Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling—and best-regarded—science and economics writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic “we are about to find out how robust civilisation is” and that “the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known.” Given that Ridley’s best-known book is 2010’s The Rational Optimist, those dire words caught some of his fans by surprise.

Ridley’s next book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (Harper), will be published in May. It touches on many questions now of acute interest, including how to set the stage for major breakthroughs in medicine and technology. Innovation, the book argues, “cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians.”

In late March, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie spoke with Ridley via Skype from their respective self-quarantines in New York and Northumberland, England. They discussed the political response to COVID-19, Ridley’s longstanding distrust of viruses and bats, and when we’ll be able to reopen the world economy.

Reason: You are the rational optimist. But when the coronavirus hit North America and Europe, you wrote a couple of pieces that were striking to me because of the pessimism involved. You talked about how you thought we would never be faced with something like this. Can you explain how the emergence of this pandemic has shaken some of your beliefs about progress?

Ridley: Well, the first thing I should say is that I’ve never believed that the world is the best of all possible worlds and can’t be improved—you know, that we’ve already reached nirvana. One of the things I’m very clear about in The Rational Optimist is there are still problems to be solved. There are still threats. There are still risks. I personally think we’ve been worrying about the wrong risks, and this is a reminder that we have been doing that. But I’ll hold my hands up and say I was not out there saying, “Watch out. There’s a pandemic coming.” I wish I had been.

But back in 1999, I was asked to write a short book about the future of disease, and I did say in that if we do have a pandemic that goes crazy—that combines high contagiousness with high lethality—then it will be a virus, not a protozoan or a bacteria. We’re on top of those enemies pretty well. It’s not going to be like the plague or like malaria. We’re too good at beating those big organisms. It’s the tiny ones, the viruses, that we’re still pretty bad at.

I also said it’s gonna be a respiratory virus. Why? Just look around you: People are coughing and sputtering all the time. There are up to 200 different kinds of respiratory viruses that we give each other every winter. We call them the common cold or flu. Some of them are rhinoviruses, some of them are coronaviruses. So there’s clearly something pretty irresistible to the virus tribe about the urban human population.

And the third thing I said was that it might come out of bats. I said that because a whole bunch of relatively new diseases have come out of bats in recent decades. And in fact, that’s been even more true since I said that, because [the 2003 outbreak of] SARS was after I made that remark. The reason is because bats are mammals like us, and it’s relatively easy for a virus to jump from a mammal to a mammal. Bats are animals that live in huge crowds—in huge densities. There’s a cave in Texas that has a famous bat roost in it. It has roughly the population of Mexico City living in that cave. So respiratory viruses are going to enjoy bats, and they’re going to enjoy humans, and there’s going to be a crossover between them.

We didn’t learn from SARS, which was a really good canary in the coal mine—a very clear warning that these wet wildlife markets in China were a dangerous place for crossover between species. That’s because the animals are alive in the markets. The problem is not bringing meat to market. The problem is bringing live animals that are coughing and sputtering. We had a dry run with a virus that wasn’t very contagious, but it was very dangerous: SARS. We should have said, “Look, this is a real threat.”

I had taken some comfort from the degree of improvement in molecular biological knowledge. The fact that we could sequence SARS in three months or something—that felt electric-fast. Because 20 years ago we hadn’t sequenced a single virus. So [with SARS], we’d read its recipe. We knew its defects. We knew how to attack it, in theory. And I had sort of vaguely in the back of my mind assumed that vaccine production would speed up as well.

We sequenced [the new coronavirus] in days. It’s almost instantaneous. But it turns out, as I now realize reading up, that vaccine development is about as slow as it was 20 years ago. I read something recently about how the whooping cough vaccine was developed in four years flat in the 1930s by two very remarkable American women. Four years is not that much longer than it’s probably going to take us to find a vaccine to this. So we have left the door unguarded, in one respect. We’ve let obstacles get in the way of the development of vaccines.

Reason: So we assume that this all started at a wet market in China. It was clear to observers, health officials and whatnot, that something was going on. We know the Chinese government is going to lie about how great they are. But what were the fundamental missteps in the United States and the United Kingdom when it came to containing this? 

