US President-elect Joe Biden may have promised a “return to normalcy,” but the truth is that there is no going back. The world is changing in fundamental ways, and the actions the world takes in the next few years will be critical to lay the groundwork for a sustainable, secure, and prosperous future.
For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world’s foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, that mission is more important than ever – and we remain committed to fulfilling it.
But there is no doubt that we, like so many other media organizations nowadays, are under growing strain. If you are in a position to support us, please subscribe now.
As a subscriber, you will enjoy unlimited access to our On Point suite of long reads and book reviews, Say More contributor interviews, The Year Ahead magazine, the full PS archive, and much more. You will also directly support our mission of delivering the highest-quality commentary on the world's most pressing issues to as wide an audience as possible.
By helping us to build a truly open world of ideas, every PS subscriber makes a real difference. Thank you.
LONDON/GENEVA – COVID-19 is the biggest public-health crisis in a century and has caused the deepest economic recession of the modern era. The pandemic has revealed vulnerabilities in public-health systems and social safety nets around the world, brought vast inequalities to the surface, and demonstrated how major disruptions can snowball through interconnected systems. Clearly, our societies and economies are not nearly as resilient as we had believed.
One reason we have found it so difficult to react to COVID-19 is that we have vigorously removed “slack” from our systems. Businesses have become disciples of the gospel of efficiency and just-in-time production, fiscally stretched governments struggle to provide even basic services, and we have pushed natural systems to their limits. Now that a crisis has arrived, we see that what was perceived as excessive slack was necessary redundancy.
More crises await, from domino effects stemming from COVID-19, to the full impact of climate change and other disruptions of the natural systems on which we rely. Some crises will inevitably arrive as “black swans,” without warning, but many others will be what Michele Wucker calls “gray rhinos”: highly probable, high-impact threats that we know about but tend to ignore.
We hope you're enjoying Project Syndicate.
To continue reading, subscribe now.
Subscribe
orRegister for FREE to access two premium articles per month.
Register
Already have an account? Log in