Archive for year: 2020

As we locked our bike outside the grocery store, the security guard said to the customer in the wheelchair, “they don’t know nothing, whether the virus came from a lab or not. I tell you it was either the Chinese or the CIA, one or the other.” While we doubt being more transparent on pandemic data will persuade that security guard (we did not, btw, feel more secure with him outside the store), we do continue to call for leaders to be more upfront about data and criteria for policies. Our fair state of Washington is no exception. We continue to assert Washington State leadership ranks near the top in the US in dealing with Covid-19, but they need to do even better. Over a month ago we called for testing and tracing and finally two weeks ago Governor Inslee started talking about it and now the state is trying to hire 800 tracers to get to a total of 1500 (an NPR report claims this is too few). They should have done this well over a month ago. And they are still only talking about quarantine facilities for the homeless. We need to provide quarantine facilities for everyone who is infected and for those who come into contact with the infected (the latter are quarantined until they test negative). There are plenty of hotels available for this. How do we come up with these conclusions? Our second story below shows which countries have been successful not in just flattening the curve but in reducing infections and deaths to near zero. All of these places test, trace and isolate (and require masks). Wuhan did too. I know it’s in vogue to hate China and we ourselves have written an entire book about the challenge of China and what we need to do to counter it. But we must always be guided by data and evidence and both point to the success of China’s central quarantine efforts (ours can be far more humane and without the authoritarianism of China’s). Lockdowns have flattened the curve in most countries. But the goal should be to bring the infection and death rate to near zero. To do that, current evidence points to test, trace and isolate using central quarantine facilities. As we await our leaders response, we isolate ourselves to examine Vietnamese cyber hacking of China, country data on test, trace and isolate, and the state of R&D around the world. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, thinking of the late, great Dr. John on Piano Night while prescribing cures for the world’s blues.

(Last minute update: Late yesterday Governor Inslee released a risk assessment dashboard with explanations and a way to track progress on among other things, testing and tracing capacity and isolation and quarantine capacity. Washington is now very transparent on data and criteria for where the state is and what is needed for opening up various aspects of the economy. Huge kudos to the Governor and his team for doing this. As we wrote above, Washington’s leadership has been one of the best in the country in the pandemic. We asked for improvement and they provided it. They deserve our thanks and admiration. If your state/province/country is not doing what Washington is, ask them why not). 

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

Vietnam’s Cyber Hacks Into China for Health

So if you’re a country that suffered from SARS 17 years ago, and word starts to spread of a strange new pneumonia disease spreading in Wuhan, China, and like any rational actor, you don’t trust the information China’s government is releasing, the natural action is to go searching for the real information in China. Which apparently is what Vietnam did in early January when a Vietnamese-tied cyber actor called APT32 hacked into China’s Ministry of Emergency Management and Wuhan’s local government. According to cybersecurity company, FireEye, “The first known instance of this campaign was on Jan. 6, 2020, when APT32 sent an email with an embedded tracking link (Figure 1) to China’s Ministry of Emergency Management.” We assume that the Chinese Ministry’s equivalent of our 84-year-old Mom opened the link allowing Vietnam into the Ministry’s network. Vietnam’s government is denying any cyber hacking of China but Reuters reports that FireEye’s senior manager Ben Read asserts, “These attacks speak to the virus being an intelligence priority – everyone is throwing everything they’ve got at it, and APT32 is what Vietnam has.” China, one of the biggest cyber attackers in the world (but for some reason Americans fixate on Russia), is condemning such attacks on their agencies. Viruses are rampant online and off during the pandemic.

