Assessment of COVID-19 Global status on the Way to Recovery

                                                                                                   IG, SF April 2020

Assessment of COVID-19 Global Status on the Way to Recovery

Summary: proceed with extreme caution; the more I study, the less I know.

Today is Sunday, April 18, 2020. We, in our extended family household of three generations in San Francisco, have been under shutdown due to COVID-19 since March 11. That is over a month and now it is time for me to assess where we are and how we are going to get back to normal.

This pandemic is global. Every country is infected. This infection can be slowed down, but thus far it has not been stopped. Yes, a region, a country, a state, or a town can be isolated, but thus far no one succeeded in keeping the virus out or locking it in.

This virus is very contagious. It moves from people to people unstoppably. The amount of pathogen needed to pass the illness on from an infected person to someone not yet infected is not known, but it is believed to be small. A distant sneeze does it.

It is possible that a small community could shut itself down and isolate itself from the outside totally. Combining such isolation with a very strongly enforced internal segregation of all suspected infections may stop the spread within the community. But such isolation would need to be enforced as long as the rest of the world still has infections.

In general, from a global perspective, lockdown, shutdown, or social distancing as it is commonly referred to, definitely works. It slows down the spread of the contagion but it does not stop it. Lockdown helps to relieve the surge load on healthcare facilities, but currently it is not known whether it does, or does not, reduce the total number of patients that will need to be treated over time. After some delay, Wuhan was shut down, but today the entire world is infected. Will Wuhan and China experience a second wave? As of now, we do not yet know.

Slowing down the spread (or flattening the curve) is extremely important to prevent unmanageable peaks in hospitalization and deaths. The need for and establishment of emergency hospital facilities to deal with the pandemic-caused overflow in China, the USA, and elsewhere have been well documented and publicized. Also, images of emergency temporary storage of the dead in refrigerated trucks in NY City have been widely published. To emphasize and quantitatively illustrate the overflow issue, as a quantitative global reference estimate for deaths due to normal causes (i.e. without of, prior to, COVID-19) I use 10 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The actual number varies from country to country and it depends primarily on the demographic age distribution and the available health care. My global reference translates to an estimate of 1,000 deaths per million people per 0.1 years (0.1 year is about the time that the local spread of the virus infection levels off with lockdown). NY City had the worst coronavirus spread in the USA and registered about 15 thousand deaths versus my reference estimate of 10 thousand “normal deaths”. In the entire USA, the virus deaths are 35 thousand, versus my reference estimate of 330 thousand due to other causes. We now believe that the spread is slowing down. Even if we assume that before the end of the year the total number of deaths will double, in the US we will have less than 100 thousand deaths due to COVID-19, versus my reference estimate of 3.3 million deaths due to other causes. Thus, it appears that the probability for most people of being killed by the pandemic is small in comparison to other causes, but the short term load can easily overwhelm all public caregiving facilities. 

There are two known ways to stop the spread of the virus and return to normal life. The best and surest way would be a preventive vaccination. Another is to achieve herd immunity.

Today there is no preventive vaccine available to the public, but several major efforts to develop one are underway. Developing, testing, and then manufacturing and distributing on a large scale such a vaccine is expected to take well over a year. Thus return to normal life based on protection through a vaccine is likely to be two years or more off into the future.

Herd immunity means that sufficient numbers of people developed immunity, i.e. have COVID-19 antibodies, for the spread of the virus to be no longer a public health concern. In the absence of a preventive vaccine, this is our best hope for a safe reopening of the general shutdown, though it will likely be partial reopening. But, if it can be safely done, living under a partially opened shutdown is much preferred over living under the current total one. There are two fundamental questions that need to be answered as prerequisites for a safe partial reopening: 1) do we have a widely available and reliable test system, both to rapidly diagnose new cases and to continuously verify/monitor the immunity of the segment of the population protected by antibodies; 2) do we have a sufficient degree of herd immunity to avoid reigniting widespread infection?

