A single volume would not be sufficient for Gates, however, and he has announced that he needs three to tell his life story. The first, Source Code, focuses on his early life, and the initial years of Microsoft, the company that made him a billionaire. As one of the most interviewed and talked about people in history, much of Gates’s personal story has already been told. So what could he tell us at this point that we haven’t heard before?

Actually, he could tell us a lot. But only if he wanted to. His remarkable life has been full of intrigue, filled with war stories — including the cut-throat tactics he used to kill Microsoft’s competitors and create one of the most powerful and destructive monopolies in the history of commerce. His personal life has been no less interesting. While his PR handlers have pushed the picture of a bookish nerd, the real Bill Gates has always lived in the fast lane; speeding in his Porsche, throwing explosive temper tantrums, and, apparently, enjoying a robust and diverse romantic life — one that, according to numerous allegations, has crossed lines.

Accounts of his bad-boy behavior are legion, and, in recent years, the media has been increasingly open to critical profiles of the billionaire. Over the past 18 months, three books (including my own, The Bill Gates Problem) have been published, all of which were at least cautiously critical. At the same time, many legacy news outlets, which have long praised Gates, have started interrogating his presumed moral authority — exploring, for example, his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

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If Gates was willing to consider partnering with a monster like Epstein to advance his philanthropic goals — that’s Bill Gates’s explanation for their numerous meetings — what else might he be willing to do? What drives a man like Gates to such extreme behavior?

You won’t find an answer in Source Code, an insipid, sanitized work of revisionist history, a PR exercise aimed at humanizing and revitalizing Gates in the public eye — reminding us that, in a world of oligarchs, there truly are some “good billionaires”.

With a heavy focus on his youth, his book tells of the accidental death of his childhood best friend, the difficulties he had seeing eye-to-eye with his parents, and his earliest entrepreneurial activities in high school. These anecdotes are supposed to make readers see him as thoughtful and reflective, but they ring hollow because he never actually reflects on his hubris, his most defining character trait. Gates is a man who has always insisted that he is the smartest guy in the room — and should be sitting at the head of every decision-making table. As he once reportedly quipped at a dinner party: “Of course, I have as much power as the President has.”

Yet Source Code gives us few hints about the genesis of his god complex. As a result, it doesn’t help us understand who Gates is today, the promiscuous pedant who uses his extravagant wealth to position himself as leader, expert and authority on a dizzying array of topics — public health, public education, climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccines, contraceptives, agricultural development and endless other issues.

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If Gates had used his memoir to simply embrace his inner power broker and reveal his real self — a man obsessed with power and control, a man driven by ego and self-interest, a man unable to control his emotions, a man who, according to numerous accounts, has trouble respecting women — we might, then, have a reason to read it.

The timing of publication is interesting, coming at a moment when other tech billionaires are surging ahead of him. Gates seems anachronistic today. He exercises most of his money-in-politics influence through dark corridors and back rooms. Last year, it was revealed that he made a $50 million dark-money donation to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Publicly, meanwhile, he goes to extraordinary lengths to hide his influence, presenting himself as a wholly non-political humanitarian, driven by a selfless desire to help others.

This elaborate branding stands in contrast to billionaires like Elon Musk, a brazenly self-interested billionaire who seems to wear the title of oligarch like a king’s crown. He certainly doesn’t try to fool the public into believing that he is a philanthropist. Likewise, Donald Trump, though a politician who is required to at least gesture to the public’s interest, usually can’t help but show how devoted he is to his own interests. The reason these men are surging into public life may be, in part, because of the vulgar honesty they bring to the table. They are not nice, kind, or generous people. And they don’t pretend to be.

There’s something grotesque in seeing the contours of our oligarchs so exposed. But this behavior also seems like a natural evolution of oligarchy, at least in American politics. Republicans and Democrats have long normalized and legitimized billionaires like Gates — accepting his campaign contributions, giving him humanitarian awards, generously co-funding Gates Foundation projects, delivering to him massive tax benefits for his philanthropy, and financially partnering with the company that continues to make Gates rich, Microsoft. Elon Musk may present a new level of normalization and legitimization for oligarchy, but he’s standing on the shoulders of Bill Gates.

Gates, perhaps, also deserves comparison to another billionaire, Howard Hughes, a man who spent his final years in extreme isolation, losing touch with reality. He reportedly let his fingernails grow several inches in length, his toenails even longer. As his health declined, he pursued a regiment of self-medication and quackery, obsessively injecting himself in the groin with mysterious fluids.

Hughes’s self-destructive behavior and agoraphobia was probably not helped by his great wealth, which allowed him to surround himself with people who depended on him for money. Financial dependence, invariably, makes people afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. Or maybe even help a man clearly in need of assistance. And this is also becoming Gates’s story.

Today, Gates surrounds himself with people who depend on his money, and cloisters himself away from his critics, even as they grow in volume and viability, on both the Left and Right. Some of the intended beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation — farmer organizations across the African continent — are openly calling on the foundation to pay reparations for all the harm it is causing. A growing body of independent experts levy a similar critique: that the foundation is doing more harm than good. To this criticism, Bill Gates never offers a response.

Meanwhile, in his private life, Gates has found himself subject to headline after headline of alleged inappropriate behavior toward women. (He denies any wrongdoing.) And in his business affairs, his zealous efforts to present himself as a leader on climate change have fallen flat because none of the game-changing innovations he has promised have materialized.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this growing criticism, Gates and his handlers are going out of their way to create a world in which no critics exist. For his forthcoming book tour, he has decided to charge, which will keep out critics and naysayers. Couldn’t the $166-billion man simply rent out the venue at his own expense?

On the flipside, his philanthropic foundation shamelessly gives out hundreds of millions of dollars to the news media — The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC and dozens of other outlets around the world — which creates strong incentives to praise Gates. Though the news media occasionally does put a critical lens to Gates, most journalists even those not directly funded by the foundation, tend to treat him differently — and better — than other billionaires. To be sure, most news outlets appear to love Gates’s new memoir. The, the New York Times‘s recent, glowing review of Gates’s memoir was headlined: “Bill Gates isn’t like those other tech billionaires.”

A similar story can be found in the billions of dollars the Gates Foundation donates to universities, which has led to what academic researchers call the “Bill chill” — the chilling effect that makes them reluctant to criticize the man who so many look to for funding.

There’s always been something desperate about Gates deploying his money in a manner that reliably builds allies and quiets critics. Why not enter the public debate standing on his own two feet, explaining who he is and what his ideas are? What is Gates so afraid of? That he’ll finally hear the chorus of voices calling him the emperor who has no clothes?

The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown, in March 2020, at a fragile moment. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its young democracy.

The timing of The Gambia’s lockdown could not have been worse. In March 2020, as many African countries shut down in accordance with WHO advice, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks. Late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains. The unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown meant that even where they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.

Anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.

The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021 and remains in double digits, much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at Covid-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes, was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian government implemented a 500 million dalasi (US$10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a per-capita GDP of US$772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of US$21.3 million.

Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic cataclysm, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have. It was frequently said that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on Covid-19”. The Gambia is beset by poverty and malnutrition. Structurally indebted to Western creditors, with a median age below 18, and where a teacher’s monthly salary is under £50, the spending of these sums to implement Western protocols for a disease quickly known to affect mostly the elderly and obese is scandalous.

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Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these policies? In fact, creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else.

Still today, billboards line the country with EU funding logos, indicating the “correct” way to wear masks. This offers a flashback to the bombardment which Gambian officials received from Western agencies on handling Covid-19. Weekly flurries of information arrived with instructions on “appropriate” behaviour. Weekly “situation reports” were demanded from the Gambian Ministry of Health by these partners: these reports had to indicate the effectiveness of the Covid protocols, and case numbers. This information was a prerequisite for further access to the finance so essential in the economic meltdown.

The Covid vaccine rollout made this dynamic even clearer. When by late 2021, vaccination numbers remained low, the UK High Commission warned Gambian counterparts that tourists would not return until all those in the tourist industry were vaccinated. Indeed, the UK only removed The Gambia from the red-list of countries once the vaccine rollout had “decreased risk to British nationals”. In the end, public officials were virtually forced into vaccination. Most of these vaccines were not gifted to the country, but paid for through World Bank loans which increased structural indebtedness.

The consequences have been vast. The impact on Gambian young women has been especially severe. The closure of schools in the pandemic made schoolgirls vulnerable to being sent away for marriage by parents desperate to earn some dowry money to assuage the pain of the pandemic restrictions. One expert in the field described how early marriage had become common in The Gambia during the pandemic.

Secondly, there has been a huge increase in Gambian youths seeking to migrate to Europe illegally. The restrictions shattered the Gambian economy. Hotels, which employ more than 50,000 Gambians, were closed. The youths lost their jobs and many of them were forced into the dangerous ‘backway’ journey to Europe. Indeed, the fledgling democratic government’s noticeable achievements in youth job creation were all but wiped out by the pandemic, and the 2022-23 season tourism was still only at 30% of pre-pandemic levels.

Another harm came in the primary health sector. The pandemic and the endless Western agency briefings as to the requirements on vaccination, social distancing and masking meant that frail health facilities were completely rewired to focus on Covid-19 patients. This meant that as malaria, fevers and digestive diseases took their usual toll on the population, no one did much. The medical personnel, drugs, ambulances and facilities were all dedicated to fighting the pandemic in accordance with the demands of Western embassies and NGOs. This made maternity, child health and outpatient services suffer disruptions which were, in many cases, fatal. There was also a severe disruption in the Meningitis A, Tetanus, and Hepatitis children immunisation schedules, which still have not completely recovered.

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Given the devastating impacts of the pandemic response on the general population, Covid vaccine hesitancy is strong. A recent survey suggested that close to 70% of Gambian adults surveyed trusted “prayers” more than the vaccines. Many accuse healthcare officials of diagnosing simple cases of malaria as Covid-19. Popular distrust extended to the Government’s efforts to alleviate the food scarcity caused by the restrictions. A series of corruption scandals have broken pointing to the embezzlement of Covid-19 relief funds, while key suppliers contracted by the World Food Programme over two years failed to deliver the required 8,550 tons of rice intended as relief for needy families.

All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.

What policymakers do not appear to have grasped are the consequences that all this will have. For all multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates’s plans, and the current US government’s ideas about future pandemic preparedness and mass vaccine manufacturing in Africa, it is clear that no citizen of that continent will be prepared to trust future lockdowns, social distancing measures or mandatory vaccinations. While policymakers opine and “official narratives” are constructed, the experience in The Gambia, and across Africa as a whole, will ensure its response to the next pandemic will be nothing of the kind.

* Co-contributor Hassoum Ceesay is writing in a personal capacity

The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules. While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

Given the irrational nature of the policy, many protesting farmers believe it can’t simply be blamed on the urbanite “green elites” currently running the Dutch government. They suggest one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants who recognise the immense value of the country’s land — not only is it highly fertile, but it is also strategically located with easy access to the north Atlantic coast (Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe). They also point out that prime minister Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, which is well known for being corporate-driven, while his finance minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Employment are also tied to the body.

