The People Who Risked Death for Immunity When yellow fever swept through 19th-century New Orleans, immunity became so valuable, people were willing to go to extreme lengths for protection. by SARAH ZHANG

When a young man named Isaac H. Charles arrived in yellow-fever-ravaged New Orleans in 1847, he did not, as one might expect, try to avoid the deadly disease, which killed as many as half of its victims at the time. He welcomed yellow fever—and, more importantly, the lifelong immunity he would have if he survived it. Luckily, he did. “It is with great pleasure,” he wrote to his cousin, “that I am able to tell you with certainty, that both [my brother] Dick & I are acclimated.”
For men like Charles, “acclimation,” to use the language of the time, was not so much a choice. It was the so-called “baptism of citizenship,” the key to entry to New Orleans society. Without immunity to yellow fever, newcomers would have difficulty finding a place to live, a job, a bank loan, and a wife. Employers were loath to train an employee who might succumb to an outbreak. Fathers were hesitant to marry their daughters to husbands who might die. The disease is caused by a virus spread through mosquito bites, and it causes chills, aches, vomiting, and sometimes jaundice, which gives yellow fever its name. The people of 19th-century New Orleans did not fully understand the biology of the disease, of course, but they noticed that their fellow residents seemed to become immune after a first bout. Thus, even the president of the New Orlean’s Board of Health once proclaimed in a speech, “The VALUE OF ACCLIMATION IS WORTH THE RISK!”

When yellow fever swept through New Orleans two centuries before our current pandemic, it made immunity a form of privilege—one so valuable, it was worth risking death to obtain.

The outbreaks exacerbated existing forms of inequality too. New immigrants to the city disproportionately bore the risks of acclimation to yellow fever, eager as they were to find jobs. (The wealthy, meanwhile, emptied out of the city during summer yellow-fever season.) Enslaved people who were acclimated were worth 25 percent more—their suffering turned into financial benefit for their owners. “Diseases lay bare who belongs in society and who does not,” says Kathryn Olivarius, a Stanford historian who studies yellow fever in the antebellum South.

These days, Olivarius told me, “I feel like I write about yellow fever by day and worry about coronavirus by night.” The diseases are not perfect analogues, but in a world upended by a pandemic that has killed more than 137,000 people, immunity may once again become a dividing line. The United Kingdom’s health minister has proposed “immunity certificates”—wristbands, perhaps—to identify people recovered from COVID-19 who can go back to normal life. Germany has floated “immunity passports” to get the immune back to work. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that the United States is considering a similar idea.

It is still unclear how these schemes would work—not least because it’s unclear how long immunity to the coronavirus even lasts. And as my colleague Ed Yong writes, the immunity tests are not perfectly accurate, which could give some takers a false sense of security. This virus and the disease it causes are both so new to humanity that scientists are still trying to answer basic questions about them.

The technical hurdles of biology aside, a system to keep track of the immune requires a massive new logistical understanding. “It’s so complicated to think about how to manage all of these things,” says Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. For example, Kahn says, consider how conditioning free movement or employment on immunity could very well lead people to falsify immunity certificates.

If the government allows the immune to return only to certain jobs or if employers prefer to hire those who are immune, that could also create a set of perverse incentives to deliberately get infected with COVID-19, especially for the young and otherwise healthy who might think it’s worth the risk for a job. Unemployment has shot to record numbers during the pandemic, after all, and many people who have lost their jobs are those who can least afford to. They might see immunity as a way out of unemployment, despite the dangers.

“People in already economically, socially precarious positions have to make choices that they should never have to make,” Olivarius said. And this, unfortunately, is familiar to her as a historian of yellow fever. Charles was one of the lucky ones to recover from the disease in New Orleans; yellow fever was responsible for 75 to 90 percent of the deaths of immigrants like him.

The recent pandemic, Olivarius said, has made her feel more viscerally how her 19th-century subjects must have felt with an invisible disease striking down their loved ones. The uncertainty, the proximity to death, the obsession with documenting their health in endless letters—it’s become our 21st-century way of life too.