Ridley: One of the lessons is that countries like South Korea were better prepared. And that was partly because of SARS. They got more of a fright from SARS in Asia than we did in the West, and so they set up this system of “contact tracing” based on extensive testing that they were geared up for in a way that we weren’t. Both in the U.K. and the U.S., we were very slow to ramp up testing for the virus. And testing turned out to be crucial. That’s one lesson.

The other lesson is we relied too much on the World Health Organization, and I think it has very serious questions to answer after this. If you look at what it was saying in January—it was repeating untrue Chinese claims that this virus was not transmissible human to human, and it was praising China to the skies, and it was ignoring whistleblowers in Taiwan and elsewhere. These are questions that need to be looked into, because I think if the World Health Organization had run the flag up in January, we all might have reacted a bit quicker.

Reason: Would you say that South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have been exemplary in their response to the coronavirus?

Ridley: On the whole? Yes. What South Korea did was it tracked it—tested lots of people and found out who they’d been in contact with. It issued each of them with an app so that they could go back through their records and find out who they came close to, which is pretty remarkable. There turned out to be one superspreader who had gone to a church and met a huge number of people. Tracking down his contacts proved vital. So yes, I do think that track and trace is the technique that’s gonna work in the absence of antivirals and vaccines and so on.

Because what’s particularly dangerous about this virus, as I read it, is that it is highly contagious in the very first few days of infection. Whereas with SARS it’s about eight days before you infect someone else, with COVID-19, it’s about four days. And quite a lot of this transmission is happening from people who are symptom-free. Young people seem to get a very, very mild version. They don’t even think there’s anything wrong with them. That is a very dangerous feature.

I’ll add one other way in which my country in particular was not ready for this, or I myself was not ready for this: In January, we were obsessed with Brexit. None of us could pay attention to anything else. I mean, that doesn’t excuse us being caught out in February, but it does excuse us perhaps not being aware of things in January. And of course that’s true of every country. America was obsessed with the presidential campaign—

Reason: And impeachment.

Ridley: Yeah.

Reason: On the one hand, you’re interested in questions of public health and science. On the other, you’re a big defender of individual freedom. It’s in the subtitle of your forthcoming book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. Is there a necessary tension between public health, as it was practiced in a country like South Korea or a country like Taiwan, and the freedom that we take for granted in the West?

Ridley: Yes, there is. We’re seeing that very clearly. Not just in terms of what you might call the technology of tracing people, but also in terms of the police state that we are now living in, where we’ve got policemen arresting people for going on unnecessary walks. That’s one of the worrying things about this. But what I would say is, yes, I’m afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you’re in the middle of a pandemic, as it was during the plague in centuries past. If you want to avoid that, then you need to unleash the freedom to innovate, to solve the problem, in good times.

Where I think we’ve been mistaken is we’ve made it very hard for people to bring forward medical devices, vaccines, drugs, etc., partly because of safety regulations, but partly because of just bureaucratic growth. I have this statistic in my book: How long does it take to get a license for use for a medical device on average? It’s like 20 months in America, and it’s something like 17 months in Germany. It takes too long to decide whether a new hip joint or a new ventilator or a new kind of personal protective equipment is safe.

The result of that, of course, is invisible, because you’re deterring people from going into these fields. You’re deterring people from inventing and innovating in this area. So you can’t point to it and say, “Show me the product that we could have licensed a bit quicker.” The point was he never brought it forward, because he looked at how dysfunctional this market was and stayed away, and so it never got developed. That’s one of the issues we have to learn is [the importance of] freedom to innovate.

But there is a tension. I’m not the perfect libertarian. I’m not someone who says that in the middle of a dangerous pandemic, the state should have no power to shut down society. On the other hand, we can have an argument about whether we are to some extent overreacting.

Reason: What is the role of dissent in a pandemic? Everybody, with the exception of very doctrinaire anarchists, is going to say, “You know what, when there is a genuine emergency, different rules apply.” There are a lot of conspiracy theories about how this disease actually was grown in a Chinese government lab as some kind of bioweapon. Toby Young, the British writer who works at Quillette, was talking about how we’re simply wrong to shut down the economy, because when you look at it from a strictly economic point of view, the recession we’re causing is actually going to kill more people. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keep going back and forth about whether or not it’s a good idea for people to wear masks when they go outside. What is the role of dissent, of pushback against authority, in a moment like this? 