The answer to the first question is a definite no; we do not have a reliable test system available to the general population. And this is a disgrace! We can go to several websites and easily order a remarkably accurate analysis of our heritage encrypted in our genes. But, we have no broadly available easy access to reliable detection and analysis of  COVID-19 genes infecting our bodies and whose genes are encrypted into our bodies. Likewise, we have no general access to testing for our antibodies that indicate that we were infected and may be immune, at least temporarily. The required knowledge is in hand but the execution is missing.

Tests need to be performed for three reasons.

1. Diagnosis of asymptomatic people. Do they have or not the virus that, if they have it,  they could pass on to others?
2. Diagnosis of people with flu-like symptoms. Is it COVID-19, or only a seasonal/other flu?
3. Antibody testing of everybody regularly to track and manage the protection of the public against the virus.

As of today (April 18, 2020), diagnostic tests as per 2. above are available for patients in the US in hospitals and upon primary-care physician recommendations at test facilities. The other two tests are not available to the general public.

We do not fully quantitatively understand the details of this pandemic. We do not even know what fraction of the population has been infected, thus our death rate numbers are pure estimates, more like guesses. We know that social distancing, and thus general lockdown works to slow down the spread. However, we don’t know whether the observed slow down is a sign of the pandemic ending or are we going to face a resurgence, especially if we relax the total shutdown.

As I tried to learn about the details of this pandemic I was shocked by our lack of knowledge, lack of preparedness, and lack of systematic response at the national and global levels. In fact, I felt that the more I studied, the less I learned, and the less I knew.

So, what does all this mean as we move towards relaxing the total shutdown? Clearly, it will have to be, it can only be, a very carefully managed partial shutdown.

Till we have a reliable and widely utilized vaccine, the threat of recontamination and the potential of restarting the pandemic are real possibilities. In fact, unless an effective, well organized, and locally fast-deployable “instant” full lockdown system is implemented, the recurrence of the pandemic is not only possible but probable. Social distancing under full lockdown is effective, especially if no one in the community violates it. As currently envisioned, as some businesses and other activities restart with some form of partial lockdown, social distancing will be too difficult to enforce fully. Unless the total community is protected by antibodies, i.e. the community achieved herd immunity, reinfection is highly likely. Furthermore, if the community is not isolated from other communities and herd immunity is not globally established, reinfection is even more likely.

Thus, as we move from the full to the partial shutdown, reinfection can be regularly expected. The only currently known response is the total shutdown and sealed-off isolation of the affected and isolatable community from other communities. The affected communities include all communities whose members may have been in contact with individuals who are infected, as well as those that can not be fully isolated from the affected one. Thus, the smaller any individual’s contact area is, and the smaller the isolatable community is, the easier it will be to contain a community’s loss of immunity and its recovery in case of reinfection.

For starters, in the partial lockdown, only very limited freedoms of movement and gathering can be anticipated. With no vaccine and no large scale testing for immunity, we can only hope for some degree of herd immunity; based on this hope, only a very cautious opening of the total shutdown should be put in place, such that upon any sign of the resurgence of the pandemic total shutdown can be promptly reintroduced. Also, to reduce the chances for such a recurrence, all person to person contacts will be limited by distancing and facemask requirements.

If and when broadly available antibody testing is put in place that allows continuous assessment of the status of herd immunity and also of changes in individual immunity will be possible. Then more opening-up, in general, can be anticipated, but still subject to rapid lockdown and isolation of communities where a resurgence of infection is measured.

Return to what was considered normal life in 2019, prior to the pandemic, is likely to occur only after a vaccine is broadly available. This probably will not occur before 2022. And even then it will be a new normal. The pandemic will have left behind major social, political, and economic changes. This is a global war against an invisible enemy. Freedom to travel and gather will return, but society around the world will be changed, much like it was changed after the brutal trauma after World War II. Will the USA resume leadership in that new world order, or will China take the lead? I don’t know, thus I can only hope for the best. 

