The China scare, American story telling

There’s great panic in America, perhaps even in the world, about China these days. Last week, I watched Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, make surprisingly candid observations on China on a CBS 60 Minutes interview. Btw, CBS 60 minutes is an excellent show. You can follow it on Youtube.

On China, first things first: The Chinese government is an authoritarian regime with illiberal policies from banning free speech to oppressing minorities. It has intensified political control at home and pursued an aggressively competitive approach with the US abroad. What I am about to say is not an apology for their serious failings in these matters.

In a few years, China will overtake the US and become the world’s largest economy. As Blinken pointed out, China is a large country and it is not surprising that they will become the world’s biggest economy. The questions are – to what extent does China pose a threat to the world order and how should America address that threat? The consequences of exaggerating or under-estimating this challenge are equally vast. A cold war with China is likely to be more costly than the one with the Soviet Union with a truly uncertain outcome.

Today, there appears to be a bipartisan consensus in America on how to deal with China. This consensus can be summed up as 1) Engagement hasn’t worked because it has failed to change China’s internal repression and external aggression. 2) Beijing represents the biggest threat to the world order created after the second world war 3) A policy of active confrontation will better counter the China threat than the previous approach of diplomacy and negotiations. It’s evident from Biden’s rhetoric that he has signed on to this view that Trump, Pompeo and other Republicans have championed over the last decade.

An entire book can be written on the looming US-China conflict and the strategies to approach it. I’m sure there are experts hard at work on this right now. I’m no expert on China or foreign policy. But, I have this to say – China’s future as a peer or even as a superior to the US on the world stage is a given. By some measures, China is already there. Within 10 to 15 years, they will unambiguously take this spot by any measure. Deng Xiaoping advised the Chinese to “bide your time” when they were just one percent of the world’s GDP. Today they are over 15 percent. The Chinese have bided their time and their moment has arrived. They naturally seek a larger global role.

There was another country back in the 19th century that was rising in strength. It wasn’t nearly as imposing as China is today. The United States in 1823 would have been what we call a “developing country” today, not even in the world’s top five economies at that time. And yet with the Monroe Doctrine, it declared the entire Western Hemisphere off limits to the European powers. While this is an imperfect analogy, I use it to simply make the point that a rising economic power WILL seek greater control and influence over the world. That by itself is not immoral. In fact, it is quite natural.

Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. In recounting the fifth century BCE wars between Athens and Sparta, he described a tendency towards war when an emerging power threatened to displace an existing one – a trap that can lock the two in costly conflict. If the US defines everything that is done by China as dangerous or threatening, then we risk falling into the Thucydides Trap. China is not the Soviet Union. In China, we would be confronting not just a rival larger than any we have seen before, but an ancient civilization with a culture and history richer than most nations on earth.

The Chinese have a great sense of national pride, just like any of us. They have risen and are now asking for their seat at the table. It would be foolish to deny them. Asking the world to choose between us and them will not be wise. We will not like the answers we get. There is still a very distinct possibility that China can be influenced to be a more responsible world leader. There is no doubt in my mind that they are fully capable of self-reflection, awareness and empathy. The first step towards managing China is for the US to recognize it as its peer and equal.

The old order, in which tiny European countries act as global heavyweights while giants such as China and India are excluded from the first ranks of global institutions simply cannot be sustained. China (and India) must be given places at the table and genuinely integrated into decision making structures. Or they will freelance and unilaterally create their own new structures and systems. China’s rise to global power is perhaps the most significant event in the world in centuries. It must be recognized as such.

Moving on to other things. Last week, I happened to read a 1895 Mark Twain essay on “How to tell a story.” (I’m always trying to read up good advice on how to tell stories 🙂 ) In this, Twain makes the claim that the humorous story is an American invention and it depends more on the manner of telling than the matter it conveys.

“There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind–the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.” Mark Twain.