Ridley: I personally think there’s no reason to shut down debate at a moment like this. Quite the reverse, actually. I think that what this is showing us is there is no monopoly on wisdom. Nobody knows exactly what the right answer is. It’s possible that we are overreacting. At the beginning, I thought we probably were, because I’d seen so many busted flushes. So many wolves had come along, and we’d cried wolf, and it wasn’t a wolf: bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola. Ebola was a wolf for people in Africa, but it wasn’t for the rest of the world. It’s right to have that debate about whether or not this is a real threat.

It’s also right to have a debate about what the prognoses are, because there’s been a dangerous tendency in this country—I don’t know whether it’s true to the same extent in the U.S.—to believe the models, to put them on a pedestal. Imperial College came out with a model saying that up to half a million people might die [in the U.K.] unless we brought in much more draconian restrictions on people’s freedoms. And that caused them to bring forward the lockdown of the economy. Now, that model is not unchallengeable. It’s got some very unhappy assumptions in it. And it was immediately challenged by another model from Oxford University—which I think went far too far in the other direction and put some crazy assumptions in about how quickly we’d get this under control. But that has reminded us that models are just that: They are models. They’re not scripture.

And that, by the way, is a lesson for the climate change debate, where models have been deified to much too great a degree. But we’ll leave that on one side for the moment.

So I don’t want to stop anybody coming out with an article saying, “here’s my evidence why the Chinese invented it,” or “here’s my evidence why it’s easily cured with this crack here that I’ve got made out of dandelions, brewed at midnight under the full moon.” Let a thousand flowers bloom in this. Let everybody say what they want. But let them produce their evidence, and let them put up with a bit of criticism if their evidence is bad.

In the case of the idea that it’s a Chinese bioweapon, I’ve seen very good molecular biological evidence that that is extremely implausible. So I don’t object to the theory being advanced, but I don’t think anyone should object to it being severely criticized too.

Reason: Some people found your take on the coronavirus to be credible because of your history of skepticism. Your willingness to publicly discuss what you’re thinking and how the evidence has changed your mind helped them take this virus more seriously. 

Certainly as somebody who has pooh-poohed alarmism about many different things, from the population explosion through to climate change…I’m all for debunking scares. So for me, as someone who’s almost a professional debunker of scares, to come out and say, “This one is quite scary, and we just need to take it seriously,” has made some of my friends stop and think.

Reason: What are the markers that go into figuring out where we are, if what we’re doing is working, and when we can start to reopen things? 

Ridley: Short answer: I don’t know. I haven’t got a model, and even if I did, I wouldn’t believe it, because it’ll depend on assumptions.

What we don’t really know, in my view, is which measures are working best. Was closing the schools a good idea or a bad idea, because it sent kids back to stay with their grandparents, and the grandparents are at more risk?

The way I see it developing is that we will get better at curing people who get it. Hydroxychloroquine and things like that may be helpful. Or the way in which just simply laying patients on their fronts, not their backs, when you’re ventilating them apparently is helping. So we’re going to get a little better at saving lives. We’re going to ramp up the capacity for hospitalization, [the number of] ventilators and so on. We’re going to improve the testing over the next few weeks so that we’re going to get better at contact tracing. And once we’ve done that, we can start to lift these restrictions, because when it does flare up, we can quickly track down who’s at risk and put them under lock and key, rather than the whole of society. Eventually we’ll get to the point where the only people who have gotta be really careful are the very vulnerable, and the rest of us can get on with a relatively normal life.

Now, will that happen in April? I doubt it. Will it happen in May? I hope so. Will it happen in June? I jolly well think so, ’cause I think that’s the point where we have to start to take Toby Young’s arithmetic very seriously and say, “Sorry, we’re killing more people by leaving them locked up with abusive partners, alone and in danger of committing suicide, workless and unable to feed themselves properly, more prone to take drugs and alcohol,” whatever it might be. There’s a whole bunch of things that’ll be going wrong with society because of this lockdown.

There are good things about this—sorry, that’s not the right word. There are no good things about it, but there are less bad things. The big one is that it does not kill children. Influenza was quite good at killing kids. Smallpox was lethal among children. We’re incredibly lucky in that respect. But of course that has contributed to the young feeling somewhat invulnerable, and that’s made it harder for them to take seriously the restrictions on movement.