Countries that Test, Trace and Isolate Do the Best

With sports at a halt, instead of reading baseball box scores or analyzing NBA playoff statistics, we find ourselves poring over Covid-19 data from around the world. It is not nearly as much fun, much more scary and certainly more confusing. But it is intellectually stimulating and as you see in our chart below, countries that have a high number of tests per confirmed case have much lower death rates. That’s a correlation without much meaning but what it is showing is that countries with large number of tests per confirmed cases likely have a much more accurate reading of the number of infections in the country. As Our World In Data explains, “A country that performs very few tests for each case it confirms is not testing widely enough for the number of confirmed cases to paint a reliable picture of the true spread of the virus…The large number of tests for each confirmed case in Taiwan and Australia suggests that the number of confirmed cases paint a much more reliable picture of the true number of infections in these countries.” Vietnam* is the true star in this regard and Vietnam appears to have the pandemic under control, as do Taiwan, New Zealand and South Korea. What do those countries also have in common? Each of them have robust test, trace and central quarantine programs. If your state, province or country is not doing that or is not rapidly gearing up to do so, ask them robustly why not. They will not get anywhere close to normal without it. NPR is tracking which U.S. states are prepared to trace as is testandtrace.com. I hope they soon report on which states are prepared to quarantine more intelligently.

**I often hear critics of test, trace and isolate claim that it can only be accomplished in small countries. Vietnam is not small. It has a population of 94,6 million. Yes, it’s smaller than the U.S. but it is not small. And Vietnam’s economy is about 1/100 the size of the U.S. America has no excuse for not being able to institute test, trace and isolate. If Vietnam can do it, than so can the U.S.

R&D Around the World

In reading some back and forth about whether the U.S. is investing enough in R&D, we became curious about the rest of the world. After all, it is research and development that gets us out of this pandemic. It turns out UNESCO has excellent data on how much countries spend on R&D. In the bubble chart below you can see how much countries are spending on R&D (the size of the bubble), their R&D expenditures as a percent of GDP (larger the further right you go) and the number of researchers per million inhabitants (more the higher up you go). The star is Israel (star of David?) which has the second highest R&D expenditure as a percent of GDP and the most researchers per million inhabitants. This helps explain why Israel has such a successful high tech economy and perhaps is an indicator of why they have thus far** so successfully contained Covid-19. Note other successes such as South Korea, Japan, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland. And, frankly, the U.S. doesn’t look so bad by this measure. But there’s certainly room for improvement and immigration restrictions which cut off talent, drive and innovation, will harm America’s R&D capability in the future.

**The words “thus far” should be used in all analysis of Covid-19

It is easy to be dazed, confused and appalled during these strange times. We confusedly dance with the heterogeneous data coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic like the Nicholas Brothers* searching for their tap shoes in Elmer Lake, Oklahoma.** Take one of a thousand examples we could offer, the list of the U.S. towns and cities with the highest Covid-19 death rates per 100,000 people. What do Bellingham, WA; NYC; Greeley, CO; Pittsfield, Massachusetts and the other towns have in common? No idea. It is easy to be appalled at the most incompetent wannabe dictator since Commodus. The U.S. President claims dictatorial powers on one hand and with the other one does nothing about testing, tracing or nearly anything else. It is easy to be dazed by the fact we may never be able to attend a baseball game this summer, nor a concert or any other large gathering. As we wonder, worry and lament all of these things, we turn to Haiti for hope (Editor: Good God, are we that doomed?!!!). The country that has suffered earthquakes, hurricanes, misrule, criminal abuse by the UN and much more, gives us salve. That’s because the Haitian musical collective Lakou Mizik teamed up with New Orleans’ legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band to write a song that reminds the world of all the good of Haiti—flowers, rolled coconuts, avocados, cassava bread, and certainly its vibrant spirit. So if we can find beauty and hope there, surely we can team up like those wonderful Haitian and NOLA musicians to find and work for good in our world. While you pick up your instrument we notice what’s filling the world’s vacuum, examine the collapse of international trade and provide a mea culpa for a recent mistake. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, Creole for important international information and data.