The struggle playing out in the Netherlands would seem to be part of a much bigger game that seeks to “reset” the international food system. Similar measures are currently being introduced or considered in several other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Britain (where the Government is encouraging traditional farmers to leave the industry to free up land for new “sustainable” farmers). As the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy sector, agriculture has naturally ended up in the crosshairs of Net Zero advocates — that is, virtually all major international and global organisations. The solution, we are told, is “sustainable agriculture” — one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which form their “Agenda 2030”.

This issue has now been pushed to the top of the global agenda. Last November’s G20 meeting in Bali called for “an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains” to “ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change”. Just a few days later, in Egypt, the COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit launched its initiative aimed at promoting “a shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets”. Within a year, its Food and Agriculture Organization aims to launch a “roadmap” for reducing greenhouse emissions in the agricultural sector.

The endgame is hinted at in several other UN documents: reducing nitrogen use and global livestock production, lowering meat consumption, and promoting more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050. Other international and multilateral organisation have presented their own plans for transforming the global food system. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy “aims to accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. Meanwhile, the World Bank, in its climate change action plan for 2021-2025, says that 35% of the bank’s total funding during this period will be devoted to transforming agriculture and other key systems to deal with climate change.

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Alongside these intergovernmental and multilateral bodies, a vast network of “stakeholders” is now devoted to the “greening” of agriculture and food production — private foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and corporations. Reset the Table, a 2020 Rockefeller Foundation report, called for moving away from a “focus on maximising shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders”. This may sound like a good idea, until one considers that “stakeholder capitalism” is a concept heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, which represents the interests of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation has very close ties to the WEF, which is itself encouraging farmers to embrace “climate-smart” methods in order to make the “transition to net-zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030”. The WEF is also a big believer in the need to drastically reduce cattle farming and meat consumption and switch to “alternative proteins”.

Arguably the most influential public-private organisation specifically “dedicated to transforming our global food system” is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is largely modelled around the Davos “multistakeholderist” approach. This is based on the premise that global policymaking should be shaped by a wide range of unelected “stakeholders”, such as academic institutions and multinational corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments. This network, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, consists of UN agencies, world-leading universities, and corporations such as Google and Nestlé. EAT’s founder and president, Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian philanthropist who is married to one of the country’s richest men, has described her intention to organise a “Davos for food”.

EAT’s work was initially supported by the World Health Organization, but in 2019 the WHO withdrew its endorsement after Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, questioned the scientific basis for the dietary regime being pushed by EAT — which is focused on promoting plant-based foods and excluding meat and other animal-based foods. Cornado argued that “a standard diet for the whole planet” that ignores age, sex, health and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations”.

Perhaps more important, said Cornado, is the fact that the dietary regime advised by the commission “is also nutritionally deficient and therefore dangerous to human health” and “would certainly lead to economic depression, especially in developing countries”. He also raised concerns that “the total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin” would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products. Despite these concerns, raised by a leading member of the world’s top public health body and shared by a network representing 200 million small-scale farmers in 81 countries, EAT continues to play a central role in the global push for the radical transformation of food systems. At the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which originated from a partnership between the WEF and the UN Secretary-General, Stordalen was given a leading role.

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This complete blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private-corporate spheres in the agricultural and food sectors is also happening in other areas — with Bill Gates standing somewhere in the middle. Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

The body tasked with the protection of public health, however, is undaunted by the criticism. We now learn it is engaged in a silent coup that, if successful, would grant it even more sweeping powers of intervention in the affairs of nation-states.

When it was created, after World War II, as an agency of the United Nations, it had the aim of promoting “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health” across the globe — whereby health was understood, crucially, as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. It was, in other words, predicated on an understanding of the fact that economic and social development are fundamental determinants of health —  a concept that would be reaffirmed in the Declaration of Alma-Ata of 1978.

As a reaction to the brutality of 20th-century totalitarian and colonial regimes — both of which had involved horrendous cases of medical abuse — the WHO also emphasised the importance of democratising medicine by putting communities and individuals in charge of their health through the promotion of proximity and primary healthcare. Under this democratic and rights-based framework, the WHO achieved several notable achievements, most notably the eradication of smallpox.

However, from the Eighties onwards, things started to change. Until then, the organisation had relied on the contributions of its member states for its regular budget. In 1982, however, the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, voted to freeze its budget — under pressure from the Reagan administration, which saw the WHO as a socialist-leaning, unaccountable organisation working against American interests. This was followed by the 1985 decision by the United States to withhold its contribution, in part as a protest against its “Essential Drug Program”, which encouraged developing countries to develop their own capacities to produce essential medicines, rather than rely on Western drug companies — small wonder leading US-based pharmaceutical companies were averse.

As a result, the organisation was forced to rely increasingly on extrabudgetary funds provided by “stakeholders”: not only governments and bilateral and multilateral agencies (such as the World Bank), but private and corporate donors as well, including pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. Over the years, among the private extrabudgetary donors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation rose above the rest: by the 2010s, it had become the WHO’s second-largest donor, accounting for around 10% of all funds.

Since voluntary contributions are earmarked, the donors largely get to call the shots on the use of the funds they contribute, as Margaret Chan, the WHO’s former Director-General, complained a few years back. This has led to the proliferation of public-private programmes more or less independent of the rest of the WHO’s programmes and decision-making structure, such as the Children’s Vaccine Initiative.

“The priorities of WHO have evolved accordingly, moving away from community-centred care to a more vertical, commodity-based approach”, writes David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specialising in epidemic policy. “This inevitably follows the interests and self-interests of these funders.” In place of the preventative and “holistic” approach to health initially championed by the WHO, which viewed health as the outcome of a wide range of economic, social and political factors, a new paradigm has slowly emerged: a commercialised approach to health, single-mindedly focused on high-tech, largely vaccine-based solutions, with a particular interest for genetically engineered biotechnologies — an emerging industry potentially worth  billions of dollars.

A crucial role in this shift was played by Bill Gates. As the WHO’s second-largest funder, Gates exercises a massive influence over the organisation, as even admirers of the foundation admit. And he has used that influence to promote vaccine-driven responses to matters of global health — through the WHO as well as through related public-private partnerships such as GAVI (Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI, also funded by Gates. In 2011, Gates spoke at the WHO, and declared: “All 193 member states [must] make vaccines a central focus of their health systems”. The following year, the World Health Assembly adopted a “Global Vaccine Plan” that the Gates Foundation co-authored, and over half of the WHO’s total budget now goes to vaccines.

His obsession with vaccines really shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Gates Foundation is strongly connected to the pharmaceutical industry, and ever since its creation, it has owned stakes in several drug companies. The foundation’s website even candidly declares a mission to pursue “mutually beneficial opportunities” with vaccine manufacturers. This is the essence of what has been called philanthrocapitalism — “a capitalist, market-based, for-profit approach to solving the world’s biggest and most pressing issues”. This kind of corporate-driven approach exemplifies the conflicts of interest inherent in the WHO’s dependence on unaccountable private donors such as the Gates Foundation.

Some activists in the Global South have especially negative views of the consequences for public health. A leading human rights activist in India, Vandana Shiva, said: “Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally.”

Meanwhile, Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex, explains in her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy how Gates has used his influence over the WHO to defend the intellectual property rights of drugs manufacturers.

Crucially, just as the WHO was falling increasingly under the dominion of private capital (and Gates in particular) the organisation also started expanding its power. A key step was the third revision of its International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, on the heels of the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, which for the first time made the agreements, encompassing a wide range of rules for the management of epidemics and pandemics, binding for all member states (even though the latter remained formally in charge of health policies).

This coincided with a wider push towards the supranationalisation of health policies, with the transition from “international” to “global” public health. While the two terms may appear synonymous, they in fact indicate two very different systems: while the former is grounded in nation-states as the ultimate repositories of authority, the latter implies that governments are just one (and not even the most crucial) component of a global health system involving a wide range of “stakeholders” — for example the media, private institutions and multinational corporations — with the WHO at its core as the ultimate voice of authority. This gradually inverted the relationship between the WHO and member states: as the latter’s influence over the organisation was increasingly eclipsed by private interests, the WHO’s influence over member states was growing.

This has led, over the past two decades, to the burgeoning of a massive global health industry encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, global and national public health organisations (first and foremost the WHO itself), private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, vaccine-focused public-private partnerships such as GAVI and CEPI, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the World Economic Forum as important intermediaries between the various actors. These actors clearly have interests independent of each other, but over the years such interests have come to coalesce over the need to prepare for, and the profit opportunities offered by, future pandemics — deemed to be all but inevitable.

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Indeed, the pandemic shone a light on the power accrued by the global health industry in the years leading up to 2020 — and its influence over the WHO. As Covid took hold, the organisation jettisoned its years-long established position on pandemic management, along with any form of evidence-based science, in favour of a completely novel pro-lockdown and vaccine-centric narrative — the same approach championed, among others, by its main private donor, Bill Gates, who, Politico suggested, used his clout to “control the global Covid response”. As one civil society group stated, the WHO effectively “outsourced” the management of the global Covid vaccine rollout to Gates.

The WHO, for example, played a crucial role in the cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis. It also jettisoned its 2019 pandemic plan (which didn’t mention “lockdown” once) to embrace and promote Chinese-style lockdowns. Such was its praise and defence of China, it was criticised for appeasement. It stoked panic by claiming Covid was much deadlier than it was already known to be. It ignored known age-stratified risk. It promoted test-and-tracing, even though it had previously claimed that “under no circumstances”, however severe the outbreak, should contact tracing be adopted, due to its limited effectiveness, but also due to “ethical concerns”.

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By Ian Birrell

It promoted universal masking, even though it had acknowledged early on that there was no evidence of its benefits. It negated the benefits of natural immunity in order to promote the claim that herd immunity could only be achieved through vaccination. It refused to acknowledge (until April 2021) that SARS‑CoV‑2 is airborne, despite ample evidence of the contrary. And it promoted the censorship of factually true claims relating to all of the above under the guise of fighting disinformation — and actually promoted misinformation and disinformation itself.

All this points to a colossal failing on the WHO’s behalf. On the one hand, it highlights the risks inherent in a top-down, highly centralised and bureaucratised approach to public health — the opposite of the democratic, community-based, bottom-up approach initially championed by the WHO. On the other, however, it is also a stark reminder of what happens when an institution becomes captured by private interests. So why are plans underway to hand the WHO even more power?

This is the aim of two agreements currently under discussion. The first consists of a set of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations, an instrument with force under international law. The second is a new “pandemic treaty” that goes in the same direction as the IHR amendments.

The IHR amendments are at a much more advanced stage, and have a much greater chance of being approved — the modifications will effectively carry the same weight as a new treaty, but are much less contentious than the proposed “treaty” and only require the approval of 50% of countries to come into force. The consequences would be far-reaching. These amendments, as Bell writes, “are intended to fundamentally change the relationship between individuals, their countries’ governments, and WHO”.

Further reading

Did scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?

