E-mail a friendJoshua Cooper Ramo
airdate April 30, 2009
Joshua Cooper Ramo has been called "one of China's leading foreign-born scholars." Splitting his time between Beijing and New York, he's the youngest managing director in the history of Kissinger Associates—one of the world's leading strategic advisory firms. An award-winning journalist, he was formerly Time magazine's youngest-ever foreign editor. Ramo also spent two sabbaticals working at AIDS hospices in South Africa. In The Age of the Unthinkable, he offers a new model for understanding an unpredictable world.
Strategic consultant talks about the problems with unregulated capitalism. (2:14)
Full interview. (12:12)
Joshua Cooper Ramo
Tavis: Joshua Cooper Ramo is a former senior editor at "Time" magazine who now serves as the managing director at Kissinger Associates. His acclaimed new book is called "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It." Joshua, nice to have you on the program.
Joshua Cooper Ramo: It's a pleasure to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start with this title -- "The Age of the Unthinkable." By that you mean what?
Ramo: I mean all you've got to do is pick up the newspaper and it seems like every day, just when you think you've reached the end of unthinkable stories like the financial system collapsing or the American economy shedding 600,000 jobs a month, you pick it up and you find out we've got swine flu that's spread in a matter of a couple days from Mexico up to Canada and New York.
That's the nature of the age we're living in now -- it's filled with unpredictable surprise. And our first instinct to that naturally is to kind of be terrified, to worry about it, but the age of the unthinkable, and what I learned over the course of putting this book together, is it's actually a period of incredible promise and opportunity, that we're living in a revolutionary era, for sure. Things are changing very rapidly.
But you have to remember that when change happens it doesn't only destroy the old order, it also creates new fortunes and new heroes. And it's a moment of incredible creativity, really.
Tavis: I want to come back to that notion of the possibilities pregnant in this moment in just a second. Before I do that, though, how does President Obama fit into this age of the unthinkable? His election, for starters.
Ramo: Yeah -- by the way, talk about something that would have been unthinkable. And one of the lessons of revolutionary ages, the first thing they do is they discredit people from the old age who were considered great figures.
So people like Greenspan or Dick Cheney or Colin Powell or even Bernanke, if he's not careful, find their reputations destroyed. That's a clear marker that there's a revolution going on.
And the other things that happen is that people are elevated from positions of relative obscurity into positions of great historical import. And so on the one hand the election of Obama is an incredible, hopeful signal that it is possible to have change that shifts us in a positive direction, but it's also a reminder that in very unstable times people rise from these positions of obscurity to have great influence.
And so what we're faced with now is not simply a financial crisis -- it's kind of an existential crisis of the system. And I guarantee you if we sit here five years from now there will be people who've risen to positions of tremendous influence whose ideas we disagree with, whose ideas may be very dangerous to the future of the kind of values that we may share, that we haven't even heard of today.
And that's why we've got to get out there and actually do something today. we've got to fight for what we care about today, because in revolutionary periods if you sit on the sidelines you become a victim.
Tavis: You keep saying things that keep piquing my curiosity, which is why I love the book so much and why you're on the show.
Ramo: Thank you.
Tavis: You just made one of those comments now. Why is it a, if I can use this word, Joshua, why is it a prerequisite for any unthinkable age or era to be ushered in, why is it a prerequisite for those persons we have known as heroes, to use your word, for them to be crushed?
Ramo: Because what happens most of the time is that people are locked into ideas about the way the world works and those ideas make them successful in one era. And when the landscape shifts they can't quite keep up fast enough.
One of the things I did for the book was I traveled around the world to meet revolutionaries -- people who sort of get the energy of this age. So I spent time with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv, with investors in Silicon Valley, with bioengineers, and I'll never forget, about eight months ago I was sitting with a guy who's one of the heads of information technology for Hezbollah in Beirut one afternoon.
And his phone rang and he answered his phone, and then he reached into his pocket and started text messaging on another phone. Now, I have one other friend who's capable of doing this kind of dance, and it's a guy who works at Google.
