 Good morning and happy Halloween to everyone. I don't think I see anyone in a costume out there but I'm sure we'll see one later today. My boss Arno de Borgrave sitting in the front row here with me and I and the rest of us at CSI welcome you to our new headquarters. It's our first event for our project in the new building which opened just a few weeks ago. My name is Tom Sanderson. I co-direct the transnational threats project with Arno de Borgrave who began the program in 1991 as the global organized crime project. We shifted after 9-11 to take into greater count the threat of al-Qaeda and related entities. We are very very happy to inaugurate our new transnational threats roundtable series with the author Moises Naim. No one better for this this roundtable series to launch a look in an investigation, a deeper investigation into transnational threats. The book you see it right here the end of power is Moises 11th book which lays out the dynamic unyielding impact of transnational actors on traditional power structures. You might be familiar with another book that Moises wrote that gained wide wide spread fame called elicit which looked at the extensive impact of elicit commerce and its impact on society. Before I'd start I'd like to thank Dick O'Neill who's also in the front row here with us who brought us together and so very very fortunate for that so thank you Dick. Today's discussion will begin with 15 minutes by Moises on the book why he wrote it, what he learned from it, what he thinks the lessons are for a range of audiences. I'll then turn to three to four questions that I have already created to generate some more discussion and detail on the book and then we'll open it up to audience Q&A. But let me first tell you a few things about this very remarkable man and author. Moises Naim is an internationally syndicated columnist and the best-selling author of more than 10 influential books including this 11th one, The End of Power, startling examination of how power is changing across all levels of society. As his experience proves Moises is a true student of global affairs he's served as a cabinet member in Venezuela and as the executive director of the World Bank. He gained international recognition for his 14 year tenure as editor of Foreign Policy Magazine which I think probably everyone in this room has accessed over the years. He's also a respected scholar right up the street at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With a unique perspective on world affairs he is one of the few individuals who truly keeps ahead of the curve in the rapidly changing grounds of global politics, economics and business. If you listen to the Diane Reem show on Friday morning the news roundup from 10 to 11 is the International Hour. I think Moises is on there every other Friday and that really is a testament to his perspective on the world. The new book End of Power reflects his ability to spot, describe and analyze a new global reality. Through his analysis we gain a better understanding of what's happening in everything from telecommunications to the Arab Spring. As a columnist, thinker and author Moises has received prestigious international awards and perhaps not surprisingly for a global citizen is the media's go-to person for instant foreign policy commentary in English, Spanish and Italian. His remarkable description of power in the world today is a claim by top leaders including former President Bill Clinton and businessman and philanthropist George Soros. This book, The End of Power will change the way you see the world, the individual, community and government power structures for decades to come. Please welcome our global thinker who will guide us through this groundbreaking idea in the face of changing power, Moises Naim. Thanks, thanks for the kind introduction. What a building. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations, CSIS. And I want to start by thanking Arnaud, the book, not for inviting me today here only, but I wrote a book titled Illicit that was about transnational crime. And when you do something like that, you recognize who the pioneers are and who are you plagiarizing. And so Arnaud is a pioneer that saw these trends before everyone else and understood them and dissected them and explained them better than anybody else. So I want to take the opportunity to recognize you. And Dico Neal is one of these individuals in Washington that is the big impresario of great ideas. So if you have a great idea or you think you have a great idea, run it by him and you'll go far. Since I started, the book was published on March 5th of this year. Since then I have given a lot of talks about the book. And it gets easier and easier. Well, that day was a bit complicated. I was, the book was launching in New York and I had a bunch of media appearances concerning the end of power. And that day, President Chavez decided to die. And so I went to pitch the end of power and everyone wanted to talk about the end of Hugo Chavez. But that gave me the start of what was going to come since then. And since then, as I said, it has gotten easier to talk about the book. Because now all I do is to invite the audiences to think about names or about concepts. So let me throw at you a few names and see what that means to you. Mohammed Morsi, Pope Benedict, the Washington Post, Edward Snowden, the Tea Party, the Taliban, Somali pirates, Kodak. Kodak is bankrupt. And I could go on. And so you get the gist of this. These are all entities where power has changed, has changed hands, has transformed, but not in the usual ways. Pope Benedict is the first pope to resign in 700 years. The Washington Post, do you imagine me coming here five years ago and telling you, you know, the Washington Post, which is one of the world's leading newspaper, is going to be sold to an internet guy. And the Graham family and everything else that surrounds that institution is going to go and there's an internet guy, not even the internet company, the owner of an internet guy just wrote a check and bought it. By the way, he bought it for less money than what AOL paid for the Huffington Post, exactly a hundred million dollars less. So the Washington Post was sold for a hundred million dollars less than the Huffington Post, except that the assets of the Huffington Post were mostly intangible. And the Washington Post did have printing presses and buildings and stuff like that. So the story of my book is a story of the mutation of power. There is one aspect of that story that is quite well known to you. And that is power is shifting. There's no surprise there. You know that. You know that power is shifting from North America and Europe to Asia. You know that power is shifting from very large companies to recently arrived agile startups. You know that power is shifting from presidential palaces to town squares. And you know that in some places it's even shifting from men to women, perhaps not as much as some of us would like it, but that too is happening. But I argue that power is not just