Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Contributor(s): Fareed Zakaria |

Join us for this online public event with Fareed Zakaria who will be talking about new book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been shaken to its core three times. 11 September 2001, the financial collapse of 2008 and - most of all - Covid-19. Each was an asymmetric threat, set in motion by something seemingly small, and different from anything the world had experienced before. Lenin is supposed to have said, 'There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.' This is one of those times when history has sped up.

In his timely new book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, Fareed Zakaria, one of the 'top ten global thinkers of the last decade' (Foreign Policy), foresees the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. In ten surprising, hopeful 'lessons', he writes about the acceleration of natural and biological risks, the obsolescence of the old political categories of right and left, the rise of 'digital life', the future of globalization and an emerging world order split between the United States and China. He invites us to think about how we are truly social animals with community embedded in our nature, and, above all, the degree to which nothing is written - the future is truly in our own hands.

Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) hosts CNN's flagship international affairs show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, which airs across the world to 220 million households. He writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, which reaches between 80-100 million readers every month. He is the author of The Future of Freedom (2003), The Post-American World (2008) and In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015).

You can order the book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis, collaboratively producing a roadmap for the future.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19