 Welcome, I'm Will Invoden, Executive Director of the Clement Center for National Security and a professor at the LBJ School, both here at the University of Texas at Austin. On behalf of the Clement Center, the LBJ Foundation, and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, pleased to welcome you to tonight's conversation with Fareed Zakaria. Dr. Zakaria is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, a columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books. His latest book, which he'll be discussing with us tonight, is Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. I can also attest that he's one of our most trenchant observers of international politics, and his insights into the complex ferment of global affairs exert great influence on scholars and policymakers alike. This evening's conversation is moderated by LBJ Presidential Library Director Dr. Mark Lawrence. So please join me in welcoming Mark Lawrence and Fareed Zakaria. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome. It's such a pleasure to have this opportunity to talk with one of the really great and certainly very influential commentators on international affairs these days, Fareed Zakaria. Thank you so much for joining us, and particularly for this opportunity to talk about this tremendous new book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Thanks so much, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of LBJ, so I'm particularly honored. It's great to have you. Like a lot of us, I've, of course, spent much of the last 15 years just trying to keep up with the news cycle in connection with COVID, the latest on the vaccines, the latest infection rates, and so forth. What I love about your book is that it steps back from all of that day by day, almost hour by hour, all-consuming detail, and enables us to think, think big, to think about the big takeaways from the pandemic. Obviously, these implications of the pandemic are going to be with us for a very long time to come. And mostly, I think, very appropriately, you focus on the future, and that's where I want to spend the bulk of our time. But you also spend some time at the beginning of the book, sort of capturing the magnitude of the COVID pandemic by placing it in the context of the last 20 years or so. You make the case, in fact, that the pandemic is just one of three shocks, as you call them, that have hit the world in the last 20 years or so. Can you start off by talking about those three shocks and what they have in common? Absolutely. So, I mean, one way to think about this is to recognize that the world we are living in was created in 1991. I mean, that metaphorically, of course, but the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a fundamentally different international system than the one that we lived in before. It was a system in which, rather than a bipolar world divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, you had basically a single global system into which every country had decided to participate, a single global economy in which everyone was trading, buying, selling, investing, and a political system largely undergirded by American power. And in this system, what we experienced has been extraordinary growth, dynamism, extraordinary technological progress, this amazing information revolution, but also an enormous amount of volatility. I mean, if you just think about the financial crashes alone, since we've been in this system, you have the Mexican crisis, the East Asian crisis, the Russian debt default, the long-term capital implosion, the collapse of the tech market in 2000, the collapse of the housing market, often called the global financial crisis, and now the pandemic induced financial crisis. And that's all in just 30 years. So what I tried to convey was the degree to which we get jolted in this very open, fast-moving system. In 2011, of course, is the great geopolitical jolt. And interestingly, like all the other ones, it starts from something very small, 19 men with box cutters boarding commercial airplanes, which turns into a multi-trillion-dollar, multi-continent, multi-year war. The global financial crisis, which starts with these little things called credit default swaps, which nobody even had heard of, and then they essentially snowball into an industry larger than the size of the entire global economy. And then they crash and bring the whole global economy down with them. And then this pandemic, which starts as a virus in a bat in Hubei province and then has become what we now realize it is, I will say the thing about these three crises is they are all asymmetrical. They start with something small and snowball into something big. But this is the biggest. I mean, if you think about 9-11, if you were living in Japan or South Africa, it meant very little to you. It was largely a West versus Middle East conflict. But global financial crisis, if you were not part of that highly technical, collateralized, leveraged world derivatives, India, Indonesia, most of Africa, it didn't affect you that much. This crisis has affected every human being on the planet. It will be the most significant event we will go through in our lifetimes, I think. Given that we're still in the throes of the pandemic in many ways, did you have any concern as you were writing the book that not enough time had passed to really draw out the big lessons? Very much so. I mean, the way