Reason: We’ve been talking mostly about the public health interventions. What about the economic responses? The federal government just passed the single largest spending bill in U.S. history. What are the types of responses, consistent with limited government, that are likely to work, and what are the ones that are likely to do more damage? I mean, we’re still digging out of the bailouts from the financial crisis 12 years ago. 

Ridley: Yeah, I think the U.K. paid off its last debt from the Napoleonic Wars just a few years ago. There is no doubt that when you hugely increase the scope of government, it tends not to retreat as fast as you would like. Britain didn’t end [World War II–era] food rationing until something like 1954. And the argument was always, “There are some people at the bottom of society who might not be able to afford food.” Well, it turned out the reason they couldn’t afford food was because food was being rationed, and so the supply wasn’t responding to demand in the same way, and so the price wasn’t coming down. Do you see what I mean? It was a sort of circular argument.

There is a real danger that what we’ve done is nationalized huge swaths of the economy. We will find it very hard to undo it. The moment you start to say, “We’ll no longer subsidize you for the fact that your business is struggling,” a lot of people will be saying, “I’m going to go bust if that happens!” On the other hand, the idea that the government steps in during this period because we think it’s temporary might be quite a reasonable one. In other words, if everyone was just to sort of say, “Right, I’m closing down my business overnight,” it would be harder to start the economy up again. But there’s got to be a degree of rethinking of how we run the economy in the wake of this. We can take a bit of a blank-slate approach. Things that we’ve said for years, “You can’t do that because there’s huge vested interests.”

Reason: Can you give us an example? 

Well, for a start, the [regulations] around product safety. Not all of them, obviously—we’ve got to have some. But it’s clear that if we can suddenly say, “let’s tear up these regulations in order to respond quickly [to the pandemic],” well then we shouldn’t be doing that anyway. These regulations are unnecessary. A lot of reporting requirements are about sending bits of paper from one person to another. It’s now being said, we don’t need to do that: “We don’t need to get that bit of paper from you. We’ll just get the grant out to you straight away.” A lot of the complication around taxes—it turns out to be much simpler to run a tax system than we thought. We need to have a real drains-up look at what we don’t need to do.

Likewise, we need to have a look at how we as individuals, not just government, run society. That’s things like videoconferencing, what you and I are doing right now. I’m gonna try and insist that I have an awful lot fewer face-to-face meetings and an awful lot more meetings of this kind, ’cause they’re generally efficient. And it turns out the technology has really advanced. Five or 10 years ago if we did this, we’d have dropouts, we’d have freeze-ups, there’d be all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t quite work. I remember trying to do a lecture to Texas about eight years ago, and there was a 10-minute delay—or maybe it was a two-minute delay. But it was paralytically difficult to do in those conditions.

A number of people I’ve spoken to say, “You know what? Our regular weekly meeting is happening at half the time now.”

This originally appeared in Reason.

“In a way, everything is technology,” noted one of the world’s greatest economic historians, Fernand Braudel, in his monumental study Civilization and Capitalism. “Not only man’s most strenuous endeavors but also his patient and monotonous efforts to make a mark on the external world; not only the rapid changes . . . but also the slow improvements in processes and tools, and those innumerable actions which may have no immediate innovating significance but which are the fruit of accumulated knowledge,” he continued.

Yes, land, labor, and capital (that’s to say, the factors of production) are important components of economic growth. In the end, however, human progress in general and global enrichment in particular are largely dependent on invention and innovation. That is surely even clearer now that humanity’s hopes for the end of the pandemic and for our liberation from the accompanying lockdown rest on further scientific breakthroughs within the pharmaceutical industry. Let’s take a brief look at the impact of technology on health care, food supply, work, and sociality in the time of COVID-19.

Healthcare

The impact of modern technology is surely most keenly felt and anticipated within the sphere of human health care. Consider some of the worst diseases that humanity has had to face in the past. Smallpox, which is thought to have killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, originated in either India or Egypt at least 3,000 years ago. Smallpox variolation, it seems, was practiced in China in the tenth century, but it was not until the late 18th century that Edward Jenner vaccinated his first patient against the disease. Smallpox was fully eradicated only in 1980.

