WORLD'S TANGLED MESS---- A FIX!

THE WORLD IS IN A NEW CHAPTER OF ITS LIFE; WHAT WE DO FROM HERE ON WILL DECIDE HOW THE FUTURE WILL GO, AS IT FIGHTS THIS NEW COVID-19 VIRUS - Keith Hunt

From The Economist - May 23 - 2020

Seize the moment

The Covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change—and creates a unique chance to do so

Following the pandemic is like watching the climate crisis with your finger jammed on the fast-forward button. Neither the virus nor greenhouse gases care much for borders, making both scourges global. Both put the poor and vulnerable at greater risk than wealthy elites and demand government action on a scale hardly ever seen in peacetime. And with China's leadership focused only on its own advantage and America's as scornful of the World Health Organisation as it is of the Paris climate agreement, neither calamity is getting the co-ordinated international response it deserves.

The two crises do not just resemble each other. They interact. Shutting down swathes of the economy has led to huge cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. In the first week of April, daily emissions worldwide were 17% below what they were last year. The International Energy Agency expects global industrial greenhouse-gas emissions to be about 8% lower in 2020 than they were in 2019, the largest annual drop since the second world war.

That drop reveals a crucial truth about the climate crisis. It is much too large to be solved by the abandonment of planes, trains and automobiles. Even if people endure huge changes in how they lead their lives, this sad experiment has shown, the world would still have more than 90% of the necessary decarbonisation left to do to get on track for the Paris agreement's most ambitious goal, of a climate only 1.5°C warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

But as we explain this week (see Briefing) the pandemic both reveals the size of the challenge ahead and also creates a unique chance to enact government policies that steer the economy away from carbon at a lower financial, social and political cost than might otherwise have been the case. Rock-bottom energy prices make it easier to cut subsidies for fossil fuels and to introduce a tax on carbon. The revenues from that tax over the next decade can help repair battered government finances. The businesses at the heart of the fossil-fuel economy—oil and gas firms, steel producers, carmakers—are already going through the agony of shrinking their long-term capacity and employment. Getting economies in medically induced comas back on their feet is a circumstance tailor-made for investment in climate-friendly infrastructure that boosts growth and creates new jobs. Low interest rates make the bill smaller than ever.

Take carbon-pricing first. Long cherished by economists (and The Economist), such schemes use the power of the market to in-centivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible. The timing is particularly propitious because such prices have the most immediate effects when they tip the balance between two already available technologies. In the past it was possible to argue that, although prices might entrench an advantage for cleaner gas over dirtier coal, renewable technologies were too immature to benefit. But over the past decade the costs of wind and solar power have tumbled. A relatively small push from a carbon price could give renewables a decisive advantage—one which would become permanent as wider deployment made them cheaper still. There may never have been a time when carbon prices could achieve so much so quickly.

Carbon prices are not as popular with politicians as they are with economists, which is why too few of them exist. But even before Covid-19 there were hints their time was coming. Europe is planning an expansion of its carbon-pricing scheme, the largest in the world; China is instituting a brand new one. Joe Biden, who backed carbon prices when he was vice-president, will do so again in the coming election campaign—and at least some on the right will agree with that. The proceeds from a carbon tax could raise over 1% of GDP early on and would then taper away over several decades. This money could either be paid as a dividend to the public or, as is more likely now, help lower government debts, which are already forecast to reach an average of 122% of GDP in the rich world this year, and will rise further if green investments are debt-financed.

Carbon pricing is only part of the big-bang response now possible. By itself, it is unlikely to create a network of electric-vehicle charging-points, more nuclear power plants to underpin the cheap but intermittent electricity supplied by renewables, programmes to retrofit inefficient buildings and to develop technologies aimed at reducing emissions that cannot simply be electrified away, such as those from large aircraft and some farms. In these areas subsidies and direct government investment are needed to ensure that tomorrow's consumers and firms have the technologies which carbon prices will encourage.

Some governments have put their efforts into greening their covid-19 bail-outs. Air France has been told either to scrap domestic routes that compete with high-speed trains, powered by nuclear electricity, or to forfeit taxpayer assistance. But dirigisme disguised as a helping hand could have dangerous consequences: better to focus on insisting that governments must not skew their bail-outs towards fossil fuels. 

In other countries the risk is of climate-damaging policies. America has been relaxing its environmental rules further during the pandemic. China—whose stimulus for heavy industry sent global emissions soaring after the global financial crisis—continues to build new coal plants (see China section).

Carpe covid

The Covid-19 pause is not inherently climate-friendly. Countries must make it so. Their aim should be to show by 2021, when they gather to take stock of progress made since the Paris agreement and commit themselves to raising their game, that the pandemic has been a catalyst for a breakthrough on the environment.

Covid-19 has demonstrated that the foundations of prosperity are precarious. Disasters long talked about, and long ignored, can come upon you with no warning, turning life inside out and shaking all that seemed stable. The harm from climate change will be slower than the pandemic but more massive and longer-lasting. If there is a moment for leaders to show bravery in heading off that disaster, this is it. They will never have a more attentive audience. ■

After lockdowns

The cure and the disease

Lockdowns are blunt instruments that can cause immense harm. It is time to be more discriminating

Since China locked down the city of Wuhan on January 23rd, over a third of the world's population has at one time, or another been shut away at home. It is hard to think of any policy ever having been imposed so widely with such little preparation or debate. But then closing down society was not a thought-out response, so much as a desperate measure for a desperate time. It has slowed the pandemic, but at a terrible price. As they seek to put lockdowns behind them, governments are not thinking hard enough about the costs and benefits of what comes next.