The WHO Shouldn’t Be a Plaything for Great Powers Trump’s defunding ploy will only make the organization’s problems worse.by ZEYNEP TUFEKCI

Donald Trump has declared that he would like the United States to stop funding the World Health Organization. It’s unclear if he has the authority to change policy in this way, but he’s trying. He wants to further break the WHO in ways it’s already broken.

Trump’s ploy to defund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration’s failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be disastrous too. Many nations, especially poor ones, currently depend on the WHO for medical help and supplies. But it is also true that in the run-up to this pandemic, the WHO failed the world in many ways. However, President Trump’s move is precisely the kind of political bullying that contributed to the WHO’s missteps.

The WHO failed because it is not designed to be independent. Instead, it’s subject to the whims of the nations that fund it and choose its leader. In July 2017, China moved aggressively to elect its current leadership. Instead of fixing any of the problems with the way the WHO operates, Trump seems to merely want the United States to be the bigger bully.

Fixing the WHO is crucial, because we desperately need well-functioning global health institutions. But that requires a correct diagnosis of the problem. There is an alternate timeline in which the leadership of the WHO did its job fully and properly, warning the world in time so that effective policies could be deployed across the planet. Instead, the WHO decided to stick disturbingly close to China’s official positions, including its transparent cover-ups. In place of a pandemic that is bringing global destruction, just maybe we could have had a few tragic local outbreaks that were contained.

This mission-driven WHO would not have brazenly tweeted, as late as January 14, that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” That claim was false, and known by the authorities in Wuhan to be false.. Taiwan had already told the WHO of the truth too. On top of that, the day before that tweet was sent, there had been a case in Thailand: a woman from Wuhan who had traveled to Thailand, but who had never been to the seafood market associated with the outbreak—which strongly suggested that the virus was already spreading within Wuhan.

We can get a glimpse at that alternate timeline by looking at the two places where COVID-19 was successfully contained: Taiwan and Hong Kong. With dense populations and close links to and travel from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong are unlikely candidates for success. Yet Taiwan reported zero new confirmed cases on Tuesday, fewer than 400 confirmed cases since the beginning of the outbreak, and only six deaths. Taiwan’s schools have been open since the end of February and there is no drastic lockdown in the island of almost 30 million people.

Hong Kong has had a slightly tougher time. It is ruled by an unpopular leader handpicked by Beijing, so not all the recommendations of its health experts could be implemented. But still, the city has had just more than 1,000 cases and only four deaths, despite never completely closing its border with mainland China and despite a lot of the city functioning as usual. Taiwan and Hong Kong succeeded because they ignored, contradicted, and defied the official position and the advice of the WHO on many significant issues. This is not a coincidence, but a damning indictment of the WHO’s leadership.

Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s health authorities assessed the pandemic accurately, and not just with respect to the science. They understood the political complexities, including the roles of the WHO and China in shaping official statements about the virus. They did not take the WHO’s word when it was still parroting in late January China’s cover-up that there was no human-to-human transmission. They did not listen to the WHO on not wearing masks, which the WHO continues to insist are unnecessary to this late day, despite accumulating evidence that masks are essential to dampening this epidemic’s spread. Taiwan ignored the WHO’s position that travel bans were ineffective; instead, it closed its borders early and, like Hong Kong, screened travelers aggressively.

Hong Kong and Taiwan remembered that China has a history of covering up epidemics. In 2003, the world didn’t learn about SARS until after it had escaped China and become impossible to deny. (Back then, the WHO openly criticized China for its lack of transparency and cover-up, and we contained the epidemic just in the nick of time.) This time, the WHO was told the truth early on: Taiwanese health authorities sent their own medical teams to Wuhan in December. Those scientists confirmed human-to-human transmission—the most crucial piece of information for determining the difference between a local tragedy (if viruses are only jumping from infected bats or pangolins to humans in wildlife markets where people interact directly with them) and a brewing global pandemic. Taiwan isn’t allowed to be a member of the WHO, because of China’s objections, but it still informed the organization. Hong Kong health authorities, too, announced as early as January 4 that they suspected human-to-human transmission was already occurring, as they also looked at the evidence and their own contacts in Wuhan.

