(bright music) - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents The Civic Discourse Project, Sustaining American Political Order in History and Practice.

This week.

- We are sitting on the cusp of what may be the greatest technological economic revolution since the Industrial Revolution, and maybe even more significant than that, because the Industrial Revolution was about human society getting new technologies, new industrial patterns.

This is a revolution that demands that we rethink what it means to be human.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at RAND, examines why nations thrive, qualities that explain the health and survival of democracy.

- I wanna start by telling you the story of two Americas.

The first of these is incredibly powerful, and kind of looms over the world in ways that it has continued to do for decades.

We have today, 26% of global GDP is the US GDP similar to the 1990s.

Our GDP is $10 trillion bigger than the European Union, and about 30% bigger than all of the Global South countries put together from around the world.

For all the talk of China overtaking the United States, in the last five years, if you measure GDP in real terms, the United States has increased its lead over China.

China is falling further behind the United States in terms of the size of its economy.

Our per capita income is seventh in the world, behind a number of small, very rich countries.

US per capita income is about $20,000 a year more than Sweden, $30,000 a year more than France, and US per capita income is about double that of Japan.

Our unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the world.

Americans start businesses at two or three times the rate of many European countries, amazing statistics of this economic juggernaut.

Now, the other America is an America filled with people, possibly including some of us, who are losing faith in our national experiment.

And I'm gonna read you a few statistics, and as I do, you can kinda try to find yourself in them, or if you disagree with them.

If you're like most Americans, you're not terribly optimistic about the future of the country.

A 2023 Pew poll asked about a few different issues, asked whether they were optimistic about the country's ability to maintain equality for all people.

28% were optimistic, 44% pessimistic.

On the future of American education, 20% optimists, 60% pessimists.

On the moral and ethical standards of our country, 16% optimistic, 63% pessimistic.

Last month, Gallup released a poll asking about overall satisfaction with national trends.

The satisfaction rate was 38%, the lowest they'd ever measured.

They ask a different common poll question, "Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in your country?"

About the last three years running, the satisfaction rate's about 20%, dissatisfaction rate is 80%.

And just a couple of days ago, the "Financial Times" reported on a new poll that of Americans, 15 to 29, only about 1/3, trust the federal government to do what is right.

So these attitudes reflect something I think that we all sensed, have sensed in the last few years in powerful ways, that our society, many of its leading institutions, its information environments, its elites, is simply not working well enough to solve our problems, and is not accountable to us as citizens in the way that it should be.

Now at the same time, the second America is an America that, in many cases, not universally, can't get things done, at least in terms of public projects.

The country that did the Manhattan Project, Apollo program, simply can't do those kinds of things effectively anymore.

California, as you may know, has been trying to do a high-speed rail system.

The original estimate was $33 billion.

Now the estimate is $100 billion.

They've spent 11 to 12 billion already, and have not built one mile of actual track.

So what are we to make of this?

On the one hand, we have a country whose broad economic position and statistics suggest a continuation of massive power, and leading position in the hierarchy of world, great powers and countries in general.

And yet we have a country that is so troubled, and increasingly can't seem to get out of its own way.

In sort of an approach to answering that question, I wanna talk about this topic of the inherent qualities of nations that make countries thrive politically, but also socially, economically, technologically, culturally.

And I'll share the results of this, about three years of research we did at RAND, looking into this question of what are the essential characteristics of countries that make them dynamic, that make them coherent, that make them successful?

Now, we were interested in part, and this work was funded by the Defense Department, they were interested in the context of the US-China rivalry.

What are the characteristics that are gonna determine the outcome of that?

One of our findings was that in its post-war heyday, late '40s through early '60s, of the factors that we decided were critical, the United States reflected the most compelling holistic combination of those possibly of any great power in history.

So we started this work at RAND in 2022, with a specific, but a very ambitious, research question.

"What is it that makes great powers successful in long-term rivalries?"