By Ian Birrell

In terms of individual rights, the WHO propose to abandon, even formally, the WHO’s anchoring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by suggesting that the phrase stating that the regulations will be implemented “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” be deleted from the text and replaced with the vague terms “equity, coherence, inclusivity”. In terms of the relationship between member states and the WHO, the amendments aim to give the WHO authority over states, by proposing to change the definition of “recommendations” from “non-binding” to (by deletion) “binding”, and specifying that states will undertake to “follow” (rather than “consider”) the recommendations of WHO. The latter may include: vaccine mandates, measures requiring proof of vaccination (vaccine passports), quarantining of individuals (lockdown), travel restrictions and all manner of health interventions.

Moreover, an entire new article is proposed where states “recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern”. This is of particular concern if considered in tandem with another amendment which widens the definition of what constitutes a public health emergency to include “all risks with a potential to impact public health”, and assigns to the Director-General — today, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — the sole authority to declare an emergency. It’s hard to see how anyone could consider putting so much power into the hands of a single person a good idea, especially in view of Ghebreyesus’s flawed response to the pandemic.

We should be very concerned about the power grab being attempted by the WHO — especially since it’s happening without any public debate whatsoever. It would be concerning even if the organisation had maintained its original funding model, institutional structure and underlying philosophy. But it’s particularly concerning if we consider that the WHO has fallen largely under the control of private capital and other vested interests. It would mark the definitive transformation of global health into an authoritarian, corporate-driven, techno-centric affair — and risk making the Covid response a blueprint for the future rather than a disaster which should never be repeated.

But this isn’t wholly the Tories’ fault. Rather, it’s another omen of the ongoing transformation that began with de-industrialisation: the end of fossil-fuel-era mass prosperity. This is now percolating well beyond the “left-behind”, and snapping at the heels of the next tier up the ladder: the Caravan Dreamers.

You’ll find them out in force on the A1, early on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Usually, they’re transporting a secondary mode of transport — such as mountain bikes or vintage cars — to another location, in order to enjoy a transport-based leisure activity. By and large, Caravan Dreamers are practical, decent people. They’re pub-goers and dog owners. They buy gifts in garden centres. They own small businesses and shops. They pick up litter. The Caravan Dream is a modest one: to enjoy both relative independence and relative comfort, at an affordable price point. It’s an autonomy made sweeter by being saved for weekends and bank holidays, and it doesn’t matter if earning the money to fund the Caravan Dream rules out actually being rootless. That feeling of freedom, for a few hours of a weekend, offsets the real-world effort needed to sustain it.

London is, of course, a different country. But out in actual England, in my anecdotal observation, Caravan Dreamers are well-represented among the 1.5 million UK households with open fires and wood-burning stoves. And it’s no wonder — the woodburner conveys something like the same aspiration to affordable independence and comfort, with just the slightest edge of one-upping your neighbour. But as the climate debate has grown shriller, the dream of affordable independence has begun to take on an anxious edge.

Britain’s carbon emissions have halved since 1990, in part by shifting away from coal-burning power stations — but also, in part, at the expense of the industrial working class. For a major contributor to this first phase of decarbonisation was in fact de-industrialisation. Since 1990, British manufacturing’s share of GDP has collapsed from 16.5% to 8.8%, as carbon-intensive industries departed for countries such as China, with lower labour costs and less stringent environmental laws.

But Phase One decarbonisation wasn’t really decarbonisation in an absolute sense. Instead of making carbon-intensive consumer goods in Britain, now we just import them from China, where carbon emissions per capita have climbed even as they’ve fallen in the developed West. Worldwide, we’re generating more greenhouse gas than ever. So the pressure is on to cut deeper. But we can’t do anything about China building coal-fired power stations, and at home we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. How to make further reductions? The obvious, uncomfortable answer is that reducing emissions means people are going to have to start doing without nice things.

But whose nice things are next for the chop? If the Caravan Dreamers are growing restive, it’s because they harbour the suspicion that the answer is: them. Towing the caravan anywhere is getting painfully expensive. Further down the line lurks a ban on new internal combustion engines. How far can an EV with a limited range tow a caravan? How long until vintage car rallies are banned?

And the threatened loss of freedom goes deeper still. If owning a woodburner afforded the reassuring prospect of being able to stay warm even in the event of power cuts or rationing, the threat of government restrictions on their use brings with it a suffocating sense of avenues closing off for the type of modestly comfortable independence, long cherished as core to the Caravan Dream. In its place looms the panicky feeling of having even provisional, partly illusory freedoms forcibly stripped away, replaced by a centrally surveilled and unaccountably-administered condition of helplessness.

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The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

And if politics feels so bitter and volatile at present, this is at least partly because Caravan Dreamers are Tory at a cellular level, much as the industrial working class was (and to a great extent still is) Labour. Theirs is not the Toryism of high finance, or large land-holdings, or a manicured pile in the Cotswolds. It’s the shopkeeper Toryism that produced Margaret Thatcher — and, with her, the seeds of its own demise.

The slow hollowing-out and financialisaton of Britain that Thatcher inaugurated has already delivered “Brexitland” populism, as well as the Left’s turn away from blighted post-industrial regions in favour of an exciting new coalition of students, identitarian “communities” and higher-rate taxpayers. Now, the Caravan Dreamers suspect their interests, too, have been sidelined by the Tories who once championed them.

They have some grounds for thinking so. After more than a decade of Tory rule, British life has transformed radically in a number of ways that are anathema to the Caravan Dream. This is structural: it is no longer possible to deliver the growth that underpins middle-class British prosperity without degrading the middle-class British way of life. Until relatively recently, the Tories squared this circle by externalising the pain overseas or among non-Tory voters, but (notably in the housing debate) this approach is now causing widening fissures within the Tory coalition.

My staunchly Tory constituency was outraged last year, for example, when the then Transport Secretary Grant Shapps waved through Luton Airport expansion plans. As a result, passenger planes have been re-routed over our heads, several times an hour, at about 5,000 feet (this is quite loud). Airport expansion, is, he insisted, “core to boosting global connectivity” and perfectly compatible with “our commitment to the environment”. So you can perhaps forgive me for laughing hollowly when I learned that Shapps was to be the new Minister for Net Zero, tasked with deciding who flourishes, and who takes the hit, as the British public are alternately shoved and cajoled toward this goal.

Given his previous approach in the Transport brief, we can expect Shapps (himself a keen amateur pilot) to support the aviation industry and doubtless seek savings elsewhere. And this is where we begin to see the widening fissures in the Tory coalition, and the reason Caravan Dreamers are growing mutinous.

According to one 2020 study, half of aviation emissions are caused by “super-emitters” representing just 1% of the world’s population. Bill Gates, for instance, is the author of How To Avoid Climate Disaster but also owns four private jets worth $200m, and admits that travelling by jet is his “guilty pleasure”. If aviation is to be supported, even as wood-burners come under scrutiny, from a Caravan Dreamer’s perspective the inference is clear: that, much as we saw after the Great Crash and again during Covid, we were not in fact “all in this together”.

You don’t have to be a basement-dwelling internet addict to see the contours emerging. The couple who run my local post office are quintessential Caravan Dreamers, and in their shop window, alongside local concert and church group announcements, there’s a lurid yellow-and-black poster warning about the danger to individual freedom posed by an elite plan to replace cash with digital currency. Nothing could capture more neatly the rising sense of existential terror bubbling under post-pandemic small-town Britain.

This is the mood powering increasingly prevalent and colourful concerns about surveillance, climate change, microchips, Klaus Schwab, digital ID and so on. It’s also behind increasingly frequent eruptions of public dissent, for example in the protests last weekend against Oxford’s proposed “15-minute city” scheme. And while detractors may mock rising popular objections to this diffuse cluster of changes as far-Right, conspiracy-mongering, or just straight-up lunacy, much of it is factually wrong but still directionally accurate.

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Welcome to human centipede culture

By Mary Harrington

For while the details are often overblown, the sense of being downgraded from yeoman to serf is not baseless. Justin Trudeau ended the trucker protests by freezing protesters’ bank accounts; it should already be obvious that a fully-digital currency would grant wildly extensive new powers of surveillance and control to any government that adopted it. What might a government do with such powers? Well, just a few days ago, the Times reported on a new University of Leeds study suggesting that “rationing has been neglected as a climate change mitigation policy option”. To force further reduction in emissions per capita, the authors suggested, governments should impose artificial scarcity, then ration carbon-intensive goods such as long-haul travel, petrol or meat. No one in government is proposing such a scheme at present, but a middle class who recently learned just how much more flexible lockdown rules were for the right people will already be taking an educated guess at how climate rationing might play out.

If you’re a Caravan Dreamer, chances are you ration nice things already, and view the free enjoyment of that ration as your hard-earned right. In that scenario, assent to “15-minute cities” threatens a net loss of prized personal autonomy, with no corresponding improvement in quality of life. And, most likely, it also means a whole new set of class stratifications: just this week, shoppers in Tesco, Asda and Morrisons were outraged to discover vegetables rationed due to unseasonable cold in Spain and Morocco.

I’m far from being a climate denialist. I suspect most of us will get used to fewer nice things, as the century goes on. But I also think the Caravan Dreamers are not wrong to treat current manoeuvring with deep suspicion. The tide of abundance that once promised to reach all the way down the social ladder past them, to the working class, is already some way back from the high-water mark and still withdrawing. All the signs suggest that, however leaders dress up their changes as climate solidarity, it will be those with only a little to lose who get sacrificed next.

Out with the caravan, and in with 100 permits a year to leave your neighbourhood. Out with the woodburner, and in with a “smart meter” that hands control of your heating to the energy supplier. And all while Bill Gates continues to warn of climate disaster — and travel by private jet.

Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems as if they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the “rising tide of authoritarianism” all over the world, as evidenced by “populism”, Brexit, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this “rising authoritarianism” is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here].

After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and Reddits of the internet and “expose” a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase “dark undercurrent” a lot. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the Thirties who became fascists. Mutter darkly about how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the “new threat to democracy” represented by this frightening movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, “global justice” and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of “problematic” views, more work to tackle “radicalisation”, more laws to prevent protests and “hate speech”, and probably more internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.

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How far will the eco-fascists go?

By Mary Harrington

The problem, though, is that actual “eco-fascism” is notable mostly for its absence. Dark corners of the internet aside — you can find any craziness there, after all — it’s hard to find a single “eco-fascist” anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course — without the prefix, the word “fascist” has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades — but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time and I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.

So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is the simplest: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call “nature”, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.

And we cannot face it, even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are, we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out — and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face — can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

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How the Left fell for capitalism

By Paul Kingsnorth

This is one explanation for the mysterious rise of the ghostly eco-fascists. But I think there might be another. The phrase “eco-fascist” is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways. They are contrasted with the right kind of green: those who are modern, global, progressive and — most important — friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

In Britain, this divide has been illustrated recently by attitudes to green pundit George Monbiot’s latest book, which embraces the neo-green vision. In the humbly titled Regenesis, Monbiot, an urban vegan intellectual, makes a case — based, naturally, on the “peer-reviewed science” — for the “end of most farming” and the replacement of much of its output with vat-grown, bacterial “food” manufactured via “industrial biotechnology”. The vast acreages of land which have been stripped of their farmers can then be “rewilded” in various Monbiot-approved ways, which mainly seem to involve growing forests for always-on urbanites to go wolf-spotting at weekends.