Although social distancing may have to be sustained for months or years, lockdowns can only ever be temporary. That is because it is becoming clear how costly they are, especially in poor countries. Part of the price is economic. Goldman Sachs this week predicted that India's GDP would fall in the second quarter at an annualized quarterly rate of 45%, and would rebound by 20% in the third quarter if lockdowns were lifted. Absa, a bank, reckons South Africa's economy could shrink at an annualized rate of 23.5% in the second quarter.

The poorest are hit very hard, because they have nothing to fall back on. In sub-Saharan Africa an individual in the lowest income quintile has only a 4% chance of receiving social assistance from the government in normal times. The combination of Covid-19 and lockdowns could drive up to 420m people into absolute poverty—defined as having to live on less than $1.90 a day. That would increase the total by two-thirds and set back progress against penury by a decade.

The consequences will be far-reaching. Hunger permanently stunts children. Lockdowns that block normal services cost lives. The World Health Organisation has warned that Covid-19 threatens vaccination programmes. If they stop in Africa, 140 children could die for each Covid death averted. A three-month lockdown, followed by a ten-month interruption of tuberculosis treatment, could cause 1.4m deaths in 2020-25. It is the same for malaria and aids. The longer lockdowns continue, the likelier it is that they will cost more lives than they save.

The picture in rich countries is less dramatic, but still worrying. America's unemployment rate increased from 3.5% in February to 14.7% in April. In Britain a third of new graduates had a job offer withdrawn or delayed. Bond markets in America are signalling a wave of defaults, especially in hospitality, raw materials, carmaking and utilities. The scarring in the labour market could last for years. Rich-world services are vulnerable, too. One study concluded that delaying cancer consultations in England by six months would offset 40% of the life-years gained from treating an equivalent number of Covid-19 patients. Vaccination rates have fallen, risking outbreaks of diseases like measles.

Lifting lockdowns risks a second wave. Iran reopened in April to save the economy, but last week designated the capital, Tehran, and eight provinces as "red zones", because the virus is spreading there again. Some American states, such as Georgia, that never suppressed the initial outbreak will soon find whether they lifted lockdowns too hastily. Some African countries are going ahead even though their case loads are rising.

To limit the risk requires an epidemiological approach that focuses on the places and people most likely to spread the disease. An example is care homes, which in Canada have seen 80% of all the country's deaths even though they house only 1% of the population. In Sweden refugees turn out to be high-risk, perhaps because several generations maybe packed into a household. So are security guards, who are often elderly and are exposed to many people in their work.

For this approach to succeed at scale, you need data from tests to provide a fine-grained picture of how the disease spreads. Testing let Germany rapidly spot that it had a problem in its slaughterhouses, where the virus persists longer than expected on cold surfaces. Likewise, South Korea identified a super-spreader in Seoul's gay bars. 

Without testing, a country is blind. Armed with data, governments can continuously refine their policies. Some are universal. Masks were once thought ineffective, but in fact help stop the spread of the disease. Like handwashing, they are cheap and do not impose hidden costs. However, closing schools harms children and stops parents from working. In contrast with flu, it turns out, the benefits to health are not especially great. Schools should reopen, under conditions that lower the risk to teachers and vulnerable pupils. As a rule, the balance of costs and benefits favours narrow local policies over blanket national ones. In Britain agency workers carry the virus between care homes: they should work at only one. Gibraltar has a Golden Hour, when open spaces are set aside for the over-70s to exercise while everyone else stays at home. Stockholm is moving vulnerable people into their own flats. Liberty University, run by Jerry Falwell, a supporter of President Donald Trump, was condemned for keeping its campus open. But thanks to social distancing, it has logged no cases of Covid-19.

Poor countries will not be able to afford all these approaches. However, Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala have shown that good primary-health systems can devise and disseminate sensible adaptations. Poor countries have more experience of infectious diseases than rich ones. Epidemiologists talk of "smart containment" that all can practise. Rwanda has put foot-operated handwashing stations in busy places such as bus depots. Slums need clean water for handwashing and to cut queues. Local leaders can spread health messages and designate areas where suspected cases can be isolated. Markets must remain open, but limit social contact. If people can earn some money, millions who would otherwise go hungry could feed themselves. 

The emergency phase of the pandemic is drawing to a close. Too many governments failed to spot what was coming, but then did what they could. In the much longer second phase they will have no such excuse. They must identify groups at risk; devise and enact policies for them; explain these so that vulnerable people change their behaviour without becoming scapegoats; provide vital infrastructure; and be ready to adapt as new data come in. This will sort countries where the government works from those where it does not. The stakes could not be higher. ■

Big pharma

Back in from the cold

An unpopular business has a shot at redemption

For much of the past two decades big pharma has been a lost cause. Despised by the public, it became notorious for price-gouging, secretiveness and its neglect of global health problems. Big pharma also lost its lustre with investors, despite its bumper profits. They worried that a business model that relied too much on rent-seeking and too little on innovation was unsustainable, and that citizens would eventually revolt and demand more regulation—or even rip up the patent system that gives drugs firms a temporary monopoly over new medicines. As a result, in the five years before the Covid crisis the pharmaceutical sector lagged behind America's s&p 500 index.

