Mention the practical steps taken by the government to reverse this decline.
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Answer:
The thrust of The Wake Up Call by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (senior editors from Bloomberg and The Economist) is that the Coronavirus pandemic has shown up a growing gap between the West (Europe and the US) and Asia in terms of economic vitality and statecraft. Countries such as Singapore, South Korea and China - where the pandemic began - have risen to the challenge of managing the fallout; the US and much of Europe (with honourable exceptions such as Greece) have seemed slow and disorganised by comparison.
This reflects a wider story, the authors say. “Anybody who flies from shoddy Kennedy to one of Asian’s gleaming new airports can see an infrastructure gap yawning. The danger is that the same gap is opening with the state more generally.”
In one particularly good chapter, Micklethwait and Wooldridge, try to imagine how the West might respond if it had truly far-sighted, enlightened leadership. They invent a president Bill Lincoln (a composite of the 19th-century British prime minister William Gladstone and US founding president Abraham Lincoln – “the two most formidable politicians from that era”) and conduct a thought experiment about what Bill might do.