For 40 years, US Republicans have been insisting that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. The bankruptcy of this has been laid bare.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz – Mar 12, 2020

As an educator, I’m always looking for ‘teachable moments’—current events that illustrate and reinforce the principles on which I’ve been lecturing. And there is nothing like a pandemic to focus attention on what really matters.

The COVID-19 crisis is rich in lessons, especially for the United States. One takeaway is that viruses do not carry passports; in fact, they don’t observe national borders—or nationalist rhetoric—at all. In our closely integrated world, a contagious disease originating in one country can and will go global.


Originally Published in Social Europe. Read the entire story here