SL. One thing I want to ask is that so basically you kind of predicted the pandemic in this
book. Actually, in this book [Our final hour] you actually bet with Mr. [Dr Stephen] Pinker
$1,000. Did you win that? MR. Well, it’s interesting because I had
the bet that there would be a pandemic with a million casualties and of course the actual
COVID-19 been far worse than that. But I may lose the bet because I said in my bet that
I thought the pandemic would be not a natural one but an engineered one. Although of course,
some people think that the virus leaked out of the lab in Wuhan, I don’t think most
believe that. So technically, I’m going to lose my bet with Stephen. On the other
hand, I think he has learned the lesson that we can’t be so optimistic about the future,
with something far worse than he envisaged has actually happened naturally.
SL. Yeah, I mean, the investigation is going to be complicated there. But do you think
it really matters? Do you think it’s important to investigate on what really happened there?
If it came from animals or if it came from a lab? Do you think it’s relevant at all?
MR. Well, I certainly think is important. I mean, the most likely thing is it did come
from animals and if that’s the case, then it’s hugely important to minimize the sort
of situations in those markets of live animals, etc. Because most of the experts think that
as the world’s getting more crowded, there’s going to be more interaction between animals
and humans and that the risk of the transfer of viruses between species is going to grow.
So I think it’s very, very important to do all we can to minimize that sort of transfer,
because most of the experts think that if we don’t, then the probability of these
pandemic’s is going to get higher and higher. And of course, not to get that they could
be far worse than the present one. SL. I guess there I mean, if it came from
a wet market, then the solution is simply more hygiene. Just avoid those bad conditions,
stacking the animals on top of each other, if it came from a wet market...
MR. Yes. Or maybe something more drastic. Yeah.
SL. Or close them down… Before we spoke about the “short term perspective” from
politicians and so on, also, probably from the media. One thing I want to discuss is
that… I was looking at the statistics of deaths worldwide. So from the pandemic, we
had, that at least that’s the reported one, about 1.8 million people died with COVID.
But then there were also 1 million suicides. And there were 8 million deaths due to cancer.
So it seems that why do you think we don’t give enough attention to “long term” problems
like cancer and so on? Because I mean, this is a far bigger problem, I think.
MR. Well, I mean, I disagree. I think there’s a huge amount of research on trying to deal
with cancer, it’s a very intractable problem. They haven’t made tremendous progress, and
it’s in part due to the fact that people live longer for other reasons. I would actually
say that, if you think of the balance of medical research, and there’s not enough being done
on tropical diseases, diseases of poor. Because the number of children who die from infectious
diseases in Africa, I don’t what the numbers are, but that’s in millions per year. I
think we certainly need to deal with all these diseases, including cancer, but I think they
are much more difficult to deal with and I think the effort of medical research is pretty
strongly focused on cancer, isn’t it, at the moment.
SL. Okay. Yeah. And then there is a problem of suicides, which is another problem, suicides
are increasing especially now with the all the psychological problems that this pandemic
has created. MR. That’s fully understandable because
of course, the pandemic has not hugely affected people who can work from home etc. But those
who are forced to go out and risk dangers and who are living in cramped apartments,
they’ve had a really, really bad time and if they got children, it’s understandable.
This is just an example of how mental health and greater equality are two things we don’t
prioritize enough. And we need in particular, to reduce inequalities.
In fact, one of the lessons that will be learned for pandemic is that the people who really
matter in a crisis are delivery drivers, health workers, and people like that. They are the
people whose jobs are insecure, who get low status and they ought to be raised. So I think
the inequalities, which are far too great within countries, as well as between countries
need to be reduced. I worry that in this country we are not moving fast enough in that direction.
Of course America is even worse. I think we should realize that we, in this country, can
learn far more from Scandinavian countries than we can the United States in terms of
a better social system. Because for mental health, people have to feel secure and valued.
That’s not happening in this country or in America. But it’s happening more in the
Scandinavian countries. When there are sort of attempts to measure,
on the basis of opinion polls, general happiness and contentment, then I think Denmark comes
out as number one. Britain and America are much lower, but the Scandinavian countries
come out top. That’s because they have public services, they accept high tax rates to provide
a good welfare state, high quality services for everyone, and avoid excessive inequalities.
So that’s the way we need to go. SL. And you think we should have universal
basic income? MR. I mean, something in effect like that.
I think everyone who can work should have to work. But I think what we should have is
very large numbers of dignified well-paid jobs, paid for by the public sector, for instance,
careers in old people’s homes, assistance for teachers and things like that. Because
the people are going to be put out a work by AI in the short term, are people working
in Amazon warehouses, in call centres, etc., which are fairly mind numbing jobs anyway.
But what’s needed is that the companies that own those robots should be heavily taxed,
so that the government can fund large numbers of properly paid jobs for carers, gardeners
in public parks, teacher assistants, the kind of jobs, where being human is important, and
where there’s a huge undersupply at the moment. So that’s the kind of thing that
needs to happen. And so this would not be giving people an automatic wage, but it would
be giving people the opportunity of jobs, which are socially beneficial and satisfying,
and also it would be producing a sort of welfare state so that the everyone was kept above
a much higher level than the rest of this rather vestigial welfare state does at the
moment. This means higher taxation. So the mantra
of low taxed economies is in my view a very damaging one. We should accept that we need
we need higher taxation. SL. You said that the wages of so-called “essential
workers” should increase, but also during the pandemic we had a huge problem, which
is the sort of destruction of small businesses in favour of a big corporations like Amazon,
for example? MR. Absolutely, yes. And, of course, there
is a problem with big corporations, which are multinational, they famously don’t pay
anything like their fair share of taxes. So it’s the tax from them, which could make
a huge difference in helping small businesses but also in producing enough jobs to meet
the need in care homes and in schools. SL. I wanted to go back a little bit about
policies and prevention and all these things. What do you think we could have done in order
to avoid this pandemic? MR. It’s not clear... I mean, it would have
been worth spending a lot of money if we could, because the pandemic is going to over the
next few years have a total cost for the world, which people estimated at least $20 trillion.
Even if you think the probability was only once per 50 years, that means that if you
work out the insurance premium by multiplying probability by impact, it would be worth spending
several $100 billion in order to reduce it or eliminate it. That wasn’t done and that’s
a lesson we’ve learned. I suppose what we could have done is been
better prepared to produce vaccines for the coronavirus, as we had done incidentally for
influenza virus, but the British had stocked up on, on vaccines for the flu pandemic, not
for this kind. They also hadn’t taken into account that this kind of pandemic required
lots of protective clothing for medical staff and it might be hard to develop a vaccine.
So things like that. But also, of course, if you think about the
World Health Organization could do, if one could have a more effective monitoring program,
certainly, again, as I say in my book, so that Vietnamese farmer immediately notices
and reports any strange disease in his flock, etc. and ways of monitoring these newly emergent
things to catch them before they spread to humans or spread very far, then that would
be better and it will clearly be worth having a far more scaled up program to do that sort
of thing. I mean, these are fairly sort of obvious suggestions,
but it’s clear that if you think of the costs of a pandemic, it’s worth spending
a lot more in trying to mitigate it or prevent it and given that pandemics often start in
remote places, on farms, etc, then having a more efficient way of ensuring that are
stopped near the sources as it were before they spread. That’s just one example.