The pandemic has reminded the world of the industry's strengths—its capacity to innovate and provide drugs on a vast scale. Many of the big firms, such as Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi, are working on Covid-19 vaccines and therapies. Scores of smaller companies are at work, too. On May 18th Moderna, an American biotech firm, said that its much-anticipated vaccine has shown positive early results (although some analysts questioned the validity of its tests). AstraZeneca, a big British firm that invests heavily in research and development (r&d), is working on a vaccine with scientists at Oxford University, helped by $1bn of new funding from America's government. Even before the virus, the industry had started to invest more heavily. In the most recent quarter America's 30 biggest firms boosted their r&d by a median of 6% year on year. Now medical innovation is back in fashion.

It looks like big pharma's moment to shine. However, the pandemic has also created new ethical and political dilemmas. Vaccine nationalism is spreading as governments panic that others may get their hands on crucial drugs first. France's Sanofi has found itself embroiled in a transatlantic row over who will be first to get any Covid-19 vaccine it develops. Paul Hudson, the firm's boss, stated last week that because the American government invested in his firm's risky scientific efforts, the United States would have early access. This led to a political explosion in France and a dressing-down from Emmanuel Macron, France's president. 

And there is mounting pressure to suspend elements of the patent system. A gathering of the World Health Organisation this week passed a resolution urging drugs firms to pool patent rights. Several dozen current and former world leaders released an open letter demanding that any successful Covid-19 vaccine should be made available patent-free.

There is an alternative to beggar-thy-neighbour nationalism and taking a sledgehammer to the intellectual-property regime. First, a global agreement is needed to govern the manufacture and distribution of a potential vaccine. It could take several years to vaccinate the world's population; global co-operation will mean that the vaccine is deployed first where it brings most benefit.

Second, the patent system should be preserved because, correctly designed, it incentivises investment in new treatments. The big drugs firms have already said they will make any vaccine available at cost-plus prices. Arrangements exist for tiered pricing of medicines and free vaccinations for diseases afflicting the world's poor that should be extended to Covid-19 treatments. If a smaller drugs firm tried to price-gouge, governments in the West and elsewhere have the powers to pass compulsory licensing orders in an emergency. 

When the pandemic passes, there must be no going back to the bad old days. Governments should seek to authorize new drug patents faster, as the best way to balance innovation and lower prices. And big pharma needs to keep investing. That will help shareholders and global public health, too. ■

THE  WORLD  HAS  AN  OPENING  TO  DO  SOME  DRASTIC  CHANGES,  NEEDED  TO  AVOID  EVEN  GREATER  CALAMITY;  WILL  THE  NATIONS  RISE  TO  THE  TASKE—— ONLY  TIME  WILL  TELL!

WORLD AFTER Covid-19 ?

The world after Covid-19 — Margaret MacMillan

The Economist May 9th - 2020 

By invitation

The pandemic is a turning point in history

The crisis exposes our weaknesses, will our leaders choose reform or calamity?

In the winter of 1788-89, the desperate government of Louis XVI asked the French people to send in lists of their grievances. It was a fatal mistake. The cahiers de doleances served to articulate the public's unspoken discontent and, equally important, its hopes for a better world. A crucial psychological barrier had fallen: it became possible to imagine a very different France. And the times— the moral and actual bankruptcy of the Ancien Regime, widespread crop failures and hopeless leadership—gave shape to the public's aspirations. The fuse was lit for revolution.

France in 1789. Russia in 1917. The Europe of the 1930s. The pandemic of 2020. They are all junctures where the river of history changes direction. The covid-19 crisis may be a pivotal rather than a revolutionary moment but it, too, is challenging the old order. Like France's cahiers, the coronavirus forces questions about what sort of future we want, what the proper role of government is and what makes a healthy society. We face a choice: to build better ways of dealing domestically and internationally with this challenge (and prepare for inevitable future ones) or let our world become meaner and more selfish, divided and suspicious.

Long before covid-19, popular thinkers like Thomas Piketty, the late Tony Judt and Paul Krugman were warning about deep social inequalities and the shortcomings of globalization. There were sporadic protests like Occupy Wall Street or France's gilets jaunes. Most of us (such is human nature) carried on living. We worried from time to time about climate change, that our children couldn't afford houses and that there seemed to be more obscenely rich people along with more homeless ones. 

Covid-19 has turned a spotlight on the dark sides of our world. We have become aware of the fragility of international supply lines, the disadvantages of off-stare sources for critical goods and the limits of international bodies. The chaotic responses and blame games of certain governments have exacerbated divisions in and among societies, perhaps permanently. 

America has withdrawn from moral and material leadership of the world. It and China have grown more hostile to one another, not less. Rogue states such as Russia gleefully make more trouble and the UN is increasingly marginalized.

When you name things—grievances, say, as the French did— you give them form and make it harder to ignore them. We are doing that now with the flaws in our world and spelling out our hopes for something better. As the French looked at Britain and America as models, we can see that South Korea, Denmark and New Zealand have controlled the pandemic more effectively than other countries, in part because their peoples have faith in the authorities and each other. Without trust—that the water is clean, medicines are safe, or thugs won't get away with it—societies are vulnerable. 

Covid-19 has caused fewer deaths proportionately in Germany than elsewhere because of the country's well-funded health system and its competent state and federal governments. As history shows, those societies that survive and adapt best to catastrophes are already strong. Britain rose to the challenge of the Nazis because it was united; France was not and did not.

