The best hope is to take big money out of big politics and to reform the public administration so that it can handle social problems of greater complexity and a longer time horizon. At a technical level, there are clear steps that can be adopted to achieve such aims. Many of these suggestions are already the law of the land in other, better-managed countries. Yet our public management problems did not emerge by accident; they reflect, in most cases, the influences of vested interests, which have all too often steered government processes toward narrow private advantage.
Who will provide the political base for cleaning up the U.S. government? All Americans should look toward the group with the biggest stake: young Americans. From the campuses to the workforce, today’s Millennials, aged eighteen to twenty-nine in 2010, are already showing a distinctive generational character. They are more open, more diverse, more wired, more networked, better educated, and more committed to making government work than the generations before them. One is tempted to call the current crisis the unintended and unwelcomed bequest of the baby boomers—my generation—to America’s young. America, I predict, will change more due to its youth than to their parents. How that can happen is the story of the next and final chapter.
CHAPTER 13.
The Millennial Renewal
Economic crises open the door to deep political change. The future is up for grabs. Yet the dangers also multiply. There are, after all, many more possible wrong turns than right ones. The most common outcome is that the government continues to lose competence, direction, and financial capacity. The hardest change to pull off is constructive change in the middle of a crisis. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed about the French Revolution, “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.”1
America’s deepening crisis has not yet led to any significant reforms or change in the manner of governance. If anything, the vested interests have held their ground. The Obama administration has been a government of continuity rather than change, as Wall Street, the lobbyists, and the military have remained at the center of American power and policy. This stasis has discredited government still further. American white, middle-aged conservatives are enraged at their loss of wealth and security and have lashed out at the government for adding to their debts but not to their relief. The Tea Party movement has resulted and has dominated the media coverage. The poor, meanwhile, have hunkered down, withdrawing from hope and activism as they scramble to survive and make ends meet. The young have been biding their time, trying to stay afloat in the face of high unemployment and little income.
This holding pattern cannot continue. It is like a cartoon character that runs off a cliff, looks down, yet remains suspended in midair. We know something is about to happen, but what?
There are three main tendencies at play and of course huge imponderables. The first tendency is inertia. The vested interests still have the money and the power but have lost their legitimacy and the public trust. Big banks, big insurance companies, and big arms manufacturers are close to Congress and the White House and have successfully resisted any serious intrusions into their prerogatives. The second tendency is backlash. The Tea Party is a concoction of the anger of middle-aged, middle-class white Americans who sense that their cohort is slipping from economic security and social dominance. They are furious, of course, and are easily manipulated by the status quo interests. That’s an old story. Time is against them.
The third tendency, the one with the long-term play, is generational change. Opinion surveys show that something truly new is in the works. The Millennials are different from their predecessors. If the boomers are the children of TV, the Millennials are the children of the Internet. The boomers sat for hours each day transfixed by the tube; the Millennials multitask for hours each day, networking with Facebook friends, catching snippets of news, watching videos, and surfing the Net. In the meantime, they are facing unique and difficult job prospects. But there is more. The Millennials are ethnically diverse, socially liberal, better educated (though struggling to meet tuition to complete four years of college), and more trusting of government. Obama was their hope and has been their first political disappointment.
The imponderables are enormous. The U.S. crisis has a complex global context. The emerging economies are not waiting for the United States to sort itself out. Global competition is intensifying. Our major firms are footloose. If they don’t make profits in the United States, they look abroad to much faster-growing markets. Nor is the ecological crisis waiting for the United States to act. Climate change, complete with intense storms, famines, floods, and other disasters, continues to intensify. And political instability is rife, especially in the regions that are suffering from a combination of poverty, population growth, and severe environmental stress. In that category we should include Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and the countries of the Sahel. The U.S. military is involved in all of them, but with no benefit, since the underlying causes of the crises have no military solution.
Nobody can predict political outcomes in circumstances like these. Life is full of surprises, both positive and disastrous. The years 1989–1991 fit into the spectacularly positive column. A social disaster, the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet communism, which had been born in the chaos of World War I seventy-five years earlier, quietly gave way to peaceful political change. A great leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, presided over the change of order, and one of the greatest triumphs of modern politics resulted: a mostly peaceful dismantling of an empire. Ironically, very few Americans have an appreciation of what actually transpired, and, as is so often the case, claim credit when the credit is due to others.
Yet equally disastrous accidents happen as well. Any sane, responsible citizen of the world should ponder the dates 1914, 1917, and 1933. The first marked the onset of World War I, not the war to end all wars as was advertised at the time, but the war to rip Europe asunder, with a wound so deep it has taken till now to heal, and the healing is still not completed. The second was the moment Russian chaos was manipulated by Vladimir Lenin to launch the ruinous experiment with Soviet socialism. The third, in the depths of the Great Depression, was the unexpected and wholly accidental rise to power of Adolf Hitler.2 The economic crisis of 1933 meant that anything could happen, and the very worst did. The world was bled as never before and perhaps never again, since a similar total war could end the world itself.
