it's time to move on

Then, while the world slowly wrapped itself in a pandemic-blanked in early 2020, another article was pushed on ‘it’s time to build’. While it got a few items wrong, most notably around the rollout of vaccines which should be celebrated as a modern miracle (from creating the vaccine in early 2020 to “57% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 9.4 billion doses have been administered globally, and 40.0 million are now administered each day”. (Source: OurWorldinData - 5th January 2022). Almost 10 billion doses and the vaccine was only rolled out in early 2021! This is modern society - and economies - at their best. However, what Marc was relatively accurate on - and not just related to the USA - hits home from the very first paragraph:

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

I’ve been listening to a recent interview on the excellent Lex Friedmann podcast with Elon Musk where it is discussed that alongside the technology revolution that compliments them, the other benefit of wars is the resetting of all rules. Are we in a situation where, we’re bogged down in the rules we’ve made for the past century (or more), and need a giant reset?

Or, from the 'Technocracy in America’, do we need a new form of government. This book describes the exceptional setup in Singapore and Switzerland, where citizens are actively engaged in all policies brought through government. Perhaps we’ve dug a hole for ourselves in the modern version of politics which plays to the media….

Of course, as I allude to that the start, it’s been phenomenal for many reasons in the past two years as we’ve seen the world, for the most part, continue to move forward due to fast internet, great computing and software tools, and light-speed development of vaccines. And in the past century, Ireland can celebrate as “an unimaginable success“. But, as always, to move forward, what comes next?