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George Monbiot's farming fantasies

By John Lewis-Stempel

In promoting a high-tech, globalised food system (perhaps overseen by the world government he has previously argued for), and casually calling for the destruction of the basis of post-Neolithic human civilisation, Monbiot offers a perfect example of what a neo-green future will look like: utopian, hyper-urban, technological, rational and most of all, “efficient”. What matters now, as he explains, is mathematics:

“It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition…”

Welcome to what the greens have become.

A number of actual farmers who are also first-rate thinkers have taken aim at Monbiot’s Machine Green dystopia in recent months (Simon Fairlie, Chris Smaje and John Lewis-Stempel offer some of the best critiques), but while they might win the battle they are, for now at least, losing the war. Only last month, a pioneering Finnish “solar food” company championed by Monbiot was given EU permission to roll out production of their new “sustainable protein” (as part of the “European green deal”). The company says that the laboratory in which it produces this “novel food” — which it calls “Factory 01” — is part of a “food revolution” that will, for the first time in history, detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food. I’m salivating already.

Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the sludge and live in the pod, might feel that something has gone terribly wrong with the numbers-obsessed rationalism that underlies this new, corporate-friendly green technocracy. But we have no five-point plan of our own, and we can’t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don’t convince anybody who matters. And now that the localists, the deep ecologists, the peasants, the small farmers — and anyone else whose human-scale vision might interfere with the march of Progress — have been conveniently designated “eco-fascists”, we are able to behold the only legitimate form of environmentalism which remains: a globalised technocratic, “progressive” push for “sustainability”, led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professional activists.

The green movement, long ago co-opted by the Left, has now been co-opted too by technocrats. For this reason, the neo-green (or should we say soylent green?) food future can’t be viewed in isolation. It is only one aspect of the unfolding phenomenon which has been dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a revolution in which the Machine Greens, wittingly or otherwise, are playing a key part.

Dreamt up, like so many other catchy corporate catchphrases, by the World Economic Forum in 2015, the Fourth Revolution is a way of describing our historical moment. That same year, Foreign Affairs produced a book by the same name, to accompany the annual Davos gathering of politicians, business leaders and Bono. In it, the inescapable Klaus Schwab explains, in prose that could make a Martian invasion sound boring, the import of the times we are living through:

“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third… It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

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Is this the end of the world?

By Doug Coupland

The rest of the book, made up of offerings from various scientists, engineers, politicians and philosophers, explores the implications of this “blurring of lines” between created and uncreated, natural and artificial, wild and tamed. Now that we inhabit what the neo-greens like to call the “Anthropocene” — now that we are, in H. G. Wells’s formulation, Men Like Gods — what do we intend to conjure with the thunder and the lightning that pours forth from our just and rational fingers?

All of the contributors stress that overcoming the old-school distinction between the digital and the natural is the essence of the thing. Neil Gershenfeld, for example, defines the “digital fabrication revolution” — the one which will soon be growing our tank-bred bio-sludge dinners — as “the ability to turn data into things and things into data”. “Intelligent” buildings, wearable sensors, implanted chips: six years ago, when this book was written, these may have seemed radical. Today, it feels as if they have been almost normalised.

Partly this is because of the ubiquity of Amazon Alexas, Smartphone apps and endless, boosterish narratives about the exciting future that AI is building. And partly it is because the Covid pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kind of technologies — smartphone-enabled passports, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control — which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of “saving the planet”. It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the Covid biosecurity state. We are being trained to like what is coming — or at least to shrug our shoulders and accept its inevitability.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Fourth Revolution, though, is what has been called “datafication”. The book’s chapter on “Big Data” explains that the knowledge available to each of us today on the Internet dwarfs that which would have been available in the Great Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of learning in the ancient world. But size, as they explain, isn’t everything:

“Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it ‘datafication’. For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and ‘likes’ are datafied, via Facebook.”

Here we see the same “obsession with numbers” that George Monbiot demands of us as we contemplate how to produce our food and live in our landscape, and it reveals the elision between Machine Environmentalism and the elite-driven tech revolution it is part of. What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics, until even novels and friendships and meadows and family meals on winter nights can be measured and compared and judged for their relative contributions to efficiency and sustainability.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

There is a rift here, and we should gaze deep into it, because there is something down there that we need to make out. It is the ancient rift between those who embrace the mindset of “datafication” — which is, in the form of sums and written language, one of the foundations of civilisation — and those who are repelled by it. I suspect it can never really be healed, because it marks the border between two distinct ways of seeing. The philosopher Jeremy Naydler has referred to them as ratio and the nous, but we could just as well call them left and right brain, mythos and logos, or — perhaps most simply — the sacred and the profane.

The Fourth Revolution and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing but an engineering challenge. It is something which can be studied, quantified and constantly tweaked until we arrive at the most efficient version. This may be done with the best of intentions (or it may not) but the things which cannot be measured will, of course, be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll “datafy” all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes’ worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.

If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the “peer-reviewed science” then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green “thought leaders” are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old Covid mask. It will all come flooding back.

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Big Tech's threat to democracy

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Interestingly, some of the progenitors of the Fourth Revolution are themselves uneasy about where some of it is leading. Even Klaus Schwab, who these days is often lazily presented as a volcano-dwelling Bond villain pulling the global strings, admits to unease at the speed and scale of change. In the book, he expresses his timid concern about how our “quintessential human capacities such as compassion and co-operation” might be eroded by deep shifts like these. “It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self,” he writes, “and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation”.

Even as he proselytises for the Fourth Revolution, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing Smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A Panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: “Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

What the Fourth Revolutionaries never seem to grasp is that the question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is “how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?” then the answer can only lead you to a globalised technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is “how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?” then you may be led in a very different direction.

It is the first kind of question that a Machine society will always ask, and there will always be endless, multiplying justifications for asking it. Ecology, equality, feminism, democracy, public health, growth, security, the war on terror or crime or drugs or whatever: there is always a reason for Big Data. The control is always necessary to prevent a greater evil. Even a movement which once challenged this grim way of seeing has today been bought and sold by it.

For at least 200 years we have been thoroughly undermining the foundations of all of our assumptions. Now, new cracks in the masonry are appearing daily. Can we caulk them up with vat-grown eco-sludge and hope they don’t spread? Can Big Data come to our rescue? What can we measure, manage, monitor, to help us escape from this? This is what I think, though I often wish I didn’t: we are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next.

As we make clear in our forthcoming book, we see lockdowns as a social, human and economic catastrophe of enormous proportions, which did very little (if anything) to reduce virus spread and death from Covid-19. We’re grateful to those who have fought hard to define this position, and continue to do so — even though we don’t agree with them on everything.

Perhaps the strangest idea still finding traction today is the notion among many influential lockdown sceptics that draconian Covid restrictions were some kind of socialist plot led by “Marxist” institutions, such as the World Economic Forum and China-sympathisers on the “woke” left. In a recent article, for instance, the San Francisco attorney Michael P. Senger draws links between the Wuhan lockdown and the way in which this was actively promoted in Italy in February 2020 by the Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who thought that the lockdowns “could be used to implement far-Left political reforms across Italy”. Meanwhile, American Institute of Economic Research director Jeffrey Tucker has described how the best way to deal with the overreach of lockdown bureaucrats is to simply abolish the failing institutes and replace them with private corporations.

We agree that Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be utterly inefficient, terribly oppressive, or both. Yet it seems clear they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. In fact, the lockdown catastrophe and subsequent mass-vaccination-by-all-means programmes, and associated pharma and tech profiteering, are the clear outcome of decades of deregulation and marketisation advocated by pro-market conservatives. Yes, centre-Left governments, from Blair to Clinton, played an important role in implementing these policies, but no one in their right mind would call Blair or Clinton socialists — if anything, they symbolise the Left’s abandonment of its socialist roots. The same can be said of Italy’s Health Minister Roberto Speranza, who hails from the anti-socialist, pro-establishment Partito Democratico.

A good example of such policies is the famous practice of the “revolving door”, where there is a cosy relationship between government and business, in which executives from companies enter senior levels of government — and then where senior civil servants move into top corporate jobs on leaving government. This policy has been actively championed by conservative policymakers, who stress how much government has to learn from business models, and believe that bringing executives into senior policy roles can help to trim waste and make government more efficient.

The Covid-19 crisis gave the lie to this claim, showing the dramatic consequences of revolving door politics. For instance, the man called to lead Operation Warp Speed — the US programme created to accelerate the development and manufacturing of Covid vaccines, which provided more than $10 billion of public funding to a handful of pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) — was none other than  Moncef Slaoui, former GlaxoSmithKline executive (running its vaccines programme) and board member of Moderna.

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Following his nomination, Slaoui was required to resign from a number of biotech boards funded by Operation Warp Speed, and to sell his Moderna stock, but was allowed to keep his stock in GSK, reported to be worth about $10 million. Meanwhile, in Europe, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose husband is medical director of a US biotech company, negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief.

Or one could mention how the WHO went from being an entirely publicly funded institution to one increasingly dependent on private “philanthropic” institutions — first and foremost, today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been accused of “function[ing] as a trojan horse for Western corporations”, and which is increasingly recognised even by mainstream media groups such as Politico as key in market profiteering associated with the pandemic response. Many lockdown critics decry the role of Bill Gates in buying influence in the media, in pharmaceutical investments, and in government, yet few would consider Gates to be a socialist; in fact he’s considered the embodiment of philanthrocapitalism. It’s also rather obvious that Gates’s ability to exert this influence has not come from socialist policies of redistribution, but rather from the upward transfer of wealth which has been promoted by the neoliberal economic agenda of the past decades.

Then there’s the fact that both the FDA and EMA rely heavily on fees and charges levied on the very pharmaceutical companies they are called upon to regulate (respectively for around half and three quarters of their budgets) — a fact which, according to several observers, raises serious issues of conflict of interest. Moreover, both agencies have long been criticised for their revolving door problem. For example, the current executive director of the EMA, Emer Cooke, previously worked for Europe’s largest pharmaceutical lobbying organisation, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

Should we be surprised, then, that Western governments almost entirely funded the development of the vaccines, fast-tracked the approval process, granted manufacturers close-to-full immunity from liability over a whole host of issues, and then allowed the pharma companies to fully own the patents and even set the price of the vaccines? It seems pretty obvious who benefited from this — the corporations themselves — just as it is clear that this is the result of a pro-market agenda, not a socialist one.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this can be found in the Global South, where the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic response have had a catastrophic impact in low-income countries (LICs). As noted in the first edition of The Covid Consensus, some have said that these were decisions made by sovereign leaders — and that global pressure has had very little to do with this. Yet the truth is that 40 years of structural adjustment and austerity policies — driven by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF — eroded the ability of state budgets to provide for healthcare and education, leaving LICs and their health agendas to be shaped by philanthropic donors and their non-profit partners.

