo Orpilla, a principal and co-founder of Studio O+A, an award-winning San Francisco-based architecture and design (rm with three decades of experience creating workspaces for companies such as Facebook, Uber, and Yelp, some of them also clients of R/GA. I f you entered o?ce life in the eighties, as I did, hierarchy was everywhere you looked. Bosses and other big shots had walled o?ces with views, while small fry toiled in cubicle reefs, bathed in )uorescent light. The industrial open-o?ce setting where C. C. Baxter labors in Billy Wilder’s 1960 (lm, “The Apartment,” a kind of white-collar factory, gave way to the cube farm where Lester Burnham sits in “American Beauty,” from 1999. Conformity still reigned in the cubicle era, but at least an o?ce schnook had partial visual privacy on three sides. (For sound privacy, you needed an o?ce.) Although they are now derided, cubicles held their charms; I met and courted my wife in one. However, like Bud Baxter, my dream was to have a door with my name on it. The cubicle evolved out of utopian notions of o?ce )exibility and )ow that were promoted in the sixties by Robert Propst, the head of research for the Herman Miller company. Propst grasped that o?ce work was fundamentally di?erent from factory work. Nikil Saval, in his 2014 book, “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” (2014), writes, “Propst was among the (rst designers to argue that o?ce work was mental work and that mental e?ort was tied to environmental enhancement of one’s physical properties.” Propst believed that, in particular, knowledge workers—a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959—would bene(t from what he called a “mind-oriented living space.” He sought to integrate a more dynamic concept of work into a program of hinged partitions and standing desks. The Action O?ce, as Propst called it, débuted in 1964. But by the mid-eighties it had evolved into the inert cubicle, and Propst was blamed for fathering it. What happened? Propst’s action-oriented designs may or may not have increased productivity and collaboration, but they did enhance the bottom line, allowing o?ce managers to add more employees without having to move to a bigger space. As density increased, partitions collapsed into the smallest possible footprint: the ever-shrinking cube. Two years before Propst’s death, in 2000, he told an interviewer, “The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 5 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM cubicles and stu? people in them. Barren, rathole places.” Not long after I had been promoted to a private o?ce—it was closer to Jonathan Pryce’s in “Brazil” (1985) than to Tom Hanks’s in “Big” (1988)—a democratizing design spirit began to emerge out of Silicon Valley, upending settled markers of status and reshu?ing personal and collaborative space according to a more communal philosophy of teambased work. Perimeter o?ces moved inside, so that the whole space got natural light; the boss, at least, was more accessible. Cubicle walls dropped from sixty-(ve inches to forty-eight, then to thirty-six, and then disappeared altogether, replaced by contiguous desks, which was my allotted space at the New Yorker o?ce when the pandemic hit. Like many older workers who once had o?ces, I hoped the pandemic might reverse the open-plan trend; people working in open o?ces take sixty-two per cent more sick leave, according to a 2011 Danish study. As I was to discover, the pandemic, far from reversing the decline of personal space in the o?ce, seems likely to hasten its demise. G rowing up in the Bay Area in the seventies and eighties, Primo Orpilla got to see at (rst hand a new democratic design aesthetic bubbling up from the California tech scene. In the early eighties, the o?ces of most large tech companies were still what Orpilla calls Dilbertvilles, after the cubicle-dwelling engineer in the Scott Adams comic strip. “They were heavy, heavy hierarchical structures,” he told me—like those of Initech, the company in Mike Judge’s 1999 satire, “O?ce Space.” “Cubicles, o?ces, meeting rooms—that was it. We hadn’t had a brainstorm room yet— collaboration wasn’t even in the conversation. You just went from meeting to meeting to meeting.” Orpilla studied interior design at San Jose State University, and, in the mid-eighties, he interned at a workplace (rm in Sunnyvale, where he did space planning for the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which was based nearby. “I got to observe engineers and how technology gets made,” he said. “There would be one superstar engineer who was the chief tech o?cer and the smartest guy in the room, and then a bunch of other engineers who needed guidance would form around him.” He noted how engineers would use movable whiteboards to create ad-hoc brainstorming rooms of their own. Unlike teams in hardware design, which tended to be stable and to pursue projects from beginning to end, software teams would form, dissolve, and recon(gure as the work progressed and as new, unforeseen problems arose. Engineers were the company’s “brain trust,” Orpilla said. But “they were dealt with as second-class citizens. They took the cubes in the middle of the warehouse without windows. If you were a big sales guy, you had an o?ce. It was all about the guys selling the product.” By the late eighties, o?ce managers started asking designers to facilitate this new, team-oriented style of work. “It all became about: How do we take care of the people who create this product?” Orpilla said. “They need to be inspired, they need to be fed, and we need to give them the spaces to do their work.” Free food and other amenities kept engineers in the o?ce, coding into the night. “They work long hours, they tend to work in the dark,” Orpilla went on. “They like to hang out for long periods of time.” The Internet boom of the nineties, which was led in part by entrepreneurial engineers, played a role in spreading the https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 6 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM team-based methodology to