shifting, that there is something more profound and more important happening. And that it's that power is decaying. So power may be shifting from A to B. But when what B gets is not as much as it was before or what A had. Power is degraded. B can do less with that power than in the past. That doesn't mean that the world is not full of very powerful individuals and institutions. Vladimir Putin that was just recognized by Forbes as the most powerful person on earth is surely very, very powerful. The Pentagon is a very powerful institution. The central bank, you know, the European Central Bank and Mario Draghi are powerful individual institutions. So I'm not arguing that they don't have a power. I'm arguing that their power they have is more constrained, that they can do less with that power than in the past, that there are more restrictions to what they can do with it. And that in addition, that power is more fleeting, that people that have power have the time span and their tenure in power has become shorter. And moreover, I argue that this is not just happening in politics, but that is happening in business. It's happening in culture, in sports, in universities, in philanthropy, in labor unions. And wherever there is organized human activity, where power matters, where something needs to get done, and in order to get it done, you need to coordinate and somehow organize and structure behavior. And therefore power is matters. Wherever that happens, as part of the human experience today, that the power is decay. Perhaps the most extreme example and the most clear example of this is Mohamed Morsi. Again, if I would have been here a few years ago and I would have told you, you know what, Mubarak is going to be toppled. And then there's going to be an election. And the election is going to be won by the Muslim brotherhood. And they're going to have an Egyptian president that is a member of the Muslim brotherhood. That would have not gone down, you know, a lot of you would have been rightly so very skeptical of that assertion. Well, it happened. Mubarak was toppled. There was an election. Mohamed Morsi won. Mohamed Morsi ended up in the palace. And he thought that he was Mubarak and that he had the same powers as Mubarak. And he was ousted in what, two years or something like that. And so power is essentially has become easier to acquire, harder to use, and easier to lose. And that is the central theme of the book. There are reasons for this. When I, the first instinct when people ask, well, why is this happening? The first instinct is, well, stay internet, of course, social media is Twitter or Facebook and all the rest. And I disagree with that. Of course, those are tools that have amplified potential interventions by individuals. These are tools that have created new opportunities. These are clearly tools that have altered the way power is used and constrained. But those are tools. And tools have users. And users have direction and motivation. So far more important than understanding the tools is to try to understand what are the forces that drive the motivation and the directions of the users of those tools. And so what are those? The list is very, very long. But I grouped it in three categories that I call revolutions. These are revolutions that are weakening, undermining, overwhelming the barriers that protect the powerful. In order to have power in a church, in a company, in an army or in politics, you need to have some special assets that are hard to replicate by the challengers, by those that compete against you. And those assets, those unique assets, those unique barriers, those shields that protect the powerful and the incumbents from challengers and contestants have becoming easier to penetrate, easier to undermine, easier to circumvent by the three revolutions. The first revolution I call the more revolution. And it tries to capture the fact that we now live in a world of more, in a more of profusion, in a world where profusion reigns. And I will give you some examples of that. But not just that we have more of everything, more people and more countries and more computers and more weapons and more philanthropists and more political parties and ideologies and more of everything, but the more that we have moves more. And that I group into a second category that I call the mobility revolution. Essentially, everything moves. Humans move more. We have more humans that move more. But money moves more and ideas and products and services and information and everything moves more. And the two together, the more and mobility create a profound change in mentality, in aspirations, in expectations, in ways, in values. And the three of them weaken the barriers that protect the powerful. The essence of the story is one where there are each one of these three revolutions has consequences for power. The more revolution overwhelms the barriers that protect the powerful. The mobility revolutions help them circumvent the barriers. And the mentality revolutions undermines the barriers. Put them together, shake them and you end up with a world where power is easier to acquire, harder to use and easier to lose. Let me stop here and continue the conversation perhaps. Excellent. Fantastic. I'll start off with a few questions and then we'll move to an audience Q&A. One of the things that struck me this year, and I think it's just remarkable, is that in August, the United States was forced to press pause on diplomacy with 20 countries for five days. Normal visa services, suspended U.S. citizen services in dangerous countries across Africa and the Middle East were suspended trade talks, political discussions, security discussions. All these things suspended across 20 countries for five days. It wasn't a country that induced this situation. It was a non-state actor, the leader of which made a phone call to another non-state actor, Al Qaeda members in the Middle East and Africa. And that conversation and picking it up in the potential for an attack on a U.S. facility pushed pause on U.S. diplomacy. I think that is truly remarkable. Even when North Korea rattled its sabers over the last couple of years, we didn't shut down 20 embassies across Asia for five days, right? But a guy making a phone call from Western Pakistan to the MENA region was able to do that. I find that remarkable. I'm wondering if you think this is the norm and are we overreacting to these groups? Well, that belongs to the category of, I think, Tom Friedman coined the term, he said, the super-empowered individual or terrorist, something like that. And that is essentially that category in which you have either individuals or groups of individuals that are non-state actors that have acquired huge capabilities. And that's one, but we have the tragedy, we have 9-11. 