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As the trauma of 2020 and 2021 fades into the reality of the painful consequences of 2022, a broader political reckoning is required. Those of us on the Left who recognise the appalling abdication of social and ethical responsibility which many — but not all — Left-wing politicians and intellectuals showed in the face of Covid must take stock of the reasons why this happened. This is something that many people are still coming to terms with: for us, the appropriation of the Left-wing movement by metropolitan liberals far distant from production chains and everyday realities of the global working class — whether in London, New York, Abidjan or Dhaka — must be a starting point for understanding how this has happened.

On the other hand, a similar reckoning is needed from those on the libertarian Right who have fought these restrictions. These did not emerge from some socialist plot, but rather from decades of policies of deregulation, revolving doors, and the capture of state institutions by corporations. If Left-leaning critics like us need to come to terms with the reasons for this catastrophic response, so must Right-leaning critics of lockdown policies recognise how they have followed directly from policies which many of them have supported for years.

What’s interesting is that the lockdown-cheering leftists and anti-lockdown libertarians actually have more in common than they would like to admit. Both outlooks are ultimately rooted in a fundamentally flawed view of the relationship between state and market. Both groups hold the belief that state-market relations are dichotomic, where the influence of one can only increase at the expense of the other. This is why many on the Left interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing the pro-market project of the past decades; while those on the libertarian Right, which see state interventionism as inherently socialist and anti-market, saw those same government interventions as expressions of creeping “socialism”.

But state-market relations are in fact symbiotic. Simply put, markets — let alone so-called “free markets” — can’t exist without the state. As Karl Polanyi argued, the emergence of so-called laissez-faire under mid-19th-century industrial capitalism entailed a highly active state to “embed” markets in society; to enforce changes in social structure and human thinking that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy. As he put it: “Laissez-faire was planned… [and] enforced by the state.”

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This has remained true throughout the various phases of capitalism. If the state’s role under “Keynesianism” was that of mediating between the interests of capital and labour, over the past decades the role of the state has become that of securing the interests of Big Capital at the expense of everyone else. As witnessed during the pandemic, this makes the modern state intrinsically authoritarian. It also makes it inefficient, as it entails the creation of an environment favourable to the privatisation of public assets and services through institutionalised mismanagement. Various terms have been put forward to describe this system — corporatocracy, neo-feudalism, hyper-capitalism — but one thing is clear: it ain’t socialism.

Even more ludicrous is the claim that the World Economic Forum is a “Marxist” organisation. Now, people have been quibbling for the past 150 years about what Marxism is, but what it clearly isn’t is an ideology that aims to hand power over to the world’s most powerful corporations. In fact, the WEF’s Young Global Leaders initiative, responsible for putting several members of the ruling elite into positions of power in business and politics, can be traced back to the US’s Cold War efforts to counter communist influence while ensuring that future global leaders would be amenable to American interests.

So, while libertarians understand (better than leftists) that capitalism today is heavily reliant on “political intervention”, what they don’t seem to understand is that the “free market” they dream of would require an equally interventionist state. Interventionism is quite simply an inescapable fact of advanced modern economies.

The point is whose interests the state should serve. “Less state” won’t make us freer, let alone deliver some mythical “free market” — it will just make the majority of us even more powerless in the face of financial and corporate power, the concentration of which has led to the lockdown catastrophes. What we need is a state that does the exact opposite of its modern incarnation: one that represses Big Capital, while expanding the liberties and rights of individual citizens and workers. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the past two and a half years, it’s that we need to reclaim the state, not give up on it.

Ever since March 2020, the memes have spread. Was Gates a mass murderer with a global depopulation agenda? Was he a “biofascist” seeking control over the world’s population through vaccine passports and microchips?

It didn’t stop there. Was the Covid-19 pandemic actually “plandemic”? Did the Microsoft founder and his acolytes create it through funding “gain of function” research in a biosecurity lab in Wuhan? Was it all war-gamed at Event 201 in October 2019?

Bill Gates has not much enjoyed being the focus of these stories for the past 18 months. He just wants to help out. He wants to solve problems so badly, he tells us early on in How To Prevent the Next Pandemic, that in February 2020, he flew from Seattle to South Africa to participate in a charity tennis match, no doubt on one of his four personal jets.

It was in South Africa that he first began to join the Covid-19 dots. The tech entrepreneur delivers the story with characteristic flair: “A couple of days after returning from South Africa, I sent an email about scheduling something for the coming Friday night: ‘We could try and do a dinner with the people involved with coronavirus work to touch base.’” Gates is happy, “everyone was nice enough to say yes — despite the timing and their busy schedules”. His work on the pandemic begins.

Now Gates is tired of all the conspiracies. He asks his critics to judge him by his actions. And the best way to do so is by reading the book: does Gates have anything sensible to say about the best way to combat future pathogenic outbreaks?

His model for the future is built on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. He cites Dr Anthony Fauci, who Gates says he spoke to once a month during the pandemic: “Not only should you appear to overreact at first, as Tony Fauci said, but you also have to be careful about relaxing all NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] too soon.” Meanwhile, you should invest enormous sums in boosting global public health systems, vaccine production in poor and rich countries, and fund a Global Pandemic Emergency Response Unit to monitor potential outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world — twice if necessary — within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen.

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It all sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Or it might do to those who haven’t seen the footage of Shanghai’s lockdown circulating on social media, to those who can work online in relative comfort, or indeed to billionaires with comfortable gardens and libraries in which to while away those six months. With the Gates model, a little translation is in order.

The massive investment required to make this vision happen is a good starting point. Where will it come from? Gates is a well-known philanthropist, and makes much of the more than US$2 billion which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ploughed into fighting Covid-19. Yet this is a small amount compared to the US$6 billion that the US government has invested in the Moderna vaccine alone. As Gates points out, “Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector… It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish.”

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment in November 2021.

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Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.

Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10 per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.

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Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all. 

For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual  spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.

Gates tries to show in this book that he gets it, while at the same time demonstrating on every page that he just doesn’t. As he draws up his elaborate plans for global governance, Gates writes that he does so knowing that he hasn’t been elected. He tells us he wouldn’t want to be anyway (after all, we can surmise, if he were elected, he might be accountable).

Gracefully, Gates understands that people are angry at the huge increases in wealth disparities during the pandemic, and pledges to return his profits to “make the world a fairer place”. He recognises that poor people across the world have suffered, and are far less able to deal with lockdowns, and even acknowledges that harsh measures might not be a good idea in some of them… And yet he recently went on record as saying that “if every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn’t be calling it a pandemic”. We can, in fact, judge him by his actions, and his words: he says one thing, and funds and promotes others.

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Looking forward, the outlook is bleak. Preventing pandemics in Gates-World means shutting down immediately at the “next major outbreak” — a favourite, and alarming turn of phrase. Future semi-permanent global lockdowns are baked-in as the new normal, something I warned of in the conclusion to my book The Covid Consensus. As Gates notes, the WHO have identified 1,500 new pathogens in the past 50 years, and thus the “next major outbreak” surely cannot be far off. In the past 20 years, pre-Covid, there were already three of note (SARS — 2003; Avian Flu — 2005; Swine Flu — 2009). In each case enormous fatalities were falsely predicted, and would surely have led to six month shutdowns in the Gates model.

Gates-World is one where citizens make sacrifices for his model to work. And it’s also one where class is totally ignored. Does Gates know what it was like for Angolan children to be forced to stay at home for seven months in 2020? He admits that internet connections need to be improved to make digital schooling possible — but does he understand that no IT in the world can help children of sex workers in Mumbai slums with their homework? Can he comprehend what it is like to be incarcerated in a flat with small children for months on end in New York, Shanghai or London?

Gates wants to be respected, and understood. His world is one of innovative scientists having dinner with one another. They solve the world’s problems by the pool, or near the barbecue. It’s what he likes doing best, because “I’ve had some of the best conversations of my working life with a fork in my hand and a napkin in my lap” (p4). He wants to fund more and more work leading to experiences like this, and meanwhile turn the rest of human society into a digital avatar of itself. 

No doubt he means well. But you don’t need to indulge the conspiracy theories to realise that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

Still: even though Gates was wrong on the specific case, he is bang on when he suggests that there is a market failure. The pharma industry has done many wonderful things. To pick one example that is very salient to me, metastatic melanoma was essentially a death sentence 20 years ago; now I have two relatives who are alive and healthy, several years after diagnosis, because immunotherapy has made it manageable, if not curable.

But there are real problems with the pharma industry. While it is amazing at developing drugs for chronic conditions for rich people in rich countries, it is less effective at producing medicines — notably, but not limited to, vaccines and antibiotics — which are not profitable in the short term but which are socially beneficial in the long term. It’s also not well set up to produce cheap drugs for poorer countries, even if those drugs are relatively easy to make and distribute. People are dying of treatable diseases because it’s not profitable to cure them.

This is the backdrop to an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian last week, in which he pointed out that Pfizer will stand to make a profit of £9.8 billion from their Covid-19 vaccine. That is, he says, unethical. He quotes activists saying that Pfizer’s patent on its vaccine – and, I assume although he does not say, other firms’ patents on their vaccines – should be suspended, so that cheap, generic versions can be produced and rolled out to the developing world. As it is, biotech patents stand for 20 years; until then, firms essentially have monopolistic power, and can set prices how they like.

I have a lot of sympathy for Jones’s sentiment. He has identified a real problem. But his proposed solution is a bad one, and I worry that it would lead to disaster. You want pharma companies to distribute their products in as equitable a way as possible, but you also want them to continue to make those products. And taking away their profits when they make a good one will not encourage them to do the same next time. So what is the best course of action?

First, it’s worth noting that £9.8 billion is not in fact very much money. Obviously it’s quite a lot of money, on the human scale. But in terms of the global economy it’s peanuts. A paper by the economist Larry Summers estimates that even if we control the virus by the end of 2021, it will still cost the US economy alone about $16 trillion (£12 trillion), if you account for the deaths and misery as well as its simple economic costs. The IMF is more optimistic, putting it at a mere $9 trillion worldwide, although that doesn’t take into account the non-financial costs.

Take the latter, lower figure. If Pfizer making a profit reduces the impact of the virus by one-tenth of one percent, then it will pay for itself, even before we start thinking about the lives lost. I think it is a safe bet that the vaccine will have a much greater effect than that; Pfizer will only see a tiny fraction of the total benefits the vaccine will bring the world.

(It’s also worth noting that AstraZeneca have said that they won’t make a profit from their vaccine “during the pandemic”, although they reserve the right to say when “the pandemic” is over.)

But the main point is that there is a real, and to some extent unresolvable, tension in what it is that we want pharma companies to do. On the one hand, we want them to produce new drugs that save our lives. On the other, we want them to manufacture those drugs cheaply and get them to as many people as possible.

Imagine that a drug firm produces a vaccine for some deadly disease that is affecting people in both the developed and the developing world. Roughly speaking, a new vaccine costs about a billion dollars to get to market, after putting it through animal trials, Phase I safety trials and Phase II and Phase III efficacy trials, applying for licensing, and so on. Let’s imagine it costs about a dollar a dose to make. So if you only made enough of the vaccine to dose one person, the cost of that dose would be $1,000,000,001.