I wrote the book, it's funny that you mentioned that you feel like you sometimes get mired in the details. I wrote the book right at the start of the pandemic because I wanted to try to understand what was going on and what were the likely consequences really for myself and for my show, for the column. And as I started to think about it, I realized that there was a value in thinking this through as well as I could and sharing it with others so that we could all try to understand it better, place it in historical context, look forward into the future. So I get up about 6.30 in the morning. I wouldn't look at the newspapers. I wouldn't look at television, Twitter, nothing because I wanted to not get mired in the details. And I would think about the media, in a sense, fix my eye on the middle distance, asking myself, what is this going to look like five years from now? What are we going to be thinking when we think to look back? And I would read, I would talk to people, I would think, I would make notes. And I do that until about 11 in the morning. So every morning I would do this seven days a week. And I did it for four and a half months. And the book is the product of that. So it's very much an effort to try to imagine what the world is going to look like. And absolutely, I worried very much that I'd get it wrong. The first thing I had to get right was the science, because I wanted to be sure that within about two years, we would in fact be in a post-pandemic world. And so I had to understand whether the vaccine was likely. Remember, before this, if you had asked somebody, when will a vaccine appear on the horizon? Most people would have said 10 years. But these extraordinary advances in biotechnology, particularly the mRNA process, gave me a lot of confidence that we would have a vaccine in the advanced world within a year and a half. They actually did it in nine months. But that was the first big bet I had to make. And then many others subsequently. Has the rollout of the vaccine altered your thinking in connection with any of the big conclusions that you come to in the book? Not the vaccine, though. For the most part, the conclusions in the book have held up pretty well. I would say the one big surprise has been the degree to which, well, two things. One, there's been more variation even within groups that I thought I understood. So I thought that it would take a certain pattern in the third world, which is that it would first affect the most globalized part of the world. Then it would affect the third world. And the third world would be affected somewhat uniformly and badly, because these were densely crowded cities and places like Nigeria or Kenya or India. And the odd thing has been some of that has been true. Much of that has been true. They're very strangely some places that have not been as affected and not as badly. So right now, as you know, we're going through a big spike in India. But meanwhile, Pakistan is not particularly affected. You're seeing a spike in the Philippines, but other Southeast Asian countries are not as affected. So and not all of it is related to government policy. The big place that I would change the book, I'm not really don't think it needs changing, but I'm going to write an afterward to the preface. And the big takeaway there is I focus a lot on governments and state and state capacity and who did well and who did badly. And that's very appropriate. But it turns out you have to look beyond the state. You have to look at societies as well. So look at a country like Germany. The state did a very good job crushing the first wave, but they experienced a pretty bad second wave. Why? Turns out the Germans just got fed up of listening to the social distancing and observing it. And come October fest, they relaxed. They violated the rules. French did the same in their August French vacation. And so some of this has to do with Michelle Gelfand. The sociologist talks about loose and tight societies. Societies that are instinctively willing to follow rules and societies that are instinctively ready to defy rules. You won't be surprised to learn that the US and Israel, for example, are instinctively loose societies in which it took a lot more effort to get them to adopt social distancing rules. The West in general is loose compared to East Asia, which is tight. So that's the one layer I think I missed in the book. The government can tell you to follow these social distancing rules. Unless you're in China, there's still a lot of leeway that people have. Really fascinating. Let me take you now into some of your lessons. All of them deserve elaborate discussion. But in the interest of time, I want to take you to two or three that really jumped out at me. And one of them is closely connected to what you were just speaking about. Your lesson two, you conclude that chapter with these memorable words. What matters is not the quantity of government, but the quality. And this might be a lesson that registers, especially powerfully in the United States, of course, where lots of people have resisted health precautions as an intrusion, sort of unwarranted intrusion by governmental authority. Would you talk a little bit about what you mean by the distinction between quantity and quality of government and how this difference is pivotal to understanding the ways in which different societies have responded to COVID? I'm glad you asked about that, Mark, because