Similar stories could be told about other killer diseases. Polio, which can be seen depicted in Egyptian carvings from the 18th dynasty, is of ancient origin. Yet the disease wasn’t properly analyzed until the year of the French Revolution, with Jonas Salk’s vaccine appearing only in 1955. Today, polio is close to being eradicated (just 95 cases were reported in 2019).

Malaria, probably humanity’s greatest foe, is at least 30 million years old (the parasite has been found in an amber-encased mosquito from the Paleogene period). It was only after the discovery of the New World that knowledge about the fever-reducing benefits of the bark of the cinchona tree spread to Europe and Asia. Quinine was first isolated in 1820, and chloroquine was introduced in 1946. Artemisinin drugs, which we still use, were discovered in the late 1970s. That’s to say that humanity lived with deadly diseases for millennia without fully knowing what they were, how they were transmitted, and how they could be cured. The fate of humanity, our ancestors thought, fluctuated under the extraneous influence of the “wheel of fortune” and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. One day you were alive and next day you were not.

Contrast that glacial pace of progress, and the fatalistic acceptance of disease and death, with our response time to the current pandemic. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported the existence of a cluster of cases of “pneumonia” in Wuhan on December 31. On January 7 the Chinese identified the pathogen (novel coronavirus) responsible for the outbreak. On January 11 China sequenced the genetic code of the virus, and the next day it was publicly available. That enabled the rest of the world to start making diagnostic kits to identify the disease.

To take one example, the first COVID-19 infection in South Korea was identified on January 20. On February 4, the first test kit (made by Kogene Biotech) entered production. On February 7, the test kit was available at 50 locations around the country. Other countries followed suit.

The World Health Organization, which declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, may have acted too late. Still, it is noteworthy that just two months expired between the first sign of trouble and the time when the entire world put measures in place to retard the spread of the disease. In the meantime, we have learned a lot about governmental incompetence and regulatory overreach. But we have also learned a great deal about the spread and symptoms of the disease. Instead of starting from scratch, medical specialists in Europe and America can draw on the expertise of their colleagues in the Far East. Before the telegraph appeared midway through the 19th century, it took up to a month for a ship to carry information from London to New York. Today, we learn about the latest COVID-19 news (good and bad) and research in seconds.

By mid April, thousands of highly educated and well-funded specialists throughout the world were using supercomputers and artificial intelligence to identify promising paths toward victory over the disease. Some 200 different programs are underway to develop therapies and vaccines to combat the pandemic. They include studies of the effectiveness of existing antiviral drugs, such as Gilead’s Remdesivir, Ono’s protease inhibitor, and Fujifilm’s favipiravir. The effectiveness of generic drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, is also being evaluated. Takeda is hard at work on convalescent plasma (TAK-888) in Japan, while Regeneron works on monoclonal antibodies in the United States. New vaccines, such as Moderna’s mRNA-1273, Inovio’s INO-4800, and BioNTech’s BNT162, are under development.

We don’t know which of these treatments (if any) will work, but here is what we can be sure of: There has never been a better time for humans to face and defeat a global pandemic. The world is richer than ever before, and money is what enables us to sustain a massive pharmaceutical industry and pay for highly sophisticated medical research and development.

Coronavirus may be deadly, but it is not the bubonic plague, which had a mortality rate of 50 percent. Luckily, it is a far milder virus that has reawakened us to the danger posed by communicable diseases. Once the immediate crisis is behind us, researchers will collect billions of data from dozens of countries and analyze the different governmental responses to the pandemic. That knowledge will be deployed by governments and the private sector to ensure that best practices are adopted, so that next time we are better prepared.

Food

When the Black Plague struck Europe in 1347, the disease found the local population ripe for slaughter. Following the close of the Medieval Warm Period at the end of the 13th century, the climate turned cold and rainy. Harvests shrunk and famines proliferated. France, for example, saw localized famines in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–17, 1330–34, 1349–51, 1358–60, 1371, 1374–75, and 1390. The Europeans, weakened by shortages of food, succumbed to the disease in great numbers.

The people of yore faced at least three interrelated problems. First, the means of transport and the transportation infrastructure were awful. On land, the Europeans used the same haulage methods (carts pulled by donkeys, horses, and oxen) that the ancients had invented. Similarly, much of Europe continued to use roads built by the Romans. Most people never left their native villages or visited the nearest towns. They had no reason to do so, for all that was necessary to sustain their meager day-to-day existence was produced locally.