These are morbid thoughts, but they are my darker forebodings prompted by the current political drift in the United States. Most of the time, drift leads only to more drift. Time is lost, but without calamity. Yet once in a while, political drift ends up in disaster. When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people.
The propositions that I’ve laid out in this book are politically feasible. They start with the individual: to pull back from hypercommercialism, unplug from the noisy media a bit, and learn more about and reflect on the current economic situation. A mindful economy calls on each of us with an above-average income to understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay. Much of affluent households’ consumption can be trimmed without disaster and quite probably with some gain in equanimity and satisfaction. The affluent probably incur as much buyer’s remorse as they do lasting pleasure from their luxury purchases.
It is, in my view, the Millennials, aged eighteen to twenty-nine in the year 2010, who more than any other group will shape the future of America in the next twenty-five years. They embody the future with all its complexity and transformation. Though 80 percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five are white non-Hispanic, only 61 percent of the Millennials are white non-Hispanic. (The data here and that follow are from a recent Pew Research Center study.)3 Around 19 percent are Hispanic, another 13 percent are Afric
an American, and 6 percent are of other ethnicities, including Asian and Native American. Still younger cohorts, those between ages zero and fourteen, are even more racially diverse, with only 55 percent white non-Hispanic, 23 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent African American.4
The Millennials are politically progressive, believing in a larger role for the government. Sixty-seven percent support a “bigger government providing more services,” compared with only 31 percent of those over sixty-five. This is the result not only of their ethnic profile but of their age, optimism, and generational outlook. White non-Hispanic Millennials, as well as Hispanic and African American Millennials, are more progressive than their older counterparts. They will also resist the deficit-increasing implications of further tax cuts on the rich. It is today’s generation, after all, that will be paying the bills left behind by the boomers.
The Millennials, of course, have a longer time horizon than other adults in the society, so it is not surprising that they are activists regarding long-term investments such as clean energy and infrastructure. Far more than older adults, they recognize the science of climate change, and far more than the older cohorts, they support action. They will be the main beneficiaries of a modernized infrastructure or the main victims of continued decay. Of course, in a truly mindful economy, the parents of Millennials (like me) will care deeply about the world we are bequeathing to our children and their children.
The greatest challenge in American society has always been the reality of diversity. It divided the country from the start, led to a bloody civil war, created an apartheid society for a hundred years afterward, and unleashed the most dramatic social change from below of the twentieth century during the civil rights era. The shock waves of the civil rights era have reverberated ever since. It is therefore of historic importance that Millennials show every sign of greater tolerance than their predecessors. This seems to be true regarding every hot-button issue of religion, sex, and race. The Millennials are less religious and less often affiliated with a specific denomination; they are less evangelical in outlook; and they are less likely to attend weekly services. They overwhelmingly accept homosexuality (63 percent say that homosexuality “should be accepted by society,” as opposed to 35 percent of those over sixty-five). They believe by a narrow majority that abortion should be legal in all or most cases (52 percent compared with 37 percent of those over sixty-five). Their favorable attitudes toward interracial relations and intermarriage befit a generation that was born and raised well after the achievements of the civil rights era.
The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation’s tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action.
What, then, are the real barriers to political change? Of course, the current vested interests will continue to fight fiercely for power and privilege. Wealth can certainly defend itself aggressively, through media power, financial largesse through lobbying and campaign financing, and more nefarious means. We had a taste of that power in 2008, when the banks not only won their bailouts but also got the White House and Congress to turn a blind eye to the continuation of outlandish bonuses even in the midst of the storm.
Alternatively, the anger of the Tea Party could presage a much more explosive environment of street unrest, but it is hard to envision the middle-aged and elderly Tea Partiers at the barricades! Or the economy could deteriorate to the point of creating a downward spiral of rising budget deficits, a deepening political crisis, and yet further deficits. That’s the path that leads to hyperinflations and defaults on government debt. Such disasters are more frequent than we in the United States tend to realize. Thank goodness, we’ve never experienced such an upheaval, at least since the Revolutionary War and Civil War. I’ve helped to clean up hyperinflation in many other countries, however. Fortunately we’re not close to that now, but another five to ten years of drift could certainly bring us closer to the fiscal cliff. One recalls the dark joke in the waning days of the Soviet collapse: “Comrades, we were at the edge of the cliff, and we’ve just taken a giant step forward!” A few more tax cuts for the rich, and we’ll be in a position to say the same.