And I just had one of these moments where I said there's a whole cast of characters out there who get the energy of this age, and when I contrast them with my friends working at the National Security Council or the Fed or the State Department, it's a different category of person. It's that revolutionary instinct.
And so the reason the old guys get discredited is they've risen up inside the very systems that are failing. And if you look around the world today, that's what's going on -- that our old ideas are not only failing, they're backfiring. The war on terrorism produces more dangerous terrorists. Trying to make the world more prosperous by spreading capitalism everywhere actually makes it more perilous.
And if we continue following down that track we're headed for disaster. The lesson of the book is there's all kinds of things we can do to avoid that.
Tavis: Why is the title, then, "The Age of the Unthinkable" as opposed to "An Age of the Unthinkable?" The age -- you see what my point is?
Ramo: Yes, I do.
Tavis: The age suggests that this has never happened before, that this is unusual. Is it really?
Ramo: No, it's not, and in fact history teaches what happens when you don't acknowledge that. There are some unique things about this age, and probably the most significant of it is the scope of involvement in all of our lives.
They say the difference between an historic era and a non-historic era is in an historic era history touches every one of our lives. I think all of us feel that today, whether it's our bank accounts or now we worry about what virus we're going to catch on the street, you can't avoid it.
And so we're all interconnected today, and that does make this age unique from previous ones. You used to be able to hide a little bit from revolutions. Today, that's not the case.
The flip side of it, and the way I kind of end the book and what I learn after this journey is that what really makes this age unthinkable is that each of us can make a difference. It used to be we were victims of history, and what's changed today is everybody has more power than ever before to make the world better.
Tavis: I want to unpack a couple of things that you've offered as examples that you talk about in the book in detail -- capitalism, for example, in the age of the unthinkable. Talk to me.
Ramo: One of the problems that we have is that capitalism is basically -- unregulated capitalism has basically shown itself to be an engine of inequality. If you look around the world today, the gap between rich and poor around the planet is greater than it's ever been in human history, and not only is that the case, it's an accelerating process and that's what's happened here in the United States.
That's a recipe for disaster. When you have money concentrated in the hands of very few people and power ever more broadly spread, you can see that tension right away. And so what's unthinkable about that is that that was sustainable. We had almost a dozen years where people were wandering around after the end of the Cold War, thinking all you have to do is spread capitalism everywhere and everything's going to be okay.
That, in fact, is the wrong model. If you spread capitalism everywhere and don't worry about the basic, fundamental human rights that more people on the planet want and deserve than ever before, then you're headed for a disaster. The idea that you just let the markets take care of things I think is now totally discredited.
Tavis: What is the future of capitalism?
Ramo: I think capitalism does a few things very well, and one of the things it does very efficiently is to help set prices for things. And so you want markets that function, to some degree. What you have to do is find ways to counteract this bad habit of capitalism of concentration, and we need a capitalism today that assures that we guarantee for as many people on the planet as possible some very basic rights.
Not a particularly complicated set of rights -- it's a right to an education, to healthcare, to raise your family in a relatively secure environment -- but capitalism itself will never provide those for people. We see that today.
One of the things I talk about in the book is I took some time when I was foreign editor of "Time," and subsequently worked as a volunteer at an AIDS hospice in South Africa. And you just saw in that context that capitalism was not coming to save these people. That we were living in a moment where 100 million were going to die of a disease the treatment for which was an eight-hour plane flight away.
We were operating in the world with ideas that were frankly kind of morally incomprehensible, by any standard. And so thinking that markets are just going to fix that is ridiculous, and that's why our policies need to include using markets in the places they're appropriate but also finding ways to compensate for the areas in which the markets don't work.
Tavis: Terror in the age of the unthinkable. Terrorism, more particularly.
Ramo: Terrorism, yeah. I'd say one of the most sobering experiences I had in working on the book was spending time in the Middle East. As foreign editor of "Time" I'd spent a lot of time with Hezbollah. I'd had the opportunity to learn how the Israelis thought about how to combat these problems.