Imagine the WHO took notice of the information it received from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Imagine the WHO also recognized that whistleblower doctors in Wuhan were being threatened with jail time. It would have realized that something important was happening, something worth investigating. It could have immediately, but politely, demanded access to the region around Wuhan and its hospitals.

This alternate timeline does not ignore realpolitik. China is not a nation known for cooperating with international agencies when it doesn’t want to. (This tendency is not specific to China. A U.S. law nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act” threatens to invade the International Criminal Court in The Hague should any U.S. service member be indicted.) If China refused access, as it likely would have, the expectation isn’t that the WHO officials would just get up and yell  “Freedom!” at China’s leadership. But there was a path that would recognize the constraints of international diplomacy, but still put the health of billions above all else.

When independent access to Wuhan was denied, instead of simply relaying what China claimed as if it were factual, the WHO could have notified the world that an alarming situation was unfolding. It could have said that China was not allowing independent investigations, and that there were suggestions of human-to-human transmission that needed urgent investigation. That would have gotten the world’s attention. And it could have happened the first week of January, mere days after China reported 41 cases of a mysterious pneumonia, but before China’s first announced COVID death. This is when Taiwan banned travel from Wuhan and started aggressive screening of travelers who had been there in recent weeks. It’s also when Taiwan ramped up its domestic mask production, in order to distribute masks to its whole population, despite WHO (still!) claiming they aren’t necessary. This is when Hong Kong health authorities started implementing similar measures, in that case in spite of their own government dragging its feet. Hong Kong’s population started a massive grassroots campaign to don masks. Activists from Hong Kong’s protest movement used their organizational networks to acquire and distribute masks to the elderly and the poor. This is also when U.S. health authorities were looking at the signs and desperately trying to get the administration to start preparing. As we know now, they were ignored.

The WHO should not have waited until January 22 to confirm human-to-human transmission, after China finally did. By that point, a deadly horse had mostly left the barn. The WHO should not have waited until the end of January to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern—a move that recognizes the severity of the crisis and calls for “a coordinated international response.” The WHO should not have let February and nearly half of March pass before finally declaring a pandemic. By that point, a staggering 114 countries had already reported cases, and more than 4,000 known deaths had occurred. By then, the declaration did not matter in the same way an earlier one would have.

Pandemics are exponential events. In January and even in early February, the world had a fighting chance. The first case known to occur in Seattle was as late as February 21. We know this with relatively high confidence because Seattle has an excellent flu-tracking program, which gave it a time machine: the ability to go back and test earlier flu samples for COVID-19. Many countries may not have had their first imported case until late January or early February. Researchers estimate that acting even a week or two early might have reduced cases by 50 to 80 percent. With proper global leadership, we may have had a very different trajectory.

A mission-driven WHO would not have repeatedly praised China for its “transparency,” (when it was anything but) nor would it have explicitly criticized travel bans when they were being imposed on China but remained silent when China imposed them on other nations. Strikingly, the only country the WHO’s leader, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has directly criticized is Taiwan, whose diplomats he accused (without proof) of being involved in racist attacks on him. Unfortunately, the WHO seems to remember its principles only when they align with China’s interests. For example, the WHO correctly opposes calling SARS-CoV-2 the “Chinese virus,” as the U.S. administration has tried to do, in another of its attempts to shift the conversation away from its own failings and onto the familiar turf of culture wars. But when China goes on a brazen global misinformation spree, making outrageously false claims about SARS-CoV-2 being a CIA operation or calling it a “U.S.A. virus,” the WHO is silent.

