MixedThe Financial Times... a shot in the arm to many who have watched their public administrations struggle with the challenges of the modern world ... From two noted internationalists, the picking apart of the international response, including that of the EU, is welcome. The portrait they paint is sobering and demands solutions ... It would be easy to challenge some of their presumptions about the losers of the Covid-19 crisis, given the recent resurgence of the virus in places that are declared winners in the book. It is also tempting to pick holes in the solutions their \'President Bill Lincoln\' advocates, too many of which could have been drawn from the pages of The Economist magazine over recent years to be considered original. But the framing of the problem is powerful, particularly given the speed with which the book has been brought out — a credit to both the writers and the publishers ... there is one area that could have been considered more deeply — the analysis of the way technology has changed society. Although the authors touch on the challenge, the structural difficulties that rapid technological progress pose to democracy goes much deeper than is addressed here ... Solutions for how to fix the future require more than the old liberal internationalist ideas polished up. We need to think about the inequality that technology is accelerating and the isolation that makes authoritarian solutions look tempting ... It’s also worth being wary of the atmosphere of defeatism that some may draw from this brief book. Democracies have a capacity for innovation and reinvention that authoritarian states struggle with. The kind of fear that China’s rulers need to instil in order to exert control leads to a structural weakness that the Covid-19 crisis also revealed — false reports, corruption and cover-ups. That should be a wake-up call for other societies, too.