Much also depended then, and depends now, on leaders. As weaknesses are exposed, do leaders fix or exploit them? While Franklin Roosevelt was promising Americans a better tomorrow in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was destroying the Weimar Republic and intoxicating Germans with promises of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. As we know, that ended in a world war.

For every Jacinda Ardern or Angela Merkel, the leaders of New Zealand and Germany who are talking to their citizens about the difficult road ahead, there is an illiberal, populist demagogue playing to baser fears and fantasies. In Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro dismisses covid-19 as "the sniffles"; in India the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party blames it on the Muslims. President Donald Trump claimed he had "total" authority, demonstrating something about his instincts if not his knowledge of the American constitution.

Wise leaders in the past have been able to steer away from danger. In 1830 Britain was coping with unrest in Ireland, violent strikes at home and demands for more power from the growing commercial and industrial middle classes. The enlightened aristocrats of the new Whig government believed that they had a choice between revolution and reform, even if the latter was at the expense of their own power and privilege. In 1832 their Great Reform Act widened the franchise for Parliament. The Whigs did not remove all grievances, but they muted them. A century later another child of privilege, Roosevelt, brought in the New Deal which helped to save American society and capitalism.

The present crisis could be the opportunity for strategies to produce essential public goods and ensure that citizens have safe, decent and fulfilled lives. People coming out of a calamity are open to sweeping changes. Governments will find it hard to resist demands for improved social programmes now that they are spending as though John Maynard Keynes were in the room. Will the British again accept an underfunded National Health Service? And countries could invest in key organizations like the World Health Organisation and give it greater power to protect the world from disease. Perhaps, just perhaps, bodies such as the G7 and G20 could become forums for unity and not dissent.

Future historians, if there are any who can still research and speak freely, will analyze the choices that individual countries and the world made. Let us hope the story shows the better angels of our nature, in Abraham Lincoln's words: enlightened leaders and publics creating together sane and inclusive policies, and strengthening our vital institutions at home and abroad. The alternative story will not have a happy ending. ■

Margaret MacMillan is a historian at the University of Toronto. This article is part of a series on the world after covid-19. For more coverage of the pandemic visit Economist.com/coronavirus

COVID VIRUS----CLEVER BODY INVADER!!!

From The Economist - May 9th - 2020

Covid-19's many faces 

The body snatcher

Why does Covid-19 have such varied manifestations?

According to England's National Health Service the signs that someone has contracted the novel coronavirus sars-cov-2 are a high temperature or a new, continuous cough. 

This is certainly true for a majority of patients, but it is not so for a sizeable minority. Papers published in recent weeks present the new virus as having many faces. This is in stark contrast to the way in which influenza, another primarily respiratory disease, behaves—and it makes sars-cov-2 all the more dangerous. It also raises the question of why this virus's symptoms are so protean.

For decades, influenza has been referred to as "an unvarying disease caused by a varying virus" because of its tendency to mutate every year and yet still cause the same symptoms of rapid-onset fever, malaise, headaches and coughing. Indeed, a review of influenza papers published in 2018 by John Paget of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, showed that even when all of the different influenza types (a or b) and subtypes (htni, H3N2, etc) were analysed, there were few differences in the ways they presented clinically. Literature on sars-cov-2 suggests, by contrast, that this virus is a master of disguise.

For example, Anthony DeBenedet, a doctor at St Joseph Mercy Health System in Michigan, reports in the American Journal of Gastroenterology that in early March, following a trip down the Nile, a 71-year-old woman arrived at his emergency department with bloody diarrhoea. She suffered with this condition for five days, while also experiencing abdominal pains and nausea. But her temperature was normal and her breathing good, so Covid-19 was not suspected. Yet when he and his colleagues examined samples of her stools for signs of the sorts of bacterial infections that are likely to be picked up in Egypt, they found none. They also saw no beneficial effects from the antibiotics they were administering. They therefore started to wonder whether something else might be going on. It was only on the fourth day of the woman's stay at the hospital, her ninth day of illness, when she developed a cough, that they tested her for sars-cov-2 and confirmed the virus's presence in both her nasal tissues and her stools.

Dr DeBenedet's findings are far from unique. Patients brought into hospital with all the symptoms of a heart attack have later been found to be suffering from cardiac inflammation caused by the virus. It has also demonstrated that it can begin as a kidney infection, or even as meningitis, before sometimes going on to cause its characteristic respiratory problems.

Variations on a theme

Precisely why sars-cov-2 manifests itself in so many ways while all of the various strands of influenza present the same symptoms is not clear. But there are several theories. One proposed by Stanley Perlman, an immunologist at the University of Iowa, is that in actual fact, nothing odd is really going on. The novel virus's many faces are being noticed merely because it is a new disease and dangerous, and so is being studied intensely. He postulates that if influenza were looked at with equal intensity, it might also be shown to manifest in other ways—as a mild winter stomach infection, for example.

An idea suggested by William James, a virologist at the University of Oxford, is that the two-phase activity of sars-cov-2, whereby it starts in the upper respiratory tract and then migrates deep into the lungs, is the critical factor that allows it to travel around the body. "Influenza rarely gets deep into the lungs," he says. "This new virus gets down there all the time." Since the lungs are designed to move gases in and out of the bloodstream (their highly vascularised airs sacs have a collective surface area of about 50 square metres), viruses find it easy to make a similar journey.