In making this exceptionalism claim for American storytelling, Twain may have been right. American storytelling evolved over a time during which there was unprecedented industrial development. American folklore is rooted in a realist, literal tradition, with a bias towards factuality and a stylistic preference for first person storytelling. Humor itself was not the objective. It was a tool used to achieve certain effects. When it is funny, it is incidentally funny by virtue of being wild but plausible. The reaction to Huck Finn’s adventures down the Mississippi is “that’s wild,” and rarely, “that’s hilarious.”

American folklore has always been about an exaggeration of reality rather than a portrayal of fantasies. It’s almost always the story of the Great Hustle in which the hero pulls off victimless cons to get ahead but is too noble hearted to cause genuine harm to others. They are stories of a competitive middle class doing what they needed to do to get ahead in a rapidly industrializing nation. We see a celebration of the hustle in folklore. We see it through Clint Eastwood in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” We see it in J. Peterman’s and Kramer’s wild eyed narratives on Seinfeld. We see it in Hollywood. We now see it in SPACs, cryptocurrencies and Silicon Valley in general. It is a unique brand of storytelling in service of the Frontier Hustle – brought to you live from New York by Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live.

Happy Mother’s Day! Stay safe. Have a great week ahead.

The Great Escape, the Global Idea that is Vaccination

The Great Influenza Outbreak of 1918 is estimated to have taken 100 million lives. In contrast, roughly three million lives have been lost to Covid-19 on a planet with four times as many people.

After the 1918 pandemic, at a time when a murderous world war was afoot, life span in the United States plunged practically overnight by 7 years, to 47 years. In England, it fell by a decade. India’s average life expectancies fell below 30 years. Imagine you were in Boston watching as they stacked bodies in a makeshift morgue or roaming the streets of Bombay where more than 5 percent of the population died of the flu in a matter of months. What prediction would you have made for the next hundred years? Would you have considered the progress of the previous fifty years a fluke? Would you have viewed the Spanish Flu as a harbinger of an even darker future? Amazingly, this dire scenario did not come to pass.

If we published a newspaper only once in a century, the headline on the latest edition would read, “LIFE SPAN DOUBLES, TRIPLES ACROSS THE WORLD.”

Since 1920, life expectancy has never reversed, except for a brief blip during the second world war. India and China have recorded what must rank as the fastest gains made by any society in history. Today, average life expectancy in India is around 70 years. There are few measures of global human progress more astonishing than this. And yet, it never appears as a headline in a newspaper. This progress tends to be measured not in events, but unnoticed non-events. The smallpox infection that didn’t kill you at two years of age. The accidental bruise that didn’t give you a lethal bacterial infection. The drinking water that didn’t poison you with cholera. In a sense, we are protected by an invisible shield, built painstakingly piece by piece over the last 100 years. This shield became suddenly visible during the last year. We have seen holes in it which we can and will fix in the years to come. We have been reminded of how dependent we are on medical science, hospitals, public health agencies, drug supply chains, storage technologies, and transportation logistics.

How did this doubling and tripling of life span happen?

It is a story that can fill a very interesting book. When history textbooks document health progress, they nod to three critical breakthroughs: vaccines, germ theory and antibiotics. They are presented as presented largely as triumphs of the scientific method. In reality, progress was made as possible by scientists as it was by activists, public intellectuals and legal reformers, who ensured that benefits accumulated to ordinary folks like you and me.

For a good part of human history, life expectancy held pretty much steadily at around 35 years. Mankind spent over 10,000 years inventing agriculture, metallurgy, gunpowder, double-entry accounting ledgers, and other clever things but failed to move the needle on how long the average person could expect to live. Until 1750. That’s when things began to change. Specifically, the life expectancy of the European aristocracy began to rise. The best way to understand this is to review the list of European monarchs killed by smallpox prior to 1750 – Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I, grand dauphin Louis of France, Louis I of Spain, Peter II of Russia, Louis XV of France, and Maximilian Josef of Bavaria. It’s a long list. Before 1750, it didn’t really matter if you were a king or a commoner. Your life expectancy was in the thirties.

