I read this for the All-nonfiction Reading Group discussion where I actually nominated it.  I enjoy Fareed Zakaria on CNN anyway so I figured I might like the book.  I was right – I very much enjoyed the book.  It’s nicely organized and well thought out.  But what would you expect from Zakaria?  

*******
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World 
by Fareed Zakaria 
2020 / 308 pages
Read by author – 7h 24m
Rating – 8.75 / politics and gov’t
*******

Zakaria goes through the global political and economic problems associated with the Covid – or any pandemic – and what the world has not been doing right and why.  It’s a hefty history compressed into 241 pages plus notes and so on.  A couple of graphs.
 
It’s frequently billed as “Life After the Pandemic,” but it’s not really that.  He does predict another pandemic before long though and that’s what spurred the “Lessons.” It’s actually a rather hopeful book and our past is very di we have to learn from a very changeable past.  Does liberal democracy work better or do dictatorships?  

Like Michael Lewis in The Risk Factor, which Zakaria notes, the deciding factors on how well a country will do in a global pandemic are competence and quality of government. Bigger is not necessarily better. More authoritarian is not better. How the financial markets are arranged and how well they work is important but that’s certainly not the whole picture. Expertise and technology help. And then there’s the fact that people are social beings – a whole chapter to that. Inequality doesn’t help but idealism certainly has some advantages. Meanwhile, nothing is written (in stone).

And the book is packed with info, dense but readable, so I have to do that again.  lol.