Speaking up against China might have ended the international political career of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was elected to his post with the support of China and its bloc. But that is the cost of putting mission first.

Be that as it may, President Trump’s own attempt to bully the WHO is worse than being merely a distraction from his own lack of preparation and the spectacular public-health failure that is now unfolding across the United States. The president wants to break the WHO even more dramatically, in precisely the way it is already broken. He wants it to bow to the outsize influence of big powerful nations at the expense of its mission.

Defunding the WHO is not just foolish. It is dangerous: A pandemic needs to be contained globally, including in the poor countries that depend on the WHO. The WHO is the only global organization whose mission, reach, and infrastructure are suitable for this. The U.S. funds about 15 percent of the WHO’s current budget, and the already stretched-thin organization may not be able to quickly make that up.

We must save the WHO, but not by reflexively pretending that nothing’s wrong with it, just because President Trump is going after the organization. We should be realistic and honest about the corruption and shortcomings that have engulfed the leadership of an organization that is deeply flawed, but that is still the jewel of the international health community. The WHO employs thousands of dedicated and selfless health-care workers in 194 countries, and even now it is leading the fight globally against polio and Ebola. It needs to be restructured, and the first order of business is to make sure that it’s led by health professionals who are given the latitude to be independent and the means to resist bullying and pressure, and who demonstrate spine and an unfailing commitment to the Hippocratic oath when they count most.

After Social Distancing, a Strange Purgatory Awaits Life right now feels very odd. And it will feel odd for months—and even years—to come. by Juliette Kayyem

Defying all medical advice, and ignoring the nature of viral infections, President Donald Trump wants to see “a very powerful reopening plan” by May 1. Two groups of governors—one in the West Coast states and another in the Northeast—are vowing to coordinate efforts to ease social distancing, if not on Trump’s terms then on their own. Still, in a recent statement, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a member of the West Coast group, listed a variety of medical and health benchmarks for ending the lockdown, none of which seems likely to be met very soon. He admitted as much, warning we shouldn’t get “ahead of ourselves.”
Anyway, most of the decisions that matter aren’t in the hands of presidents or governors; American society as a whole needs a plan for what comes next. The coronavirus is revolutionary not just because of the suffering it has caused, but because it—like other diseases, from the bubonic plague to malaria to HIV—has the power to shape social norms for years to come. Those norms change with surprising speed. For most people, the prospect of sitting at home for months was almost unthinkable at the beginning of March.

Over the past week, I’ve been informally contacting friends and colleagues in a variety of fields—sports, travel, architecture, entertainment, arts, the clergy, and more—to ask them how their world might look after social distancing. The answer: It looks weird.

We will get used to seeing temperature-screening stations at public venues. If America’s testing capacity improves and results come back quickly, don’t be surprised to see nose swabs at airports. Airlines may contemplate whether flights can be reserved for different groups of passengers—either high- or low-risk. Mass-transit systems will set new rules; don’t be surprised if they mandate masks too.

Changes like these are only the beginning. After most disasters, recovery occurs days or weeks or a few months later—when the hurricane has ended, the flooding has subsided, or the earth has stopped shaking. Once the immediate threat has abated, a community gets its bearings, buries its dead, and begins to clear the debris. In crisis-management lingo, the response phase gives way to the recovery stage, in which a society goes back to normal. But the coronavirus crisis will follow a different trajectory.

Until scientists discover a vaccine, doctors develop significantly better medical treatments, or both, people all over the world will be working around, sharing space with, and sheltering from a virus that still kills. The year or years that follow the lifting of stay-at-home orders won’t be true recovery but something better understood as adaptive recovery, in which we learn to live with the virus even as we root for medical progress.

During this strange purgatory, places such as schools will be governed by direct orders from public officials, and large corporate employers will have tremendous influence on work-related norms. But Americans spend a good amount of our life and money in other spaces. After basic needs are addressed or met, what will it be like to be you?