*The Nicholas Brother accomplished what Fred Astaire called the greatest dance performance ever

**The setting for Footloose

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

Filling the Vacuum

The other day I was cleaning up a mess with our upright vacuum and had to get down on the floor to pick up something wedged in a corner when the vacuum tipped over and hit me in the head. Which is all to say the world hates a vacuum, including of American leadership. That’s why some European countries and Canada are working to fill it. Or as the Global News puts it, “Canada has formally joined a German-French coalition aimed at saving the international world order from destruction by various world dictators…” Many countries are concerned at the abandonment of global leadership by the U.S. since Trump became president, and are not ready to hand over the keys to an authoritarian China. So, new alliances and institutions are being built, without the involvement of the U.S. Japan is also part of the nascent Germany-France-Canada effort. Japan has been busy in the last year creating new geopolitical partnerships. Last year, we told you of Japan’s creating an alliance with Vietnam. This is all good news. The world needs democracies to build new international structures even if the U.S. does not participate. The old world order is dead or just about. Long live the new world order…as long as its built by liberalized societies and not authoritarian ones.

This image is dedicated to Charlie Mitchell

Crashing Global Trade, Globalization Stands

Many are heralding the end of globalization due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Morticians should hold off, it’s not even on a ventilator yet in our diagnosis. It’s true that global trade has been growing slower than GDP for a number of years but it was still growing until the pandemic. And, of course, globalization is more than trade in goods and services. It is also connectedness through the Internet, financial flows and immigration. The first two are flowing even more since the pandemic, the latter has been in retreat for a few years and is virtually at a stop currently due to pandemic-induced border controls. And now international trade is indeed crashing due to worldwide lockdowns crushing demand. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has created scenarios for how trade might drop in the coming months and year due to the pandemic. In an optimistic scenario, merchandise trade (things you can touch and feel like airplanes, cars, computers and swabs) would fall 13 percent year over year. The worst case scenario? WTO says “global merchandise trade will plummet by 32 percent relative to 2019. This includes a fall in merchandise exports from North America of 40.9 percent, from Asia of 36.2 percent and from Europe of 32.8 percent. Imports would drop by 33.8 percent to North America, 31.5 percent to Asia and 28.9 percent to Europe.” Ultimately the world progresses past the pandemic by cooperating, including through trade, but the short to mid term is scary indeed.

Naughty By Nature

When we wrote on April 2 about a study in Nature Medicine we interpreted as saying the Covid-19 virus had possibly been spreading in humans for years and might not have originated in Wuhan, we noted “It is still early days in the study of this virus and the pandemic so take everything, including what I write, with a large grain of salt.” We regrettably must grab a rather large size salt shaker because thanks to our friend and doctor, Jim Roos, we have discovered we misinterpreted the Nature article. Jim explains to us that the Nature article authors “do NOT suggest the virus entered the human population and then spread within the human population for years or decades, gradually evolving until it caused human disease.” Instead the article suggests “a series of spillovers,” that Jim explains are “similar to MERS with its ‘short transmission chains’ that ultimately terminate.” Every time one of the “spillovers” occurs, there is a chance the virus will mutate and one of those mutations could “develop the key protein (the polybasic cleavage site) that seems to be necessary for human-to-human transmission.” So, Jim explained to us, “it’s not that the virus has been passing WITHIN the population but rather that it ‘kept trying to’.” Jim tried to make us feel better by pointing out it appears the NIH director similarly misinterpreted the article. Unfortunately, according to Trump Administration rules, this automatically makes us the new head of the NIH. We apologize to the country in advance for any errors we make in that position. One other point: I asked Jim whether the Nature authors’ theory suggest one way or another whether Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan area. He thinks it probably did originate there though he notes he is not a virologist, microbiologist or epidemiologist. You can read his reasoning below:

Jim Roos’ take on geographical origin of Covid-19: The paper does not address the issue of where the spillover event took place. However, I would say that it most likely did take place in Hubei province or nearby. However, it’s possible that it occurred elsewhere with infected people bringing it to Hubei but I would think there would’ve been a similar outbreak near the original location. My reasoning relies on the 2 characteristics of the “spike protein” discussed in the article (RBD, the “receptor binding domain”; and PCS, the “polybasic cleavage site”). The RBD is believed to be a key element of the infectiousness of the virus (i.e. it’s ability to cause infection in humans). Since a very similar RBD has been found in pangolins, the authors theorize that this was already present in the virus when it entered the human population. That is, it could cause an infection in those people who contracted it. But without the PCS, which has NOT been found in an animal host, sustained human-to-human transmission would NOT take place and an outbreak would not ensue. Now if the virus first mutated into its pathogenic form (i.e. had both characteristics) and THEN entered the population, the outbreak would happen in that area soon after since the virus was “ready-made.” If, however, the virus had ONLY the characteristic RBD when it entered humans, it then mutated within the population to form the PCS. HERE’S THE KEY (taken from the paper itself): “Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off.” So as soon as the virus had PCS and was in the human population, the outbreak was inevitable. Now it’s possible that this mutation took place in a person who acquired the infection elsewhere and then moved to Wuhan, but I think this unlikely. And since before this occurred, sustained human-to-human transmission would not take place, I think the time between the spillover event and this mutation would’ve been a matter of weeks. Anyways, that’s my take. Now I am not a virologist or a microbiologist or even an epidemiologist, but I did see Contagion twice.

I limped over to the field of play and Rob put the axe in my hand while showing me how to throw it. Remarkably, defying all expectations, I hit the target. Not perfectly as Rob did every time he tossed the axe with a casualness, strength and precision that was amazing to see, but for a beginner not too long after our third knee surgery I took a bit of pride in the minor accomplishment. Of course, Rob wasn’t recovering from something as lame as knee surgery, he was in temporary remission from cancer which had spread through much of his body. Being a world renowned lumberjack (and school teacher), it is just possible he was tougher than me. He was certainly more thoughtful, erecting a tent for me to sleep in. Rob was a remarkable guy I met in college. A great athlete, an upbeat attitude, a great guy to share a drink and story with. I received word of his death last Friday while on a bike ride. With the closing of our gym due to the coronavirus crisis, the worsening of the weather in Seattle, and my generally being a fair weather bike rider, my outfits to keep warm for bike rides have become increasingly ludicrous. I look like the nerdiest character from a Mad Max movie. But given Rob was prone to dressing a bit crazily himself–he led us into town during the camping trip with everyone dressed up in crazy old western-like gear, he was a lumberjack, after all–on this bike ride I felt dressed perfectly. And perhaps just as perfect, the song Long As I Can See The Light, came on our iPhone as we rode. It was a cover of the old Credence Clearwater number by 80-year-old Louisiana Swamp Pop pioneer Warren Storm. Towards the end of the song a different voice begins singing–74-year-old John Fogerty, founder of CCR, and writer of the song. It was goddamn poignant. The light, of course, was all Rob Waibel, gone far too soon at 54.

Last night it was announced that legendary pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis, one of the great musical patriarchs of New Orleans, died after being hospitalized with Covid-19 symptoms. New Orleans has lost too many icons and legends over the last twelve months and we worry more are to come in this pandemic. RIP Mr. Marsalis. Here is a link to his performance at the 2012 Jazz Fest. Here is a wonderful tribute by his son, Wynton Marsalis.

Without further ado, in a world awash in ado, here’s what you need to know.

Japan Decoupling from China

Over the last many months, “decoupling” was the word de jour of U.S. – China relations analysts (can we get these two countries on a couch in a relationship therapist’s office ASAP?). But as we pointed out many weeks ago, Covid-19 will change supply chains more than any event since September 11. One recent example is Japan announcing it will subsidize the moving of Japanese companies production back to Japan or to locations in Southeast Asia. The Yomiuri Shimbun reports the, “government will subsidize establishing buildings and installing equipment for manufacturers that set up production bases in Japan. When firms plan to move their production centers to Southeast Asian countries, the government plans to subsidize the installation of equipment.” Japan’s government is committing up to 200 billion Yen for this effort. Japan, like other countries, is realizing it needs to diversify and spread out its supply chains. The world will be very different even after the pandemic subsides.

Editor: Note Taiwan’s numbers. 