other forms of knowledge work. Creating a successful digital product such as Google’s Ad Words—an invention that helped turn the money-losing search company into an advertising-driven colossus—often involves cross-disciplinary teams of engineers, marketers, and product managers. As software became the engine of growth in the tech industry, and in the economy as a whole, hard-walled barriers between formerly separate divisions of workers continued to melt away. Orpilla and his design partner, Verda Alexander, started Studio O+A in 1991. Over the years, the amenities they provided became increasingly lavish. “We did skateboard ramps with DJ turntables, lots of game rooms with pool and ping-pong tables; we did music rooms and cafeterias with sophisticated barista bars and beer taps,” Alexander wrote in 2019, in an essay for Fast Company. Workplaces had laundry service, napping rooms, and gyms—further incentives to keep employees from leaving the o?ce. In the late nineties, a few businesses outside tech sought to seed similar cross-departmental innovation through openplan design. Among the (rst was the advertising agency Chiat Day, whose co-founder Jay Chiat, after hiring Frank Gehry to build the company’s binocular-fronted building in Venice, Los Angeles, got rid of private o?ces, cubicles, and desks, making it possible to work from anywhere in the o?ce. The Chiat Day workplace was like Propst’s Action O?ce after a triple espresso. With today’s mobile technology and broadband speed, the plan might have worked, but Chiat, who died in 2002, was two decades ahead of his time. After the company moved out of the space, Wired’s 1999 postmortem noted that the Venice o?ce had become “engulfed in petty turf wars, kindergarten-variety subterfuge, incessant griping, management bullying, employee insurrections, internal chaos, and plummeting productivity. Worst of all, there was no damn place to sit.” Designers addressed complaints about the noise and the distractions by incorporating elements of “activity-based working,” a term coined, in 1994, by the Dutch design consultant Erik Veldhoen. Layouts featured a mixture of open areas for team-based work, “living rooms,” and “huddle spaces” meant to promote casual encounters and focussed work. Activity-based design also helped introduce “hot desking” (unassigned (rst-come, (rst-served seating), and “hoteling” (reservable desks). Studio O+A o?ers prospective clients a menu of di?erent “typologies”—semi-modular, activity-based room types that can be (tted into any open plan. These include the Think Tank (“A conceptual greenhouse in which the (rst sprouts of projects are nurtured”), the Library (“A place of respite”), and various Sanctuaries and yurt-like Shelters (“This ancient structure from the steppes of Mongolia is a popular modern amenity”). Orpilla told me that O+A wanted to “create a kit of room types that suggest a certain type of behavior.” It was what made his job so interesting: “You’re changing behavior. That’s really what workplace design is about.” In recent years, activity-based design has become a powerful tool in many companies’ branding and recruitment e?orts. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 7 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM Gensler has specialized in creating this kind of space, and, with its design of the Campari America headquarters, which opened in March, 2019, the (rm hit peak o?ce-as-life-style. The place is intended for workers who are “living the brand every day,” Stefanie Shunk, Gensler’s lead designer on the project, told me as she showed me around the deserted workplace in early August. Desks are (rst-come, (rst-served, although Ugo Fiorenzo, the head of Campari America, admits to having a “preferred corner.” Personal items are stored in lockers; anything left behind on a desk at day’s end winds up on a “table of shame.” Fiorenzo described the aim of the design as “collaboration and collision.” There are (ve di?erent bar spaces scattered around the two )oors, including a speakeasy, the Boulevardier, hidden under the internal stairs. Shunk used the metaphor of the perfect cocktail to describe the interior aesthetics: “Clarity, color, aroma, )avor, and (nish.” The tasting pro(les of particular liquors (the company also owns Wild Turkey, Skyy Vodka, and Grand Marnier, among other brands) inform the color palettes in branded meeting rooms. Shunk and I were joined by Jaime Celebron, Campari’s senior director of human resources, at the reception desk, designed to look like a Milanese espresso bar. Normally, “you’d kind of belly up to the bar,” Celebron said, nodding toward the white marble C-shaped counter. We were careful not to touch it. It was Celebron’s (rst time back since the second week of March. “I wish you could see it with the people,” she said, looking stricken. We followed the tour that new hires used to receive, ending up in the intimate-feeling Boulevardier. We didn’t stay long. With the pandemic, the bar felt like a covid cocktail. Living the brand was one thing; getting sick from it was another. I n the months after the March shutdown, Gensler, O+A, and many other workplace designers scrambled to put together safety protocols for clients that, like Campari, were considering a speedy return to the o?ce. Workplaces premised on bringing teams of people closer together now had to keep them apart. “Clients are looking to us for answers,” Amanda Carroll, a principal at Gensler, told me. The white-collar workplace has never been regulated like manufacturing, construction, and health care, sectors where the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets health and safety rules. With the pandemic, potentially fatal hazards entered the o?ce, as did possible liability issues for employers, but osha declined to revise its standards. David Michaels, who headed osha during the Obama Administration, told the Washington Post, in June, “Thousands of workers have complained to osha, and osha has told them they’re on their own.” The Trump Administration was focussed on slashing regulations governing businesses, not creating more of them. Some states have issued back-to-work protocols, but in many cases it’s left to designers like Carroll and her colleagues to develop best practices concerning social distancing, surface cleaning, and air quality, and to convey these to their clients as suggested procedures. Carroll told me, “We are used to industry standards on inclusivity and diversity, but this new social responsibility around health and wellness takes it to another dimension. Plus, it’s highly personal to https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 8 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM individuals—what their perceived level of safety is.” The Great Fomite Freakout—a term coined by Dylan Morris, a researcher at U.C.L.A.