I really do think it's such a central lesson for America. So when Americans think about government, first of all, when we think about government, we think about how to limit it. There's a deep anti-status tradition that comes out of the revolution, that comes out really out of the English colonists and their experience with the Tudor monarchy. So it's something deep in the DNA of the country. But when we think about it even more instinctively now in modern terms, we tend to think about the great debate of the 20th century, which was about the quantity of government. You know, if you have a big government, it means you're getting closer to socialism. If you have a small government, it means you're allowing for more freedom. And that debate dominated our lives for a long time, but it's really not the debate of the 21st century. You know, the Soviet Union is dead, communism is finished. Countries are broadly speaking some variety of capitalist countries. The real debate is about the quality of government, not how much government you have, but how well can it function? How well does it execute its tasks? So that's about, do you have a bureaucracy that is well conceived, well structured, staffed with experts, trusted by the public? And it turns out that the governments in East Asia do that very well. By the way, on very lean budgets, so Taiwan for example, which probably gets the gold star, gold medal for handling COVID, spends one third as much per capita as the United States does on healthcare. It's not about quantity, it's about quality. Germany by contrast has a big government, but also a very competent government and manages very well. And what really mattered was whether or not you were acting intelligently. So let me give you the example of Taiwan. Taiwan, as I said, probably did best right next to China, huge numbers of visitors coming back and forth from China. In a country of 22 million people, Taiwan has 10 COVID deaths. To put that in perspective, New York State has 19 million people, and we have 40,000 dead. I can't remember the number for Texas, but about the same population. And I think it's, I think I'm writing to that, it's about 20,000 dead. So you have these extraordinary diversions between Taiwan and really most of the rest of the world, why? They acted early and aggressively. Early because they recognized having had experience with SARS and MERS and H1N1 that, you know, it's important to get to these things fast because otherwise you have exponential growth. They were aggressive about it because they decided that better or on the side of too much rather than too little. And intelligent is probably the most important. So what the Taiwanese did was they said, particularly in the early stages, very small numbers of people get COVID. The most important thing is to isolate those people, but really isolate them, do contact tracing, and isolate anyone who's suspected of having COVID. So in total, they did that mandatory 14-day quarantines for 240,000 people roughly. Sounds like a large number. It's 1% of the population. So by taking 1% of the population out of circulation, they were able to achieve the result I described without a day's lockdown. Now, when I tell Americans this, they say, oh, but we could never do this because we're, you know, we're the land of the free. And I say, okay, so you're saying that you couldn't deprive 1% of the population of their freedom for 14 days, but you were willing to shut down the entire economy of the United States, put tens of millions of people out of work, force businesses to stop operating. And that's okay. That's not an infringement of people's civil liberties. So, you know, it's like, we're just doing it dumb and they're doing it smart. That's the way to think about it, rather than getting into a debate about big or small government. One of the questions you really sparked in my mind is, why has the United States fared so poorly in comparison to other countries? And I suppose there's an easy answer and a partisan answer, which is to say, well, it's the Trump administration. It was anti-science. It made bad decisions left, right and center in the early phases of the pandemic. But you seem to be suggesting that the problem runs much deeper than that. Really, there are political traditions that run through American history, even since its inception, that limit the ability of the United States to respond effectively to these societal problems. What, where would you strike the balance? And perhaps along the way, you could reflect a little bit on the specific decisions of the Trump administration. Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right that Trump, I don't want to let Trump off the hook, but it's much deeper than Trump. Trump definitely handled the pandemic badly. He denied it was happening. He wanted to sort of wish it away in some ways, very similar to what Prime Minister Modi did in India for the last few months, which is to sort of hope that it would go away resume economic activity on the theory that it's going to go away and then to be surprised when you're caught with a very big second wave. I think the best way to look at Trump's response though is to look at by compared to Biden. With the vaccine, when Biden comes into office, about 700,000 people are being vaccinated every day. Last week, we were up to 4.5 million people being vaccinated every day. And this is 50, 60 days into Biden's