9-11 is estimated to have cost half a million dollars. And the consequences of 9-11 are 3.3 trillion dollars and still counting, depending on how you count. So that gives you a sense of proportion, right? But what's very interesting about that is, you know, we have evidence of what you described on a daily basis. You open the newspaper and you see that a small, tiny actor, sometimes an individual, has changed things. So there is a category of that. But what's fascinating is how that behavior cuts across all kinds of disciplines. So think about other examples that are quite interesting from other realms. I mentioned Kodak. Who here doesn't have a Kodak moment, right? Kodak was a company that for decades, perhaps even a century, dominated photography. If you wanted film, cameras, photography, pictures. Kodak was it, Kodak moment. Well, Kodak is now bankrupt. Kodak went out of business. Uncannily, at the same time that Kodak was going, filing for chapter 11, a company was bought for a billion dollars. The company was in photography. The company had 13 employees. One, three, 13. I joked that it had three, it was three years old. And I joked that the average age was 13 of the employees. That company is Instagram. And it was purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars. So just compare and contrast. You have this giant company in Rochester, New York that dominated the world of photography for almost a century. That has, I'm not suggesting that Kodak went bankrupt because of Instagram. Kodak went bankrupt because of Kodak. But it was just think who replaced or who played, who became a very important player in that world. And we have evidence, as I said, there's a great story that I like very much. You've heard it, I'm sure. There is this little 11-year-old girl in England who went to school every day and she hated the food in the cafeteria that she was fed. So she decided to start taking pictures every day of her lunch at school and started a blog. And then started commenting, what is it that they went bankrupt, being fed? And other kids started doing the same. And the parents got involved. And it became a major issue. And therefore, and the public system, the school system, had to change completely over the way in which food was served. So I'm trying to use very different examples to indicate how broad this trend is beyond the one that you mentioned. Thank you, Moises. In the book, you mentioned that for every dollar Al-Qaeda spent for the 9-11 attack, the U.S. has responded with $7 million for each dollar they've spent. I mean, that is really remarkable. You mentioned the internet in the blogging. And the internet obviously is a tremendous part of this discussion. Cisco and other IT companies are pushing what's known as the internet of everything or the internet of things, where books, shoes, lights, all of the objects in our lives are connected by the internet where everyone has access to information. People know things about others, you know, an end to transparency or, I'm sorry, an end to secrecy in a new era of transparency. How might this also impact power structures when everyone has access to every piece of information or on the way to that point? In several ways. I think the more honest answer that I can give is that I don't know. And I think that a lot of people that study this would also agree that this is a still, a very uncertain future for a lot of these things because, you know, it's the combination of new technologies but at the same time of new social demands. I think there is a building, a huge appetite for a user experience that is safer than what we have now. Every one of us at some point will be willing to pay some money to have an experience in the internet where you feel a little bit more safe and secure. That is going to create a very unequal internet. There's going to be the internet of the generics of, you know, the high school student in India or in Ecuador that can access the internet for free more or less and roam the internet. That individual is going to be exposed to a lot of risks. And then there is people that the more money you have and the more money you are willing to invest, the more protected you are going to be in the way you use the internet. And that will have huge consequences for the distribution of power. But we're not there yet as Angela Merkel can tell you. Fantastic. One final question before we open it up. And it's, I know you're saying it's not that traditional power structures are not losing their powers. It's not a wholesale shift to non-state actors and other entities. But as I went through your book and as I look at the work that Arno and I have done with Dick and Ron and others, you know, lives are becoming more uncertain for a lot of people, complicated and threatening for quite a few people. So won't there actually be a trend, do you think, of people returning to power structures, safe harbors that they know of religion or governments? You know, in fact, turning away from this and saying all of these non-state actors actually make me want to go to a status quo power? I don't think so. I think the appetite for that is there. I think the need for, you know, people wanting to do it, governments that want to have to go back to the old ways in which they had less constraints is there. And companies, you know, hungry for having more autonomy and less constraints, all of that is there. But I think that the forces that I describe in the book, some of them are irreversible. They have to do with demographics. They have to do with technology. They have to do with geopolitical realities that are now very deeply entrenched. And they are having to do also with the mentality revolution where expectations have changed, values have changed. You know, the University of Michigan has conducted the World Value Survey now for 40, 50 years. And they just go out and survey values in a sample of countries that account, I think, for 85 percent of humanity. And when you look at the trend lines of how values have changed in the last 10, 15 years, it's quite amazing. And it's a very different world of values. These are different world of expectations. You have this global middle class, as you know, it's the fastest growing segment of humanity. And that middle class creates all kinds of new realities for power. And so, yes, the appetite to take, to go back to tribes, to go back to cocoons of safety, to go back to governments that govern and that, you know, the strong hand that contains anarchy and care, all of that, the demand for that is there and may be growing. But the capacity to do it, I think, has been very significantly undermined by trends that are not controlled by anyone. Excellent. So we'll open it up to questions and please identify yourself and your affiliation, if you do, in fact, have one. We'll start with Ron Marks in the front row here. Thank you, Moses. It's an interesting premise. I just want to run a historical comparison to see what you think. We've had periods of time, whether it was at the end of Rome, whether it was the end of the Catholic dominance in Western Europe. I mean, obviously the Western civilization examples. We've had the end of certain of the Empire period in the early 20th century and now, to some extent, we're at the end of an industrial US