IT’S ASKING A LOT FOR INSTITUTIONS TO BE READY FOR SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS LESS THAN ONCE IN A LIFETIME: “Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.”

I mean, I’d like us to have been in better shape, and we should have been. But peacetime armies are never really ready for war, and war happens a lot more often than once in a hundred years. Expecting bureaucracies to function smoothly and effectively is expecting a lot; it’s expecting even more when they’ve been on idle for decades.

Which isn’t to say that this piece doesn’t state a problem. “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.”