tenure, you started to see this massive ramp up. It's gone down a little because of the J&J pause, but I think it'll be back up. We will really basically be the first country to fully vaccinate, the first large country outside of Israel and the UAE to fully vaccinate as many people as are willing to take the vaccine, which will probably happen within I think two months. Why? Because Biden believes in government, he believes that there's a way to make it effective. He worked with government rather than against it. And he put the power of the presidency entirely on this issue. And so you had czars, you had the chief of staff, everyone's looking at this from a daily point of view. That makes a huge difference. Now, the reason I say it's not just Trump is you can't do that with everything. If the president chooses to take one thing and make it like the moon landing or the Manhattan project, which is what the Biden administration did with vaccines, you can do that. But the fundamental problem is we have an anti-status country. We have a country in which individual liberty is venerated. You have a country with massive center state local government variation. And power often residing with the local government, not with the national or even the state government. I think there's something like 9,000 different public health authorities in the United States. And I want to be clear, there are many things for which all this is very good. You know, for the flourishing of liberty and democracy and autonomy. I'm a big fan of American decentralization. You know, Brandeis called the local government the laboratories of democracy in America, all true. But it does turn out that there are some things like a public health crisis for which this is very bad. Because you need uniform standards. You cannot have a national lockdown if every state has a different policy. You cannot, you know, have national mandates on mask wearing, if half the states do it and half the states don't. Taiwan clearly benefited from the fact that they had a centralized database where they could immediately figure out whether somebody was infected, what their status was, you know, they have a universal single-payer healthcare system. So I'm not even saying that's always a great thing. I'm saying in this kind of, there are certain kinds of crises where collective action becomes very important. And American government is not structured for collective action of that kind. So I would say when you look at something like public health, my own opinion, when you look at elections and you see the crazy divergence that happens with, you know, not just among states, but within a state where some counties use paper ballots and other ones use butterfly and others use, there are those kinds of problems in America that are because of American decentralization. And the final point I'd make is all this has clearly been exacerbated by a 40-year campaign against the federal government and against government in general, the kind of Reagan-Hatchel revolution, in which you basically starved almost every government agency. You funded the military, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, but everything else was left threadbare. And, you know, it has consequences. You cannot expect even the CDC or the FDA or these places if they're funded poorly, disrespected, demeaned and overruled to be able to somehow solve a major crisis. One of your lessons brings us to the question of popular attitudes towards science and scientific expertise. And again, you have a very memorable line at the very end of that chapter. You suggest that ordinary people would certainly do well to pay more attention to scientific expertise, but also you say the experts need to listen to the people. What do you mean by that? So I was trying to figure out this phenomenon of people being so suspicious of the scientists, the doctors, the medical experts, the heads of the FDA, the CDC, and it was clearly much more widespread than any of us expected to see. And I realized that it was actually caught up in something much larger, which is perhaps one of the defining political features of America right now, which is a class warfare. You know, Michael Lin, one of the scholars at your school, talks about this very, very intelligently. What you have in America, perhaps more than anything else right now, is a bifurcation of the country into two classes, and one of which would be described roughly as a somewhat more educated, somewhat more urban class, and the other side would be a somewhat less educated, somewhat more rural class. That is the big divide electorally. If you look at voting for Biden over Trump over Biden 2020, single biggest predictor is party affiliation. So party loyalty still matters. Second strongest predictor of where you voted was whether you had some college education. If you did, you voted for Biden. If you didn't, you voted for Trump. Third strongest predictor was whether you lived in a metro area. If you lived in a metro area, you voted for Biden. If you didn't, you voted for Trump. But that doesn't even quite capture, because that's like a political demographic divide, but there is a cultural class divide. On the one hand, people who go to Starbucks and eat sushi and do yoga, and on the other side, people who live a very different kind of life, each one suspicious of the other, and perhaps most crucially, the rural folk really resenting the