In the USA, the pandemic is going to leave behind major economic damage: increased unemployment, increased national debt, and shrinking GDP. Many small businesses are likely to fail, but only a few, if any, of the majors are likely to go bankrupt. Capitalism is going to survive but with more socialistic elements integrated into it. General healthcare and national public health institutions will be strengthened. Globalization is likely to continue, but local supply chains will be strengthened to deal with pandemic-like disruptions of the global supply chain. Income taxes will increase. Income and wealth inequality will receive more scrutiny. Industrial automation, with a strong emphasis on the service industries, will increase significantly; the pandemic taught us that machines don’t get sick and continue to work well under a shutdown. There will be fewer jobs. Unlike in previous times when manufacturing offered employment to those who were no longer needed in agriculture and subsequently the service industry picked up those not needed in manufacturing, there is no new industry to employ all the people who are replaced by automation in the service industries. The new full employment figures will be based on a lower labor force participation rate and on a higher number of unemployed workers than the pre-pandemic 63.2% and 3.6% (BLS figures for 2019). A guaranteed minimum income for all Americans may be required to maintain societal stability.

Epilogue to my Notes on Malthusian Ideas

                                                                                           IG, San Francisco, April 2020

Epilogue to my Notes on Malthusian Ideas

(on the US road from idealistic American liberal democracy to populist misery)

Productivity improvements, introduced by the application of some elements of the Industrial Revolution, e.g. improved tools, into agriculture during the Second Agricultural Revolution in Northwestern Europe, significantly reduced the number of people who were needed there to produce food. Subsequently, these advances then spread eastward and southward in Europe, and eventually to other continents too. By the end of the 19th century, new industrial societies became established and replaced agrarian societies in regions now commonly referred to as the developed world, in Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia. The labor released from agriculture was employed in the growing manufacturing industry. In the developed world, this evolutionary process of moving large numbers of people from farms to factories started in the second half of the 18th century. Much of the rest of the world achieved high agricultural productivity and moved the majority of its population into manufacturing industries during and after the Third Agricultural Revolution, during the second half of the 20th century.

Clearly there was a bidirectional exchange between industrialization and agriculture. Increasing agricultural productivity allowed people to move into new industries Industrial advances were applied to agriculture, and this, in turn, further reduced the labor required to produce food; people released from agriculture, could move into industry. Obviously, there was a positive feedback process between a growing new industry and modernizing agriculture.

In the 20th century, significant industrial productivity improvements were achieved. People then moved into the newly emerging service Industries. Furthermore, some of the achievements of the service Industries were of direct benefit to further improve industrial productivity.  While early Industrial Automation was principally simple mechanization, the later phases are principally software-driven. Here again, we observe positive feedback between the emerging service industry and the earlier and productivity-improving manufacturing Industries.

The costs of all man-made goods can be broken down into three fundamental components:  materials, labor, capital. Productivity improvements are driven by automation. Automation involves machinery, to build and install the machinery requires capital. As productivity improves, less labor and more capital are needed. To make things in a fully automated factory, only machines and no labor is required. (A further benefit of automation is that automated factories produce fewer defects than manual production lines do, which results in lower materials consumption; thus capital’s share, depreciation, of the cost of goods produced is thereby also increased.)

In bygone eras capital once was thought of as money owned by rich people who invested it into goods and property. In our time we recognize a new capital. Some name this version of capital intellectual capital. Good education and good ideas can be converted into real money and ideas can also be purchased with real money. The forming of Amazon primarily did not involve the acquisition of goods or machinery, it simply grew out of a good idea, which then, in turn, generated the biggest individual fortune in the world. Even though Amazon delivers physical goods, its core activity and value generator is the software that allows placement of orders for billions of items from practically anywhere on earth, secures all payment without any cash exchange, and manages the deliveries of the ordered goods virtually without any error. Likewise, Google grew out of an idea and so did Facebook. In all of these cases, an idea was born which then was expanded on with the support of investors. Even though the companies that grew out of the ideas may now own real estate and other property, the fundamental business is still dealing with ideas and abstractions; while  Amazon handles physical goods, Google and Facebook only handle thoughts, ideas, and feelings. - - In contrast, earlier entrepreneurs who made major fortunes had ideas that resulted either in new hardware or new mining explorations; Rockefeller, Hewlett and Packard, Watkins & Johnson all created enterprises that sold physical goods. (A possible exception may have been William Hearst, who created newspapers filled with news.) The new tech-entrepreneurs all invent, promote, and sell new ideas, not physical goods. ( Elon Musk and his Tesla electric car may serve as a counterexample, but Musk did not invent the electric car; it was invented more than a hundred years ago by Edison and Ford. Most of what is new in Tesla, what couldn't have been done 100 years ago, is the software residing on silicon chips.) 