Face shields—not masks, but clear plastic full-face shields—will be required for fans at sports games or concerts, to the extent that those happen at all. Golf could become the sport of choice as it’s easy to maintain distance and is outdoors. Not coincidentally, the PGA Tour announced plans this week to restart its season in June.

In some of the rosier scenarios, COVID-19 testing and tracking become widespread enough that most businesses can stay open. Even then, the very idea of having a routine—picking up or dropping off dry cleaning on your own schedule—will be lost as individual businesses open or close based on the health of employees. Communal experiences—including the arts and performances and programs such as book events—will no longer exist without much more stringent health protocols. Pre-ticketed admissions may become the norm at museums or movie theaters; as for the latter, The New York Post recently reported that the movie chain AMC, which had to close all its movie houses, is talking to bankruptcy lawyers. The company disputes such reports, but its financial situation, like that of other cinema companies, is daunting.

We will choose our social events wisely. To lure you in, restaurants will mandate temperature screening and reduce the number of tables so that patrons don’t feel crowded in. Servers will wear protective equipment; menus will be disposable. The maximum capacity of bars will be cut in half, if not more; since the Cocoanut Grove era, the number of people allowed in such establishments has been constrained by fire codes, but a fast-spreading coronavirus dictates even more space per person. As stores restrict admission at peak times and long lines form outside, we may find ourselves scheduling appointments to buy groceries.

Some of these protocols will garner widespread public support; others, like certain airport security measures after 9/11, will strike a jaded public as being merely for show. The changes will happen anyway. Cities will implement one-way sidewalks. Millennials who are starting families could begin a new exodus from tight urban quarters: The exurbs are the new Williamsburg!

New expressions of love, fellowship, and human connection will be tested. To visit a friend or relative who has just become a parent, we will not lightly jump on a plane—as middle-class Americans might previously have done in an age of relatively cheap flights. (But your new baby looks adorable on Zoom.) Responsible religious leaders will find alternatives to rituals—such as the “passing of the peace” in many Christian denominations and its equivalent in other faiths—that could spread germs. Expect a wave of memorial services as families belatedly mourn those who have perished from COVID-19 and other causes, but many people will hold back from forms of human contact—perhaps reflexively rather than intentionally—that once seemed second nature.

On dating apps, people will specify (with varying degrees of accuracy) whether they’ve had COVID-19. Casual making out will come to seem reckless. A handshake? Have those test results ready. A friendly hug? I don’t even know your last name.

Our attitudes and outlooks may change in disappointing ways. We will be home a lot more. We’ll also use shaming, against friends and others whom we judge to be taking needless risks, to cultivate better voluntary behavior.

The simplistic idea of “opening up” fails to acknowledge that individual Americans’ risk-and-reward calculus may have shifted dramatically in the past few weeks. Yes, I’d like to go meet some girlfriends for drinks. But I am also a mother with responsibilities to three kids, so is a Moscow mule worth it? The answer will depend on so many factors between my home and sitting at the bar, and none of them will be weighed casually.

Adaptive recovery is like living through evolution in real time. We will swerve and pivot, become acclimated to random closures and sudden changes in testing regimens, and hope that we can box the virus in long enough to buy time for a more permanent solution.

My friend Jonathan Walton, the dean of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity, has described our time hiding from, mobilizing against, and then living with the virus as the “now normal,” the simple effort to live each day as if it were typical, knowing that the next day will bring a new round of uncertainty. Our reentry will be slow. There could be another wave. Adaptive recovery is going to last a very long time—and it will not feel normal at all.