sense that the country is being run by these educated urban professional class. There's a wonderful book called White Working Class, which points out that working class people don't dislike rich people. Where they really dislike professionals, people with college education, postgraduate education, lawyers, doctors, consultants, people who they think for the most part do nothing, journalists, academics, consultants, but have enormous power within the system. And so the suspicion of that scientific advice was wrapped up with this reality. And I think it's on us, the people who are more educated, the people who do live in these urban areas, and who do in a sense have more standing, more power in the system, let's be honest, to understand and to try to communicate better, and to try to be more empathetic. And I think we don't do that well. I think that, I got a letter, I can't remember exactly what it was right after Trump was elected, by a guy, I think he lived in rural Mississippi, and he was telling me, just imagine what my life looks like. Every movie I see is set in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, every song comes out of there, every TV show comes out of there. It's as if we don't exist. And I think we need to recognize that more, and find a way to communicate the dignity of everybody's life, the importance of honoring every, I mean, we all talk about tolerance and celebrating diversity, but we forget that there is also that diversity, which we have to celebrate and honor, which is people who live in rural areas, who are maybe less educated, who work with their hands, not with their heads. All of it, we're all God's children in a sense, and we've lost that somehow, and until we can fix that, and I think it's going to be very hard, but until we can fix that, don't expect miraculously that because somebody with a PhD, or who works at a fancy institute with a fancy name says, you know, climate change is real, you should wear a mask, the virus spreads this way, that people will just unquestioningly listen. They won't. There's a lot of suspicion there, and we need to work to overcome it, and the way to do it is not to just say, look, I have a PhD, so listen to me. You entitle one of your chapters, one of your lessons, very bluntly, inequality is going to get worse. You do some interesting things, I think, in the book to show that globally, if not necessarily within the United States, inequality had actually been becoming somewhat less striking over recent decades, but the lesson you draw in the book is very stark. Inequality is going to get worse. What is it about the pandemic? What are the specific mechanisms that you think will drive widening inequality in the years ahead? So there are two fundamental dynamics which are making, this is probably the most troubling of the consequences of the pandemic. The first one is the rise of the digital economy, the rise of digital life, if you will, and we can all see it. Look, many of us have been able to continue to work despite the pandemic and the essential paralysis that has caused to the physical economy. Anyone who manipulates words, numbers, computer code, images, symbols, I think Robert Reich once called them symbolic analysts, all those people are doing fine. They're working online, they're generating the same amount of income roughly that they were before, but we have to realize that that's probably 30 or 40% of the country. There is another group of people, probably another 30 to 40% of the country, who work with their hands, manipulate physical objects, not symbolic objects, people who work in restaurants, hotels, theme parks, retail, cruise ships, all these people are experiencing the great depression. And now it's been cushioned by all these COVID payments, but the reality is there are no jobs there. You can see this, the Federal Reserve, after I wrote the book, the Federal Reserve put out a chart where they showed you the effect on unemployment for the top income earners and the bottom income earners for the last four recessions. Very interestingly, and I didn't realize this, in most recessions, the rich and the poor lose jobs at about the same pace. In this recession, the recession of 2020, by the end of 2020, the top 25% income earners in this country had gained jobs, not lost them. The bottom 25% had lost 30% of their jobs, which is equivalent to the Great Depression. That divergence is just so stark and it's probably an acceleration of trends that were happening anyway, which is the digital elite are doing better than the non-digital working class in this country. And so that trend has been accelerated. The second acceleration of inequality comes from the fact that there are countries around the world that will be able to issue debt, that will be able to borrow money to provide COVID relief to their citizens, the United States, European Union, Britain, Switzerland, China, Japan. But that's a small group of countries. Most countries will have to borrow at high interest rates. In a currency, they don't control the US dollar probably. And that's a very different outlook. And for the Indians of the world, the turkeys, the Brazils, I think it's going to be a much, much rougher ride. We are worried about, can we take on all this debt? But that's a kind of theoretical worry about what might happen 25 years from now. For most countries, they face a much, much more difficult scenario. And so the