Now you could add up military power, size of the economy, size of the population, but our instinct was, with this office at the Defense Department that sponsored this work, that the qualities of societies actually make a big difference, the kind of society that it is.

And to me, the best example of this is the Cold War.

The United States and Soviet Union both had some very advanced military technologies.

The Soviet Union had a big empire, but ultimately it was the dynamism of the open American society that made the critical difference.

It just produced more innovation, more growth, more technology over the long term.

And eventually the Soviet leaders got that.

So if that's true, what are these qualities?

We did a bunch of historical case studies, going all the way back to ancient Rome.

We looked at a whole bunch of different literature that bear on this question.

Like one really fascinating issue is something that's called the Great Divergence.

Starting at about 1500, European countries raced ahead of the rest of the world in their economic development, their technological development.

And there's an enormous literature trying to explain why.

What are the qualities of those societies that made that difference?

A lot of modern research on different factors.

And we eventually came up with seven characteristics that we think are the determining factors in long-term national vitality.

First one, national will and ambition.

Both internationally and domestically, the most competitive societies have a strong sense of drive, of will, of a desire to achieve.

From a national perspective, they have a sense of their own exceptionalism.

And groups within the society, scientists, business people, and others, have kind of a driving ambition, a desire to better themselves, a work ethic, all of this stuff that makes the country an engine of driving itself forward.

Second characteristic, unified national identity.

Pretty straightforward.

Countries that are more unified, as opposed to fragmented, as in the case of like the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union, countries with a sense of who they are, their identity, have a competitive advantage, and specifically an identity that makes people in the society willing to sacrifice on behalf of the nation, in the military, but also in a lot of forms of volunteerism and philanthropy, other kinds of things.

Third, shared opportunity.

How well does the society get the talents of all of its people, and not exclude potential scientists, and innovators, and entrepreneurs based on whatever factor?

Fourth factor was something we called an active state.

This is not meant to imply that the state runs the economy, or the state has the leading role, but merely that in all of these historical cases, you see governments that take targeted, limited actions to catalyze national competitiveness, doing what they need to do to allow the rest of the society to have its effect.

Now in in older times, this was creating simple rule of law.

More recently, a great example is the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, that made a bunch of investments in the '60s and '70s, that helped to create the internet and GPS, and a lot of other leading technologies.

So this is not a dominant government role, but it's a catalytic role in critical ways.

Fifth factor, effective institutions.

It's a common finding of economic and political science research that societies that have well-functioning institutions, that allow the society to work efficiently, have a huge competitive advantage.

Sixth factor, one I think is most interesting, important, and hardest to define, a learning and adapting society.

This is one of those things that's hard to define, but you really recognize it when you see it.

And it leapt off the page of a lot of our historical case studies, where some societies just have an intellectual energy about them.

They have a critical mass of people that are trying to push the frontiers of scientific knowledge.

There's intellectual exchange.

Scientists get together to to talk about issues, and debate them.

And there's a sense of adaptive energy, so as things are learned, the society changes how it does things in response.

And then seventh, and finally, a factor we isolated was diversity and pluralism.

So we mean diversity, not necessarily just in the the way this become controversial, but in a very broad sense.

Going back to the Roman Empire, for example, Rome managed to integrate talented people from many of its provinces in an amazing way.

They had ideas and inputs from a lot of different sources.

And by pluralism we mean political pluralism.

So societies that have a complex set of political governance, like in America, states, localities, as well as the federal government.

You have all these little laboratories of public experimentation that gives you, in the long run, a competitive advantage.

So those were the seven things we came up with.

One common pattern you saw in countries that were the most vital was that positive versions of some of these characteristics would work with the others in a positive-sum feedback loop.

So you'd have good institutions allowing people to have more opportunity, which is supported by the intervention of an active state, and so on.

And then in countries, empires that had passed their peak, you see a negative version of that, where damage to some of these things plays off against others, and creates a loop that can become self-reinforcing.

