Recommended Reading: I thought Fareed Zakaria was spot on in his Washington Post column about Donald Trump’s re-election strategy and the conundrum within it. This reminded me of one of the most instructive books for our time, The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton, which makes the point that strongmen inevitably burn themselves out once they are elected, because their strength is in fighting government, not being a part of it. Also from the seer of this crisis, Laurie Garrett, a damning piece about the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid emergency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”
The epidemic begins in a teeming country in Asia, but despite the efforts of the government to contain it, it soon spreads throughout the world. Some victims experience an uncontrolled immune response called a cytokine storm, causing them to drown in their own fluids. In America, schools close as citizens shelter at home. Grocery store shelves empty, and the United States is plunged into the worst depression since the 1930s.