greatest good fortune of the last two or three decades, which as you said, been the narrowing of global inequality as people in India and China escaped from poverty. That mechanism is now in reverse. The IMF and the World Bank have already estimated that about 150 million people fell back into poverty into extreme poverty. That's under $2 a day in 2020. And my own guess is that you will have at least another 100 million people fall back into poverty in 2021. Let's talk for a minute about geopolitics, something we haven't hit on directly yet. I suppose an optimist these days might say that the pandemic is reminding us all that there are more important things than great power rivalries. We have these global problems that demand international cooperation. And yet we also see at the same time a resurgence of great power rivalries. How in your view will the pandemic play into those great power rivalries? And I think I take the lesson from your book that it's very likely to make those rivalries worse and more enduring. But I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. Well, you present the dilemma very well because in fact, the pandemic affects us or we're only going to get out of it if we can solve the problem for everyone. If most of the world gets vaccinated, large parts of it are not going to be able to produce or buy the vaccine at market prices. So the recipe is set or the stage is set for a certain amount of international cooperation, burden sharing, a recognition that we are all in this together. And I think there is some of that. There is that dynamic at work. I mean, you see it in the Biden administration's approach now to third world countries, particularly India. But there is also the reality that it is exacerbating the nationalism, the narrowness, the selfishness of countries because everyone wants to take care of their own. And you're looking around, whenever things go badly, you will look around for somebody to blame. And if it's a foreigner, so much the better. I mean, if you think about 9-11, there is a natural tendency to say those people out there that did this to us. And so the pandemic is exacerbating the rivalry between the United States and China. It's exacerbating the great power competition between these two countries. And because this is the new defining feature of the international system, the bipolar reality of these two powers, America and China, towering above all else, it's likely to make things much more tense. And you're already seeing that, I wrote the book before the Biden administration came into power, but I predicted essentially that the Biden administration on this issue would be more like the Trump administration than people imagined. And it's proved to be true because it's a structural reality. It's not about personalities. So I worry a lot that we are going to end up in a kind of competitive downward spiral where the two most powerful countries in the world are competing on everything. And there are some areas where competition is very good, economics, things like that. But imagine if we end up in an arms race, in a space race, in an artificial intelligence race, in a quantum computing race, in a cyber attack race, you end up with a less open, less dynamic, less growth oriented world in which the Chinese are carving out their supply chains and their technologies and we carve out ours. Every country is being forced to make a decision. It's back to the Cold War except for a very complicated and complicating factor, which is during the Cold War, we traded with the Soviet Union $5 billion a year. We trade with China $5 billion every day. So you're layering on this competition onto a world that is highly interdependent with these flows of goods, investments moving by the second across the world. And what will that look like and how disruptive will it be? This is one of the areas where I don't actually think we know what the future will look like. You can see, one of the things I write about in the book is people talk about the future as if it's out there and it's our job to kind of figure it out. It's not out there. It will be shaped by what we do. And nowhere is this more true than in the US, China. We could imagine a world of competition but also cooperation and a certain degree of an effort to keep a global system together. We could also imagine aspiring downwards to a new Cold War, which by the way could also turn into a not so Cold War. I mean, there are flash points where there could be military crises such as over Taiwan and neither side would want to back down. And so that could, you could go down a very dark path. You anticipated where I wanted to go with my next question. One of the things I love about your book is that each of the lesson seems to contain within it choices. The world can choose to respond to the consequences of the pandemic in this way or that way. And sometimes there are more than two choices. And you're very careful in your conclusion to say that all of these options are open. Nothing is determined. Nothing is set in stone. And you memorably tease out this theme with some of your most striking passages, I think. A question that's on my mind and also frankly came to me from a number of the members of the Friends of the LBJ Library who are invited to submit questions in advance is on the whole, what is your level of optimism that we as a national society or as a global society will choose the more