The Sky Isn’t Falling

Our world is more stable than we think

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK
Published May 16, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 25, 2009

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  • Posted By: drewand @ 05/25/2009 3:22:57 PM

    Three words...Worst Case Scenario

  • Posted By: distantsmoke @ 05/16/2009 10:50:42 PM

    When Pres Bush was Pres. and the economy was IMPROVING Islamweek was here to tell us the end was nigh and we shouldn't be "suckered" by all those positive indicators. As soon as the DEMOCRATS have control of ALL three branches of government and the stock market loses a third of it's value, well here is good old Islamweek telling us to relax, it's not as bad as those awful Republicans want us to think it is. Your agenda is not only NOT hidden, but it's wearing peacock feathers and dancing on main street. Democrats=all that is good; Republicans=all that is vile, evil, god awful, and worst of all not ecologically friendly!!!!!
    It just amazes me that so many Americans are willing to wear the rose colored glasses you give them with every issue you publish.

    • Posted By: NeitherLeftNorRight @ 05/22/2009 12:34:42 PM

      Oh my lord, does it always have to be Democrats vs. Republicans in these comments sections? This article has absolutely NOTHING to do with partisan politics - it's about our paradigm and the way we tend to think about the world around us. Some things are bigger than petty partisan debating. Open your eyes.

  • Posted By: Savage1701 @ 05/19/2009 8:35:14 AM

    Oh, and by the way FZ, that incredible response by Mexico (how a whole country can be described as the epicenter of a virus is laughable) meant nothing. Swine flu is everywhere including 48 out of 50 states in our country. Mexico knowingly hid the virus for at least a couple of weeks and the best guess right now is it started in a hog producing area that had terrible sanitation conditions. That does not merit a "Thank you" in my mind. Rather, it more merits a phrase that begins with a word describing a small threaded rod typically found with a bolt on it, and ending with the word "you".

    Wake up and get a clue or find a dumber audience. I'm not drinkin' the Kool-Aid on that one either.

  • Posted By: Savage1701 @ 05/18/2009 1:47:05 PM

    Edutech, you are right on. This is sensationalist anti-sensationalism. Now that the media, FZ included, has created all these social anxieties, they then want to do the equivalent of a slap across the face of the everyman/everywoman and say, "Get a grip!" Which, of course, leaves everyone still anxious and now confused about what to be anxious about.

    So let's take your hypothetical situation and assume that this flu antigen-shifted into a virulent form with a horrific mortality rate. In that case, the dissemination of the information would then indeed match the underlying knowledge about the information. My son's school letter would have been correct - at that level of mortality, a 2-week supply of food would be required. Actually, it would probably be more on the order of a 2-year supply of food, water, fuel, firearms, and a remote cabin in the wilderness.

    But, again, the media hyped this story beyond belief, insinuating that no blend of flu like this has ever existed (it has), almost none of us has any immunity to it (which we know is patently false given the high survival rate and past swine flus in the 70's), and that its source will never be found (turns out all of a sudden the epicenter was a swine farming area with horrible sanitation that people lived in close proximity too). This brought the tin-foil-helmet crowd out in droves in the internet.

    If H5N1 ever aerosolizes we will be in a world of death. H1N1 will need a vaccine this fall since many flus return for a second time in a more virulent form. Those are highly probable scenarios and disseminating that information ought to cause some social anxiety if they were occurring or stand a high chance of occurring. For H1N1, it's true.

    I don't know that I'd be yelling at the CDC though. Flu spreads because people spread it. it's not containable as it once was when populations densities were lower and countries were more isolated. How many variants of swine flu made their way through Asia for all of the thousands of years before there were trade routes with Europe? We'll never know. One thing is for sure - containing it now is far more difficult, and I don't blame the CDC for that.

  • Posted By: edutech @ 05/18/2009 12:07:10 PM

    It is such a shame that Newsweek and Mr. Zakaria has to now take the opposite sensationalist stance for headlines. Swine flu is still a problem and the WHO may, in fact, still declare a pandemic. Pandemic level is not indicative of mortality but rather morbidity. Although one terrible mutuation and we could be looking at many more dead. Let's hope that this thing fizzles instead of blaming health officials for warning us. If people were dying at the rate of avian flu (60-70%), you'd, no doubt, be yelling that they didn't do enough!