How the English aristocracy at first, and then the European elites, extended their life spans is attributed to Edward Jenner’s invention of the smallpox vaccine, a watershed moment in human history. But, life expectancy had already begun to rise among the English elites prior to Jenner’s vaccine. An earlier innovation, which originated thousands of miles from England, called ‘variolation’ was the cause. Variolation is a proto-vaccination procedure that involves direct exposure to small amounts of the virus itself. Some accounts suggest that it originated in India two thousand years prior to the first western vaccine. Like other great discoveries, it could have been independently discovered in various parts of the world. Regardless of its origin, the practice had spread to China and Persia by the 1600s, and to Turkey from where the English elite imported it and put an end overnight to smallpox in their ranks. Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was inoculated at birth and lived long enough to produce an heir, King George III. Most crucially, variolation inspired Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Jenner’s approach was to inject a less virulent version from the same virus family, which lowered the mortality rate of vaccination compared to variolation. Vaccination was truly a global idea from the very beginning.

Then came pasteurized milk, which triggered what economist Angus Deaton has described as “the great escape,” a genuinely new cycle of positive health trends in human societies across the world. In New York city, only 60 humans survived to adulthood in the 19th century. Today, 99 do. The rise of chlorination is another example of transformational reform. It was the work of chemists no doubt, but equal credit must go to sanitation reformers, local health boards and waterworks engineers, whose ranks comprised industrious men and women working silently to revolutionize the lives of fellow citizens. We might be tempted to think that pharmaceutical drugs formed the cornerstone of the last 100 years of health progress. Truth is much of the benefits accrued from clean water, pasteurized milk and early inoculations. For much of the 20th century, drug discovery was an unorganized sector with a scattershot approach. Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of penicillin’s life saving uses in 1928 marked the starting point of Big Pharma. 30 years after Fleming’s discovery, companies like Pfizer and Merck signed on to develop it, and turned into a “miracle drug,” beginning the age of antibiotics. I will save for another day the remarkable story of how Indian and Bangladeshi scientists collaborated to use “low tech” and eradicate cholera from the Indian subcontinent and eventually Africa and other developing countries.

It took Sweden 150 years to bring its infant mortality rate to under 1 percent. South Korea pulled this feat off in 40 years. India doubled life expectancy in just 70 years. In 1951, the difference in life expectancy between the US and China was twenty years. Now it is just two. On the eve of his first term as President, Thomas Jefferson wrote about removing smallpox from the “catalog of evils.” On December 9, 1979, smallpox was declared to be officially eradicated by a committee of world scientists.

As we live through the present pandemic, and keep in mind the extraordinary progress we have made since the last one, what predictions would you make for the next 100 years? Will the forces that propelled the great escape over the last 100 years continue? Will the rising tide of egalitarian public health continue to lift all boats? Or, will we be washed away by an actual tide?

A century of brilliant progress has created a new, more advanced threat: ourselves. History tells us that scientific and technological progress alone do not guarantee our wellbeing. Social progress must go hand in hand with them. The responsibility to keep alive the momentum of the last century rests squarely on your shoulder and mine. Whether or not we lurch recklessly into a new era of pandemics, or race blindly towards a climate apocalypse depends on how we vote. No longer can we afford mediocrity and low-minded thinking in governance.

Universal, free healthcare is a human right. We must say this out aloud. We must ensure that our political leaders understand this and act with expediency.

Before I let you go, a nugget from history: The 1950s were a bizarre period in America, it appears. While a post-war economic boom fueled prosperity, it was also an era of mistrust of “enemies,” both internal and external. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet President, declared to America, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” The situation went to Code Red in October of 1957 when the Russians launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. The Americans became terrified that the Soviets had beaten them at their own game. They figured that they had to do something big to showcase America’s might to the entire world. So, they decided to, wait for it… NUKE THE MOON! Yes. The idea was to create an explosion on the moon so large that all earthlings would see it and be suitably impressed. Luckily, this project dubbed the A-119 project, never saw the light of day. If it had, it’d have given a whole new meaning to “shooting the moon.”