constructive paths that you sketch out so nicely? Well, I'm an immigrant. So by nature, I'm optimistic. I mean, I came to this country to make a better life for myself. I think of this country as the land of the future and the land of opportunity. So I tend to be optimistic and I tend to be optimistic in general. So I guess what I'm saying is color this with a little bit of that innate optimism. But the way I think about it is this. One of the great tragedies of the pandemic is that it has caused huge disruption. But one of the great benefits of the pandemic is that it has caused huge disruption. It is very hard to change except when your back is against the wall, except when things are already in disarray. There's very good studies of countries that have to go through serious economic reform, so-called structural economic reform. And they all conclude that countries only do that when they're in a crisis, when things have gotten really bad, when their backs are against the wall. I mean, that's why we have the phrase, nobody fixes the roof when the sun is shining, right? There is something there that it's easy to continue business as usual, to be a little complacent if you're not facing a crisis. So the great virtue of this pandemic is it has created this enormous disruption. It has created an enormous, and it's not just the disruption, but it's also given us in a weird way time to reflect on society, time to reflect on our own lives, I think. I think it's not an accident that the Black Lives Matter stuff boiled over during this pandemic. It has allowed societies to think about how are we organized? How should we be organized? If you're shutting down the whole economy anyway, if you're providing relief anyway, what are we trying to make happen? How do we build back better, right? So I think that provides within a seed of a real opportunity. And I think to give the Biden administration credit, you're seeing that, right? We are making more ambitious efforts than we've ever made. I mean, look, these two bills that Biden has put forward. In my time in the United States, I came here in 1982, every major fiscal effort of the United States government since my time in America, 37, 38 years, has been either tax cuts for the rich or a war. This is the first time you have major fiscal efforts, really since the Johnson administration, that are largely directed towards the poor or the lower middle class. The COVID relief bill contains within it a child credit proposal that most experts believe will cut childhood poverty in the United States by half in one year. So think about that and think about what it means. It means we always had the capacity to cut childhood poverty in half in the United States. We never used it. We're a rich country that acts poor. And so you could imagine many such changes, not all of which are that expensive. If we could imagine investing in the future, whether it's green technology, we could imagine investing in cities and finding ways to allow people who are at the very bottom of the scale to move up. This is the greatest tragedy in America right now, which is that social mobility, economic mobility, is stronger in Northern Europe than it is in the United States. It's stronger in Canada than it is in the United States. And this is the greatest tragedy because after all, what is the American dream? The American dream is that you can do better than your parents, that there is this escalator or this ladder of opportunity, and that has stopped functioning in the United States. So if we have to spend a couple trillion dollars to get that restarted, to rebuild that ladder of opportunity, I think it would make a huge difference because this is an incredibly productive society, incredibly dynamic. We still dominate the world economically. All the technologies of the future, America is a cutting-air draw. Geopolitically, yes, China is a new competitor, but look, put it in perspective. We have 59 3D allies in the world. China has two, sorry, one. China has one North Korea. We have 800 bases in the world. China has three. We have 11 aircraft carriers. China has one and a half. We're doing fine. What we need to do is to invest in the future to ensure that the next generation of Americans have the same opportunities, have the same abilities as possible. And it's particularly true for minority, particularly Black Americans. I mean, President Johnson has that wonderful memorable line where he says, you can't suddenly take the chains off people and say to them, you're at the starting line. Now just run like everybody else. You've got to help them, equip them so that they can run that race. I think that's what we've gotten very bad at. We haven't been able to help people run this race in the meritocracy that we've created. And I support the meritocracy, but I think we need to understand that it isn't functioning and the way for it to function is for us to really equalize opportunity. If we could do that, I think we'll be able to do a lot. And if we can do that and America is confident, we'll lead the world and we'll set an agenda for the world as we have for the last 75 years. We have an enlightened self-interest where we do things that are good for us, but they're also good for others in the world. We never had that much coercive power. What we had was the power of ideas. We could come up with an idea that worked for us, but also helped others out. People looked at