  • Posted By: jvoorhies @ 05/18/2009 11:54:50 AM

    Some design aspects don't change when you move to the web from print. His photo ought to face in towards the center of the screen.

  • Posted By: Savage1701 @ 05/18/2009 9:23:46 AM

    People today confuse the dissemination of information with knowledge about said information and/or the ability to influence that which is the cause of the information. They are not the same.

    Consider this flu and start moving slowly back in time. My guess is that when the time machine hits about 1960 or 1970, no one would have really known about Mexico, antigen composition of the virus, or even bothered to attempt a vaccines. We would have just perceived we had a summer flu, not unheard of, that tended to be little more than a nuisance to most people. Sadly, as with every other flu, a few sick, elderly, or young people would not have made it.

    The only real result is yet another media-engineered bout of social anxiety. FZ is as big a contributor to this as anyone else in his line of work.

    You don't think this is ridiculous? I got a letter from my son's school that was essentially a disaster guide and advised us to have a 2-week food supply on hand to weather the impending societal disruptions. We, as a society, have truly lost our marbles.

    • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/18/2009 10:10:32 AM

      Yes, Savage1701, in simpler times past news was high in factual content and low in editorial comment. The fact of the flu as opposed to "what to do about it and how panicked you should be". The news was fifteen minutes around 7 AM, fifteen minutes, weather and all, at about 5 PM, and fifteen minutes at 10 PM. Today, the news is twenty four hours nonstop. This leads to the need to say something. It's the "something" hours where all of the useless banter sometimes generates unnecessary problems. Often you can see in the glazed over eyes of the narrator, who must not stop talking, a lack of much understanding of what is being said. If we must name it, I like to call it "cheap talk". Little of it is news. Cheers, old savage.

  • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/17/2009 10:48:48 AM

    Thanks, Mexico. We could try to return the favor by dealing in some other way with our drug problem than we are presently doing. We could also have a ceremony where our two leaders flip a coin to see which one offers statehood to the other. Don't laugh. Just analyze the problems that both countries have and think about how a merger could go to solve them all.

    • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/17/2009 8:30:46 PM

      Just think of how cheap the border fence would be if we only had to fence what is now the southern border of Mexico. See, I told you it was a good deal.

      • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/18/2009 9:05:01 AM

        We could save Social Security, too. Cut the payments in half. Wait. Don't panic. With the United States being part of Mexico, all of our old (us, we) could move to Mexico where everything is half price and the climate is warm in the winter. Then, in the summer, the mountains there are cool. Our old could replace all of the people there who could travel north to the good jobs on the Old USA. All of our children could be bilingual, smarter in other words. It's a natural. Think about it.

  • Posted By: Cazador72 @ 05/17/2009 9:01:52 PM

    Fareed, as usual, a very insightful post on your part.

    However, I think your ending note on the Swine Flu fiasco is not the most helpful one. I just recently won a bet with my prediction that the Swine flu would not last three weeks in the news cycle. I was also aware that increased action by governments would make it seem as if there was no problem originally. The fact is... there wasn't! The Swine flu strand wasn't any more dangerous than more common flu strands to begin with. More people have sadly died in the world for not wearing seatbelts since this news broke than over this so-called "impeding pandemic". Do you remember about 10 years ago when shark attacks off the coast of Florida were being reported steadily over a summer? Many people decided against going to the beach, which affected local tourism. Some right wing politicians even said Castro was "training sharks to attack" Americans! It turned out that during that summer there were actually less shark attacks than in previous years but media attention (there was nothing else going on) was actually causing panic and giving the wrong picture of reality.

    The problem is that by constantly crying wolf over stuff like this, the day a real threat happens many will ignore it. We are a nation on a steady diet of fear by politicians and the media, and while Obama hit the right note in calling us to be cautious, Biden actually told people not to fly on airplanes! How about the media exercising a little self-restraint? Too much to hope, because fear sells like nothing else can:

    Threat = Fear = People tuning in = More advertising = Higher revenue.

    It's not a conspiracy; it's spineless people running around like chickens screaming: "the sky is falling!"

    • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/18/2009 9:00:29 AM

      You are right, Cazador72. An old first grade story whose main character is Henny Penny, comes to mind. Also, the question of whether the egg or the chicken came first, as one questions whether we get constant news because we demand it or whether constant "news" is forced through the air to keep us in advertisements. Cazador, the hunter. ¡Hola!

  • Posted By: fuzzytruthseker @ 05/18/2009 4:05:10 AM

    It is true that the world is more stable than we think, and that's what James Lovelock concludes in his ongoing refinements of "Gaia Theory".

    At the same time, we should not be too complacent. A few years ago, even after Lewis and Frank Partnoy had poblished their Wall Street insiders' whistle-blowing books "Liar's Poker" and "F.I.A.S.C.O.", then IMF Director of Research Stanley Fischer told a group of high-powered Economists and Finance Specialists that " We successfully predicted twelve of the last four recesions!"

    Litle did he know that, even as he spoke those wise words, he was missing the warnings of Lewis and Partnoy about the building mega-bubble in the mortgage-financing business and in exotic derivative product fiancil innovation.

    While Fareed's level-headed perspective is welcome, it is always good to err on the side of prudence.

  • Posted By: olderwiser @ 05/17/2009 8:32:56 PM

    We never miss Fareed's Sunday program. Best guests. Best questions. Superb.

    • Posted By: Cazador72 @ 05/17/2009 9:07:08 PM

      I agree, he's one of the very few interviewers that don't have me screaming at the TV, because he asks the right questions and presses the point. Unlike John King and many others, he doesn't soft-ball anybody or retreats when the guest gets testy. His interview with Musharraf today was a case in point.

  • Posted By: Jon L @ 05/17/2009 1:51:25 PM

    The title of this article is amusing. You could take these exact headlines, 'The Sky Isn???t Falling - Our world is more stable than we think' and 'Zakaria: Don't Listen to the Doomsayers', as well as much of the text of this article, replacing ???swine flu??? with ???anthropogenic climate change???, and you'd be pretty accurate, but we all know that Newsweek would never print an article dismissing that particular doomsday scenario.

    You observe the billions of dollars that were largely wasted in the responses of various governments, but particularly Mexico's, yet you, and the rest of the media, seem incapable of extending and extrapolating that to the proposed response to "global warming". And that proposed response will waste several orders of magnitude more in assets, capital, and lives.

    • Posted By: Vigilance @ 05/17/2009 5:37:42 PM

      If Mexico hadn't nearly shut down when it was discovered, the infection rate could have been a lot worse for the swine flu. It was a drastic step.

      Similarly, if we don't get acclimatized to the idea of taking a drastic step or two to reduce greenhouse emissions, things could easily get much worse than they are.

      • Posted By: Jon L @ 05/17/2009 9:06:50 PM

        You mean the global average temperature could NOT increase even MORE than it HASN'T over most of the last decade??? Oh, the horror!

        Every year, actual observations diverge more from IPCC predictions. A few more years of this, and only the most dogmatic of the "consensus" climatologists will be able to claim that the models are valid, let alone accurate, and maintain any self-respect.

        But you'll never hear about that in Newsweek, the coming climate catastrophe will just be '"delayed" a bit, and the IPCC models will "just need some fine-tuning", so that Doomsday will perpetually be about a decade away, or the debate over greenhouse gas emissions will be subtlly shifted to some other impending crisis such as ocean acidification.

  • Posted By: Loden Green @ 05/17/2009 8:13:13 PM

    Hindsight is always 20-20. I think it is unwise to accuse the world's health authorities of crying "Wolf!" just because the dreaded pandemic did not occur--this time. I would rather be safe than sorry. This was not one of Mr. Zakaria's better efforts.

  • Posted By: edwinlee @ 05/17/2009 5:51:14 PM

    Usually I find his comments to be thoughtfut, well reasoned and sometimes helpful. Not this time. Our response to the flu threat has been appropriate.... cautious based on early data of deaths in Mexico, then more relaxed as data confirmed that the flu was relatively mild in most cases. Continued caution is urged because the flu could mutate to something more virulent, and the general population has no immunity to it.