So in the last part of the research, we assessed the United States.

We looked at these seven things, said, "How are we doing?"

Now, one of finding was, as the first America that I described would suggest, incredible areas of continuing resilience and strength.

But we also found a lot of potential danger signs, ebbing national willpower and confidence, fracturing national identity, a sense of opportunity that is denied to too many, institutions that don't solve our problems in the way that they once did.

And we began to identify the risk that the United States could be in the early stages of falling into this trap of classic great powers and empires, that we are beginning to see the early stages of this negative feedback loop where failing institutions undermine opportunity.

A lack of national willpower reduces the incentive to adapt and learn.

A divided society undermines the value of diversity in pluralism.

And when you begin to have negative trajectories on all of these, they can kind of play together and have a significant negative effect over the long term.

Democracy, at the end of the day, is an information-processing mechanism.

That's in a lot of ways what it is.

If a vigorous and well-functioning information environment is really important, then we are in some degree of trouble.

Because, as we know, there's a lot of indicators of the decay of the public sphere in the United States, and a lot of advanced countries over the last number of years.

It's become more poisoned, polarized, unable to support the process so critical in a democracy that the public sphere is supposed to do.

There's a lot of evidence for this, a lot of reasons why.

But one fundamental reason, I think, at the core of it really, is the fragmentation of the public sphere, right?

There's a former CIA analyst, and now public intellectual, named Martin Gurri, who wrote a really good book called "The Revolt of the Public."

And his argument is simple, from a fairly unified, coherent, centralized information environment, some of us are old enough to remember three big television channels, a few big national papers, Walter Cronkite was the voice of the American people, the public sphere has collapsed into a thousand shards, and people rely on YouTubers and influencers and 100 different websites and Substacks and all the rest.

Gurri argues, he has a term for this new information person, "Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.

The resulting assault on authority has expanded to virtually every point in the social landscape where an established hierarchy confronts a public in command of the new platforms of communication."

So the very nature of the public sphere is becoming broken into a million shards.

Now, one result of this, as we know, is that large numbers of people have come to believe things that are pretty demonstrably untrue.

So if this audience is representative of the American people, and I suspect it is not, but if it is, 20% of you think that the COVID vaccine had a secret microchip in it to track Americans, one in five of you also believe that 9/11 was an American conspiracy run by the government, 18% of you think the moon landing was faked.

We've now had enough missions that they should have been able to take enough pictures to see if it's actually there.

But much more important, I think, and more essential to the future of democracy, if you are representative of Americans, 40% of you believe that whatever we are told about who actually governs our country, the real decisions are made by a secretive group of people behind the scenes, that we don't know, that are actually in charge of our lives.

40% of Americans.

Now imagine the effect of that kind of a belief on the legitimacy of democratic governance.

Now, challenge is centralized, elite-dominated media was too narrow.

Breaking it up to some degree is an important thing in a democracy.

Conventional wisdom did become imprisoning.

And lately, some attacks on so-called misinformation have wrongly gone after people who were just offering alternative perspectives.

But what we face, I think, could still be called, and this is another project we're doing now at RAND, an epistemic crisis.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how we learn, so a crisis of knowledge in society.

We're just not sure who or what to believe.

The very idea that there's a settled truth doesn't seem possible anymore.

We don't believe experts or elites.

And when people come to distrust experts and elites of any kind, the public sphere can't do the jobs that Habermas laid out for it.

And it's dangerous to a democracy.

And the development is coming at a very dangerous time.

One of the major findings of our work, looking at assessing the United States today, is that we've come to a place where, you know, any generalization bears exceptions, but a lot of major institutions in our society are confronting a crisis in effectiveness, credibility, and legitimacy.

One is bureaucratic stagnation, right?

Across many sectors and domains, large scale organizations have become loaded down with layers of administrative bloat.