The next phase of labor-saving activity involves artificial intelligence, AI, which is likely to completely redo the service Industries, and as a result of this redoing, AI is likely to remove many people from the current payrolls of the service Industries. (For example, Amazon today is a major US employer. It employs 750 thousand people in the US, many in their warehouses and in the delivery to homes of purchased items. Warehouse automation continues relentlessly, and delivery by autonomous vehicles and drones is anticipated within a decade.) This change may present a major question. In the past, as technology improved and productivity increased, labor from one area of the economy could be employed elsewhere. All of the freed-up labor from one industry was immediately employed in a new industry. From agriculture people moved into factories, from factories they moved into services, But now we face a quandary. Where will the people no longer needed in the service industry move; where are they going to find new employment and earn good middle-class wages?  This unanswered question at this time, together with another issue to be discussed below, income and wealth inequality, will need soon to be addressed at all levels of government and society.

Not only earthshaking major ideas that result in billion-dollar enterprises imply intellectual capital, but education also does. In the USA post-high-school education is expensive, but the returns are significant. Graduating from college pays, getting graduate degrees pays even better, especially so in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  Typical engineering graduates with bachelor's degrees receive starting salaries that put them comfortably into the upper half of all US earners. Master's degree holders earn even more, and engineering PhDs start out earning at levels in the upper 15% of the US individual income distribution. Unemployment is virtually unknown for STEM degree holders. Many engineering PhDs,  without entrepreneurial success, make it into the upper 5% income bracket. Decades of earning a good salary combined with wise investments can convert educated Americans’ intellectual property, i.e., their education, into substantial physical capital.

The distribution of wealth in the USA is very uneven. The upper 10% holds about a 70% share of the total net worth of all households, while the lower half, 50% of the population, holds only 1.2% of the total. Income and wealth inequality is a major and growing political and social problem in the USA. The rise achieved and the support enjoyed by populist politicians on the right (Trump) and the left (Sanders) are clearly expressions of social discontent. While the core supporters on the extremes of the two groups blame different enemies as the cause of their anger, they all feel left out; they are all unhappy with things as they are now, and they all want change.

The social pressure is very likely going to intensify shortly. A major economic uncertainty resulted from the COVID19 pandemic. Currently, the country is under shut-down. Unemployment is rising to levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the shut-down, the GDP is at a virtual standstill; the GDP in 2020 is likely to contract. We don’t know when the pandemic will end and how: protracted, slowly drawn out, or sudden, the recovery will be. Even less do we know how the economy will recover as normal life resumes. Will there be a sudden step-like rise and return to the pre-pandemic level of activity? Or will the $2 Trillion emergency injection into the ailing economy prove to be insufficient to sustain it? Will the many businesses now unable to operate be forced to permanently shut down and/or face bankruptcy? Is this another phase of main street vs, Wall Street, when the big ones survive and come out even stronger than before, while the small businesses become victims of the crisis?  Will all this result in massive and protracted unemployment and economic contraction? 

We face a nightmare scenario when we consider the possible outcome of the given combinations: 1) the after-effects of the pandemic; 2) the continued AI-driven productivity improvements in the service industries with no place to go for the released labor to find new labor-hungry industries; 3) the wealth and income inequality that is likely to get worse as capital will continue increasingly to replace labor in all three segments of the economy (agriculture, manufacturing, and service); with 4) the growing social anger brewing on both the right and the left, an anger combination that wants to destroy all that we the believers in American liberal democracy hold and cherish.

We brace ourselves, hope for the best, and some of us are relieved and happy to be more than 80-years old!