Real change will not come easily because there is so little consensus on the way forward. America may well continue to choose very badly, for example by cutting taxes further despite the gaping deficits or continuing to reject decisive action on climate change because of the poor economic conditions. Politics, alas, is filled with “positive feedbacks,” meaning in essence that one damn thing leads to another, with each disaster causing the next. In recent years, the outsourcing of government services to incompetent and corrupt contractors has led to repeated failures, leading to more criticism of government and then, ironically, to still more outsourcing! The collapse of government becomes, in essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All this means that it’s extremely difficult to get on the right track. Yet it’s certainly possible. The actual solutions are within reach and require only moderate changes of course. And the pace of change accelerates these days because the spread of ideas is so much faster than in the past. What seems outlandish and impossible one moment becomes mainstream and inevitable the next.
Eyes on the Prize
When short-term navigating is so difficult, the key is to keep one’s eyes on the long-term prize. We spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about the latest wiggle in consumer confidence, industrial production, or new orders. Great fortunes are made and lost depending on who can guess better, even when little can really be done about the economy’s short-term meanderings. A far better use of our time would be to maintain long-term focus on the issues that will have mattered decisively when we look back after a quarter century. I believe that four issues will prove to be decisive for America and its place in the world: education, environment, geopolitics, and diversity.
The first decisive issue will be education. The path to national prosperity, life satisfaction, and sustainability in the twenty-first century will depend heavily on education, and especially on a large proportion of today’s young Americans being able to complete higher education, albeit a higher education that has been fashioned to fit the needs of our times. The labor-market data tell the brutal truth: low-skilled workers are either scraping by in near poverty or failing to find work altogether. There is almost no chance today of securing a well-remunerated career without a college degree or its equivalent in vocational training. Low-skilled jobs are being filled by recent immigrants prepared to accept wages a cut above those of their home countries, replaced by outsourcing, or eliminated by reengineering the jobs away entirely using advanced information technology. Young people know these facts and are prepared to go deeply into debt to achieve a higher degree. Yet steeply rising tuition and onerous borrowing terms have led to epidemics of dropouts or limited enrollment in the first place.
One of the bright spots in education is the potential, still in its early days, for information technology to transform the educational process, making it more effective and accessible to all. More and more curricula can be found online; more and more distance learning can link disparate parts of the world together. Each Tuesday morning at Columbia University I have the joy of participating in a “global classroom” with twenty campuses around the world linked via Internet-based videoconferencing into a global discussion of sustainable development. As the discussion bounces from Beijing to Ibadan, Nigeria, to Antananarivo, Madagascar, to New York City, the thrill of global problem solving comes to life for hundreds of young people around the world. If anyone is equipped to carry this technological potential forward, it is today’s Millennials and their younger brothers and sisters!
The second decisive issue will be environmen
t. Today the issues of climate change, water scarcity, resource depletion, and biodiversity seem like special problems that can be relegated to the Sunday talk shows and newspaper science sections. Within a generation, and probably much sooner, these will loom as the largest challenges facing the planet. The world is headed over the cliff, exceeding or soon to exceed the safe global boundaries on countless ecological fronts: greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from nitrogen-based and phosphorus-based fertilizers, water scarcity, habitat destruction, and much more.5 The United States will experience water stress in the Midwest, drought in the Southwest, extreme weather events in many parts of the country but most seriously the hurricane-impacted Gulf Coast, hypoxic zones in the estuaries, and profound coastal erosion and threats from rising sea levels. The vulnerability of the poorer countries is likely to be far worse, with at least some experiencing violent conflict as a result of encroaching droughts, floods, and other climate-induced calamities.6
Once again, social networking and the promise of new IT technologies will make a profound difference. Mobile telephony and wireless broadband are already making possible new breakthroughs in environmental surveillance (soil mapping, drought monitoring, discovery of deforestation and illegal fishing, crop estimation, tracking of population movements and disease transmission, and much more) and disaster response. The IT revolution created the new globalization; it can lead to the “new sustainability” as well. Once again, Millennials will take the lead in these breakthrough prospects.
The third decisive issue is geopolitics. No matter what success the United States has in recovering its dynamism and vitality in the years ahead, it is almost inevitable (barring global catastrophe) that America’s relative economic position will decline. We are, I have stressed repeatedly, in the age of convergence, in which the emerging economies have the prospect of decades of economic growth that is more rapid than that of their high-income counterparts. The United States currently represents around 20 percent of gross world product (GWP), measured in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars. That is likely to decline by midcentury to perhaps 10 to 12 percent of GWP, with China and India both being larger in absolute size than the United States, though still with roughly half of its per capita GDP.7
The Price of Civilization Page 24