by Joakim Book
The American Institute for Economic Research
I’m not a big fan of Israeli pop-historian Yuval Noah Harari, the star-spangled author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus, and most recently 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. His writing is under-analyzed, hyperbolic, ideological, and usually somewhere between trivially true and demonstrably false.
It is therefore not a surprise that his long-read in the Financial Times last week (‘Lessons from a year of Covid’) didn’t exactly resonate with me. He does however raise what I find to be the most difficult and most engaging question of our times: how groups of humans peacefully coexist.
Harari spends the first half or so of the essay exploring the many ways that this pandemic differed from those of the past.