Maybe Both China and the U.S. Lose

One of the issues we examine in our forthcoming book is China’s growing power in the world as the U.S. cedes global leadership. We read much analysis that the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating that trend. During the global financial crisis, the U.S. was a leader in fostering cooperation around the world to contain and mitigate the crisis. During the current pandemic, the Trump Administration has barely provided leadership at home much less abroad. However, even though China has been actively trying to use the pandemic to burnish its brand and smear the U.S., it’s often facing backlash around the world. There is much anger against China in Europe, for example, where people blame China for spreading the virus, and where some of the equipment delivered by China has been found to be faulty. What’s more, China’s economy as we described last week, is badly impacted by the worldwide drop in demand. Plus, there is concern that African countries who are now impacted by the pandemic will default on loans owed to China. And as the story above about Japan decoupling shows, there is likely to be continued supply chain diversification away from China. Its economy may be greatly weakened not just in the short-term but also long-term by the pandemic. It is possible that the two strongest powers in the world both come out of this pandemic weakened as global powers.

It’s Possible Covid-19 Did Not Start in Wuhan

Three weeks ago, which is a century in pandemic time, we wrote about the “Fog of Corona,” i.e. that like in war, much of what we think we know will turn out not to be true. Specifically we wrote, “There are many things the world does not understand about the virus itself and the most effective public policy reactions to it. In fact, we are willing to wager that much of what we think we know will turn out to be wrong in the light of longitudinal studies and time.” In that vein, we bring your attention to a new study published in Nature last week by scientists in the U.S., Scotland, Australia and New Orleans (NOLA really is its own world), that suggests “The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 might have been quietly spreading among humans for years or even decades before the sudden outbreak that sparked a global health crisis.” These scientists studied the virus and its evolutionary path and determined it is possible it jumped from animals to humans many years ago, and perhaps not originally in Wuhan, China. The paper states, “It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission.” It is still early days in the study of this virus and the pandemic so take everything, including what I write, with a large grain of salt (and maybe some anti-viral medication). As the great screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” At least not yet.

Important Last Minute Bonus Story: Masks Might Be Hugely Important

This Twitter thread will be one of the four most important things you read today. It’s about a new study on the importance of encouraging everyone to wear cloth masks. It includes the below graph with “blue countries having norms of mask-wearing for sick people, green countries having no such norms but adopting mask regulations in response to the spread of the virus, and orange countries doing neither.” Authors admit this is preliminary but they will have more data soon. Feel free to send us photos of your cloth masks.

We’re almost finished with The Sympathizer, a novel about a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army who has an outsized ability to see and understand multiple points of view. Perhaps that’s why even though we see Covid-19 spreading darkness around our world, and worry deeply about the future, we also can see glimmers of hope and positive signs. Not least of which is the army of helpers out there. Health care workers, of course, but the neighbor offering help to our Mom, people providing daycare to relatives, Facebook groups formed to help small businesses, arts organizations and other distressed communities. In fact, the hated tech companies have been stalwarts so far in bringing people together. In addition, although I feel like I should be allowed make a citizen’s arrest of certain high level federal officials for negligent homicide, there is great progress being made in testing capabilities in the U.S. so that finally perhaps in six to seven days, America will be able to test at South Korea levels. Not only that but a whole variety of possible effective treatments are being developed around the world. Chinese scientists are making progress on understanding the virus so that we can better contain it. We don’t forget that there have been massive mistakes made by leaders in a whole host of countries, including here in the United States, but because, as we have often noted in this space, the world has continued to improve over the last 100 plus years, we are in much better shape to deal with this pandemic, almost despite ourselves. So yes, we present to you the Trump/Xi Axis of Evil Stupidity, the China Propaganda Machine and a Less Free World, all stories of darkness. But the light is seeping through. And as we showed over a year ago here, the world can lean on each other, if we just sing it loud enough.