dominated business that started, I think, you know, really in 45 and beyond. Why does this trend necessarily differ from the other ones? We've had break up of great power and then a coming together again of power under another in somewhat different circumstance. That's a great question and a challenging one. And it's one that I had to think hard about, you know, how much of what I'm describing is a passing ephemeral snapshots that will go back to the normal, which is what we had in the past. I am convinced, I don't know because it's a self serving conclusion, but I am convinced that no, that this time this is indeed different than the past for several reasons. First, many of the examples that you use to illustrate how this is another manifestation of the fragmentation of power that we have witnessed in the past, you know, with city states and neo, you know, there is a whole school of thought, which is the Neo Medieval. You know, there are people that are writing and researching. They call it is the Neo Medievalist approach in which essentially argue that the future looks in many interesting ways like the medieval times. I disagree with that, mostly because of the more immobility revolutions. If you think about some of the good examples you gave, they touched a tiny bit of him. First, there were very few of us, and those were highly concentrated in geography. They happened in very specific places and did not spread too much. This is happening everywhere and is spreading at a great speed. So some of the things that we were discussing is, you know, a school in England, but at the same time, you know, someone in Pakistan calling someone in Yemen. We are discussing things that are happening in Latin America in Capitol Hill and the Tea Party and with Kodak. And so what I'm arguing is that the trends that we're talking about are far more global, in fact, and and faster. Great. Yes. Arnaud in the front and then this gentleman in the middle round. Thanks for a fascinating talk. One thing that troubles me more than anything right now is social media. We've gone from newspaper reading to Twitter in just a few short years. People don't read newspapers anymore. Only older people do. Where does all this lead? Social media. What is the ultimate danger as you see it or advantage as you see it? Again, I think, Arnaud, that even the people that spend their lives trying to understand that on a daily basis with an honest answer to that question is we don't know. Because it's changed again. It's changing very fast. And there are all kinds. I was. I had the privilege of presenting the book and discussing it in Silicon Valley. And I went to several of the leading companies there. And when you hear what they have in store, you know, there is a whole wave of new technologies that are going to change our consumer behavior in terms of consumers of information and so on. And so there is that first is that, you know, uncertainty about what's coming. But then there is that is that the social media consequences are good or bad for readers. Again, you're right that a lot of people now just communicating in very short spurts. But on the other hand, I find I am an intensive user of Twitter and I now get a lot of what I read. I read through Twitter. I don't follow the idiot that tells me now I'm going to go drink, you know, but I follow people that I respect and tell me I have just read the best article about the Arab Spring. For example, and then and then I click and I go to an article in a journal or in a blog that I would have never gone on my own. So I in social media and Twitter can give you a share pass that helps you navigate this tsunami of information that is so difficult to understand. And then I think the mainstream media are going to come up. I am very curious to see what Jeff Bezos does with the Washington Post. And I can imagine that there are some interesting possibilities there, if merging a big brand and good journalism with technological innovation. I like how you put that. The Internet gives us Sherpas to navigate the tsunami of information. That's that's superb. In the middle here. Hold on. Bob Berg World Academy of Art and Science. Some of my colleagues and I have also been to Silicon Value where we're talking about the future of universities and libraries and the democratization of higher education that's coming, which we have no idea what the political implications will be. Let me ask you a not unreasonable hypothetical. Let's say a modern major head of state says, OK, I see these changes. I'd like to take advantage of them in a new politics. What would you advise would be the new opportunities? I get that question quite a bit, and I don't know the answer. It depends on the head of state and it depends on the circumstances. What I know is that one of the main challenges for heads of states is lack of partners. Not inside of their government and inside of a party, but in adversaries. One of the big problems that heads of states have is that their adversaries, their opposition, their rivals are weak. This may sound paradoxical, right? You know, if you are a head of state, having weak competitors is nirvana, right? You are the top power on the game. But that's not true. Ask President Obama if he would have not loved to have a stronger speaker. That speaker burner cannot deliver the votes and the caucus in Congress. And President Obama would have been very, very interested in having a speaker that is stronger and more powerful. Or to have partners to deal with Syria that would have, you know, the reality in the Middle East is weakness everywhere. Who in the Middle East is powerful? Who? Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, the U.S., Europe. Who is strong there? Well, everyone has a little bit of power. No one has enough power to define the game. Frank Fukuyama coined a term that I think is very appropriate. He was not talking about geopolitics, he was talking about national politics. He said that the democracies around the world today are becoming veto-crasses, veto-crasses. Meaning that you have a profusion of political players, groups or individuals that have the power to veto the initiatives of the majority or the initiatives of those in power. So you have this proliferation of players. Each one has a capacity of raising their hand and says, no, or not like that, or let's postpone it, or let's water it down, or let's not do it. And therefore you end up with governments that are hobble giants because they are surrounded by these actors that have, don't have the power to play but have the power to stop the others from playing. And so that I think is one of the realities of President Obama and others. Moises, on that note I would just read one brief line from your book on page 108 where you say in the chapter, the decaying power of large armies, while it is clear that today's micro powers cannot go toe to toe with the world's military powers, they are increasingly able to deny victory. And that I think reflects that comment. This ma'am, woman here. Margaret