Stay safe. Have a wonderful week ahead.

Exercising the thinking-and-writing muscles, India’s Covid crisis

When I started writing this letter, my goals were straightforward: to write a thousand words of good quality every week without fail. To exercise the thinking-and-writing muscles and keep them in good, working condition. I have seen that it is easy to lose these muscles. All it takes is a few months of inactivity and the next thing you know, you’ve slipped a few thousand feet. The effort to recoup lost altitude is harder than the original climb.

I like what’s happening with the Vaccine so far. I hope you do too. I enjoy the process of sitting in front of my laptop at six AM on a Saturday morning, with a cup of coffee and a blank sheet. The world hasn’t woken yet, except for the twitter of the birds in the backyard. These days, the sun is up by the time I’ve brewed my coffee and sat myself at the table. Back when I started (in January), I’d see the world light up as words filled the blank sheet.

I’ve become attached to the act of writing. It’s not that I consider myself exceptionally good at it. I’ve read exceptionally good writers and I know that I am not one of them. I can be good, sometimes very good, but rarely great. I’ve made my peace with that. There was a time when I felt that I could be the next Hemingway with an Indian mind. But, I didn’t commit myself. I didn’t drop out of corporate America, take writing classes, work the muscles, and get better. In fact, I veered the other way. Whenever I felt the writing obsession overtake me, I consciously resisted it. Maybe it alarmed me to think that it might take over my life? Or, I worried that choosing writing as a vocation might take the joy out of it? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. The mantle of the Indian Hemingway remains unclaimed.

I’ve gotten better at holding a conversation over the last decade or so. It has taken focus and practice. It took me a while to realize that the spoken word is perhaps the most crucial element in a relationship, be it with a loved one or a colleague. What we say, how we say it and how much we care about the person hearing it heavily influences the quality of relationships. Taking the time to think through ahead of time and choosing our words carefully can go a long way. Having said that, writing continues to be the zone where I feel the most comfortable. If I ever won an Oscar, I’d prefer to write a letter thanking the Academy rather than speak the same words on a stage. That is also exactly why the chances of my winning an Oscar are less than zero.

Let’s see where we are. About 70 are subscribed to the Vaccine. The ‘open rate,’ which is the percent of subscribers who open the email (let alone read it) has been hovering around 55%. The subscriber count has barely moved in the last month. And, all of that is okay. I have no intent of popularizing this beyond an immediate circle, which includes most of you who have already subscribed. This is an experiment, more designed to help me than you. I try to choose topics that may interest you but the writing process has been my focus. About ten years ago, I had a fairly popular blog (tens of thousands of views and thousands of unique visitors each month, amplified by my Twitter account which had 25K followers). I’ve been at the more popular end of the spectrum, and I can honestly say that while popularity is nice, it does nothing to enhance the quality of the written word. In fact, it can worsen it. When I began to feel the pressure, I stopped the blogging. I now have barely 500 followers on Twitter, and all of this feels just about right.

There are all kinds of formats in which we express ourselves – books, letters, blogs, twitter, podcasts and so on. I made a simple 2×2 chart to organize them. Essentially, it comes down to what expectations the author has of the audience versus the expectations the audience has of the author.

If you don’t have ‘display images’ turned on in your email client, below image might not show.

The experimental quality of a letter like this means only a small fraction of readers will have the patience to ignore failed experiments, resist the urge to unsubscribe and wait it out for the good ones.