it and said, yeah, that's a good idea. And we've got to be the organizer in chief, the agenda setter in chief. And that's how we've built this open international system. Not through brute force, but through the power of ideas, the power of example. So I still am very hopeful. And I think that the key to it is we've got to be confident. We need to run fast, but we don't need to run scared. Another question that came from our audience, and I think perhaps a fitting place to end, as much as I'd love to keep talking with you all day, is what can ordinary people do? You write so eloquently about governments and broad trends, but some of our listeners, I think, would love to know what they can do in their day-to-day lives that could point in at least small ways toward these happier outcomes that you sketch. Probably the first is take democracy seriously. I think that we don't do that as citizens. Get involved, vote, but not just at the national level. American government happens at the local level, and you have to take it seriously at the local level. And you have to figure out whether you have good people who are in charge representing you. If not, you've got to find good people. There is a more active aspect that everyone needs to take than happens right now, because when you don't do that, what happens is the most fanatical minorities dominate. That's what's really happened to America politically in the last 30 or 40 years, is you have the primary electorate, and it's not even just the primary electorate, now it's a sliver of the primary electorate. If you will, the active users of Twitter are dominating and defining American politics. And just so people understand, what we're talking about is probably 5% of the electorate, dominating and defining and shaping American politics. That is, and that 5% is the most extreme, the most confrontational, the people who really want to burn the other house down. That's a terrible place for it to be, and it's happening largely because the vast majority of us are too silent, too passive, and don't get involved, and we have to. The second I would say is, use the pandemic as a way to think about yourself as well. In the book, I talk a lot about the external supports and external changes that need to happen, to build resilience into the system, to create better structures of society. Maybe that's in the great Western tradition of political commentary, which is, how can we dominate our external surroundings and shape them to make us happy? Maybe because I grew up in India, there is also another equally important task, which is, what are the internal supports that we need to make ourselves internally more resilient, more mindful, more happy? What is this pandemic taught each of us about who we really are, what we really need? For me, certainly, it's made me much more profoundly aware of how important family and close friends were to me. How many of the things that I did day to day were just not that important, and I invested too much of my time and energy and ego in a business meeting here, a lunch meeting there, dinner meeting there, that the things that gave me real joy were deepening the connections with the people closest to me, recognizing, finding ways to be more at peace with myself, not by constantly doing, but by being and reflecting. And for each person, it's going to be different. For some people, it's family. For other people, it's going to be meditation. For others, it will be running for 10 miles a day. Whatever it is, I think it's an opportunity to, it really is a blessing that allows us to say, what makes me happy? What makes me fulfilled? And to take the rest of your life and to use those insights to create a more happy, more fulfilled life for the however much longer we have, because it's very rare for something like this to happen where you have literally a kind of pause where you can sit back and say, all right, let me really try to figure this out. And I think a lot of people are doing that. Fareed Zakaria, thank you so much for those eloquent words and for the time you've taken out of your busy schedule for this wonderful conversation. And thank you most of all for this fabulous book, 10 lessons for a post-pandemic world. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. It's an honor. I'm Mark Uptigrove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, and I want to thank you for joining us. And thanks to our sponsors, the Moody Foundation and St. David's Healthcare. Copies of Fareed Zakaria's book, 10 lessons for a post-pandemic world, are available at lbjstore.com. We depend on your membership support to produce our programming. If you aren't currently a friends of the LBJ Library member or simply haven't renewed your membership, please do so at lbjfriends.org. You'll be doing so at a great time. On May 22, the LBJ Library will celebrate its 50th anniversary. On May 20, we'll feature a program on the library's Archival Crown Jewels, the LBJ telephone tapes featuring presidential historian Michael Beschloss and others. Then on May 22, we'll offer a video on the library's 10 most memorable moments of the past half century from LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence. In June, you'll be able to enjoy programs with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed and former U.S. Senator and Virginia Governor Chuck Roth. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again soon.