The challenge we face today is when you attack terrorists, they tend to get stronger. They are these organisms that evolve. And so military attacks don't work. In the case of Hezbollah, in 2006 Israel launched the largest air war in history against Hezbollah; Hezbollah fired the same number of missiles on the last day of the war as on the first day of the war, just to prove a point.
Tavis: Afghanistan, same example (unintelligible).
Ramo: Same thing -- and not only Afghanistan (unintelligible) now has had these side effects in Pakistan. And so we really need to recalibrate how we do this, and one of the points I make in "The Age of the Unthinkable" is that a lot of this means re-training our instincts. Our instincts after something like 9/11 are like, okay, we're going to get out there and we're really going to pound these people. We're going to turn that country into a parking lot.
We've seen that doesn't work. And so the instincts we need to have are we're going to have a military response, it's going to be the appropriate military response, but we're also going to build schools and hospitals and do other things. And that's a very different kind of immediate sensation for us, but that's how we've got to feel.
And my argument is also that we have to do that individually in our own lives. Today we look at our bank accounts, we look at our families -- there's a lot to be scared about today. But rather than retreat inside a shell what we've got to do is engage the world and try and make it better.
Tavis: I want to close, then with these two questions first: How pregnant, really -- you make the case in the book -- but how pregnant really is this moment with possibility?
Ramo: It's huge. All of us know what has been created around us in the last five or 10 years that didn't exist, whether those are political realities or technological realities. And also when people get defeatist about the United States it doesn't ring true to me.
I live mostly in China and so I have the chance to kind of contrast the two. The United States is the most efficient engine in human history for turning dreams into reality. And so I think getting that back on track, letting people be innovative, is the most important thing.
Tavis: Is that still for the many or now for the few?
Ramo: I think it's got to be for the many, and that's why I think a lot of these -- and by the way, I don't think that's just sort of like a social issue or a kind of political reality. I think it's the only way to build a country that's resilient and can withstand the shocks that are coming.
Swine flu is just the latest of these things, but frankly it is inevitable that we're going to face more crises as we go forward, and we need to do that with a country that's resilient, and that means having tens of millions of Americans actively involved in living the kind of lives that are resilient and sustainable.
Tavis: How does that happen, then, where you close the book, in fact? How does that happen for everyday people?
Ramo: Well, that's exactly where I close the book, which is each of us have to look in the mirror and understand that the question our children and our grandchildren are going to ask us is what did you do at this moment when the world shifted? Where did you take your responsibility?
The thing I think that's the most important is -- there's two things. One is each of us has to say are we living a resilient lifestyle? Are we saving, are we taking care of our health, are we doing environmentally sensitive things?
But the most important thing is I think each of us have to decide to live some of our lives in what I call the caring economy, which is worrying about people outside the scope of our family, caring for people either in our country or in other countries who are not receiving the advantages of the global system, and we've got to decide to do that.
That is going to be part of our lives that each of us will take one or two or three years and really do that. And that's not only good because it's the decent thing to do, but it also connects us with the world in a way that's more sustainable and that's better than the way we're connected to the world today.
Tavis: Let me close with this. You mentioned a moment ago that you spent a lot of your time living in China. How do our values stand up, stack up, factor into succeeding in this era? Does that make sense?
Ramo: It does. And I have to tell you it's a book that's profoundly influenced by the fact that I lived in China for seven years. The Chinese have a very different way of looking at things, and by this I mean not just the kind of contemporary communist party Chinese, but kind of the grand 5,000-year sweep of Chinese history.
It's a philosophical distinction that assumes constant change is inevitable. The oldest book of Chinese philosophy is called "The Book of Changes." And I think the mistake we make is we always are looking to close things down, to think we've finally reached a conclusion. It's a very Western way of thinking.
And so there are benefits to both Chinese ways of thinking and Western ways of thinking, but in the book I really do spend some time trying to say what is a totally different way of thinking about the world, and can it be useful to us? And I found, personally, at least, the Chinese had a great deal to teach me.
Tavis: His name, Joshua Cooper Ramo. His new book, fascinating reading, "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It." Joshua, a delightful conversation.
Ramo: Hey, thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
Tavis: Glad to have you on, it's my pleasure.
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