Dr Perlman agrees that this notion may be correct, but points out that the only way to be sure is to take samples from places other than the respiratory tract, in people suffering from early stages of the infection, to see if virus migration depends on getting to the lungs first. As for why the disease sometimes makes its initial appearance in the digestive system, as it did in Dr DeBenedet's patient, this is probably because ace2, the cell-surface protein that sars-cov-2 binds to, is abundant in the gut as well as the lungs. How the virus gets through the highly acidic stomach unharmed is unknown. But clearly it can, and does.

ACE2 is also found in the kidneys and the heart, which may help explain why symptoms manifest there, as well. By contrast, the entry molecules preferred by influenza viruses are almost exclusive to the upper respiratory tract. Knowing all this may make identification of the early stages of Covid-19 easier, and thus help to ease the plight of future cases like that of Dr DeBenedet's patient. ■

The OFFICE may NEVER BE THE SAME

CHANGES FROM THE COVID PANDEMIC

From The Economist - May 9 - 2020 

Offices

The shape of things to come

Millions of workers are toiling at home because of the pandemic. Many of them may never go back into the office

On May 10th Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is expected to outline the beginning of the end of lockdown. Non-essential shops will start to reopen and factories will gradually get back to work, while maintaining sensible distancing.

For the deskbound, not much will change. Unlike pubs, restaurants and nonessential retailers, offices were not closed by government decree. Instead, since late March, the government has been encouraging those who can work from home to do so. As The Economist went to press, it was due to issue guidance on how to work safely in offices. The main thrust is expected to be, for now, not to.

A few will start to return. Those who need better IT support and faster broadband than they have at home will be back sooner. Banks expect traders to work from either their normal offices or from disaster-recovery sites. Charlie Rudd, chief executive of Leo Burnett, an advertising firm, reckons design and production staff will be among the first back: "when you're dealing with big files of high-quality material domestic Wi-Fi is not great". But for now, the numbers are likely to be small. Nicolas Aubert, head of British operations at WillisTowersWatson, an advisory firm, says that "it's going to be a very small percentage of our population, we believe that is going to be roughly 25% for six to nine months". And many bosses predict that the pandemic will lead to a step-change in home-working and the demand for office space.

According to the Office for National Statistics around one in 20 workers did their jobs mainly from home in December 2019. Thanks to faster internet connections, the number is edging up. Chris Grigg, the chief executive of British Land, a property company, notes that the car parks near rail stations in commuter towns are already emptier on a typical Friday than in the rest of the week. Will Gosling from Deloitte, a professional-services company, believes the pandemic has brought about a "five-year acceleration" of a trend that was already under way: it has shown that working from home is feasible and has made it more acceptable. The old view that "you've got an easy day" if you work from home has become much less common, he says.

Attitudes have shifted rapidly. A business-continuity planner at a financial-services firm says that before the lockdown, when the company initially pondered moving to split working to enforce more distancing in their offices, "no one wanted to be on the working from home side. But a few weeks later, as we started planning how to get back to the office, everyone wanted to stay at home." More than half of Britons would like to work from home more often after the crisis and around a third say the ability to work at home will be a factor when they next seek a new job.

Nobody is yet committing to flogging their own headquarters and, in the short term, the need for social distancing within offices may prop up demand. But some bosses are predicting radical changes that will delight chief financial officers eyeing potential savings from dumping expensive city-centre locations. Jes Staley, chief executive of Barclays, has said that large headquarters buildings may become a "thing of the past". Mr Aubert "would be very surprised if corporations in professional services kept more than 50% of their real estate, and it, might be significantly less". Even a commercial-property manager admits that "there is a serious risk that what was once a prime real-estate asset is now an overpriced half-empty building."

The pandemic has prompted firms to think hard about what offices are for, and many are concluding that a lot of tasks are better done from home. Lee Elliott of Knight Frank, an estate agent, reckons that "the days of people taking a 74-minute average commute into town to process email, and then 74 minutes back out—they're gone." Mr Gosling believes that "the focus of the workplace will be much more around collaboration, much more around the things you can only get the most value from by being together."

That will be more important to some sectors than others. Mr Rudd of Leo Burnett reckons that "in the advertising world many people thrive off that collaboration and being together, and so they will still need offices where they can do that." But if social distancing limits the number of people who can work physically together, it will undermine the office's collaborative function; "I'd happily go back if everyone was going back," says an executive at a technology firm, "but it makes no sense if only one in four people are there. I might as well be at home."

More home working will mean new challenges for managers. Home workers are harder to monitor and so trust becomes more important. It will be harder for junior employees than senior ones. Junior employees need mentoring, want to socialize and have worse living conditions. But the decisions on the future of offices will be shared by those for whom the alternative is more likely to be a nice house than a bedsit.

Some even predict the decline of office politics. "Normally in the office power structure, there's always one who's chatting up the powers that be, being just perched outside the office door when they're going for lunch or for coffee," according to Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute. When people work at home, "that kind of political operator is rendered useless."

If companies shrink their office space, the impact could be felt well beyond the firms themselves. "Getting rid of those physical barriers between cities will actually make us much more diverse," says Tanuj Kapilashrami, head of human resources at Standard Chartered, who predicts that the firm will recruit from a wider pool. "I think there will be a significant movement of people out of London," says Mr Gosling. "If I was in Boris's shoes, the opportunity for the so-called Tevel-up' is unbelievable," says Mr Aubert, referring to the prime minister's plan to raise incomes outside London and the south-east. There could be consequences for infrastructure, social geography and the subject closest to the British heart—house prices.

