Here is our take on the articles summarized below: 

While we are certainly in a better place than we were a year ago at the pandemic’s onset, low vaccination rates and virus variants are threatening to derail the globe’s recovery. An additional risk to recovery efforts is rising political and economic instability across the globe which will not only affect our ability to rebound from the pandemic but will also impact the global order for decades to come. Amid all this, the ever-present concern over the place of Big Tech companies in everyday life continues to appear in new and unexpected ways.

Countries That Let the Virus Run Rampant Are a Danger To Everyone

Marian Blasberg, Rafaela von Bredow, Veronika Hackenbroch, Kunal Purohit, and Christoph Schult, Spiegel International

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While vaccination campaigns in some Western nations have begun to turn the tide of the pandemic, in other areas the danger of Covid-19 continues to rise. Compounding this issue is the promulgation of coronavirus mutations from India and Brazil, prompting concerns that a vaccine-resistant strain may emerge. In India, a slow and underwhelming response to the pandemic has propelled the daily caseload to astronomical levels. A lack of sequencing data has obscured the true spread of the Indian mutation; this lack of concrete information has made preventative measures difficult to assess. A similar situation in Brazil, where President Bolsonaro has not embraced antiviral measures, has swept through the country like wildfire and spread to others. While health organizations estimate the likelihood of a vaccine-resistant variant mutating to be less than 10%, should such a mutation emerge it could undo nearly a year’s worth of effort to eradicate the pandemic. For that reason, the authors push for continued vigilance in restrictions and speedy uptake in vaccines to reduce that possibility.

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Harrowing Take on Our Possible Futures

Stewart M. Patrick, World Politics Review

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The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) recently released a report called “Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World” outlining what it imagines the world will be like in 20 years. The global picture the report paints is one of division and chaos: a world in which no single nation will be dominant. The NIC report highlights four major trends – demographic, economic, climatic, and technological – that will undoubtedly shape the world in the coming years. From a demographic perspective, the human population is growing rapidly and urbanizing quickly. By 2040, earth’s population could reach 9.2 billion and two-thirds are expected to live in cities. These two trends alone will strain public finances, particularly in developing countries. Further straining governments’ ability to support citizens will be an era of even higher sovereign debt and growing economic fragmentation. Additional issues, from an economic standpoint, are rising income inequality, outdated multilateral trade rules, and monopolization, among other things. The NIC also adds that institutions of international economic governance are not poised to handle these challenges, further adding to global disarray. As we have just started witnessing, the issue of climate change will transform world politics as extreme weather exacerbates water, food, health, and energy insecurity, which in turn, increases global instability. Finally, the emergence and convergence of new technologies will not only transform human life, but increase strategic competition between actors as nations fight to dominate emerging fields. New technologies could also disrupt industries and reshape relations between public and private entities. As the report states, these trends are “likely to produce a more conflict prone and volatile geopolitical environment, undermine global multilateralism, and broaden the mismatch between transnational challenges and institutional arrangements to tackle them.”

Herd Immunity Is Humanity’s Great Hope, and It’s Proving Elusive

Robert Langreth and Emma Court, Bloomberg

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“Herd immunity” has quickly become a popular term that is also hotly debated in Congress, on TV shows, in news articles, and on social media; “In the popular imagination, the phrase has become shorthand for the end of the pandemic—a finish line that will suddenly cause the virus to subside and allow maskless normalcy to resume.” While the definition of herd immunity – a population’s resistance to the spread of a virus based on the immunity of a high proportion of people – is simple, it can be a very difficult threshold to predict. The population percentage needed for herd immunity can depend on a wide range of factors including location, human behavior, how long immunity lasts, the mitigation steps that are in place, local climate, and how quickly the virus mutates. With a rise in more infectious Covid-19 variants, herd immunity is becoming more and more elusive. Many medical and scientific experts are suggesting that Covid-19 will be around for several years similar to the flu, though conditions are improving greatly as vaccination numbers rise. The biggest threats to the pandemic recovery are low vaccination rates and virus variants. Even with high vaccination rates overall in some countries, there will undoubtedly be “pockets” of people who are not vaccinated because of race, income, religion, political affiliation, etc. These pockets will be prone to outbreaks and will be breeding grounds for mutations. While challenges and threats exist, the best way to move forward is to continue focusing on the things we can control, primarily, encouraging people to get vaccinated.  

The Challenge of Big Tech Finance

Barry Eichengreen, Project Syndicate

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As the field of financial technology (“fintech”) has expanded rapidly in the past few years, concerns of excesses on Big Tech platforms have begun to surface. In the past, companies and regulators engaged in a constant, energetic dance. Now, the pace of development seems to have outstripped bureaucracy’s red tape production capacity, with regulators facing great difficulty in reigning in some of Big Tech’s algorithm-based models. Risks of infrastructure-shattering failure, unethical data harvesting, and discriminatory practices provide impetus to those constructing the guideposts, but as more and more of finance is hidden behind “black box” artificial intelligence algorithms, the ability to discern the signal in the noise has become increasingly rare. The traditional checks and balances simply will not suffice; most platforms are too interconnected to easily separate what data should be protected. A key example is in loan identification: whereas traditional finance must base lending decisions on a limited slate of information, the near-comprehensive dataset available to fintech companies allows them to identify risk factors more quickly, giving them a significant advantage over most banks. Regulators must act swiftly and creatively to prevent another wave of excesses.