I plan to write 3 or 4 books someday. I have in mind about half a dozen (what I think are) clever concepts and plot lines for books. But books require a lot of upfront design and planning. They need more time and long range planning, which is a problem when you have a daytime job that pays the bills and other responsibilities that take precedence. But, I am patiently working on the ideas, making notes, putting pieces in here and there, as and when I find time. When I hang up my corporate boots, I expect to have my hands full for several years. Let’s see.

The hyper increase in Covid cases in India has been in the news this past week. Delhi and Mumbai are on their knees, reminiscent of what New York City went through a year back. Hospitals are full, beds and ventilators scarce, and oxygen in short supply. India opened up its economy late last year, lifting lockdowns and other restraints. For a good part of six months, it looked like the move paid off. Last week, India exceeded 300K daily cases, higher than the US’s peak last summer. Why this sudden surge? There aren’t any good explanations, and that is troubling and puzzling.

A nugget from history before we go: This one involves Diogenes the Cynic and Aristippus, two Greek philosophers. Aristippus seems to have been quite an operator and won himself a spot in the king’s court and the benefits of royal favor. He once saw Diogenes cooking lentils and berated him for not being worldly wise. He said, “If only you learned to flatter the king, you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.” Diogenes replied, “If only you learned to like lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter the king.” I love this guy!

Stay safe. Get vaccinated, if you already haven’t. Have a great week ahead.

The best of times. And the worst of times.

It is the best of times, in a way. Just a year after sinking into what may be the worst crisis the world has seen since the second world war, we have a number of vaccines that will help save hundreds of thousands of lives from being lost to the Corona family of viruses. It is only a matter of when, not if, anymore. We now have a clear path forward. In nearly every state across America, folks across all age groups are now eligible to get inoculated.

Thanks to advances in science, we have come to take top notch achievements for granted. Often, we don’t pause to acknowledge the difficulty and perseverance that went into them. The availability of vaccines in just over a year is one such amazing feat. We owe a great deal to the researchers who worked around the clock to get us an antidote. Sadly, there are those who refuse and resist. Over 50% of American men who lean Republican do not plan to get the vaccine. That’s a shame.

On other fronts, the US economy looks strong. It is expected to grow at levels not seen in decades. Biden’s infrastructure spending push, if it comes through and it likely should, could keep things humming for a decade. I feel cautiously optimistic about where America is headed. Of course, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Not everyone who lost their jobs last year has got them back. But, the clouds are parting, and sunlight is emerging. We’ve got sensible, grown up folks running the show. Fingers crossed.

In some parts of the world, it looks like the worst of times. Even as we race to increase vaccine supplies and grow the ranks of the vaccinated, the pandemic continues to rage. Last week on Indian Twitter, my timeline was filled with tweets about people losing loved ones, photographs of hospitals and crematoriums overflowing, etc. Hospitals, I read, are running out of beds. I saw a photograph of two men sharing the same bed in a Delhi hospital. Sometimes, the media tends to blow things out of proportion to get a few extra clicks on their websites. Also, I tend to not draw conclusions based on what I see on Twitter. A lot of the Twitterati are drama queens. Having said that, I’m sure that not all of the Covid-related news from India or elsewhere can be dismissed as fake news.

Every country has struggled through the pandemic and India is no exception. In Rome, Italy, funeral workers went on strike as coffins piled up in cemeteries. Michigan’s governor is at loggerheads with the White House over whether to lock the state down in response to escalating case counts. In Brazil, hospitals have run out of sedatives, forcing healthcare workers to physically restrain patients while intubating them. Things are still grim. Even so, I can’t help but observe that the Indian government’s lack of focus and planning, and its chronic inability to stay focused and execute to relatively straightforward goals has worsened what was already a tough situation. They had a year to prepare and they’ve fallen short. While this is no time for finger pointing and blame games, times like these are sordid reminders that incompetent leaders can cost us dearly. I just hope that we are able to vaccinate more people around the world at a faster rate. We are not out of this until all of us are out of this.

