Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World Quotes

“You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“So, let’s be clear, as we navigate this pandemic and future crises, people need to listen to the experts. But the experts also need to listen to the people.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“IN OCTOBER 2019, just a few months before the novel coronavirus swept the world, Johns Hopkins University released its first Global Heath Security Index, a comprehensive analysis of countries that were best prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. The United States ranked first overall, and first in four of the six categories—prevention, early detection and reporting, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. That sounded right. America was, after all, the country with most of the world’s best pharmaceutical companies, research universities, laboratories, and health institutes. But by March 2020, these advantages seemed like a cruel joke, as Covid-19 tore across the United States and the federal government mounted a delayed, weak, and erratic response. By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism?”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Outbreaks are inevitable but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant,”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Historically the lesson is clear: if growing inequalities are not addressed by reforms, revolution might follow.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide, yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“(It was called the Spanish flu not because it began in Spain, but because that country, being a noncombatant in the war, did not censor news.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“months. Various studies estimate that somewhere between 70 million and 430 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty over the next few years.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Lenin is supposed to have once said,”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Fear is a great divider—and fears of disease in particular have divided the world in the past. In the nineteenth century, when the bubonic plague had long disappeared from Europe but lingered in some parts of Asia, it reinforced the divide between the industrial and nonindustrial world, between colonizers and colonized.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“The statesmen who led the Allied countries through war and depression knew better and resolved to give idealism a chance.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“The greatest moral failing of meritocracy is the belief that your success, your higher perch in society, makes you superior in any fundamental sense.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“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.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“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%.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“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.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“The highly unequal access to health care is part of a larger dynamic of a “pay-to-play” society, in which everything has become dominated by the market. Hospital executives and university presidents are seen not as societal leaders but as CEOs, and are paid to behave like them as well.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“The health-care system in the United States is a vast, complex, and expensive one, but it responds to market incentives. Facilities for testing and treatment are concentrated in wealthy areas, forcing people who live elsewhere to find their way to substandard facilities.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Good government is about limited power but clear lines of authority. It is about giving officials autonomy, discretion, and the ability to exercise their own judgment. It requires recruiting bright, devoted people who are inspired by the chance to serve their country and earn respect for doing it. This is not something that can be created overnight, but it can be done. Taiwan and South Korea were not born with good government.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Having voted in ways that ensure gridlock, Americans point to that very gridlock and despair that any good can come from Washington.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“America is, in its DNA, an anti-statist country. The Right comes at it by defunding government. The Left does it by encumbering it with so many rules and requirements that it has a similar dysfunctional effect. As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“There is pride in good government.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Between 1947 and 1989, when America was on the one hand building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world seventy-two times, by one scholar’s count, almost every time without UN approval.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“In 1953, in the midst of the Cold War and with the Korean War still ongoing, he delivered a speech proposing that all nations adopt strict limits on the numbers and nature of arms, with the disarmament process to be administered by the United Nations.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“Today’s self-professed socialists want greater government investment, new and expanded safety nets, a “Green New Deal” to address climate change, and higher taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders himself makes clear his”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“China pledged $2 billion to the global response to Covid-19 while the US moved to cut funding for the World Health Organization and withdraw from the agency altogether.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“But as Michael Sandel, a Harvard philosopher, explained in his 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, we have moved from accepting a market economy to creating a market society, one in which everything is seen through the prism of price.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“one-third of African Americans say they personally know someone who has died of Covid-19, compared to only 9% of Whites.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5%”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World