We Need an Atlantic Charter for the Post-coronavirus Era This moment presents a once-in-a-century opportunity for American leaders to wrest a better future. by Richard Fontaine

Winston Churchill boarding the USS Augusta in 1941
In August 1941, Winston Churchill climbed aboard the USS Augusta, anchored off the southeast coast of Newfoundland, ready to talk with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who awaited him on deck. The British and American leaders began lengthy discussions about the shape of a postwar world. Their eight principles for “a better future” included self-determination, open trade, freedom of the seas, and a rejection of territorial aggression. The Atlantic Charter, as the statement was eventually called, was a precursor to many collective arrangements, including the United Nations, NATO, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

The Atlantic Charter may have seemed quite premature. After all, the United States was not even at war in August 1941, and Pearl Harbor was still four months away. Yet FDR and his team could feel the geopolitical tectonic plates shifting. As war spread across the globe, they sought to wrest a better future.

Hopefully, the coronavirus pandemic will prove far less destructive and disruptive than world war. Yet UN Secretary-General António Guterres has already called the coronavirus the most challenging crisis since World War II. Henry Kissinger has written that once the pandemic has run its course, the world will never be the same. If such predictions are even partially correct, we are living through extremely rapid, possibly epochal change. This moment presents a once-in-a-century opportunity for American leaders to wrest, as in 1941, a better future: We need an Atlantic Charter for the pandemic. And as FDR and Churchill demonstrated, the time to think and plan is not at the end of a crisis, but as it unfolds.

In the short term, COVID-19 has shut down most of the planet, interrupting billions of lives. It has already produced an every-country-for-itself approach, with border closures, export controls, competition for medical resources, and other restrictions. Supply chains and trade relationships have been rattled, relations with allies have been strained, and even liberal countries have welcomed intrusive technological surveillance measures to fight the virus. Autocrats have seized more power at home, and China has launched a major charm offensive abroad. Current government intervention to prop up economies is unprecedented in speed and magnitude.

Long-term, the pandemic will likely affect population movements, work and travel patterns, trade and finance restrictions, the scope or lack of international cooperation, the role of public health in the pantheon of global threats, the trend toward nationalism and autocracy—and that's just a short list. Some of these effects will revert after the pandemic ebbs, while others won’t.

At a minimum, however, the pandemic will accelerate geopolitical changes already in progress. At a maximum, it will usher in a new global era, with as-yet-undefined characteristics. American leaders should be not bystanders as this new world unfolds, but its visionaries.

Donald Trump conjuring an especially expansive vision of a post-pandemic world is difficult to imagine, based on how he’s handled the crisis so far. But the mindset the Atlantic Charter represents is one needed today. American leaders—the Trump administration, even if its vision may be limited; certainly Joe Biden; and members of Congress—should each begin planning now for the institutions, initiatives, relationships, and movements that should rise in the trauma’s aftermath. This forward-thinking effort must begin at home, and ultimately include like-minded partners—the countries that can play a constructive role after 2020, akin to Britain’s after 1941.

How should leaders get started? Again, the Atlantic Charter offers a guide. In 1941, the principles addressed deeper issues that had led to war. Now the systemic problems America faces that demand solutions include a decline in globalization and international cooperation, creeping illiberalism, and the shifting U.S.-China balance of power. Leaders should not simply accept that those problems will be the same after the pandemic. The crisis presents an opportunity to catalyze new approaches to governance and geopolitics. While policy makers focus on the current crisis, they should start asking the bigger questions.

The pandemic, for instance, has prompted strikingly little international cooperation. Governments have made decisions about borders, entry protocols, export bans, and population-control measures largely on their own. Key multilateral groupings, such as the UN Security Council, the G7, and the G20, haven’t accomplished much. Instead, nations have thrown up walls to travelers and trade. Even if many coronavirus-era barriers eventually fall, the world passed peak globalization roughly a decade ago, and key populations around the world have grown skeptical of international engagement. Are more effective responses to transnational threats possible, and how can countries generate the will to implement them? Is a new social contract needed for countries to more broadly share the benefits of globalization?

The world’s leading democracies feel the effects of creeping illiberalism. A debate now rages over whether democracy or dictatorship is better suited to beat back pandemics, but the ideological competition is nothing new. A democratic recession, the rise of tech-fueled autocracies, the willingness of some to undermine democratic practice, and declining faith in liberalism all preexisted the coronavirus. The initially befuddled response of the United States and other key democracies may end up adding fuel to the fire. Are new institutions and efforts required to push back against political and ideological threats?