We can’t get videos to embed in Mailchimp anymore. Any Mailchimp experts out there, please email me. In the meantime, click on the Everlasting Arms video link

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

The Trump/Xi Axis of Evil Stupidity

In our upcoming book about the challenge of China and how the U.S. and world should react to it, I document how the Trump Administration has trashed the post-World War II/post Cold War liberalized world order. I also explain how that “opens the door for China to remake the world order with Chinese characteristics.” More and more of the challenges in the world are transnational with a global pandemic being the obvious current one. But instead of cooperation among countries, we are often seeing competition. In addition, many countries are using the crisis as an opportunity to score points or push forward nefarious goals. Just this week alone, rather than working together, Trump provocatively called Covid-19 the “Chinese flu” while one of his officials called it “Kung Flu” to an Asia American reporter. Meanwhile, China has started a full-blown propaganda push on Corona (see story below), flew J-11 fighters into Taiwan’s airspace and is kicking out American journalists from China, including those from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. We suggest Trump, Xi* and their minions be quarantined to an island while the rest of us get to work.

*Criticism of the Trump Administration is not to say there is a moral equivalency between China and the United States. Trump is an incompetent, narcissistic buffoon, but a duly elected one with checks and balances of a liberalized, federalized society. Xi’s constraints come within an authoritarian unelected regime with no way for the people to change it or its direction. But, if we want America to improve and to continue as a functioning democracy, we must maintain a high standard on our leaders and the government—it is even more important to criticize them than China for that reason. That I have to write such a long footnote explaining this obvious fact, knowing that many people will attack what I wrote in this story, nearly causes one to despair…except that we are a fan of footnotes! Regardless of length. In fact, one day we’d like to write a book with one sentence and the rest of it a very, very long footnote.

The China Propaganda Machine

The most important step a country can take during a global pandemic is to take full advantage of it for propaganda purposes. China has obviously learned this lesson so well it could write a dissertation—in tabloid style. Early in the week, a China Foreign Ministry spokesperson tweeted, “It might be the U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”  Yes, China is engaged in a worldwide propaganda effort to convince people that the virus did not start in China. They are also propagating the line that China “bought the world time” and the world is increasingly thankful for it. They did not buy the world time. A China government spokesperson retweeted fake videos of Italian citizens clapping along to the PRC national anthem, as if Italians believe China is their savior. China has also been claiming to be giving away equipment and masks to places like Italy. In fact, they are selling them. However, there are plenty of Chinese, not the government, who are generously giving aid (and comfort) in this challenging time. We ourselves received a wonderful email from a Chinese partner worried about us in Seattle: “We are deeply concerned with the situation in your area. If you need any assitance, please let us know.  We will be more than happy to offer a hand to our friends.” This is why it is so foolish and short-sighted of Trump and others to call Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and otherwise engage in racist bullsh**. Go after China’s government strategically and intelligently, but win over the Chinese people, who often have been and continue to be, heroes in this pandemic.

World Less Free

If you are one of the many people in the world currently locked down due to Corona, and are looking for something to read to cheer yourself up, we don’t recommend Freedom House’s latest Freedom in the World Report. The world, as you’ve probably noticed, is becoming less free, and has been deteriorating since 2009.  According to the report, “64 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties while those in just 37 experienced improvements.” Freedom House notes that minority rights are under attack, including in democracies and spell out the bad consequences of this, “The progression illustrated how violations of minority rights erode the institutional and conventional barriers that protect freedom for all individuals in a given society.” The same with immigrants: “Attacks on the rights of immigrants continue in other democratic states, contributing to a permissive international environment for further violations.” The whole world is looking shaky, and this report documents it, “The unchecked brutality of autocratic regimes and the ethical decay of democratic powers are combining to make the world increasingly hostile to fresh demands for better governance.” And what about one of the most important countries in the world and the second-largest economy?  “China pressed ahead with one of the world’s most extreme programs of ethnic and religious persecution, and increasingly applied techniques that were first tested on minorities to the general population, and even to foreign countries.” You may want to pick up whatever crappy book Oprah’s peddling instead.