Hayes with Georgetown University. Moises, in illicit in your last chapter where you address, how does one address this, you argue that in order to deal with this profusion of power and opportunities for transactions that governments are going to have to change from kind of a hierarchical way of thinking to thinking more like networks. And I'd like you to, can you, have you changed that posture as you write this book? It seems for instance, in disaster response and other areas, we are using networks to mobilize social media to communicate with the public and and so forth. Is is that the solution to the end of power? Depends on that's a great question. And and I think it depends on what realm are you thinking? You know, are you thinking the private sector? Are you thinking government? Are you thinking the military universities? There are some activities where there are more welcoming to operating with networks. And there are others in which you require hierarchies and power as it as we knew it. One of the concerns I have with networks is that now it has become fashionable. In the 90s, I wrote something of a book that essentially argued that in the case of reforms and development, institutions matter very much and that there were two stages of economic reforms, one in which you essentially change things by decrease and you know, you devalued your your currency, you privatize, you could do those things with a stroke of a pen. And then there were other kinds of reforms that required building institutions that took longer, the political economy was more complicated. And it became, you know, institutions, not institution building became quite common as a as a theme, which I now think was a mistake on my part. And I think it's a damaging concept because institution building has become a phrase that makes people feel or pretend that they know. And we don't know. Institution building is a word that serves to mask to mask ignorance. And the reason I'm talking about that is because with networks is happening. Wherever people, there are situations that people don't understand, say, well, you know, networks, let's do networks, let's have a networked approach to this. Let's have, you know, the network is now in the 2000s. Networks is what in the 90s was institution building. Whatever you don't know anything and you want to sound smart, talk about networks. And the problem with that is of course there are networks, of course we need to build institutions, of course we need to strengthen institutions. Of course a lot of what's going on is the networking of what used to be hierarchies. The problem is after you say that, there's not a lot more than we know. Networks are not the same. Networks are different. Networks have different configurations. Networks can behave in different ways. So our ignorance of going after saying that, yes, networks are important. When you scratch the surface of that assertion, there is not a lot of good knowledge there, reliable knowledge. There's a lot of buffering. The second row here. Josh, right here. Thanks. Peter Stevens, American University. Maybe critical realignment is now an obsolete description for the political process that's occurring. If networks are the start but not the end by any means. Would you say a few words about that? What is critical realignment? Critical realignment where you have major swings in terms of domestic politics and sometimes there's spillovers globally and you know, liberal parties come in, hold majorities. Conservative parties come in, radical parties come in. It seems that that sort of movement back and forth is becoming more rapid and as you pointed out, much more ephemeral. Yeah, that's that's right. So yes, there is, I don't know if it's critical realignment is insurgencies. You know, I would call it that in a lot of places, what you're seeing is insurgencies. The Tea Party is an insurgency against the Republican Party. You can even argue that the Tea Party is a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by a group of insurgents. And in throughout Europe, you see these new insurgent groups that are very critical of everything but have very little to offer. So the critical realignment, as you call it, is a huge criticism and short on prescription. And that is a pattern that you will find in a lot of these movements that are very, very good at agitating, at steering, at mobilizing, but not that effective at prescribing. Networks and movements and that kind of energy are very good at mobilizing people are very bad at governing. Chris. Hi, Rob Levinson, Bloomberg government. I guess I want to ask the sort of the normative question of is this good thing or a bad thing? If you if you think big powerful institutions, militaries, governments, the religious institution, whatever, they do offer one thing and it goes back to your point earlier about security. They certainly offer security and as their power erodes in some ways we are less secure. I mean, it's, you know, anarchy is less secure than dictatorship and that kind of thing. So so if that's a downside of sort of a lessening of security, what sort of the upside of all of this for it, say for individuals or different groups, you know, some obviously will benefit others may not. But what do you see as sort of the upsides of this kind of thing or the downsides? So I was I looked in the book, I wanted to show you a graph I have, which I call the inverted U curve. Essentially, you have a U an inverted U, a parable, where if you measure social desirability of, you know, in the horizontal, you measure the decay of power, the concentration of power or the spread of power. Thank you. He knows the book better than I do. Essentially, this is my way of saying that there is there in one extreme, there is a world of concentration of power of dictators, of monopolists, of strong men and all of that, which is not good for us. So we don't want constant power to be too concentrated. And so as you move and power becomes less diffused and there's more competition, it's better for society. So if you measure benefits to society, you go up. But then there is a point that you identified where more of that is bad for society because it leads to anarchy and and the difficulty of making decisions and vetocracies and all of that. So I am all for I don't care about the hyper diffusion of power in the private sector, let them compete the more competition there is, the better. But there is there and so there is a lot that is good in the in the in the in the trends that I described here. This is a world of opportunity. This is a world of possibility. This is a world in which a few people can get together and create huge changes. This is a group where eleven year old in England can change things where people can take to the streets and topple a tyrant. So it there's a lot of very good groups that have been marginalized now have a shot at that, you know, at the seat of the table. So it is a lot of good that it's going on that I think we need to welcome and applaud and promote. But then