They're fountains of rules, regulations, and paperwork.

Workers across many fields spend as much time serving process as they do outcome or output.

It's true in healthcare, higher education, in my field of defense, for sure.

My friend and colleague, Michela Zanini, is a management consultant and writer-researcher, who has spent years researching this issue, and has abundant evidence across a lot of domains.

One of his estimates is that in the private sector, excessive bureaucracy costs American firms over $3 trillion a year.

Second, US society reflects institutions, not only that are slow moving, but that are also increasingly menacing.

So there's a British sociologist named Anthony Giddens.

He has an idea of what he calls abstract systems.

And by that he means all the big generic structures that manage and operate modern life.

So the banking system that makes your ATM work, the financial system, healthcare systems, in many cases.

An emerging pattern, I think, is that abstract systems aren't just big and complex, they're also, to a significant degree, predatory.

And I've called the resulting pattern predatory abstract systems.

And when combined with their ineffectiveness, it creates this environment that drags vitality, but also makes Americans wonder about what's happening to our society.

And this emphasizes to me the importance of steps to reemphasize and revalidate aspects of national competitiveness, part of which the school is trying to do.

So finally, our RAND study of the social factors that shape national dynamism and power, found many cases that demonstrate a simple proposition.

The most successful nations benefit from elites who have the public interest at heart, and they suffer when they get elites who are self-interested and amass wealth and power for themselves.

Elites tend to send cues about the behavior that is acceptable.

They underwrite the legitimacy of social institutions by participating and investing in them.

They tend to produce better long-term policies by not focusing on short-term gain.

So the inverse of that is pretty obvious.

If a mass of citizens believe that the elites in their society are out for themselves, they're hoarding power, they're hoarding wealth, resentments will grow.

And again, the legitimacy of the democratic system will be in peril.

Well, do we think that the critical mass, the strong majority of American elites, as we define them, is public-spirited?

Those are some of the major findings of the research we did.

I wanna add one factor that we did not include in this research, even a few years ago, because we're doing a lot of work on this at RAND now.

I've been involved in this for the last year, and it intensifies and exacerbates all these trends and challenges I'm talking about.

And that is artificial intelligence, AI.

There are enormous uncertainties around artificial intelligence, of how powerful it gets, how fast it moves, what it can actually do, a year, two years, three years from now.

But there are people in the labs, and people following the technology, that believe within a year, two years, three years, many of these models will begin to be good enough to replace millions and millions of workers in various kinds of jobs.

They will be good enough to replace teachers, because they will offer highly specialized, individualized, one-to-one tutoring with kids.

They will create unbelievable new technologies, scientific breakthroughs.

Now this is the magical view, or the the strongest view of AI.

And I'm not necessarily endorsing it.

There's a lot of questions about how fast this can go.

But we are sitting on the cusp of what may be the greatest technological economic revolution since the Industrial Revolution.

And maybe even more significant than that, because the Industrial Revolution was about human society getting new technologies, new industrial patterns.

This is a revolution that demands that we rethink what it means to be human, and what are the activities that humans have to engage in to make that real.

And one of the challenges right now is that all of the discussion of AI, or much of it, if it's not just about how fast the technology is going, is about competition.

It's about the labs competing with one another.

And it's about America competing with China, and how can we get ahead of them.

Discussions of what will this mean for us?

How can we manage it?

What does a society look like when you have agents running around, AI agents, doing the work of many people?

Huge questions we have to answer as a society, layered on top of these things I was already talking about.

So to return to that issue of the two Americas, America, rich, powerful, innovative, dynamic, alienated, mistrustful, fractured, losing drive and energy, AI has the potential to deeply exacerbate that difference by pulling apart a super-empowered part of the country from much of the rest.

And it raises questions of what kind of society we want to be.

One of the questions for us is, "Could we have such a campaign of national renewal in the United States today?"

Do we see some of the beginnings of the flickering of one in a variety of places?