In the spring of 2003 we were returning from a trip to China and we caught a cold (the cold caught us?). A day or so later as we drove home from the office our right eye felt strange and we realized goop was streaming out of it. Not a trickle, more like a gushing river. Needless to say we found this alarming and it made driving difficult. We had no experience with something like this and were frankly considering panicking. At one point we saw a cop on the side of the road and briefly considered pulling over and asking the police what the hell was going on with our eye. But we calmed down enough to make our way home where we asked our wife, “what the hell is going on with our eye?!!!” By this time our eye was completely bright red and swollen—we looked like an extra on a demented horror movie set. Our wife also had no idea what was going on so we made a doctor’s appointment for first thing the next morning. We wore dark sunglasses at the doctor’s office lest we frighten the children and other innocents there with our incredibly gory looking eye. We were shuffled to one of the examination rooms and when our long-time doctor walked in asking how we were doing we took off our sunglasses. She looked at us and said, “that’s the worst case of pink eye I’ve ever seen.” But we did not have SARS which was running rampant in China while we were there, although during the first part of the trip one would not have known it from the Chinese media. So while we are not panicking like in the car drive home in 2003, we will act cautiously during our trip to Japan which we leave for tomorrow. In the meantime we squint at China’s excuses for not liberalizing, hold a microscope to world cancer rates and raise our eyebrows at Saudi Arabia’s treatment of a female rapper. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, announcing we are running for president…in 2044…when we’ll be old enough to be a candidate for president.

International Need to Know will be off next week during our trip to Japan but back on March 12 either from Seattle or in quarantine.

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

No Excuses for Not Liberalizing

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all experienced fast economic growth over a long-time period and then as their working age populations peaked, reverted to slower economic growth. See the charts below to illustrate this. As they grew economically, they liberalized their politics. China has experienced rapid economic growth over a long-time period but its working age population has now also peaked. The China Communist Party has promised fast economic growth and by doing so has maintained power. But China’s fast economic growth is now history. So why not liberalize politically like other Asian nations did?  Undoubtedly the answer from the CCP will be that their continued rule is the only way to ensure stability in China. But if you’re going to have slow economic growth, why would people continue to give up freedom of information, assembly, speech and other freedoms? People may give up those liberties if they perceive by doing so high economic growth is guaranteed. But now that fast economic growth is over, we doubt the Chinese people will be fine with no political freedom. We delve into this much more deeply in our upcoming book on China and the U.S.

Cancer Deaths Decreasing

The world is awash in fear of the Corona virus (and if the world was more diligent about washing, perhaps we would not have so much to fear). We’re a bit nervous ourselves given we’re headed to Japan tomorrow. But one of the tragic stories of Corona in Wuhan is that patients, including those with cancer, are being ignored as the city focuses all its attention on the virus. But there is good news about cancer in general in the world. According to Ourworldindata.org, the age-standardized cancer death rate is decreasing. The overall number of people dying from cancer has increased over the years but that’s due to there being more people in the world overall (a lower percentage of a greater number of people is still high). And the cancer death rate not age-standardized has increased because there are more old people in the world and older people are more likely to get cancer. But the best way to assess how the world is doing with cancer is age-standardized cancer death rates, normalizing the data to adjust for there being more people in the world and a higher percentage of older people. The age-standardized cancer death rate is down due to fewer people smoking and better treatments now available. Let’s hope it continues to go down in the coming years, viruses or no.

Mecca Rapper is Sugar Candy

Because we miss being surrounded by music in New Orleans, let’s finish the week with a story about a female rapper in Saudi Arabia. Asayel Slay released a rap song on YouTube that led to Saudi authorities to call for her arrest. What does Slay rap about? According to the BBC, she “raps about women in the city of Mecca” calling them “powerful and beautiful.” One of her lyrics goes, “Our respect to other girls but the Mecca girl is sugar candy.” This obviously inflammatory lyric led the governor of Mecca Khaled al-Faisal to tweet, “it insults the customs of Mecca.” The video is no longer available on Youtube and Slay’s account has been suspended which if this is a decision by Youtube, makes us want to create a video criticizing Youtube. We look forward to a world where Asayel Slay is free to rap about what she wants and the world ignores D.J. Khaled (how is this guy still a thing?).

Asayel Slay – Girl Of Mecca (Official Music Video) 21,099 views