there is the downside of the curve where more of that creates gridlock governments that cannot decide decisions that are postponed decisions that are watered down. And that is the part of politics that I think ought to worry us. And so I think that one of the implications of what I'm saying is that in democracies we need to restore a little bit of power on those that have power. Essentially what happened, one of the secular trends that we, you know, exist is the decline of trust around the world, everywhere, trust on others, on institutions of governments is declining. Because trust is declining, democracies have replaced lack of trust with more checks and balances on those that have power. You don't trust people that have power, so you constrain their power. That's happened in the United States. And so we are we are overdosing on checks and balances to the point in which governments to the point in which we witness the spectacle that we witnessed all these past weeks with the in Capitol Hill and everything. So I do believe that there is a need for restoring a little bit of power in the while maintaining democracy and transparency and accountability. But I think we have gone overboard in constraining the power of elected officials. Back row with John. Thank you. I'm John Glenn with the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. This has been really stimulating. You obviously put your finger on something. Can I ask one way to further the conversation is in addition to the notion that power might be decaying or diffusing, how do you think power is changing today? I mean, obviously here at CSIS, I can't help but think about the smart power commission that they hosted here. But I mean, there's certainly a notion that there are certain kinds of power. Let's talk about the hard power, soft power dichotomy, perhaps, is one that's no longer to be able to accomplish certain things that we thought the nature of global threats is changing. You can't use a military to solve a pandemic. But at the same time, so there's different kinds of power that are effective. I imagine this is a question you've been asked before. I'd be interested in your thoughts. Yeah, that's it. And it's a tough one because, again, it depends on where, where power, where, in the Vatican or in the Pentagon, in the Harvard or AFL-CIO. In all of those places, power is changing more or less in the ways I'm describing. And we need to differentiate between the tools of powers and the actual use and possibilities of the tools. There's no doubt that hard power exists. There's no doubt that soft power exists, hard to measure and everything else. But it's there. You know, the allure of a foundation certainly has some some uses. But what is happening is that in both cases, it is more constrained and it's harder to use. And there are there is a very interesting conversation about how do you leave and prosper in a world like this? And how, what does it mean for leadership? And, and, you know, what does it mean to lead an organization where weakness is more common than strength? Next question, yes. Third row. Huge warts. The othesis, the end of power is pretty convincing, although there is a question of whether it is temporary. At the same time, which this seems to be taking place in the United States and in a number of other countries in the advanced world and the middle income countries of the world, the upper one-tenth of one percent of the population have increased in the last decade their holdings of income and wealth. Are these two things inconsistent or is is the latter a reflection of the fact that power, as we've defined it traditionally, is, is mistaken and it has to be redefined. And then we would find it that there has not been a diminution in power. So when I was writing the book, I had two paralyzing thoughts as I was, you know, in front of my computer writing. One is that I was writing about power and just put yourself in the shoes of someone that wakes up in the morning and said, now I'm going to write a book about power. You see, very often I felt like an idiot. I felt like it was, you know, what can I say about power that has not already been said? This is one of the great things about which everyone has read. So that was a very paralyzing thing that I needed to. And the second is not only am I going to write about power, but I'm going to say things that run against the current because the common wisdom is that power is concentrating. Why? Because of what you said. Because income and wealth are concentrating and because power is money and money is power. If money is concentrated, capital and wealth are concentrating, therefore power is concentrating and I'm arguing the contrary. And your question is excellent and is one of the questions that I had to grapple with. So the first one about writing about power, I decided that if I wanted to write about power, I should not write opinions. I should really, really collect as much data and as much persuasiveness and apply to it the best social science available, the leading edge thinking in terms of the social sciences and see what that showed and let the numbers do the talk about power. And so that was my way of overcoming the overwhelming fear of writing about that big subject. And the second is that, again, the notion that concentration of wealth and income would lead to the concentration of power is I found that that's not true. And the book has a lot of evidence. I tackle that issue very directly because it's there. If you think about the private sector, you know, perhaps the most extreme example in the private sector is the financial sector. After the financial crisis, a lot of bank and financial intermediaries when bankrupt were taken over by larger institutions and about five of them concentrated a huge amount of the portfolio of assets in the United States, JPMorgan, HSBC, Wells Fargo and others, Goldman Sachs, of course. And then you look at what happened. So these are the masters of the universe now. Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan and Bob Dimon at Barclays, which is another of the big banks that came on top. Barclays took over Lemon. Lemon became, you know, the good assets of Lemon became part of Barclays. Well, Bob Dimon, who led that, is out of a job. He was fired just a few years later. Jamie Dimon, as we speak today, is confronting a super challenge by regulators all around the world. And then at the last number that was thrown around was a fine of 13 billion dollars. And that was not just the last of his problems. Each one of the big banks is now limited in ways that it was not before. Am I arguing that Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are not powerful? Of course not. They are, but they can do less than they were able to do before, even though they now concentrate a lot more of assets. And the statistics bear this out. I cite in the book the research that shows that a company that was in the top 20% of its sector in 1980 had, I think, 20% probability of falling out of that category five years hence. As time went by and that research was replicated, the probability that companies at the top of their league would get out of that would have increased. Turnover rates of CEOs of the 2,500 largest companies in the world have skyrocketed. It is now very unsafe to be a CEO of a very large company. You get fired more often than ever. Still, you have the great life and the planes and the office and the salaries and all that. But it's more fleeting. You last less, you're not that long. The tenure and power of the CEOs. And there's a whole list of factors that are affecting the wealth. And so, of course, wealth buys power but less than before. Moises, when you look out at at institutions, status quo powers, nations, in light of what you've written, but also just in light of what you've seen recently, since you published the book, what institutions or countries or other status quo power entities do you think have a short shelf life? China. China. So, there is a study that someone is initiating and talking. You know, someone got very interested in the book and decided to measure the three revolutions. More mobility and mentality and apply, you know, they develop something like 60 variables for each one of them that measures these things. And then they rank countries as to which countries where more prone are going to be more prone to important changes in power as a result of the intensity of these three revolutions. And the research is still ongoing and it's just actually not ongoing. It's beginning. But some preliminary numbers on the back, you know, back of the envelope show that, you know, some of the countries that are going to think about China, you know, it's actually, you don't need an econometric model, right? Think about the more revolution, the more of everything is going on in China. The more of everything that moves is going on in China and very profound changes in expectations, aspirations and values is going on in China. So, if you put all that together and you believe that those things have consequences of power, then the corollary is it's hard to imagine that the current status quo can be sustained in China for the next decade or two. And in fact, you know, Mingxin Pei is a colleague of mine, a friend of mine who I regard as one of the top sinologists in the world who's very well-informed. He argues and he has a paper that, you know, there's a lot of now academic papers that are coming out doubting that the current system that now is in place, the government in China can be sustained. That doesn't mean that it's going to move from what we have now with the Politburo and everything else. It's not going to move from that to switch to a Canton system of democracy and referendums. But what it means, and I am convinced, is that the current way of governing China is going to be very hard to sustain in the next decade or two. That reminds me of a term you used in the book which I think was great, which was contact breeds aspiration. And that's a great term to apply to China, all the way in the back. Moses, I look forward to reading your book, Tom DeQuino from Canada. I wonder what you say in your book about obviously the democratizing benefits of what we might call the new form of consumerism or at least with all of this mobility, many more people being beneficiaries. As power centers are broken up. But, and I know you've expressed concern about how far this goes before it tips into total anarchy. One of my concerns is the following. Good public policy is often not driven by the mob and good public policy is not often driven by political leaders, whether they be autocrats or elected, simply giving people what they want. What do you say in your book about the impairment or the undermining of good public policy which is essential in terms of good governance? So there is a whole section in the book titled Terrible Simplifiers. The terrible simplifiers are the people that told us that internet companies without revenues ought to be valued at billions of dollars. Terrible simplifiers are the likes of Hugo Chavez and his successors that promise economic policies that we know don't work and yet they manage to sell them to the public. Terrible simplifiers are people that argue that the United States budget can be the issues there can be solved with numbers that don't add up but somehow are managed to get a hearing and become respectable commentators where the numbers are patently false. So Terrible Simplifiers is part of the new breed of problems that we have which is in a population that is full of anxiety, confused, threatened, a middle class that feels that it's losing ground, the appetite to listen to Terrible Simplifiers is there. So what I say in the book about what to do about it is to bring back an institution that is rarely mentioned in conversations like this and that is political parties. When I go to colleges, I like to ask them, I'm launching a new NGO that is trying to save a butterfly in Indonesia that is in danger of extinction. How many of you would like to join me in saving this butterfly in Indonesia? Inevitably several hands, they're ready, they're ready to go, they're ready to help save the butterfly in Indonesia. Then I explained this and I don't know anything about butterflies, I made it up, it doesn't exist, I was just testing your willingness to help, to do good, to help others. So now let me ask you different questions. I am going to join a political party, let's decide on which one and we'll join the political party and they run for the exits. They don't wanna know about political parties. This is my way of explaining how in the last 20 years or more, political parties have had a terrible run and NGOs have had a great run. So if you're a young, idealist individual, you don't join a political party, you join an NGO. And that's bad, not joining the NGO but not joining the political parties. And of course there are very good reasons to be, not to join political parties and reject them. They are corrupt, they are old, they are slow moving, they attract the wrong kind of people, they are exclusionary, the list of why political parties, people abhor political parties everywhere is there. Yet we need to change that and political parties need to modernize, need to learn from NGOs and become more like NGOs but retain a lot of what political parties, the functions of political parties have been lost. Why am I saying this? Because political parties can be an antidote to the terrible simplifiers. Front row here. Bill Tucker, I worked in the Reagan administration and I've done a lot of work in China and I'd like your comment and reaction on China's one child policy. I've been an observant of this over a period of years and I have seen incidences where there's the parents, two sets of grandparents and with a child in a department store that wants something that the parents won't buy for them or the grandparents and the child is on the floor throwing a tantrum. And there are six, I mean, yeah, six adults that are saying, oh, oh, oh, you know, to