It’s interesting to observe what professions and roles get included in public esteem ceremonies and pageantry. India has a Teachers’ Day but no specific day for the military, which gets recognized along with a bunch of others on its Republic Day. America has two holidays – Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day – to celebrate its military but none for public health. Perhaps we can keep Veterans’ Day for the military, and repurpose Memorial Day to honor our public healthcare workers? Or, even have a whole new holiday for them? Just so you know, healthcare is now at 17-18% of our GDP whereas Defence is at around 3-4%.

How does a cop not know the difference between a taser and a gun? A Minneapolis cop shot Daunte Wright last week, thinking that she was about to taser him. She yelled “Taser” thrice before firing a single bullet and recoiling in horror. Inadequate training? An honest mistake in the moment? I think there’s a fair bit of both here. The cop in question has resigned along with her chief. If it were up to me, I’d choose to NOT prosecute the cop given that she has resigned and will likely spend the rest of her life in the shadow of guilt and self-doubt. I believe she is genuinely horrified at her mistake. Then again, I don’t have the facts in my possession. A life has been lost and I concede that there must be real consequences even for genuine mistakes when they are fatal.

In 2019, a software engineer in London who was testing an app that would tell users the route and model of any passing plane looked up at the sky and pointed it at an overhead plane. Then, he saw something falling out of it. He went in search and found the house of another software engineer whose patio had been “totally destroyed” by the falling object. The object that fell out of the sky was a human body. It belonged to a stowaway on the Kenyan Airways flight from Nairobi to London. To this day, the police have not been able to identify the man. Last week, he was buried in London in an unmarked grave. There are many like him. They keep quiet counsel in unvisited graves and their stories vanish with them.

Who’s interested in a flying car? A Silicon Valley startup called NFT is accepting a refundable deposit of $5k if you’d like to join its Founders Club and buy one of the 1,500 limited edition models they plan to build. The car will have folding wings, a 150mph top speed, a 250 mile range powered by six batteries, and dual gas motors to charge the batteries. The plane is called Aska, Japanese for flying bird, and will set you back by a modest $789,000 on delivery. There’s no word yet on whether the car will include floor mats.

Finally, a nugget from history. Diogenes, aka Diogenes the Cynic, a Greek philosopher, was once kidnapped by pirates who planned to sell him off into servitude. So, they asked him to list his skills so they could find the right master for the right price. He replied, “My skills lie in leading men. So, you should look for a buyer who needs a master.” The expletives yelled by the pirates in response is not documented but I think it’s safe to assume that some choice words were exchanged. This story ought be told to everyone who goes to business school. 🙂

Stay safe. Have a wonderful week ahead. Do write back, wave your hands, blink your eyes or anything that lets me know that you’re reading this 🙂

Boomers vs millennials, vaccinations and gratitude

I listened to an interesting podcast by Ezra Klein (who works for the New York Times), in which he talked to Jill Filipovic (a left leaning lawyer and activist) and Helen Andrews (a right leaning journalist) about the generational fissure that has developed between the “boomers” (born in the 1950s and the early 60s) and the “millennials” (born in the 1980s to the mid 90s). There is a great millennial rage in America today that can be summarized as “Ok boomer, let’s talk about how your generation’s self-obsession and narcissism left my generation behind.”

Are the boomers leaving the world better than they found it? Are the millennials a self-pitying lot who want to blame everything on everyone else? Here’s a summary of what I heard.

Boomers are possibly the most intellectually and politically polarized generation. They have always stayed split down the middle between the left and the right. So, the argument heard from boomers (especially the left liberal ones) is that “Hold on. No generation is perfect. There were political forces in our generational cohort who didn’t do the right thing for America and the future generations. So, let’s not blame the entire generation.” There is some fairness to this defensiveness. As things turned out in America over the last five or six decades, the liberals won the culture battles and the conservatives won the political wars. Even so, it’s a stretch to say that the boomers have left things better than they found it. The fact is we are now living on a planet that is flooding and burning.