Notes on Malthusian Ideas and Related Matters

                                                                          IG, San Francisco, March 2020

Notes on Malthusian Ideas and related matters

(or the road traveled from Malthus to European immigration in the 21st Century)

Recently I reread several notes on the  Malthusian catastrophe and related ideas. While for some time the  Malthusian ideas had been already rejected by most mainstream economists and political scientists, the definitive proof of observable data for its rejection was provided by the result of the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution, also known as the Third Agricultural Revolution, redefined agriculture in the developing world during the 1950s and early 1960s. Those were also the years of my Berkeley studies when I was much interested in philosophy, political science, economy, and the evolution of the global battle between communism and capitalism; the success of the Green Revolution was very much part of my studies and are major parts of my personal memories of that era.

Some would argue that the Green revolution peaked in the late 1960s, others argue that it is still ongoing. I will comment on this later, but there is a general agreement that the Green Revolution is the result of highly successful agri-technology initiatives that started in the 1940s and made their initial major impacts worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thomas Malthus was an English clergyman who studied and wrote extensively about economics. His fundamental belief was that the population of the world is doubling about every generation, i.e., every 25 years, while food production lagged significantly behind, and thus Humanity was heading into an unmitigated disaster of mass self-extinction. In his publications, he considered both preventive and mitigating actions. His preventive actions included advocacy of birth control and late marriage. He considered war, starvation, and pestilence as mitigating activities since they reduced the number of people who needed to be fed.

In the post-world War II period, while the developed world had no difficulty producing enough food to feed its people, there were significant worrisome signs in the developing world that Malthus may have been right. Some parts of Latin America, and also India, were not producing enough to feed their growing populations. After the Revolution In Mexico (1910-1920), the land reforms solved a political problem but created a new problem: food production was dropping.  Already in the 1940s, the Mexican government authorities recognized that to feed their people they needed to improve agricultural productivity and were seeking technical solutions. 

Possibly as a rare benefit derived from the conflict of The Cold War, the US came to Mexico’s rescue by undertaking the development of agricultural improvements that prevented the impending disasters of mass starvation and political unrest in the developing world. 

Key elements of the effort were the development of improved yield seeds, well-controlled irrigation, large-scale production, and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers. The initial developments took place in Mexico. The Mexican model was then employed worldwide. 

Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), an American agronomist led agricultural Improvement initiatives worldwide that became known as the Green Revolution. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and he is now considered the father of the Green Revolution. He started his career with DuPont but in 1944 he moved to Mexico to head a new program of wheat research and production, associated with the Mexican Government and funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The program also received support from the US government, the United Nations, and FAO. 

The Green Revolution that started in Mexico also achieved its first major successes there. The early efforts focused on the development of special high-yield variety (HYV) seeds. To appreciate the degree of success achieved, it's worthwhile to note that in 1943 Mexico was importing about half of its wheat need and by 1964 it was exporting a surplus of half a million tons per year.

Mexico's early Green Revolution success was subsequently followed up by successes in several developing countries. India's wheat production increased by more than 400% by 1986. A breeding program in the Philippines resulted in the IR8 miracle rice that was quickly adopted throughout Asia. In the adoptive countries, the rice yield increased by 52% by 1983. During the same period, in countries where the new varieties had not been adopted, the rice yields declined 4%. The story of the Green Revolution in Brazil followed a different path. In some parts of Brazil, the soil was too acidic for agricultural use. Therefore a massive effort of lime dispersal over the fields was undertaken and by the late 1990s about 15 million tons of lime we're spread on the fields yearly.  As a result of these efforts, Brazil became the world’s second-biggest soybean exporter.

It is interesting to note that efforts to bring the Green Revolution to Africa pretty much failed. The reasons for the failure are a combination of corruption, lack of needed infrastructure to support the effort, tribalism, and a mismatch between local preferences and the available HYV seeds. Also, colonialism and its after-effects cannot be ignored. In fact, some parts of Africa, for example, the two Congos, only became independent of Belgium and France in 1960. The postcolonial after-effects include the lack of integration of civil society with the state and a deep mistrust of benevolent state actions. Whatever the reasons, the failure to bring the Green Revolution to Africa, in combination with the large population explosion there, are certainly the most important fundamental reasons the 21st century Europe faces a continuously increasing very serious immigration problem from Africa.