The second problem was the lack of important information. It could take weeks to raise the alarm about impending food shortages, let alone organize relief for stricken communities.

Third, regional trade was seldom free (France did not have a single internal market until the Revolution) and global trade remained relatively insignificant in economic terms until the second half of the 19th century. Food was both scarce and expensive. In 15th-century England, 80 percent of ordinary people’s private expenditure went for food. Of that amount, 20 percent was spent on bread alone. Under those circumstances, a local crop failure could spell the destruction of an entire community. (Those who think that COVID-19 exposed the fragility of modern society should look up the Great Famine.)

By comparison, by 2013 only 10 percent of private expenditure in the United States was spent on food, a figure that is itself inflated by the amount Americans typically spend in restaurants. Speaking of restaurants, while most have been forced to close their doors, the restaurateurs use apps to deliver excellent food at reasonable prices. Moreover, months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the shops are, generally, well stocked and regularly replenished by the largely uninterrupted stream of cargo flights, truck hauling, and commercial shipping. Due to the miracle of mobile refrigeration, fresh produce continues to be sourced from different parts of the United States and abroad. Shortly before writing this piece, I was able to buy oranges from California, avocados from Mexico, and grapes from Chile in my local supermarket. Globalization may be under pressure from both the left and the right of the U.S. political spectrum, but should the pandemic impair U.S. agricultural production, many will be forced to acknowledge the benefits of the global food supply and our ability to import food from COVID-19-unaffected parts of the world.

This extensive and, at this point, still sturdy supply chain is, of course, a technological marvel. Computers collate information about items on the shelf that are in short supply, adjust the variety and quantity of items shipped between stores, fill new orders, etc. And so, commerce that’s still allowed to go on goes on. So does charity. Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks, feeds tens of millions of people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, etc. Since 2005, the organization has been using a computerized internal market to allocate food more rationally. Feeding America uses its own currency, called “shares,” with which individual food banks can bid on the foods that they need the most. Grocery-delivery services bring food to the doorsteps of those who cannot or do not want to leave their homes. The old and the infirm can also use phones, emails, and apps to call upon volunteers to do their shopping and delivery.

Work

The nature of work has changed a lot over the last 200 years or so. Before the industrial revolution, between 85 percent and 90 percent of the people in the Western world were farm laborers. Their work was excruciatingly difficult, as witnessed by one 18th-century Austrian physician who observed that “in many villages [of the Austrian Empire] the dung has to be carried on human backs up high mountains and the soil has to be scraped in a crouching position; this is the reason why most of the young people are deformed and misshapen.” People lived on the edge of starvation, with both the very young and the very old expected to contribute as much as they could to the economic output of the family (most production in the pre-modern era was based on the family unit, hence the Greek term oikonomia, or household management). In those circumstances, sickness was a catastrophe: It reduced the family unit’s production, and therefore its consumption.

The industrial revolution allowed people to move from farms to factories, where work was better paid, more enjoyable, and less strenuous (which is largely why people in poor countries continue to stream from agricultural employment to manufacturing jobs today). Moreover, wealth exploded (real annual income per person in the United States rose from $1,980 in 1800 to $53,018 in 2016). That allowed for ever-increasing specialization, which included a massive expansion of services catering to the desires of an ever-more-prosperous population.

The service sector today consists of jobs in the information sector, investment services, technical and scientific services, health care, and social-assistance services, as well as in arts, entertainment, and recreation. Most of these jobs are less physically arduous, more intellectually stimulating, and better paid than either agricultural or manufacturing jobs ever were. Crucially, many of these service-sector jobs can be performed remotely. That means that even in the midst of the government-imposed economic shutdown, some work (about a third, estimates suggest) can go on. The economic losses from COVID-19, in other words, will be astronomical, but not total.