The great mistake, if we can call it that, of the liberal boomer politicians was their transformation from being champions of the working class to becoming warriors in identity battles. The old left became the new left in the 1970s, and it left the American middle class at the mercy of the libertarian and conservative decision makers, who used the opportunity to systematically hollow out the working class during the Reagan years, and then performed a volte face by claiming to be the working class champions during the Trump years. The clashes between the boomers and the millennials have somehow led us to Joe Biden, who’s a pre-boomer and from the old left, as the POTUS, an astonishing turn of events.

The other reality is that America is a much more diverse society than it was when the boomers were growing up and watching “Leave it to Beaver.” We have more immigrants from more countries. We are much more racially diverse. We are now in fertile territory to be more creative than ever. Technology has played a huge role in fostering this creativity. The millennials are taking to new forms of expression on social media like ducks to water, and using it to educate the boomers who grew up amidst comfort and in a monoculture. This is indeed a positive offshoot of technology.

It is important to note that the leaders of movements in the 60s and 70s were not boomers. Martin Luther King Jr was not a boomer. Neither were Gloria Steinem or Malcolm X. Boomers were the foot soldiers in their movements. They showed up. They put their bodies on the line. But, they did not come up with the intellectual underpinnings of such great movements, which changed America profoundly.

The boomers, as a generation, may have committed their most egregious faults when it came to higher education. They were that generation in which college educated Americans went from under 10% to over 30% and yet on their watch, college education costs have skyrocketed. It’s almost as if the boomers have climbed to the top and pulled the ladder up behind them. We now face a situation where the millennials are destined to be less affluent than their parents and even their grandparents. The millennials who are relatively lucky – folks who graduated from college, members of a professional class, etc – are going to be okay. The problem is that there are so many members of the millennial generation who are Black and Brown who are going to do much worse than the previous generations.

The boomers are accused of dismantling the church and shredding the concepts of marriage and families. Personally, I don’t see these as problems. These institutions are old, imperfect and not all of them are beloved anyway. Surveys show that the millennials view marriage differently from previous generations. They marry in their thirties but have had the stablest marriages in half a century. They tend to have happy marriages. They view marriage as a capstone rather than as a cornerstone. Marriage isn’t a place from which millennials build life. Rather, it is something that arrives when they’ve put the other pieces in place. This approach has unleashed a tidal wave of women participating in the workforce. At the same time, millennial women are on track to have 25 percent of them be childless. They have been left to handle this biological reality largely on their own, without much help. As people like to point out, there are more dogs than children in San Francisco now.

The real failure of the boomer generation was not in that they weakened institutions, but in that they did not replace these older institutions with something different and something that would support those who followed them, especially when it came to things like race and gender. The work of building a country that hosts a variety of viewpoints and people who want different things, and strains to meet their aspirations remains an unfinished business.

In other news, I got vaccinated today 🙂 We took the Johnson and Johnson shot, a single dose vaccine. All good so far, other than a feeling of low key simmering and mild internal heat (not quite a fever). I guess I’m done with the vaccine until they tell us that we will need to do this again. It feels incredible even now when I look back on the last 12 months. Back in April last year, I watched the numbers at work crater and the business fall off a cliff. There was a moment I thought that everything was about to go under. A year later, we are still here, standing on our feet, a little shaken, but most things are okay, even stronger in many ways. Not to mention, the providential escape we had last November when Biden won the election. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have Trump in charge of distributing vaccines and restoring normalcy. More miraculously, we now have several vaccines, all of which are showing that they can reduce hospitalization and death rates to nearly zero. It’s like we narrowly escaped being struck by a meteor. Now more than ever, as we see the light emerging at the end of the tunnel, it’s a time to be grateful and humble and get vaccinated and find our way out of danger.

Stay safe. Please get vaccinated as soon as you can. Have a wonderful week ahead.