Home > Work > Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
101 " Cities are an ideal way to organize human beings for modern life—allowing them to mingle, work, and play, all in the same place. "
― Fareed Zakaria , Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
102 " Only 13% of people in households making over $100,000 were laid off or furloughed, compared with 39% in households making less than $40,000. "
103 " Olmsted, captured the prevailing wisdom, writing in 1870 that “air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage, "
104 " King Lear, having been in power for decades, can no longer hear anything but flattery, banishing the one person—his own daughter Cordelia—who dares to speak to him truthfully. "
105 " There is a larger critique of markets, though, that goes beyond economics. Market-centric thinking has invaded every area of human life, leaving little space for other values like fairness, equality, or intrinsic value. "
106 " In the 1970s, as inflation took off and growth slowed, Western societies seemed to have fallen victim to excessive state intervention in the economy, embracing wage and price controls and other supposed remedies that only made things worse. "
107 " Denmark’s taxes add up to 45% of its GDP, whereas in the United States the figure is 24%. And Denmark doesn’t just tax the rich. Like other European countries, Denmark collects a large part of its revenues from a national sales tax. Its sales tax rate is 25%, in line with the European Union’s overall average of 20%. "
108 " Worldwide, the total number of people who live in extreme poverty dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 650 million in 2018. On one crucial metric, the progress has been immense: the mortality rate for young children dropped 59% over the same period. "
109 " The health-care system in the United States is a vast, complex, and expensive one, but it responds to market incentives. "
110 " At the end of April 2020, low-income and middle-income countries, which have 84% of the world’s population, were home to just 14% of the world’s known deaths from Covid-19. "
111 " Doctors must spend large amounts of time making the business end of their practice work, giving priority to the procedures that generate the most revenue. Hospitals are run like hotels, aiming to fill their beds and leave little spare capacity. "
112 " Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” in the first episode of The Colbert Report. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” his character asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart . . . Face it, folks, we are a divided nation . . . divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart . . . Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut. "
113 " Yet bringing on new coworkers, and establishing trust and teamwork with them, is extremely hard to achieve on video. "
114 " When you teleconference, you are spending social capital rather than building it. "
115 " E. M. Forster’s science fiction story “The Machine Stops.” Written in 1909, it feels eerily prescient in 2020. "