Sanjay G. Reddy An economist makes the case for valuing quality of life and liberty, too. Lockdowns, as broad and untargeted measures that affect the entire population, generate a huge cost. By their very nature they imply massive, damaging consequences for employment, incomes, and economic activity generally. They also directly and indirectly create health and social costs. Cancers go unscreened and therefore untreated; children go uneducated, and even go hungry. There is an alternative: targeted measures that aim at enabling normal life to continue as much as possible. Call them “smart” measures. They focus most on protecting specific groups in…

Governments cannot openly admit that the "controlled easing” of COVID-19 lockdowns in fact means controlled progress toward so-called herd immunity to the virus. Much better, then, to pursue this objective silently, under a cloud of obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine will arrive before most of the population gets infected. The Covid-19 pandemic is the first major global crisis in human history to be treated as a mathematical problem, with governments regarding policy as the solution to a set of differential equations. Excluding a few outliers – including, of course, US President Donald Trump – most political leaders have slavishly…

Insofar as the world economy was already on a fragile, unsustainable path, Covid-19 clarifies the challenges we face and the decisions we must make. The fate of the world economy hinges not on what the virus does, but on how we choose to respond. The global economy will be shaped in the years ahead by three trends. The relationship between markets and the state will be rebalanced, in favor of the latter. This will be accompanied by a rebalancing between hyper-globalization and national autonomy, also in favor of the latter. And our ambitions for economic growth will need to be…

On April, 20, 2020, the Yoruba ethnic nationality of Nigeria was admitted into Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation UNPO). The euphoria that greeted the epochal event, which ranked the Yoruba 45th amongst UNPO members, followed closely by the Igbo who were registered as the UNPO’s 46th member, is yet to die down. The Yoruba nation’s agitation for sovereignty is led from unusual quarters – Mr Banji Akintoye, an octogenarian emeritus professor of History and African Studies, is an avowed Awoist and top echelon leader of the pan-Yoruba leadership group known famously as Afenifere, which had been in existence pre-Independence Nigeria.…