But if you make two doses, the average cost per dose is $500,000,001. If you make four, it’s $250,000,001. If you make a billion, it’s $2. The more doses you make and sell, the closer your average cost per dose gets to your marginal cost of making a single dose.

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The socially optimal outcome is that we charge everyone the marginal cost, $1, so it can reach the maximum number of people. But if we do that, the pharma company will never cover its fixed costs: it will be $1 billion in the red, and probably won’t want to make any more vaccines. 

On the other hand, if you let pharma companies charge the market value — that is, the amount that people are willing to pay — then it will cover their losses, because people in rich countries want to be vaccinated against this disease. But poorer countries will not be able to afford it. People who would be willing to pay the marginal cost are priced out of a vaccine. 

The cost that will encourage industry investment R&D, and the cost that maximises the number of people covered by the vaccine, are different. It’s a simple tradeoff. “It’s obvious that, if your financial model is to sell to rich consumers at above cost price, you’re going to do R&D on products that you can do that for,” says Owen Barder, a development economist who has worked on pharma incentives. “The patent model suffers a really big problem.”

One obvious solution would be to take the whole business out of pharma companies’ hands, and let governments and philanthropic organisations run the whole thing. But the profit motive is very good at one particular thing: making pharma companies drop a product that isn’t working. “I think the key skill of a pharma company is knowing when to exit,” says Barder. “And, to a gross generalisation, governments are rubbish at exit.” 

Most candidate drugs don’t work, or don’t work very well. So most of the time you have to abandon research, after spending a lot of money on them. But it is very hard for a government to say “This thing that we’ve spent £100 million on doesn’t work, and we’re going to throw all that money away.” It’s easier to throw another £100 million in and avoid the question. Drug companies, we all agree, are extremely good at making money. And part of being good at making money is not throwing good money after bad. Publicly funded research is great for blue-skies, open-ended questions that help us understand things, but it is less effective than private firms at developing specific products, because of this exit problem.

Instead, says Barder, what you need to do is separate the fixed cost from the marginal cost. You need to find some way of encouraging pharma companies to sell their products at a low cost to poor countries, while also incentivising them to keep putting money into R&D.

There are several ways of doing this. One example is a financial prize: we (governments, philanthropic agencies, etc) will give whoever comes up with the first vaccine some large amount of money: perhaps $1 billion, on the condition that they then agree to make it in large quantities and sell it at close to marginal cost to the developing world.

That’s a useful model, but it has a disadvantage. In the last two weeks, trial results for two Covid vaccines have been announced: the Pfizer one and, this week, the Moderna one. Initial signs suggest that Moderna’s one is a bit better than Pfizer’s: it appears slightly more effective, and it can be stored at normal freezer temperatures for months, while Pfizer’s needs to be kept at -80°C.

If we had put in place a prize system, so that the first group to develop a working vaccine got a billion dollars, then (assuming Pfizer’s vaccine gets licensed first) Pfizer would get the whole lot, even though it appears Moderna’s product is slightly superior. Depending on what costs remained, it might well make financial sense for Moderna to abandon the project, because they would not get the reimbursement that would make it viable. But, obviously, if a superior product comes out a week later, you still want to be able to buy it. (And you may want lots of different vaccines anyway, because each will have different advantages and disadvantages.)

But there is a better way. The pneumococcus bacterium causes meningitis, pneumonia and septicaemia; this Lancet paper estimates that it killed about 800,000 children in the year 2000 alone. The pharmaceutical industry — Pfizer, as it happens — developed a vaccine, Prevnar. But it was only suitable for the strains of the disease found in Western countries, not in the developing world. Creating a version that worked for the strain found in poorer countries was perfectly possible, but the financial incentives just weren’t there.

To solve the problem, in 2004, the economist Michael Kremer — he of deworming fame — and the British economist Rachel Glennerster proposed something called an “advanced market commitment”, or AMC. Five national governments and the Gates Foundation put aside $1.5 billion dollars. They promised the pharma industry that, if they developed a new vaccine for the developing world, then for every dose that the companies provided at the marginal cost of $3.50 a dose, they would reimburse them a further $7.

Unlike a prize, an AMC rewards both speed of development and quality of product. If your vaccine is first to market, you can sell it and make money without any competition; but if you know your vaccine is better than the one that’s first to market, you can carry on developing it without worrying that it will be rejected because all the money has gone to the earlier, but inferior, product.

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Better yet, it keeps all the risk on pharma companies. If they know a vaccine isn’t likely to work, then they will abandon it, because it won’t make them money — it won’t meet the requirements. If governments or philanthropic agencies were funding the research directly, they’d have the problem of exiting after spending lots of money on it. The funding bodies never have to pay for a product that doesn’t work (although they do have to pay a premium for the ones that do).

With pneumococcus, it was a roaring success. By 2016 the vaccine was being distributed in 60 countries, and more than 150 million children had been vaccinated; Gavi, the body that oversaw the AMC, estimates that it will have saved 700,000 lives by the end of the year.

To be clear, the AMC model won’t work for everything. In the case of Covid, for instance, the problem wasn’t that companies weren’t investing in R&D — they knew that there was a market. But building a vaccine factory takes months and millions of dollars, and pharma companies, understandably, don’t want to invest millions of dollars in a product that very possibly won’t work; they’d rather build it at small scale until they’ve done the testing, then scale it up afterwards. 

Most of the time that works fine. But in the Covid case, the costs to society of making a few factories that ended up not being used were negligible compared to the cost of waiting even a few more weeks for a vaccine. So it became worthwhile for the UK government (for instance) to start paying for manufacture of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine even before it had released its results, and why Bill Gates (again: one of history’s greatest heroes) invested billions of dollars building seven factories for different vaccine types, knowing that some, or even most, would not work.

And AMCs wouldn’t work for antibiotics. Antibiotics are a special case: we need lots of new antibiotics so that we can combat antibiotic-resistant microbes, such as MRSA. But we don’t really want people to use them, because then microbes will become resistant to the new ones, as well. Most of the time, if a pharma company brings a new drug to market, it will win a significant chunk of that market — if you make a new cancer drug or antidepressant that works better on some group than the existing ones, then it will be prescribed for that group. But with antibiotics, most of the time, doctors will continue to prescribe doxycycline or methicillin, and will save your new drug for when they encounter drug-resistant bacteria.

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So there is very little incentive for pharma companies to invest in antibiotics, because — essentially — your new antibiotic will rarely be prescribed, so it will rarely be sold, so you’ll make very little money. According to Jeremy Knox, policy lead in antibiotic resistance at the Wellcome Trust, there’s an additional problem that, for hard-to-explain reasons, antibiotics command low prices anyway. “So you have this toxic combination of very unpredictable small volume markets and very low prices,” he says: “and both of those things combined means that if you’re a producer you’ll probably forecast making a loss.” An AMC that paid them for each dose sold wouldn’t help, because not many doses will be sold even at low cost.

There are models in place that get around this. Jim O’Neill, who was the antibiotics tsar under David Cameron’s government, suggested a lump sum given to each pharma company that brings a novel antibiotic to market. Wellcome and the British Government are also looking at what Knox describes as “the Netflix model”, where bodies like the NHS agree to pay a fixed sum a year to the manufacturers, and are then given as much as they need. So if you only need to use five doses all year, you pay X million; but if you need 5,000 doses, or 5 million, you still pay X million.

It means that pharma companies aren’t incentivised to sell as many doses as they can, and the decision to prescribe can stay in the hands of doctors. (It is worth noting that the UK Government, and the health secretary Matt Hancock in particular, have been quick to take up this model; I rarely have nice things to say about Matt Hancock, so I will flag this now.)

There is also a funding scheme, CARB-X, which supports the R&D of new antibiotics. It’s not enough — Knox thinks we need about 10 new antibiotics every decade, and that at the moment we might be lucky to see two or three. But it’s an improvement.

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By John Lichfield

Coming back to Owen Jones’s article, it’s worth noting what I think is a factual error. It’s a minor one, but I think it’s instructive. He says that vaccine companies “abandoned” research into a vaccine for Sars in 2003 because it was not “immediately profitable”. But as I understand it, the reason that the pharma industry stopped work on a Sars vaccine was because Sars (somewhat mysteriously) disappeared. If people weren’t getting infected, then you couldn’t tell if your vaccine stopped infections. In fact, Mike Osterholm, the US epidemiologist, says that the pharma industry invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Sars vaccine research, and then when it went away, the US government and philanthropic agencies left them “holding the bag”, and wary about future investments.

I think it’s instructive because most of the scientists working at pharma companies want to save and improve lives, just as scientists do at universities or other bodies. But just like the scientists at those other bodies, they have to navigate the incentive structure that surrounds them. For university scientists, it’s publish-or-perish – your work is useless if it doesn’t get you journal articles and citations, regardless of how true it is. For industry scientists, it’s profit. 

The trick in both cases is to help the incentives align with what we want out of the research they do. In the case of the pharma industry, we want them to keep producing new drugs and vaccines, but also to provide them at a low cost to the people who need them. If we remove the pharma companies’ patents, and stop them making profits, then we might be able to provide this drug at a low cost, but we’ll be less likely to see the next one. Instead, we need to come up with clever ways of incentivising them to do what we want, so that we continue to spend more on curing malaria than we do on curing baldness.

Little wonder countries on the continent rushed to follow the lead of rich nations such as Italy and Spain that were visibly struggling to cope with pandemic. Many closed borders, shut businesses and locked down citizens. Among the firmest responses was Uganda’s, where public transport was suspended, schools shut down, shops closed, curfews imposed and big gatherings banned. Kampala has conducted more than 350,000 tests, according to official data. After doom-laden warnings of 68,000 fatalities from the virus if there were failure to act, there have been 44 confirmed coronavirus deaths in this east African nation of 43m.

Such actions won praise from global health bodies. Yet were blunt lockdowns really the right approach in Africa? A growing body of doctors, economists and scientists fear these measures will have disastrous consequences. These experts warn of financial carnage, spiralling epidemics of other diseases, the intensification of gender and wealth inequalities and the battle against poverty being set back by decades. They point to Africa’s youth, with a median age of 18 years compared with 41 years in Europe, and few people in the highest-risk older categories — which may help explain why a continent of 1.3bn people has seen fewer confirmed virus deaths than the UK. Almost one in five Britons is aged 65 or over; in Africa, it is fewer than one in 50. Yet the impact of shutting down countries will be far worse than in wealthier developed nations.

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David Bell, a malaria specialist who has worked with both Bill Gates and the WHO, is among those concerned that we may be witnessing catastrophe unfolding on the continent. “It seems global health authorities did not think through the collateral damage, yet we knew by March the age-related fatality levels of this virus. If you looked at Italy or China, it was old people who were dying. In developing nations, many people live day to day, so even short disruption can be devastating to lives, while there are already large epidemics of malaria, tuberculosis and HiV that will only get worse if you reduce access and healthcare for a few months.”

