Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. June 27, 2021 On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: First, Fareed gives his take on Democrats' struggles to gain footing in state and local offices.
With blue states like New York and California lagging their red competitors in services delivered per tax dollar collected, Fareed says, the emergence of Democratic pragmatist Eric Adams in New York City's mayoral election shows that voters want competent, efficient governance more than progressive ideals.
"The Democratic Party wants more government now, for many good causes and reasons," Fareed says. "But in order to gain the trust of people, it needs to first face up to its failures and work harder to show that it can effectively manage the governments it is already running. President Biden is doing that at the federal level. At the local level, New York City would be a good place to start."
After that: This coming week, China will mark an event for which it has been preparing for decades—the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Where is the new superpower heading? And are we at the start of a new cold war? Fareed talks with a panel of China experts: Elizabeth Economy of Stanford's Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, Oxford historian Rana Mitter, and The New Yorker's Jiayang Fan.
Next, renowned author and "Revisionist History" podcast host Malcolm Gladwell discusses a few of the topics he's been examining, from a future filled with autonomous cars to how rankings could be biased against historically Black colleges and universities.
Finally, Fareed explores an alarming trend in online speech: clampdowns on free expression in some of the world's largest democracies. As the Chinese Communist Party prepares to observe its 100th anniversary on July 1, the retrospectives and forecasts are pouring in. The Economist writes that the party's secret sauce has included "ideological agility" (which enabled a pivot from the hardline rule of Mao Zedong to the patient strategy of later leaders) and, today especially, swift and tech-enhanced repression of dissent.
Assessing its chances of staying in power forever, the magazine writes that if the party appears monolithic to outsiders, in fact it "suffers from factionalism, disloyalty and ideological lassitude. … The moment of greatest instability is likely to be the succession" following President Xi Jinping. "No one knows who will come after Mr Xi, or even what rules will govern the transition. When he scrapped presidential term limits in 2018, he signalled that he wants to cling to power indefinitely. But that may make the eventual transfer only more unstable. Although peril for the party will not necessarily lead to the enlightened rule that freedom-lovers desire, at some point even this Chinese dynasty will end." Reprising four books on the state of US retirement in The New York Review of Books, Caitlin Zaloom writes that the bargain has been broken.
Public employees' pensions, especially, have proven fiscally unsustainable in some cities, thanks to decades of white flight that stripped out urban tax bases and a municipal debt crisis that unfolded in places like Detroit, after the 2008 financial crash. Non-government workers, meanwhile, have been shoehorned into a system that was designed for upper management: The original idea behind 401(k)s, Zaloom writes (citing the analysis of Teresa Ghilarducci and Tony James, from their book "Rescuing Retirement"), "was to create a tax benefit as an incentive for executives to invest their extra cash. 401(k)s were not intended to establish security for middle- or lower-income Americans. We should not be surprised that these plans have failed them."
Proposals exist, including to hybridize defined-benefit and defined-contribution retirement plans into federal accounts that would stay with workers throughout their careers, Zaloom notes. But barring a change, many Americans "face the prospect of either a falling standard of living in retirement or working until they die. If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by next year, according to Ghilarducci and James … Others ... will be forced to work well into their old age to meet their basic needs and pay for health care." Industrial carpet is now being made from carbon pulled or diverted from the atmosphere, Jon Gertner writes in the current, climate-focused issue of The New York Times Magazine—and it's not the only such product in the pipeline, as a host of startups aims to make durable products from recombined air pollution.
"Advocates of carbon utilization, or carbontech, as it's also known, want to remake many of the things we commonly use today," Gertner writes. "But with one crucial difference: No emissions would have been added to the environment through their fabrication. Carbontech sees a future where the things we buy might be similar in their chemistries and uses but different in their manufacture and environmental impact. You might wake in the morning on a mattress made from recycled CO2 and grab sneakers and a yoga mat made from CO2-derived materials. You might drive your car—with parts made from smokestack CO2—over roads made from CO2-cured concrete. And at day's end, you might sip carbontech vodka while making dinner with food grown in a greenhouse enriched by recycled CO2. Many of these items would most likely be more expensive to the consumer than their usual counterparts, in part because they often need significant amounts of energy to make. But the hurdles to making them are no longer insurmountable." Uneven vaccination will soon beget an uneven reality, Dhruv Khullar writes for The New Yorker. The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, is believed to be up to 60% more transmissible than the original, and anecdotal evidence suggests it could also be more deadly. And yet, Khullar notes, a completed, two-shot regimen of the Pfizer vaccine will largely protect against it. So as thoroughly vaccinated places party on, citizens of countries with low vaccination rates face enhanced danger—as do those living in pockets like the American South, where "only about a third of the population has been fully vaccinated," Khullar writes. Different countries are handling the emerging risk differently: The UK and other European governments have held onto or reinstated public restrictions, while the US charges ahead into hopefully-post-pandemic life. |