China’s attempt to recast the coronavirus narrative—portraying itself as decisive, ruthlessly effective, and generous to other countries—demonstrates just how competitive the U.S.-China relationship has become. Despite a few recent indications, such as Beijing’s provision of medical supplies to New York, the coronavirus has emerged not as a commons for bilateral cooperation but as one more vector of bitter competition. The balance of power is shifting; is it possible for the United States and China to both compete and cooperate?

Other issues to consider should include how to prioritize national-security challenges and deploy resources against them, whether to cooperate with Russia against mutual threats, how to manage a possible post-pandemic debt crisis, and what the next global catastrophe might look like.

Postwar planning in the first half of the 1940s sought to answer similarly fundamental questions. It also flowed from principles that Americans hoped would undergird the world to come. Principles on which to base planning for the post-coronavirus world could include: that all people share in the economic benefits of globalization; that democracies remain free of foreign political interference; that countries work in common cause against shared threats such as pandemics, terrorism, and climate change; that the United States and its allies seek to prevail in a long-term competition with China and Russia, ensuring that the world remains conducive to a liberal-democratic way of life; and that as rising powers such as China grow more powerful, they do so in a world where the United States and its friends are strong and working together. These are broad ideas, but the Atlantic Charter also started with abstract principles. They also go beyond the crisis of the day to address key trends that have preceded this moment in history.

The world has changed a great deal since 1941. The Atlantic Charter, in form and substance, was the right response to a particular moment in world history. And its spirit and fundamental optimism endure today. We do not know the full shape of a post-pandemic world. We do know that its contours will depend in part on how hard America and its partners work to shape them. The idea that animated FDR and Churchill held that free nations should be the authors of history, not merely its subjects. Even eight decades later, that is not a bad starting point.

Trump Was Right to Prioritize America’s Competitiveness Over Inequality Would you choose to deprive a country’s workers of higher wages in order to deprive its corporations of higher profits? by Joseph W. Sullivan

More than two years ago, President Donald Trump overhauled the U.S. tax code, giving the Republican Party its biggest legislative accomplishment of the 21st century. Serving on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, I helped articulate the vision for the corporate tax cuts and reforms.

Even before the law passed, critics argued, quite vocally, that the cuts would increase the deficit and expand inequality. But these critics failed to grapple with the Trump administration’s overarching goal in cutting the corporate rate: to enable American workers and firms to compete against their foreign counterparts. “When our workers have a level playing field, which they didn’t have, they can compete and win against anyone in the world,” Trump said in 2018 in Ohio, a state where workers have historically suffered the costs of globalization. “And that goes for our companies. But we were forcing our companies out.” As officials try to bring the economy back to normal, they would do well to remember this vision.

The United States used to have the highest statutory corporate-tax rate of any developed country. Our competitors had been cutting their tax rates as ours stood still. These disparities encouraged companies to leave America—or discouraged them from moving here at all. As companies looked elsewhere, the United States lost out on new jobs and new investments.

When the U.S. lowered its corporate-tax rate, the purpose was to boost America’s competitiveness on the global stage so that the U.S. workforce and the country’s corporations would both win. Sure, American corporations would gain higher profits, benefiting their shareholders and executives. But as new jobs emerged, American workers would earn higher wages.

Economists debate the extent to which the benefits of corporate-tax reform accrue as profits to a country’s corporations versus wages to its workers. But from the Trump administration’s point of view, squabbles about what share of America’s gains would go to its individuals or its corporations, blue-collar or white-collar workers, are beside the point.

“Our country wins because we’re all in this together. We’re one team, one people, and one family,” Trump said in his speech in Ohio.

The Trump administration’s corporate-tax overhaul was motivated by this inclusive concept of the nation’s economic interest. In the administration’s view, incentivizing corporations to do business in America complements rather than threatens the interests of America’s workers. This view reflects a bipartisan consensus within economics literature. Even Gabriel Zucman, the progressive economist who advised the Democratic former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on her tax plans, seems to agree with Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers on this point: In the world as it normally exists, higher corporate-tax rates tend to lower wages. The logic is straightforward. Governments impose taxes on the incomes of both individuals and corporations. Whereas corporations may leave a country when their tax rates go up, workers cannot. They stay even as the businesses and jobs depart. As a result, economists disagree not about whether a country’s workers suffer when its government’s corporate tax code is uncompetitive, but only about how much of the corporate-tax burden ultimately falls on the country’s workers rather than its corporations.

Many who criticized us at the Council of Economic Advisers wielded estimates implying that every $100 in higher wages for America’s workers came with $230 in new corporate profits. We didn’t agree with their estimates. I still don’t. But even if those estimates are true, should America’s government deny $100 to its workers for the sake of denying $230 to its businesses? For these estimates to translate into criticism of the policy, you’d need to defend a “yes” answer.

Businesses in America, like U.S. workers, compete beyond the country’s borders, and winning the competition is in America’s national economic interest. From the Trump administration’s point of view, then, this “yes” answer would lower inequality at the expense of the country’s national interest.

In conventional supply-side economic models, lower taxes on individuals or businesses incentivize the creation of investment and economic output that would otherwise never have existed. But the Trump administration’s corporate-tax overhaul can boost wages by enticing the investment and job creation happening somewhere else to come to the U.S. Supply-side à la Trump doesn’t necessarily expand the global pie, as the conventional supply-side wisdom would require. America can simply grab a bigger share of the pie.

Prominent Democrats would raise the corporate rate, if they could. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has declined to propose raising the corporate-tax rate back to the 35 percent that persisted before Trump’s overhaul. Like President Barack Obama, who recognized the burdens of an excessively high corporate-tax rate, Biden proposed settling on 28 percent—higher than today’s 21 percent. Senator Bernie Sanders, when he was still running, advocated restoring the old 35 percent rate. Biden and Sanders cited some combination of fairness and inequality alongside deficit-driven concerns to defend their positions.

When it comes to inequality, however, the sound and fury has so far failed to find expression in the actual data. U.S. Census Bureau measurements show decreases in direct measures of American income inequality since the new tax law was passed. Additional data indicate an acceleration in wages among the lowest-earning Americans relative to their higher-earning counterparts, a trend likely to further decrease metrics of inequality.

As for the deficit, the data do show that revenue from corporate-tax collection has decreased since the legislation passed. In 2019, U.S. corporate-tax receipts were $230 billion, down from $300 billion in 2016. This suggests a deficit contribution from the corporate-tax overhaul of about $70 billion—or about 0.3 percent of GDP. Though the interest rate on U.S. government debt remains near record lows, the costs of the deficit increase may be real. Even so, a policy that advances the administration’s economic and national-security priorities is worth that cost.

But the case for prioritizing America’s competitiveness would remain strong even if the data corroborated the critics’ concerns about inequality. The American public seems to agree with the Trump administration that protecting American jobs from overseas competition should be a bigger priority for the U.S. government than worrying about which Americans are doing better than others.

A 2018 Pew Research Center poll asked Americans to identify issues that should be top foreign-policy priorities. The No. 1 answer was “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorism.” The second-highest priority was “protecting jobs of American workers.” Meanwhile, according to a separate survey asking about domestic problems, the “gap between rich and poor” hasn’t registered as a priority among more than about 5 percent of Americans in at least a decade.

In the time since its passage, economists have interrogated each new release of economic data for evidence of the tax reform’s effects. Only the mumbles from future data can tell the full story of whether the corporate-tax overhaul did, or did not, work as promised. But questions about inequality and deficits are beside the point. What the administration aimed to do was improve America’s competitiveness.