    As to the economic crisis, I'll have to be numbered among those who think this thing is just getting started.... his claim that there are "deep, structural foreces create stability." is made like a religious claim... he doesn't suggest what they are nor does he offer any body of evidence for them.... just his personal, unsubstantiated belief that such forces exist.

    Nature produces stability through a set of operations including massive surpluses, diversity of processes and outcomes, local adaptations (rather than centralized management) and other processes which sustain life as a whole, but simultaneously insure term limjits for all individuals, and almost guarantee term limits for any species. He is suggesting deep forces that preserve the stability of what...the economic system? the American Way of life? The global survival of humanity? The survival of the richest 5%?

    I post articles on Fareed Zakaria's topic on my blog at http://www.dismountingourtiger.com including one on April 22: Stop Whining about taxes, we're in serious trouble!

    Ed Lee
    Bend Oregon

  • Posted By: Vigilance @ 05/17/2009 5:35:53 PM

    I have more respect for Mr. Zakaria than any other young journalist working today. His articles are measured, rational, and always urge stability in troubled times, and present the facts in such a way as to inspire reassurance, not panic.

    Bravo, Fareed. Keep up the good work.

  • Posted By: rrobeson @ 05/17/2009 5:07:35 PM

    The problem is what do we do looking ahead? Did we learn anything from this crisis? Did Mexico need to waste those billions of dollars? Did that really slow the epidemic, somehow I think not since from the beginning every medical source said that once it reaches that point, it's already all over the world (and it was). So I guess we should learn not to repeat Mexico's mistake as a futile gesture of sacrifice where none was warranted.

  • Posted By: LadyintheDark45 @ 05/17/2009 4:57:08 PM

    It makes more sense to prepare for the worst and then give a sigh of relief when it doesn't materialize than to let disease become pan-lethal and then try to play catch up. It's not the fault of WHO or the CDC if people run around in useless masks and the media - instead of dispensing accurate information - goes into hyperdrive. Read the sensationally titled but well researched "The Coming Plague" for some facts and potential scenarios. There's no need to panic in any case since fear never made anyone more logical. On the other hand, this is an H1N1 virus like the killer that took out more people than the war after WWI - if it spreads the same way, it's not the first wave of infection that's deadly, it's the second, so watch the southern hemisphere during their coming winter to see how it plays out.

  • Posted By: Jon L @ 05/17/2009 2:28:19 PM

    "Why did the predictions of a pandemic turn out to be so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it would have been difficult to ignore major international health organizations and governments when they were warning of catastrophe."

    It is the job of WHO and other such bodies to issue warnings. And journalists apparently believe it is their job to expand on those warnings and blow them out of all reasonable proportion, to scare the crap out of the mouthbreathers, thus selling more newspapers, magazines, and website hits. Just do a search of media articles in the week after the 'swine flu' warnings. Do the majority of the headlines bear any similarities to the actual text of the warning? No.

    "I think there is a broader mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can describe it in great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we can rarely anticipate the human response to that crisis."

    Fareed, you are correct in asserting that there is a problem with "the way we look at the world", but it is much more than an underestimation of the "human response". The problem is that some humans are so arrogant that they believe that nothing is so complex that our human institutions do not have the capacity to measure, model, understand, predict, and remedy it, immediately and accurately. The concept that "Once we see a problem, we can describe it in great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences", is RARELY true on a decadal timescale - it takes science generations just to describe a problem, let alone understand "all its possible consequences - particularly when it comes to complex systems such as the human body, the biosphere, the global climate, the global economy, etc. Yet for some reason, even after we have been proven wrong time and time again, most people, but especially those in the media, seem to want to continue to believe that we always have the right answer THIS time.

    o believe that

  • Posted By: The Messiah @ 05/17/2009 12:52:01 PM

    Actually it's much worse than the sky falling... The economy is falling due to inept and corrupt politicians in DC. Tens of millions will die as a result of the crimes of the criminals on Corruption Hill.

    As for the swine flu, it's very real. It demonstrated the lack of ability of the world to deal with a bio terrorist attack, which should make all terrorists very excited.

  • Posted By: rockefeller @ 05/17/2009 7:53:07 AM

    all i can say is that i like the new look of the site, much more like the TIME, hehe

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