Again, all across the political spectrum, where people in different places are saying, "This isn't working.

Our institutions need to change.

We need to do this differently.

We need to do that differently."

Beginning to organize around some of this.

If we had such a movement, what would it look like?

What are the main issues that it would focus on?

Who would lead it?

Those are the questions that confront the United States today, I think, in terms of the future of its vitality and the future of its democracy.

At the end of all of our research, I remain very optimistic about this country.

But as in some of those earlier cases, we have reached a point where we can either begin to make change to kind of restart the trajectory of American growth, greatness, the legitimacy of our democratic experiment, or we can sit by and watch as some of the problems that have become really very severe, continue to eat away at those foundations.

The time has come for this notion of anticipatory national renewal in the United States.

I know that there are some, again, Republicans, Democrats, everybody who have very much that thought in their mind.

And I continue to be optimistic that we could see that over the next decade.

And with that thought, I leave you tonight.

Thank you so much.

(audience applauding) (playful music) - I'd like to open by bringing up a term that you didn't use, but it's a term that two figures, one American, one Britain, have brought up, and that is decadence.

That Ross Douthat, columnist in "The New York Times" has revived the word decadence.

And I think it's important to say what Douthat means by decadence.

This is not an overly rich dessert.

This is not something to do with sexual indulgence or sexual depravity, but decline.

But Douthat is talking about a society that is not able to do what it once did.

And I bring up another, a British journalist and historian, Simon Heffer, because Heffer wrote a book called "Age of Decadence."

So where does decadence, where does decline come into your story?

- Yeah, it's a great theme.

And we actually, we use some of those sources and some of the research, and very familiar with Douthat's book.

I think it's, in a lot of ways, the flip side of our first characteristic of national will and ambition, 'cause to me, the essence of decadence, in the way they're talking about it, is a society that's just kind of a big sigh.

You know, it's like, "I'm gonna get a job, and I'll do my stuff, but, like, don't ask me to care all that much."

And it's interesting, I think it's very similar, Fukuyama's book, "The End of History," the full title is "The End of History and the Last Man."

And he talks about the people that exist at the end of history, which we no longer have, he was wrong about that.

But his picture of those people, I think, is still relevant to this, which is people after history who just don't care that much about anything anymore.

They're just bored.

They're just kinda sitting around.

And it's that notion of you could potentially have a reasonably happy society with decadent people.

And in any society, as an American society, you have plenty of pockets of incredibly driven people who are creating all this economic dynamism that I'm talking about.

But if you have a general society where, you know, when the suggestion is made, "What's your ambition?

What are you, you know, what are you determined to do?

What are you driving to do?"

The most common reaction is, you know, "I don't really have a lot of energy, or I don't have very specific ideas."

That's a challenge for competitive advantage.

Arguably, it's a challenge for democracy, and it's a big difference, well, it is somewhat of a difference between the United States and China.

Interestingly, there's a very significant degree to which this trend is arising in the more developed areas of China as well.

Among young people in China, there's something called the lay-flat movement, which is all about just, you know, chilling out, and, "I'm tired of working so hard."

And you see it partly in the reaction in Japan and South Korea and China to traditions of 80-, 100-hour work weeks, and things like that.

To some degree, it is a natural result of postmodern societies where people say, "Okay, we got to this point, so I don't have to work 100 hours like people did three generations ago."

But on the other hand, there's that fine balance of do you get to a point where a society just doesn't have a lot of energy anymore?

- The sense of no new worlds to conquer.

No challenges to meet.

Every generation has a test.

And in Fukuyama's phrasing, after 1989, and then 1990, 1991, the Cold War's over.

We are now in a world at peace.

So there's no test for us.

And that leads to, as then Douthat's formulation, you can't even make a good "Batman" movie anymore.

And above all, thank Michael Mazarr for a fine talk.

- Thank you so much.

(audience applauding) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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