The need for workers to cluster together in offices has shaped every aspect of modern life. If the pandemic has weakened the office's hold on society, the implications will be profound. ■

THE POWER OF THE SUN----some nations getting it

From The Economist - May 9th - 2020

Solar power—

Rays of hope

The future is bright

BENBAN

The Arab world is increasingly looking to the sun for energy

Two millennia after the ancient Egyptians dropped their solar deity, Ra, their descendants are rediscovering the power of the sun. In the southern desert, half an hour's drive from Aswan, Egypt is putting the finishing touches to Benban, one of the world's largest solar farms. Its 6m panels produce 1.5 gigawatts (gw) of energy, enough to power over 1m homes. "In a decade we'll still need oil for plastics and other petrochemicals, but not for energy," says Rabeaa Fattal, a Dubai-based investor in Rising Sun, one of Benban's 40 fields.

Much of the modern Middle East and north Africa was built on oil. It exports more of the black stuff than any other region. A quarter of Middle Eastern power comes from it, compared with 3% from renewable sources. But the recent collapse in oil prices is a reminder that it is risky to depend on a single source of revenue. And in the long run the global trend is towards cleaner energy sources. Renewable-energy capacity in the Middle East has doubled to 40 gigawatts (gw) over the past decade and is set to double again by 2024.

Down on the farm

With its vast deserts, the Arab world's most abundant clean-energy source is the sun. Non-oil economies were first to take advantage of it. More than a third of Morocco's energy now comes from renewables (in the EU the average is 18%). Oil producers are catching up. A big project in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), recently received the world's lowest tariff, bid for solar power.

Oman, Kuwait and Qatar have large projects, too. The Middle East as a whole generates 9GW of solar power, up from a paltry 91 megawatts a decade ago. Between 2008 and 2018 investment in the field increased 12-fold.

The growing competitiveness of renewables makes analysts optimistic that the trend will continue. Solar farms are cheaper, faster and safer to build and maintain than oil and gas plants. The UAE’s new solar plant will generate electricity at roughly two-thirds the cost of gas and a third that of oil, even at today's low prices. Several countries in the region speak of becoming renewable-energy exporters.

Investors, though, still have cause to hesitate. For a start, Arab autocrats often promise more than they deliver. Take Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who has made renewable energy a pillar of his economic-reform plan. In 2018 he and SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, announced the world's biggest solar-power-generation project in the Saudi desert. It was shelved six months later.

Regional turmoil scares investors away, too. Iraq's electricity minister blames protests for derailing his plans to meet 20% of demand with renewables by 2030. Conflicts in neighbouring countries have damned Jordan's efforts to export solar power to Lebanon. Turbulent Egypt offered to buy solar power at above-market rates in order to attract investors to Benban.

There is also a risk that, in the short term, cheap oil dims countries' ardour for solar power. Saudi Arabia, for example, might prefer to burn more oil for energy. Declining revenues could force oil-producing states to suspend new solar projects.

But such projects are largely driven by the private sector, and they continue to compare favourably with fossil fuels. "We have seen an acceleration in tenders during Covid-19," says Paddy Padmanathan of ACWA Power, a Saudi firm that operates renewable-energy projects. "Why spend money taking fuel out of the ground and processing it rather than relying on God-given free sun and wind?" ■

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AND  INDEED  THAT  IS  THE  WAY  THE  WORLD’S  NATIONS  SHOULD  BE  GOING,  WITH  EVER  INCREASING  SPEED.  MAYBE  NOW  THAT  OIL  IS  FACING  ITS  LOWEST  INCOME  EVER,  NATIONS  WILL  SMARTEN  UP  AND  GO  MORE  WITH  THE  POWER  OF  THE  SUN.

Keith Hunt

VIETNAM AND KERALA beat the Covid-19 virus!

From The Economist - May 9th - 2020

ASIA

Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala have curbed the virus on the cheap

Developing countries and Covid-19

Bargain abatement

The phone rings and a doctor picks up. "Sir, we've run out of ventilators. What do we do when more patients come?" Soon after, a grim medic explains that the disease they are battling kills three in four victims. There is no vaccine or treatment.

Such talk has become commonplace in the time of Covid-19. Yet this scene has nothing to do with the current pandemic. It is the opening of "Virus", a film that won critical acclaim last year in Mollywood, as the Malayalam-language cinema of the Indian state of Kerala is sometimes known. Styled as a thriller, it tells the true story of the struggle to contain an outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018. The bat-borne pathogen killed 21 out of the 23 people infected. But Kerala tamed Nipah within a month, adopting an all-hands approach that included district-wide curfews, relentless contact-tracing and the quarantine of thousands of potential carriers.

Kerala has used the same simple, cheap tools to fight covid-19, with similarly stellar results. It was the first of India's 36 states and territories to report a covid-19 case, a medical student who returned in January from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the epidemic started. By March 24th, when Narendra Modi, the prime minister, declared a nationwide lockdown to combat the disease, Kerala accounted for a fifth of India's cases, more than any other state. Just six weeks later, it ranks 16th. As India's active caseload has risen by a multiple of 71, Kerala's has fallen by two-thirds. It has suffered just four deaths. Many of Kerala's 35m people work abroad; 20 times more of them have died of the illness in another country than have at home.

