The Wall Street Journal - 21.03.2020 - 22.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 |C1

REVIEW

Clean Hands

The medical pioneer who

proved that handwashing

saves livesC3

Let the Outside In

The ‘glass house’

of Mies van der Rohe

Books C7

CULTURE|SCIENCE|POLITICS|HUMOR

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN W. TOMAC; BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

BASEBALL

Hitting gurus from the

margins of the major-

league game have

taught batters a radical

new way to swing,

causing an explosion

in home runs.C5

JASON GAY

A veteran hater

of meetings at

the office now

finds himself

longing for that

next Google

Hangout.C6

WEEKEND

CONFIDENTIAL

A British baroness

and former lady

in waiting to

Princess Margaret

sticks up for

the royal family.C6

‘Black

Swan’

The metaphor for

a rare catastrophe

goes back centuries,

but the birds weren’t

as rare as thought.C3

Inside

ruptions of supply chains is...driving the last

nail into the coffin of the globalists.” Ian

Bremmer, founder of the risk-consultancy

Eurasia Group, sees a starker era ahead, in-

cluding more palpable tension between the

U.S. and China. “Globalization has been the

biggest driver of economic growth,” he says.

“Its trajectory is now shifting, largely for

geopolitical reasons, and that will be accel-

erated by the coronavirus crisis.”

In the midst of our current spiral, it is

hard to resist such dire forecasts. But we

should. There is every reason to think that

our post-coronavirus future will see not an

end to the globalizing trend of recent de-

cades but a new chapter in that story. The

sudden halt in commerce and travel precipi-

tated by the outbreak will not snap back

overnight, and the next few years will see a

re-nationalization of some industries for

countries that can. But when this crisis

passes, we are likely to find fresh confirma-

tion of what we already know about globali-

zation: that it’s easy to hate, convenient to

target and impossible to stop.

Even before the virus, there were indica-

tions of both a pause and a modest pullback

in globalization. Last year, global trade con-

tracted a smidgen, by less than 1%, but at

$19 trillion, it was still higher than any year

before the record-setting 2018. As for China

and the U.S., the dual effect of the Trump

administration’s tariffs and the assertive na-

tionalism of Xi Jinping put a brake on fur-

ther integration. Data from the U.S. Census

Bureau show that the total value of trade in

goods between the two countries declined

from $630 billion in 2017 to $560 billion in

2019. Even so, this pullback just puts the
      U.S. and China back at the trade level of


2020. And that amount, it should be noted,
      Pleaseturntothenextpage

Mr. Karabell is the author, most

recently, of “The Leading Indicators:

A Short History of the Numbers That

Rule Our World” (Simon & Schuster).

From the mid-14th to the early 18th

century, outbreaks of the plague varying

in size from local epidemics to continen-

tal pandemics occurred roughly every

five years in Europe, on average. Accord-

ing to Franco Mormando, a professor of

Italian studies at Boston College who has

studied the role of the plague in Italian

PleaseturntopageC4

An engraving

depicts the 1348

plague as described

by Boccaccio.

A

s Italians confrontthe world’s

deadliest outbreak of the coro-

navirus, under quarantine in

their homes with no clear idea of when

they will come out, not least among their

resources is an unsurpassed heritage of

plague culture.

BYFRANCISX.ROCCA

The Covid-19 pandemic might be closing borders

and disrupting supply chains, but it can’t

stop our long-term movement toward a more

interconnected world.By Zachary Karabell

TheEndof

Globalization?

Don'tCount

OnIt

‘These

were our

ancestors,

we are made

of the

same flesh

and blood.’

FRANCO MORMANDO

Professor of

Italian Studies

Students under a coronavirus lockdown are learning

from masterpieces inspired by Europe’s historic plagues.

In Italy, Contagion

Has Its Own Canon

O

ver the past week, the

coronavirus has gone from

an Asian contagion with

ripple effects on interna-

tional supply chains to a

global pandemic that will

plunge the whole world

into recession. Travel has been halted across

the globe. Borders are shut. Hundreds of

millions of people are in effective lockdown

in the European Union, and the U.S. is head-

ing in that direction. The crisis has erased

trillions of dollars from global stock markets

and imperiled the future of millions of small

businesses around the world, along with the

livelihoods of vast numbers of wage earners.

In the months ahead, we are likely to see

one of the sharpest economic contractions

on record, and the downturn will undoubt-

edly serve as yet more evidence for those

who have argued in recent years that global-

ization is coming to an end, or at least being

rolled back. Nicolas Tenzer, chair of the

Cerap think tank in Paris, argues that the

rising barriers in response to the virus will

strengthen “the populist and nationalist

forces that have long called for reinforcing

borders. It is a true gift for them.” The vet-

eran U.S. market commentator Gary Shilling

recently wrote, “The coronavirus’s depress-

ing effects on the global economy and dis-