My own organization, for example, shut its doors in mid March. Since then, everyone has been scribbling away at home or appearing on news shows around the world via the Internet. All of us are in regular contact via the phone, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Other organizations are doing the same. As we already discussed, a great deal of shopping is taking place online. Shipping and delivery companies are expanding, with Amazon hiring 100,000 additional workers in the United States. Home entertainment, of course, has grown tremendously, with Netflix adding millions of new customers and expanding its offerings with thousands of new films and television shows. With over 30 million American children stuck at home, online learning companies are booming, and educators from high-school teachers to college professors continue to perform their jobs remotely. Telehealth is expanding, allowing patients to see their doctors in a safe and convenient way. Even minor medical procedures, such as eye exams, can be conducted remotely, and multiple companies will deliver your new specs to your front door. Banking and finance are still going on, with many people taking advantage of low interest rates to refinance their mortgages. Finally, the often unfairly maligned pharmaceutical industry is expanding as we all wait and hope for the release of a COVID-19 vaccine or effective therapeutic treatment.

Sociality

Aristotle observed that “man is by nature a social animal” and noted that without friends we would be unhappy. But the role of sociality (that is to say, the tendency to associate in or form social groups) goes much deeper than that. As William von Hippel explained in his 2018 book The Social Leap, sociality is the mechanism by which Homo sapiens came about. When early hominids were forced down from the trees (perhaps as a result of a climatic change that dried up African forests), they became more vulnerable to predators. To cover longer distances between the fast-disappearing trees while maintaining a modicum of protection against other animals, our ancestors developed bipedalism, which allowed them to free their upper body to carry weapons such as sticks and stones.

Even more important was the invention of cooperation. While a stick-wielding ape is slightly better-off than an unarmed one, a group of armed apes is much better at dispatching predators. Individuals in more cooperative bands survived to adulthood and bred more often, resulting in more-cooperative species. Furthermore, since living alone was tantamount to a death sentence, selfish apes who didn’t care about being ostracized for not pulling their weight died off, resulting in a desire for communal cooperation and a deep-rooted fear of rejection by the group.

The early hominids had brains more like those of chimps than those of modern humans. That’s because the evolutionary pressures that created the former — such as predation and food scarcity — could be overcome without tremendous intelligence. These pressures to survive were part of the physical landscape — a challenging but static environment that didn’t require a lot of cognitive ability to navigate. The environmental pressure that resulted in modern humans was the social system itself. The social landscape is much more dynamic than the physical one. Once they had banded together in groups, our ancestors were forced to forge relationships with, and avoid being exploited by, individuals with divergent and constantly shifting interests. Those who couldn’t keep up with the increasingly complex social game either died or were unable to mate.

This new pressure created a positive evolutionary cycle: Banding together created more complex social systems, which required bigger brains; bigger brains needed to be fed; and the best way to get more food was more cooperation and a more sophisticated social system. The main cognitive development that evolved from this evolutionary cycle is known as the “theory of mind.” In short, the theory of mind is the ability to understand that other minds can have different reasoning, knowledge, and desires from your own. While that seems basic, the theory of mind distinguishes us from all other life on Earth. It allows us to determine whether an affront, for example, was intentional, accidental, or forced. It allows us to feel emotions such as empathy, pride, and guilt — abilities that are keys to a functioning society.

So sociality and human beings are inseparable, as we have all been clearly reminded by the sudden restrictions on our ability to interact with others. As we sit at home, working away on our computers or watching television, most of us feel a tremendous sense of isolation (“social distancing”) from our family, friends, and colleagues. The urge to be around others is innate to us. It is who we are.

Dissatisfied with impersonal modes of communication, such as email and texting, we have rediscovered the need for a face-to-face interaction with our fellow humans. To that end, we utilize digital platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook Live, and FaceTime to catch up on the latest news in other people’s lives, or simply to complain about the misery of loneliness and the pathetic inadequacy of our public officials (of both parties). Throughout the nation, people engage in virtual happy hours, dinners, book clubs, fitness classes, religious services, and group meditation. As my Cato Institute colleague Chelsea Follett recently wrote, “Technology has made it easier than ever to hold a physically-distanced ‘watch party’ synchronized so that viewers in different locations see the same part of a movie at the same time. For those who like to discuss movies as they watch, technology also enables a running group commentary of each scene in real time.” In the saddest of cases, technology enables people to say goodbye to dying friends and relatives. In a very real sense, therefore, technology keeps us sane (or, at the very least, saner).

Technology, then, allows us to cope with the challenges of the pandemic in ways that our ancestors could not even dream about. More important, technology allows our species to face the virus with grounds for rational optimism. In these dark days, remember all the scientists who are utilizing the accumulated store of human knowledge to defeat COVID-19 in record time and all the marvelous (not to say miraculous) ways the modern world keeps us well fed, psychologically semi-balanced, and (in many cases) productively engaged.