Vietnam

With 95m people, Vietnam is a much bigger place. In dealing with Covid-19, however, it has followed a strikingly similar script, with an even more striking outcome. Like Kerala it was exposed to the virus early, and saw a surge of infections in March. Active cases also peaked early, however, and have since tumbled to a mere 39-Uniquely among countries of even remotely similar size, and in contrast to such better known Covid success stories as Taiwan and New Zealand, it has not yet suffered a single confirmed fatality. The Philippines, a nearby country of roughly the same population and wealth, has suffered more than 10,000 infections and 650 deaths.

Like Kerala, Vietnam has recently battled deadly epidemics, during the global outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and of Swine Flu in 2009. 

Vietnam and Kerala both benefit from a long legacy of investment in public health and particularly in primary care, with strong, centralized management, an institutional reach from city wards to remote villages and an abundance of skilled personnel. Not coincidentally, communism has been a strong influence, as the unchallenged state ideology of Vietnam and as a brand touted by the leftist parties that have dominated Kerala since the 1950s.

Some suggest that having relatively young populations may have lessened the toll of the disease in both places. Others speculate that universal inoculation with BCG, a vaccine against tuberculosis and leprosy, has made locals less susceptible. 

Todd Pollack, a specialist in infectious diseases based in Vietnam, says the reasons for its success are simpler: "Countries that took early, aggressive action, using proven methods, have severely limited the virus. If you reduce it fast enough, you never reach the point of exponential growth."

Mr Pollack agrees that cultural factors may have aided Vietnam's effort, such as a willingness to study and learn from China, social comfort with wearing protective masks, acceptance of being isolated away from home and respect for expert advice. He admits that the age profile of Vietnamese Covid-19 carriers has been generally younger than elsewhere, giving more resistance to illness. But that is largely because health workers swiftly and effectively isolated carriers, so protecting older people.

Before the end of January Vietnam had declared a national emergency, formed a top-level steering committee chaired by the deputy prime minister and begun screening passengers and restricting movement. The effort to trace the contacts of infected travellers drew on personnel from the army and civil service as well as health workers. At one large hospital in Hanoi, the capital, investigators tracked and tested some 5,000 people. As early as mid-February, Vietnam had imposed stringent lockdowns on some districts, with communes of as many as 10,000 inhabitants placed under heavy police guard. As in China, potential carriers of the disease were quarantined away from their own families.

The government's public-awareness campaign was equally aggressive, relying on text-messaging, information-packed websites and downloadable apps as well as a barrage of some 127 articles a day, on average, across 13 of the most popular online news outlets. "The impression they created was that the government was really doing everything it could," says Mr Pollack.

Kerala's state government has been similarly energetic, from the chief minister, its top elected official, giving nightly pep talks to village-level committees working to set up public hand-washing stations.

Aside from showing logistical efficiency in  monitoring cases and equipping its health system, it has also emphasized sympathy and compassion for people affected by the pandemic. The state has mobilized some 16,000 teams to man call centres and to look after as many as 100,000 quarantined [people, ensuring they do not lack food, medical care or simply someone to talk to]. Free meals have been delivered to thousands of homes, as well as to migrant workers stranded by a national lockdown.

Both Kerala and Vietnam are keenly aware that the danger is far from over. Until there is a vaccine or better treatment, Vietnam will remain on alert, says Mr Pollack Kerala, for its part, is preparing for a huge influx of expatriate workers returning from the economically battered Arab Gulf countries. More than 300,000 have requested help getting home via a state website. Rajeev Sadanandan, a public-health expert who spearheaded Kerala's Nipah campaign, admits this is a big risk, as well as an added burden at a time when state revenues are under severe strain. "But", he says, "there is no doubt in government or in our society that they must be brought back and that we should stand by them whatever the circumstances." ■

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WELL  GOOD  ON  THOSE  TWO  AREAS  OF  THE  WORLD,  FOR  GETTING  IT  RIGHT;  GOOD  EXAMPLE  FOR  THE  REST  OF  THE  WORLD  TO  FOLLOW  WHEN  ANOTHER  VIRUS    COMES  ALONG,  AS  FROM  RECENT  HISTORY  IT  SURELY  WILL.

Keith Hunt

NEW WAY SHOPPING----given a huge boost

The Economist - May 9th - 2020

Lexington | What's in store

The pandemic threatens devastation to the retail industry that built America

In almost all its modern crises, America has looked to its merchants for leadership. In 1914 John Wanamaker, the greatest retailer of the age, made headlines by dispatching 2,000 tons of food aid to Belgium—then suggesting America buy the little country to make the peace. In 1942 his New York rival, Macy's, announced it was cancelling its annual Thanksgiving parade and donating 650 pounds of balloon rubber to the war effort: "We've enlisted!" 

Department stores, America's temples of commerce, could always be relied upon to sell war bonds with panache. In a Younkers store in Des Moines, Iowa, a coffin for Adolf Hitler was lowered mechanically from the ceiling to the floor whenever a sale was made.

Masters of self-promotion, the great retailers did not suffer by being associated with patriotism. Yet rather than deplore their opportunism, Americans celebrated the consumption it was designed to promote. 

During the Great Depression, they rallied to the retailers' "Buy Now" campaigns. Shopping was not merely the surest way to boost the economy; it was urbanites' main community activity. As recently as September 2001, President George W. Bush hinted at that dual truth when urging Americans to shrug off terrorism and hit the stores. By contrast, the current crisis is the first in over a century in which retailers have provided no comfort.