—was in full swing in early summer, when I began joining Zoom calls with designers at O+A, Gensler, and Arup, a global engineering and design (rm. At (rst, when the virus was thought to be conveyed mainly in droplets of moisture, surfaces were believed to be a primary medium of transmission. (A fomite is an inanimate object that can carry contagions.) Anything that workers regularly touched—railings, elevator buttons, faucets, the reception desk, the co?eepot, the water cooler—was a possible hot spot. Carroll and her colleagues collected information on the antimicrobial properties of copper versus plastic and cardboard. Designers developed “sneeze guards” and transparent barriers around open-plan workstations, making them, in e?ect, see-through cubicles, and leading to an acute shortage of plexiglass. It was then discovered that, although the virus can linger on some surfaces for days, it is extremely unlikely that a person can catch it by touching those surfaces. By early August, the scienti(c consensus was that airborne transmission might be a greater threat than fomites. The possibility that the virus could circulate in the o?ce’s heating-and-airconditioning system meant that designers had to add information about clients’ H.V.A.C. systems to their portfolios of covid-related considerations. It also meant that barriers alone wouldn’t stop the virus from spreading. The virtual meetings I sat in on were charged with a sense of high purpose, as designers on the front lines used their skills to potentially save lives. Signage was key; 2020 proved to be a golden age for graphic designers. Proposed safety signage in white-collar workplaces was greatly expanded to convey information about keeping social distance, hand washing, mask wearing, and one-way )ow in “curated” elevators, lobbies, and hallways. Some signs used humor and whimsy: “hug that sneeze,” “wash your paws.” Others sought to elicit empathy for colleagues. But, in spite of all the research and recommended interventions, the majority of o?ces remained almost empty; many of the signs were never deployed. By the end of November, according to the Partnership for New York City, only ten per cent of white-collar workers in Manhattan had returned to their o?ces, and even as people get vaccinated it seems unlikely that many employers will be bringing sta?s back before the summer of 2021; Google recently pushed its return date to September, 2021. Some enhanced hygiene and cleaning procedures may outlive the pandemic, but they are likely to be absorbed into the voluntary rating system for “healthy buildings” administered by Fitwel, the real-estate industry’s certi(cation board, and operated by the Center for Active Design. Fitwel awards ratings to both buildings and individual workplaces based on things like access to natural light and the promotion of physical activity. Many covid-related best practices have already been incorporated into Fitwel’s downloadable Viral Response Module. S tudio O+A assembled its own covid tool kit for o?ce safety. Then Orpilla asked the sta? to develop a new set of covid-related typologies—activity-based spaces that might become standard features of a post-pandemic workplace. The Donning/Do?ng Room was the top typology that emerged from a meeting I attended, in which the https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic…f742898581cd72c9fe78873bd50&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=TNY_Daily Page 9 of 15 Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker 1/25/21, 1:53 PM sta? presented about a dozen ideas. This space, some version of which many other workplace (rms were also proposing, would include a temperature-check station, an isolation room for people who tested hot, a place for mandatory hand washing, and lockers to store outside gear and shoes, in addition to personal items. (Thermal temperature checks are now common in those workplaces which have reopened, even as it’s become clear that they aren’t very useful at stopping the spread of covid, because so many people with the disease are asymptomatic.) Other typologies that seemed like potential keepers included the Radio Station, a room with enhanced A/V capabilities to connect with remote workers; the Boot Camp, an area for new hires; and the Rickshaw, a small, enclosed private workspace. Orpilla sent R/GA the tool kit and the new typologies, and Corns came up with a design brief. O+A followed up with a questionnaire and a “visioning” session that added detail to the ideas outlined in the brief. Meanwhile, in New York, Lyons and his team had decided to sublet the lower )oor of R/GA’s HQ. The news was reported in The Real Deal, a real-estate magazine, in early September. The article noted that available sublet space in New York had spiked dramatically since the pandemic. The only businesses that seemed to be expanding their realestate footprint in the city were Big Tech companies, which were also setting the standard for working from home. Amazon completed its lease agreement for the former Lord & Taylor department store, at Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Facebook leased 1.5 million square feet in Hudson Yards. However, as Dror Poleg, the author of “Rethinking Real Estate” (2020) and a co-chair of the Urban Land Institute’s Technology and Innovation Coun...