The Raging 2020s summary

For most of human history, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. The condition is one where a person’s body can’t produce enough insulin, which can lead to a coma and even death. Fortunately, in 1922, scientists discovered a way to extract insulin from cows and administer it to humans to control the condition.

Those scientists realized they’d created a life-saving miracle drug. So they decided to sell their patent to the University of Toronto, for a grand total of. . . three dollars. 

Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The storm’s winds reached a fearful 150 miles per hour, and it brought destruction to match. Just under two million citizens were abruptly left without access to drinkable water, the island’s power grid was knocked completely out of commission, and people were dying.

Yet, despite that extraordinary need, it took the United States government four whole days to send shipments of food, water, and equipment. It took almost two weeks for a navy hospital ship to arrive. And within a month, a government agency calculated that it needed to be distributing 2.2 million meals a day but it was only doing two hundred thousand.

On December 30, 1936, workers at the GM automotive production facility in Flint, Michigan, locked themselves inside their factory. Production suddenly came to a standstill. Within days, strikes had spread to other nearby factories. 

GM was in a panic. They tried cutting the heat to the Flint plant, hoping that the cold would drive the workers out –⁠ yet they stayed put. Ditto when the Flint police stormed the facility and sprayed tear gas at the strikers. 

Imagine you’re a pizza delivery driver. Whenever you get a tip, you have to share 20 percent with the owner of the pizza place. Any job-related costs –⁠ like gas money –⁠ can be taken out of the total before your boss takes her cut. So say you make 25 dollars in tips one night and spend 5 dollars on gas. You get back that 5 dollars first, then your boss takes 20 percent of the remaining 20. She ends the night with 4 dollars and you get 16.

Now extrapolate. Imagine you’re a multinational corporation and your boss, the pizza shop owner, is the government. This is how taxes work in an ideal world. But multinational corporations don’t tend to play by the rules.

In 2014, Ireland closed one of the tax loopholes that enabled the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. And what happened to Google as a result? Well, countries that had been cheated out of their taxes were mad. Italy and France both launched tax fraud investigations against Google, which ultimately resulted in the company paying over a billion euros in back taxes. 

Yet we can’t quite say that the “good side” ultimately won. Because for every Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich that comes to light and makes headlines, there are countless other tax-related schemes that enable the world’s wealthiest companies and individuals to store their taxes offshore. Solving this problem will require a coordinated global effort.

Chris Lynch never envisioned himself working for the US government. Like many in the tech industry, he was skeptical of state authority. But after he spent a month and a half with the USDS –⁠ the United States Digital Services –⁠ everything changed.

The first problem Lynch worked on involved the way veterans’ medical records were shared. The Veterans Affairs Department could only accept records in PDF format, but sometimes the Pentagon sent them as JPEGs. This meant that certain patients wound up with incomplete records, which sometimes caused doctors to mistreat them. 

In the wake of the Cold War, the United States became a beacon of stability and prosperity – for a time. But it ultimately failed to change and adapt its social contract for the twenty-first century. The problems that have resulted from that,⁠ such as growing inequality and the rise of populism,⁠ mean the US is no longer a model society.

Two alternate models have risen in its place, and countries must decide which they’ll choose. On the one hand, there is the open model, which welcomes innovation, investment, and free speech and offers public benefits. And on the other, there is the closed model, in which governments are authoritarian and discourage dissent in an effort to quickly amass greater geopolitical power.