Online ones are thriving but unloved. The biggest, Amazon, is battling damaging headlines over its patchy service and treatment of workers. Traditional retailers are meanwhile looking into the abyss. This week J. Crew filed for bankruptcy. J C Penney, whose low-cost innovations helped it survive the Depression and proved inspirational to one of its employees, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, is also struggling under a heavy debt load. Macy's, America's biggest department store by sales, lost its place in the S&P 500 last month while all its 775 stores were closed. It reopened 68 this week but expects them to do around 15% of their regular trade: more a death rattle than a recovery. By one estimate, over 300 department stores could go under by the end of next year.

Losing your custom overnight will do that. Yet bricks-and-mortar retailers were struggling long before the virus struck, against e-commerce and other stresses, including Donald Trump's tariffs, which many decried. The president was never going to turn to them as Herbert Hoover did to his friend J.C. Penney in 1929. Yet a weary sense of inevitability about legacy retail's demise should not obscure how traumatic a development it is. Many of America's shuttered cities were shaped by department stores: they would not have developed as they did, or at all, without them. Nor would the consumer economy; nor elements of American democracy.

The emergence of palatial, multi-line stores in New York, Chicago and other big cities in the mid-19th century was a first-world phenomenon, pioneered in Europe. Yet merchants such as Wanamaker, who opened his first department store in Philadelphia in 1876, added American characteristics. Their stores tended to be bigger than European ones and packed with extravaganzas; Wana-maker's flagship store boasted 2m square feet and the world's biggest organ. America's retailers also poured their huge profits into advertising, which shored up the free press. And they were more egalitarian than Europeans, especially to women, as both customers and employees. By 1918 42% of Macy's buyers were women.

Many promoted their enterprises as morally improving. Wanamaker, who also formed the world's biggest Sunday school, described his stores as "beautiful fields of necessities". With steepling cast-iron structures and acres of plate-glass, flooding them with light, they were America's answer to Europe's cathedrals.

Such stores' impact on cities surpassed even their footprints. They feminized and commercialized them. They fostered civic identity as well as consumerism. To be from Philly was to know and shop at Wanamaker's. Thereby the great downtown stores became synonymous with the forces that had fuelled their growth, industrialization, urbanization, democratisation. To this day famous names such as Macy's, which retains its giant flagship store in Herald Square, Manhattan, retain an exalted place in the culture: over 3m turn out to watch its annual parade.

This is despite the fact that most Macy's and other department stores are now in the suburban malls that began mushrooming after the second world war. They are less loved. Where Hollywood invariably depicts downtown stores as places of innocence and Santa Claus, it portrays malls as anonymous and prone to zombie attack. Those contrasting views are linked—the suburban expansion having devastated many cherished downtown areas. But the contrast is also unjust. Most Americans seem to associate malls with relaxation and family—a truth your columnist learned while staying on American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. All the bigger ones had a rudimentary mall, selling fast food, sportswear, cheap carpets and Celtic swords, where the soldiers loved to saunter and unwind. Even conventional malls build social capital in a way it is hard to imagine e-commerce ever could.

Shop till you drop

Moreover, following a period of intense competition in the 1980s, America's malls have increasingly come to resemble the extravagant old emporia. New Jersey's $5bn American Dream mall, which opened last October, has an indoor ski slope, Legoland and Ferris wheel. The Grove shopping centre in Los Angeles takes its homage to early retail even further. It is a mock-up of a 20th-century town centre, including a tram-line and Art Deco cinema.

Such enterprises aim to retain a place in American life even as face-to-face retail recedes from it. The developers of the American Dream mall aimed to let only 45% of their area to retailers before the pandemic—and have since slashed the figure to 30%. That would seem realistic. Except, what if the virus persuades a generation of Americans to stay at home for their entertainment, as well as their shopping? And what kind of America would that be? ■

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IN  MANY  COUNTRIES  OF  THE  WESTERN  WORLD,  THERE  WAS  ALREADY  A  SLOW  CHANGE  COMING  TO  “SHOPPING”  BEFORE  THE  COVID-19  VIRUS.

THE  “STAY  SAFE”  “STAY  AT  HOME  ISOLATION”  HAS  JUST  ADDED  A  HUGE  BOOST  TO  A  NEW  WAY  OF  SHOPPING—— 

GO  ON  THE  INTERNET,  SHOP  FROM  YOUR  COMPUTER  OR  SMART-PHONE;  HAVE  IT  ALL  DELIVERED,  OR  PICK  IT  UP  FROM  THE  SIDE-WALK.

YES  A  HUGE  CHANGE  IS  COMING  AS  TO  HOW  PEOPLE  WILL  INCREASINGLY  DO  THEIR  SHOPPING,  ESPECIALLY  THE  RETIRED  COMMUNITY  OF  OUR  POPULATION.

YES,  WE  ARE  GOING  TO  SEE  MORE  AND  MORE  OF  THOSE  FLYING  DRONES  DELIVERING  OUR  STUFF,  TO  OUR  FRONT  DOOR.

YES,  A  MASSIVE  SPACE-AGE  CHANGE  IS  COMING,  FASTER  THAT  WE  EXPECTED,  GIVEN  A  LARGE  BOOST  FROM  THIS  COVID  VIRUS.

Keith Hunt