Take Uganda, where borders remain closed, the curfew is still in place, and half the citizens are under 16 years old. On the plus side, there is thought to have been a fall in traffic fatalities as people stayed at home. But a new study by Bell and five other researchers indicates restrictive measures led to plummeting detection of new HiV and malaria cases, along with treatment of highly-infectious tuberculosis, while maternal mortality instantly surged from 92 deaths in January to 167 fatalities in March. “The fear is more people will die from other conditions,” said Agnes Kiragga, head of statistics at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Kampala, and co-author of the paper. “This has been a learning curve. Governments in Africa must consider not just Covid but other diseases that are more dangerous in a young population.”

One medic said the nation’s health budget had been depleted in three months, storing up problems. Another told me of children missing critical immunisations and a surge in suicides amid economic downturn so fierce the BBC recently showed a school teacher who lost her job selling maize on the street. “I had to look for a way of surviving,” said Harriet Agasiu. “I was eating my savings, which I finished.” There is little safety net in such places. Many people also live in crowded conditions lacking basic services that make social distancing impossible. And in countries such as Angola, Kenya and Uganda, people have been killed by security officials enforcing lockdown and others beaten and shot, exposing how thugs in uniform may be more dangerous than the disease.

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Malawi was among the handful of African countries that did not impose such rigid measures after its pandemic response became ensnared in electoral politics. Human rights activists, fearing the government was using the virus to wriggle out of a re-run presidential contest, won a court battle to stop lockdown on the basis there was not sufficient provision to stop poor people going hungry. Even big campaign rallies went ahead, although schools and later bars were shut down. Predictive modelling warned that inaction would lead to 16 million infections, 483,000 hospitalisations and 50,000 fatalities in this southern African nation of 19m people — yet there have been just 176 confirmed deaths to date.

There has been limited testing in Malawi, while doctors admit significant numbers of deaths may be going unrecorded, especially in rural areas. Yet there have been few coronavirus patients in their hospital emergency units. “We’ve not seen a lot of cases and the reasons remain unknown,” said Marah Chibwana, a member of the Viral Immunology Research Group at Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme. She has just completed a study in Blantyre that found one in eight health workers has had Covid-19, highlighting this discrepancy between predicted and actual reported deaths. “It is a mystery that despite not going into a lockdown, we have experienced a low number of fatalities.”

The youth of citizenry must be a factor. But, as Chibwana says, another theory under investigation is that previous exposure to coronaviruses, such as those responsible for common colds, might have built up immunity to Covid-19. One leading South African virologist says he cannot think of any other reason to explain the numbers of completely asymptomatic people seen on the continent. If this is correct, it would mean the very conditions expected to fuel huge fatalities — cramped homes, crowded urban areas and communal washing spaces — may in fact help to protect poorer places in developing nations. Although who knows what lies ahead with this unpredictable new virus?

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Some countries are now tweaking their approach to focus more on testing and surveillance, having seen the disadvantages of lockdown. Lynda Iroulo, a Nigerian research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, points to a spike in crime during lockdown in Lagos. “African nations made the mistake of mimicking Western measures without considering local conditions. In Western nations lockdowns were more feasible because the infrastructure is there and social welfare is available. But in most African nations lockdowns were flouted in search of money and sustenance. This is not surprising — it is a difficult challenge to overcome because the pandemic only exacerbated existing problems within nations. So the lockdown did more harm than good.”

A series of studies is starting to show the collateral damage in a continent where countries and families are being pushed to the brink, and where more than eight in ten people are self-employed, many surviving on marginal incomes as street vendors or day labourers. The UN forecast that Africa could have 30 million more people in poverty. A study by the International Growth Centre spoke of “staggering” implications with 9.1% of the population descending into extreme poverty as savings are drained, with two-thirds of this due to lockdown. ‘The context is very different to Europe because people become food deprived,” said co-author Matthieu Teachout, who fears the crisis could set poverty rates back two decades.

Then there is the wider health impact. One US charity predicts 2.3m child deaths due to disruption of services in the pandemic’s first year. Births in Zimbabwe’s health clinics have fallen more than one-fifth — which, according to a study in the Lancet, if replicated across the developing world might lead to 12,200 more maternal deaths, since women are more likely to die in childbirth from complications if not in a medical setting. A WHO analysis projects an extra 200,000 fatalities from TB this year, while the organisation also warns that the blocking of access to anti-retroviral therapies could lead to half a million extra deaths from AIDS-related illnesses.

The Lancet paper in May came from researchers at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who were instantly concerned by the possible side-effects of the pandemic. It showed the results of modelling maternal and under-5 deaths resulting from disruption of health systems and decreased food access. The best scenario resulted in 253,500 additional child deaths over six months in 118 low- and middle-income countries; the worst led to 1,157,000 extra child fatalities and 56,700 more maternal deaths. “The scenarios were based on assumptions, not empirical data,” said lead author Timothy Roberton. “However, since May we’ve seen various data from different countries, and lots of anecdotal reports, that suggest our original scenarios might not be far off the mark — including the higher scenario.”

Malaria, the main cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa, is another concern. To put this in perspective, Angola has seen 126 coronavirus deaths compared with 2,500 fatalities from this parasitic disease in just the first quarter of 2020. One study warned that suspending the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and a big drop in the use of drugs across Africa could lead to mortality rates not seen for two decades. Another paper in Nature Medicine by researchers at Imperial College, London, predicts a doubling of malarial deaths this year: “In Nigeria alone, reducing case management for six months and delaying long-lasting insecticidal net campaigns could result in 81,000 additional deaths.” The tragedy behind such horrifying data, as co-author Thomas Churcher pointed out to me, is that we know how to control malaria though prevention and quick treatment.

This discussion over lockdown in Africa is a microcosm of the wider global debate over how to balance the handling of a deadly new disease with wider health, commercial and social issues. But it is multiplied many times over since coronavirus fatality rates are so much lower than in developed nations while the impact so much more profound. “Lockdowns are the wrong policy not just for Africa, but for almost all low income countries,” said Charles Robertson, global chief economist at Renaissance Capital and author of a book on Africa’s renaissance. I fear he is right. The more you look at the data, the harder it is to avoid the conclusions that the instant panicked response on the continent was a mistake — and one that may have the most hideous long-term consequences.

Mindsets are an idea in educational psychology that have become fashionable in the past decade or so, mainly through the work of Professor Carol Dweck, a Stanford researcher. People with “fixed” mindsets, according to the theory, believe that abilities are fixed: if they aren’t good at, say, maths, they think “guess I’m just not good at maths”, and give up.

People with “growth” mindsets, on the other hand, think “I need to practise more at maths if I’m going to get good at it”. The really interesting claim, though, is that through the use of relatively minor interventions – things like praising a child for “working hard”, rather than for “being clever” – you can instil a growth mindset. And that doing so dramatically improves children’s outcomes at school and beyond.

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I should, here, declare a conflict of interest, which is that I wrote a piece in 2017 that was sceptical of growth mindset, questioning whether the statistics behind it stand up. So I have publicly nailed my colours to the mast on this topic, and the laws of motivated scepticism dictate that I will therefore tend to find problems with the research. So, bear that in mind as you read on.

Growth mindset has become something of a phenomenon. When I wrote my piece in 2017, I reported that hundreds of British schools were using mindset interventions in class; things like the poster my son made. CBeebies helpfully informs you how to instil a growth mindset in your preschooler. The University of Portsmouth’s “Changing Mindsets” programme has been going since 2012 and has worked with thousands of pupils in years five and six “across Britain”. The Guardian this year called it “arguably the most popular psychological theory in education”.

It’s also hugely popular outside education: Google, Nasa, the British government and Bill Gates have all recommended it. New York Magazine, back in 2007, did a whole big feature about how you should never praise your kids for being clever, because if you did they’d turn out to be feckless weaklings who give up at the first hurdle (I paraphrase).

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But despite all this excitement, when other scientists tried to find what the original researchers found, they often struggled. Tim Bates of Edinburgh University was the first researcher I became aware of who was explicitly trying to replicate it. His three studies of 624 children aged between 10 and 12 found no effect: children’s IQ did not improve, nor did their educational attainment, or their ability to get over setbacks.

One large, preregistered study by David Yeager, a longtime collaborator of Dweck’s, looking at 12,000 ninth-graders (14- to 15-year-olds) in the US, has apparently found a link. It’s not published yet, and the preprint has – unusually – been taken down for revisions, but it’s still available here (PDF download link). It found apparently real, but tiny, impacts: if I’m reading it right, the “effect sizes” – the statistical measure of the impact – were all below 0.15. Effect sizes of less than 0.2, by convention, are not large enough to be considered “small”. According to the paper: “On a 4-point grade metric (‘A’ = 4.0, ‘B’ = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment effect was 0.03 grade points.”

(For comparison, I worked out an effect size in one of the studies in Dweck’s original 1998 paper, and found it was 1.6! That is huge.)

Another pair of meta-analyses found that the correlation between growth mindset and academic achievement, on a scale where 0 is “totally random, no link” and 1 is “perfect 100% correlation”, was 0.1, although it was a bit higher (0.19 and 0.15) for children and adolescents.

They also found that smaller studies – but not larger ones – were more likely to find results that were more positive than average, which is what you’d expect if many of the more negative results were quietly being hidden in desk drawers, a problem called “publication bias”.

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More amazingly, the meta-analysis found that mindset interventions only correlated significantly with academic achievement when “the manipulation check failed” – that is, the students’ mindset had not in fact changed. If your growth mindset intervention actually invokes a growth mindset, then it won’t help! That suggests that the data is, according to a psychologist friend, “very noisy and messy”.

And, last month, the Portsmouth “Changing Mindsets” programme finally reported, having undergone an independent assessment by the Educational Endowment Fund, which was supporting it with a £300,000 grant. It found: nothing.

That’s not quite how they write it up. They say that pupils “who received the growth mindset workshops made an average of two additional months’ progress in English and maths”, but that “the findings were not statistically significant” – i.e. there’s a strong possibility that they are pure fluke. When they gave teachers the growth mindset training, children actually did worse, by about the equivalent of two months’ progress – but again, non-significant, so very likely pure chance.

The effect sizes range from -0.11 to +0.18, hovering around the zero mark – so even if it turns out that they are real, they’re small. But under the usual conventions of scientific publishing, these are null results.

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For what it’s worth, my bet is that there is some small but non-zero effect of mindset interventions on learning, although I would not be at all surprised to learn that it’s entirely ineffective. But assuming it’s real, this tiny effect does not come for free.

The Portsmouth programme’s workshops cost about £400 per pupil per year, apparently. The average spend per English primary school pupil in 2017/18 was £4,700; for secondary school, £6,200. So we’re talking about spending 7% of the total money per pupil on mindset interventions. Other interventions, such as that studied in the Yeager paper, were cheaper. But the effects are so small that we need to think very carefully about whether they’re cost-effective.