This originally appeared in National Review.

If you need a ray of sunlight in these dark times, consider the magnitude of the human capacity for charity and voluntary action as we help one another through a time of crisis. Individuals, private organizations and businesses across the United States have stepped forward to offer assistance to those in need amid the novel coronavirus emergency. Voluntary cooperation and compassion are proving to be some of the most potent weapons we have in tackling the pandemic.

Technology and social media have allowed for better coordination of charitable efforts and volunteer work. Across America, online groups have popped up to help people exchange needed supplies, information related to the virus and to arrange volunteer work. For example, in my own local area, the “DC-Area COVID-19 Grocery Getters” Facebook group helps to coordinate volunteers to deliver groceries for elderly or immuno-compromised individuals.

Similar groups offer free online tutoring to help students learn remotely or arrange for volunteers to deliver meals, which are donated by restaurants, to hospital workers. One innovative online group matches owners of RV trailers that are sitting idle, with healthcare workers who need a place to self-isolate after long hospital shifts so they don’t infect vulnerable family members. And hundreds of thousands of volunteers are donating their computers’ spare power toward virus research, through projects like “Folding at Home.”

Many individuals have donated face masks and other supplies to medical workers, while volunteer groups have also emerged to coordinate the making of new masks for donation by using 3D printers or by sewing. Such generosity is not limited to individuals. Organizations ranging from the Washington National Cathedral operated by the Episcopal Church to the financial services company Goldman Sachs have donated troves of N95 masks from their own supply closets to help address the shortage of such masks among medical professionals.

Before many locales issued stay-at-home orders, various organizations and businesses were already encouraging social distancing. Many places of worship had already ceased in-person services out of an abundance of caution and moved their services online. Similarly, many employers were already encouraging their employees to work remotely.

Many businesses are stepping up to help not just their employees, but the most vulnerable among us. They do so on a voluntary basis. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Pete Gaynor noted that it has not been necessary to fully enforce the Defense Production Act, because companies have been voluntarily manufacturing masks, ventilators and other critical supplies for donation.

National Public Radio reported that even before the Trump administration encouraged non-medical companies to produce medical supplies, the latter already had partnerships with medical companies lined up. Businesses ranging from the automotive maker Ford to the clothing company Brooks Brothers are now making medical supplies. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has vowed to manufacture ventilators, as will Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, a company that normally makes rockets.

Many non-manufacturing businesses are also doing their part amid the pandemic, for example by helping students. Zoom has given schools free versions of its teleconferencing software to aid remote learning, while AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are offering free Wi-Fi to students who lack internet access so that their studies won’t be interrupted. Online education platform Coursera made its courses free to universities, and Scholastic has launched a “Learn at Home” website with many free tools for new homeschoolers.

Most major grocery stores have instituted seniors-only shopping hours for the elderly, who are among the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19, to reduce the seniors’ exposure risk. Numerous restaurants have created discounts or waived delivery fees to serve those in quarantine at home.

Philanthropists have also been generous in providing funding for efforts to combat the novel coronavirus. Billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and Oprah Winfrey are pouring their fortunes into research on COVID-19 treatment and prevention, heightened medical center capacity, and long-term pandemic preparedness. The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s $1 million prize, which rewards various breakthrough developments in combatting COVID-19, provides another example of increased philanthropic efforts in the face of the pandemic.

In some cases, the human inclination toward charity is unfortunately hampered by over-regulation. While the government has, fortunately, recently loosened outdated restrictions on who can donate blood, some other charity-hampering laws still remain in place.

Food banks, for example, are pleading with the government to relax certain regulations that prevent them from operating with safe social distancing. Under the current rules, volunteers giving out emergency food supplies are legally required to collect information from the supplies’ recipients through extensive interviews that are difficult to conduct from the recommended distance of six feet away. Despite such unfortunate red tape, people continue to find ways to help one another.

The COVID-19 outbreak has many people feeling hopeless, and so it is more important than ever to draw attention to the ways in which individuals and organizations are tackling the crisis through volunteering, donations and other forms of kindness and solidarity.

This was delivered as an address at the America’s Future Foundation virtual event on April 7th, 2020.