In my view, Humanity has completed three agricultural revolutions and is currently in the fourth one. Some people combine the current one with the third one but in my view, they serve distinctly different purposes and thus I prefer to separate them. The first agricultural revolution occurred in the Neolithic era when Stone Age man domesticated plants and animals and thereby communities could grow larger than was possible previously when Man supported itself through hunting and gathering. The second Agricultural Revolution took place principally in the 17th  through the 19th centuries and it took place in North-Western Europe. During this era, all the new benefits of industrialization were applied to agriculture. It started with the adoption in Holland of the Chinese plow, allowing the use of fewer draft animals than was required to pull the previously used plows. The Dutch version of the Chinese plow was then imported into England by Dutch farmworkers working there. Subsequently, the early phases of the Second Industrial Revolution were principally taking place in the United Kingdom and then spread back onto the European continent. Its primary features were new ideas concerning the use of fertilizers, land reclamation, selective breeding, and crop rotation. The invention of the steam engine also made a significant impact by replacing animals in powering the progressively increasing sizes of machines combining plowing, planting, and harvesting. Transportation also became a significant component of enhancing agricultural productivity, allowing remotely located high productivity agricultural areas to support the growing city populations. By the second half of the 19th century, the Malthusian fear of mass starvation was no longer a concern in the developed world. As already discussed above, the Second Industrial Revolution was followed in the middle of the 20th century by the Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, which basically eliminated mass starvation in most of the developing world. Feeding all of mankind is no longer a question of whether it can be done but it is a question of will, political organization, and investment to deploy the known methods and tools. The Green Revolution slowly morphed into the currently ongoing Fourth Agricultural Revolution. Its objectives are to extend the beneficial results of the Green Revolution to those areas that are still living with agriculture that may not even be at the level achieved by much of the developed world during the Second Agricultural Revolution. Furthermore, mankind now faces new issues related to climate change and human-caused environmental stress. Simply stated, while we do know how to produce enough to feed and clothe and house all of us, our environmental, or ecological, footprint exceeds what is available on Earth. Since we do not know how to grow the Earth, we must shrink our footprint. While we may be able to develop still more efficient higher-yielding crops and less environmentally stressing fertilizers, most likely the most significant progress we can make in our footprint reduction is by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources: switching to electrically-driven agricultural machinery from the currently used internal combustion-engine driven ones. 

Unlike political revolutions, agricultural revolutions cannot be defined by precise start and end dates.  Thus in the foregoing, the indicated time periods are approximate but they allow the significant agricultural events to be placed into a general historical context. The most significant message regarding Malthus and his ideas is that the Malthusian social ideas are completely debunked. Starting with the Age of Enlightenment, followed by the development of the scientific method and the Industrial Revolution, humanity is able to control much of its destiny. 

In closing, I wish to comment on the interrelationship between national wealth, agriculture, crime, and migration.

In the modern world, there is no nation on Earth whose economy simultaneously is dominated by agriculture and who also can be considered amongst those who can claim to be high GDP per capita producers. A set of very interesting analyses of agricultural employment was published by Our World in Data. One of their analyses covers the period from 1801 through 2010 and it shows on a single scatterplot graph the share of agricultural employment worldwide versus GDP per capita, using 2011 International Dollars. The data allows a straight-line approximation of the plot, showing on the linear vertical axis the percent employment in agriculture and on the logarithmic horizontal axis the GDP per capita. At $1,000 per capita  GDP, close to 80% of the people are employed in agriculture, at $10,000 per capita GDP about 30% work in agriculture, and in the USA In 2010 with close to $50,000 per capita GDP about 2% of the population worked in agriculture. Another analysis, from the same source, covering a period of about 700 years from 1300 through 2012, shows that all over Europe the share of agriculture in total employment significantly declined beginning at about 1800 and the decline continued into the 21st century. Clearly this decline indicates the success of the Second and Third Agricultural Revolutions. (See: https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture)