There’s folk-wisdom here that we can all agree on and in fact is kind of obvious: if you believe that you can’t improve on your abilities, you won’t work to improve them. But we all know that practice makes you better at things. Still, most of us also think that practice only gets you so far. While we can all learn to play the violin, only some of us can play at Carnegie Hall. Most of us are both growth and fixed mindsets, in the end.

Anyway, we quietly ignored our son’s “homework”. The poster was forgotten. Hopefully his mindset will survive.

It is therefore no surprise that when the folks at Our World in Data compared the media’s coverage (specifically, in the New York Times and The Guardian) of various causes of death with mortality statistics for the general population they found a mismatch. They also looked at causes of death through a third lens – online searches by the public.

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The findings are summarised on the site in an article by Hannah Ritchie:

“…around one-third of the considered causes of deaths resulted from heart disease, yet this cause of death receives only 2-3 percent of Google searches and media coverage… just under one-third of the deaths came from cancer; we actually google cancer a lot (37 percent of searches)… but it receives only 13-14 percent of media coverage…”

This is pretty much as one might expect. Specific incidences of death caused by a common disease do not generally make the news – except in the case of famous individuals.

As for online searches, one would expect the public to turn to ‘Dr. Internet’ if they have concerns about their own health or that of people they know – and, given the wide range of possible symptoms and warning signs associated with cancer, it’s not surprising that it prompts a disproportionate share of searches.

Then we come to the most dramatic findings:

“…the largest discrepancies concern violent forms of death: suicide, homicide and terrorism. All three receive much more relative attention in Google searches and media coverage than their relative share of deaths. When it comes to the media coverage on causes of death, violent deaths account for more than two-thirds of coverage in the New York Times and The Guardian but account for less than 3 percent of the total deaths in the US.”

Ritchie says that compared to what actually happens in real life, homicide is over represented in the newspapers by a factor of 31 and terrorism a factor of 4,000.

Ritchie does acknowledge what she calls the “very nature of news”. As the word makes clear, news is all about novelty and therefore the unusual, the sudden and the spectacular. This, she says, leaves most of us “with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.”

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I'm Lionel, I'm a news-aholic

By Lionel Shriver

Commenting on the Our World in Data study, Bill Gates was moved to tweet the following:

“I’m always amazed by the disconnect between what we see in the news and the reality of the world around us… we must fight the fear instinct that distorts our perspective.”

But is it right to pathologise what Ritchie calls a “strong bias for outlier events”?

Weighing in on the debate, Nassim Taleb slammed the “naive empiricists” who equate the future significance of a danger with how common it happens to be over a particular period of time.

The most egregious example of this fallacy is a cheap trick that’s often pulled by faux sophisticates in the commentariat. This is how it works: firstly, look up the stats for some rare, but crushingly banal, way to die – like falling off a ladder or accidentally drowning in a bathtub. Then, tell your readers that they’re still more likely to die that way than be knifed by a mugger or blown-up by terrorist. Then reassure everyone that the country is not, in fact, going-to-hell-in-a-handcart and that all is well in the liberal paradise. Finish with a condescending quip about Brexit voters – and you’re done. File that column, sit back and bask in the respect of your peers.

Taleb exposes the flaws in this ‘thinking’. He does so by distinguishing between two domains of probability, which he calls ‘Extremistan’ and ‘Mediocristan’. Terrorism is an example of a risk that belongs to Extremistan. It may, at present, be small – but it has the potential to become massively and unpredictably more significant.

A single act of terror can pitch a nation into a series of foreign policy disasters, as with 9/11 and the US. An escalating campaign of terror (and counter-terror) can bring fear and division to an entire society as in Northern Ireland during the Troubles; or, yet worse, develop into a full-scale, bloody civil war – as it did in Syria. Crime, too, poses potentially systemic risks. If it gets out of control, the harm is not just to the immediate victims, but everyday life and long-term prosperity across an entire neighbourhood, city or country.

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The same cannot be said of bathtubs or ladders. We may have the luck to live in a time and place where they kill more people than terrorists do, but the risks associated with their use belong to Mediocristan. This means that the most extreme scenarios really aren’t that extreme at all – society will not be rocked to its foundations by an uncontrollable epidemic of bathtub drownings, for instance.

Could it be that the general public has an instinctive sense of the risks that have the greatest potential to turn into catastrophe? If so, in pressing our buttons, the media is not whipping up scare stories – but acting as a means by which legitimate public concerns can be identified, amplified and pushed up the political agenda.

Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor, statistician, “data rock-star” (thanks to the advent of TED talks) and the author of the bestseller, Factfulness. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 2018. In it, he explores why we get so many facts about the world wrong and what we can do about it – encouraging the reader to think beyond the obvious.

Since its publication in April, the book has acquired must-read status among Silicon Valley executives, thanks in no small part to repeated endorsements by Bill Gates. A friend of Rosling’s, he described it as “one of the most important books that I have ever read and an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world”. Gates – as only a billionaire can – then went further than most of us do with our favourite books. He gave a copy of Factfulness to all new graduates of colleges and universities in the USA, if they registered with his website.

It’s not surprising Gates loved it. Rosling’s counter-intuitive optimism is very Silicon Valley. The book recalled the golden age of the high-tech hub – the era when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, could make “Don’t be evil” the motto of their company, and Steve Jobs’s Apple could have as its advertising slogan “Think Different” without (too much) widespread mockery.

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Like Jobs, the Swede, who died in 2017 (his children finished the book on his behalf) was part missionary and part showman. His mission was to shake us out of the state of ignorance that convinces us the world is getting worse – when, in fact, it is getting better.

Our overdramatic worldview, in his account, misses the big story of human progress. It manufactures a topsy-turvy reality, a “mega misconception”, whereby global poverty is growing, when in fact it is reducing, levels of education are worse rather than better, and violent crime is going up when the opposite is true. “The world has moved on,” Rosling says. “Our worldview hasn’t.”

He enjoyed playing with his audience to prove this. His preferred set-up was to give his audience of medical students, scientists or investment bankers a multiple-choice quiz to test their level of ignorance. Routinely, they would do “worse than chimpanzees” in answering questions designed to demonstrate his somewhat controversial idea that the “gap” between the rich and the developing world no longer existed. By “worse than chimpanzees” he meant that his audience’s results were worse than random, owing – he believed – to ignorance on a global scale how much the world was getting better. Most of the population, he argues, are somewhere in the middle.

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Even his audience at the World Economic Forum at Davos demonstrated a level of ignorance that was worse than that of a bunch of apes. Global political and business leaders, it turns out, did not know that the average world life expectancy is 70, that 88% of children are vaccinated against disease, or that in 2100 there will be 2bn children below the age of 15 — the same number as today.

To demonstrate his point, Rosling would use animated graphs. Multicoloured bubbles changed in size as they moved across the screen to show that, for example, life conditions in Sweden at the time of his birth in 1948 had similar levels of health and wealth as Egypt today, or that today the life expectancy and income of people in countries as different as China and Egypt are close.

By the end of his life Rosling had become culturally part of the same world as Silicon Valley. He rejected the “lone genius” stereotype, but was a TED talk phenomenon, had his own army of cultish followers and addressed Davos on sustainable development. He even sold the presentation software that he helped design to Google.

That same limitless optimism and energy bursts from the book. Along with a desire to shock. And each chapter starts with a multiple-choice test. In many ways its technological determinism reads like a therapy-cum-self-help book for hassled Silicon Valley executives who just want to be told that they are doing a good job.

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Rosling sets out to make these execs feel better about themselves. He shows how ignorance stops us from seeing the amazing story of human progress, largely created by technology. We can’t appreciate its wonders because of human instincts that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Just as our bodies still want to hoard fat and sugar, we still want gossip and dramatic stories, which, in the past, transmitted information that might make the difference between living and dying. This craving for drama then helps to create an overdramatic worldview.

He maintains we are in a systematic state of ignorance about how much technology is making our lives better because selective reporting prevents positive news stories from making the front page. Instead, journalists, activists and lobbyists produce an unrelenting torrent of “bad news” that mislead us into thinking that the number of people dying from disasters is on the rise when it is on the decline, that there are more hungry people in the world when there are fewer, or in reverse, that there are fewer babies being immunised when there are more.

Negative news, he believes, shapes our worldview because our instincts mean that we pay more attention to scary things. The doom-mongers and manipulators he identifies are, of course, the same journalists and activists who frequently have Big Tech billionaires in their sights.

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The problem is that Rosling’s optimism makes him comparably selective when it come to criticism of the tech tycoons and their products. Strangely, the possible hazards of social media and the other products of his billionaire friends are largely unaddressed, despite accusations that the algorithms they have created are amplifying fake news, widening divisions in society and undermining faith in the very facts to which Rosling points. He once said:

“I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right, and you are wrong.”

Even if you ignore the messianic tone, Rosling may have been selective about the facts himself. Rather like the journalists or activists he disdained, Rosling, according to some critics, put a positive spin on “big picture stats” to back up his argument, while ignoring evidence that suggests that life is still grim for many.

He also glosses over some inconvenient facts: the population in many countries is growing; world hunger is on the rise; and while more girls are being educated, women with advanced degrees still have higher rates of unemployment than men. Almost half of humanity still lives in conditions that the average American, European, or Japanese would find unacceptable.

Rosling argues that the world is becoming more democratic even though many people don’t feel that it is: China’s economic growth has certainly not been matched by democratic reform. He shows us graphs of the numbers of washing machines in the world to demonstrate human progress, but has material progress made us happier? Others read the same graphs as an illustration of unsustainable growth that is destroying the planet. Some might say we were happier as a species when we lived in small, sustainable village communities – or even as simple hunter-gatherers.

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Silicon Valley's 'suicide pill' for mankind

By Mark Piesing

Most glaring of all, Factfulness shows no scepticism about the tech billionaires who have helped to create today’s uncertainties – which some might call chaos. Instead, it offers a sop to weary executives who have left it too late to buy a bunker in New Zealand, by assuring them that the apocalypse probably won’t happen. Their ideas and products, he says, are improving everything: technology is bringing our society and species together rather than breaking them apart. And any nagging doubt the techies themselves might feel isn’t their guilty conscience speaking, but down to the media.

Only instinctive, fearful thinking, according to Rosling, would suggest technology is likely to have some negative effects. He studiously ignores any plausible arguments that automation may cause mass unemployment and civil unrest, or that synthetic biology and CRISPR gene editing may create terrifying new artificial life forms and viruses. And he waves aside the idea that AI and body modification may lead to the creation of a new species of uber-humans that will enslave the rest of us.

Rosling could be right, of course, but the jury is still out. What we do know as  fact, however is that terrorism is increasing, more people are dying from war, polar ice caps are melting, and AI is seen by some to pose an even greater danger to the future of humanity than climate change.

At the moment, though, Rosling’s sword metaphor for technology isn’t so much a weapon against falsehoods that seem plausible; it’s more like the sword of Damocles, which hung by a single hair over the throne of Dionysius as a warning of constant peril and foreboding.

If Rosling is right, the “silent miracle of human progress”, as he described it, will continue. If it doesn’t, however, his unbridled optimism looks actively irresponsible. It is not encouraging that earlier this year Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct.