My Take | Dictatorship and democracy together cook up a pandemic
- Thanks to their respective political systems, authoritarian China and Western democracies complement one another – one in causing an outbreak, the other in enabling its global spread
You may be surprised, but sometimes people know bad things are going to happen yet still let them happen. The almost incomprehensible complacency and passivity of many Western governments in the face of the Covid-19 threat may be one of those instances.
Of course, many factors – social, economic, technological – contribute to a country’s response to a pandemic, but its political system and leadership are surely a big factor.
Why couldn’t Western governments have been more proactive, when many of their own experts were already warning against the danger long beforehand? Perhaps they couldn’t.
People sometimes quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the influential financial writer, by describing the pandemic as a “black swan” event. But it’s something else he wrote in his eponymous book that I find more enlightening. Imagine, he asks his readers, someone who has the foresight to warn against a coming disaster. People listen and take precautions. Then nothing happens. Did he just save the day or waste everyone’s time and resources?