It is generally well known that fertility rate, and thus population growth declines with increasing income. The US FED carried out a global study examining the quantitative relationship between fertility rate and  GDP per capita. (https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income) The published data shows that at an income level of a few hundred dollars GDP per capita the fertility rate is approximately 6, as GDP increases it continuously declines and once it reaches about $100,000 it is beginning to approach 1. It matches the replacement rate of 2.1 at about $10,000 GDP per capita. Clearly the USA and Europe follow this pattern and their native-born birth rates are below the replacement rate. In 2019 the EU had $44,500 GDP/cap PPP and a birthrate of 1.6. And so does Sub-Saharan Africa but on the opposite side. In 2017, Nigeria had $5,900 GDP/cap PPP and a birth rate of 4.72. In The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the corresponding figures were $800 and 5.77, Furthermore, in the DRC, 70% of the population is engaged in agriculture, cultivating about one-eighth of the available land, while receiving an excellent 147cm/year rainfall and 23-27C monthly average temperature; nevertheless, child malnutrition is widespread and most of the population lives in conditions of food insecurity. Major ongoing international efforts are engaged in assisting the economic advancement of the DRC, however political uncertainties interfere with significant progress.  (Data sources: CIA Factbook, USAID website, and DRC USA embassy website).

Major undesirable events in other parts of the world are beginning to cause starvation and displacement of several groups. The Syrian War forces millions of people to move from their homes and the narcotics trade in Central America is causing waves of migration heading north. While these forces are primarily not destroying agriculture, their effect on the well-being and feeding of the people is strongly negative. Clearly politics, war, violence, and social instability can cause significant local food supply and personal security problems. Again it is not a question whether we can take care of our people but it is a question whether the local powers wish to do so and whether the local social issues and conditions allow local powers to act contrary to the public good.

Clearly we know how to produce enough food for all people. Where there are shortages, most notably in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the major unresolved issues that block the rapid full-scale adaptation of the results of agricultural revolutions that eliminated hunger and helped to boost modern economies are political and social in nature. - - Resolving these issues is key both to improving the lives of millions of people and to ease the migration pressure facing Europe, and to a lesser extent North America, already now. These pressures are huge now and will be even greater in the next half-century.

The optimistic view is to look forward to when all of Mankind practices the best agriculture technologies and reaches income levels commensurate with what is today the norm in the developed world. An interesting question though arises:  what will happen when all people enjoy a GDP/cap close to $100,000 a year, available today in the richest societies? According to the current data cited above, the birthrate then will fall not only below the replacement rate of 2.1 but may also fall below 1. Will mankind self exterminate at that point, possibly in a few generations? Will the populations collapse at a rate that none of the institutions of society and no part of the economy can continue functioning? Back to subsistence farming and then to hunting and gathering? I have no answer but I find the question interesting.

As I am writing this in March of 2020, it is impossible to conclude without a reference to the coronavirus COVID-19. It now permeates our daily lives at every level. The global economy is virtually shut down. Much of Europe and the USA stopped working, China is now beginning to start up after several weeks, or more, of enforced closure. My guess is that the world will have missed several months of productive activity with virtually zero GDP. How will this end and what will be the consequences? I do not know. Nothing like this happened in our history. I brace myself and hope for the best. Some believe that a new world, unknown to us, is coming.

P.S. According to some online news today, March 30, 2020, COVOD-19 arrived in Sub-Saharan Africa. Social distancing, the first line of defense to slow the spread of the virus in urban areas around the rest of the world, may not be applicable here. In Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, initial plans by the governor of the city to implement lock-down rules to accomplish social distancing were withdrawn as undeployable because many of the city’s 12 million residents live in congested housing without running water. Many of the other 90 million inhabitants of the DRC live in widely spread out rural areas where social distancing may be less necessary, less effective, and less enforceable. What will all this mean in the future? I make no prediction other than here too COVID-19 will have major impacts on all aspects of modern life, on society, politics, and economics.