try to please this child and that's opposed to this older age in China that has worked all their lives to build a country and they really have no social security as we have in our country to support this older generation. And yet they are producing this younger generation that are spoiled brats, frankly, and do not want to work and do not want to work as the older generation has especially to build a country. And what effect that's gonna have on China? I know that there are several books and articles that have discussed the consequences of the one child policy, one child per family policy. They range, the consequences range from the psychodynamic behavior inside the family to very large macroeconomic consequences in terms of saving rates, in terms of social security and even in terms of, because I think there's an additional thing there and that is, I think Amartya Sen might have studied that which is a lot of those, there's a disproportionate amount of men. And there's a whole bunch of cohorts of females that are not there. And that creates, of course, a very significant problem that probably is going only to be sold by migration. But again, it's a huge subject for which I am not an expert, but I know that it's a huge subject. Yeah, yes, in the middle here and then another one. My name is Herman, I'm a member of National Press Club in Washington and correspondent for Compass Daily in Jakarta. You mentioned also the sea of power from men to women. And I understand you have been taking place for decades in some countries like in the Philippines, in the Latin America, in Indonesia, even, women president. My question is that why in the United States the process of being led by woman president or female presidents is very hard to take place. Do you have any prediction for years to come, United States being led by female president? Thank you. So you are asking about Hillary Clinton and her potential. But what I was saying about the shift of power for men to women did not just have the numbers of leaders of heads of state or heads of governments or CEOs or member of boards. If you look at the numbers there, they are hugely underrepresented. The other day I was reading the central banks, there are 182 central banks in the world. Only 17 are led by women. So wherever you see large institutions, you see that women are underrepresented by huge numbers. But that is changing. And I'm not looking at the big institutions, I'm looking at society. When I was researching the book I found two factoids and statistics that I thought were fascinating. First rates in India are skyrocketing among the elderly, initiated by the women. That means if they are the elderly that means that of course these are marriages that have been going on for 30, 40 years and therefore there are arranged marriages. Now the women are walking out of those marriages in large quantities. That is a shift of power, that tells you something about what's happening to power. And I think the reason why this is happening is because they are more empowered, they are no more, the three revolutions apply there. They see more, they now are more prosperous, they have the resources, they have the opportunities and the mentality revolution is there. And another similar survey also discovered the same what's happening, surprise, surprise in the Gulf countries where also divorce rates initiated by the women are now much higher than they were. So it's that kind of shifts that are quite important I think. And it's those shifts in the essence of society, the family that eventually will pave the way for more changes at the top and vice versa of course. Back to the middle. Hello, I'm Ian Strome of the Advanced Technical Intelligence Center. So in 2010 in the Egyptian Revolution the Mubarak government shut off the internet and the telephones for a couple of days or so to inhibit the planning of protests. I'm wondering how else might governments push back against advancing means of communication and capabilities to try and stop students, rebels, corporations, criminals or terrorists from decaying their power? Yeah. There is more and more of that. You know that there was all these thoughts and books and articles about the internet becoming a liberation technology, the technology that was going to be used to free, to fight for freedom and we saw a lot of that in the Arab Spring. But we also have seen the contrary in Iran for example the government and the intelligence and services used quite effectively tracking SMS messages and other, you know, Twitter and everything else to identify who were the nodes of the groups of people that were protesting, who were the central people that said let's meet at this town square at 3 o'clock on Sunday. So they would go to them directly, that would help them target them more effectively. And a lot of them ended up in jail. So side to side to the huge potential that the IT technologies have in helping people that are contesting governments, there is also governments are not technological dummies. Now they do have the technologies also to use those to shield them from those attacks. Over here on the left. You mentioned earlier that the shifts in power can allow the marginalized better access to a seat at the table but that also means that those decisions made at that table could be watered down. And I'm wondering if you can speak to the idea of how that might compare and contrast with the idea that this also gives those marginalized players, for example civil society, better ownership of those decisions that are being made. For example, at the global level and setting the post-2015 development agenda through the United Nations. So sure, there is, we have evidence, right? We have now almost 20 years of evidence about the resurgence, the surge of civil society and aspects of civil society has now gone global. And you can mobilize a lot of energies at the global level at the service of some causes. One of the initial examples that everyone used all the time and became a cliche was landmines and how civil society mobilized. And in fact, I think they wanted the organization, the civil society organization, and Mrs. Powell I think was her name that led that, won the Nobel Peace Prize for that. So that was one of the early, most visible examples of the trend that you mentioned. So there has been more of that. And I think there is more of that. And I think there's a lot to welcome that with one caveat. And that it's very easy to miss the reality that a lot of this, what we call civil society, that it has good sounding, non-governmental organization, even better sounding. In fact, our interest groups, very focused, very single issue, very able to ignore everything else. So if you worry about butterflies in Indonesia, that's your thing. You don't have to worry about how the people in Indonesia in that area make a living. That's not your problem. Your problem is save the butterfly. And so, yes, there is a lot to applaud and welcome and promote civil society. But let's not lose sight that these are interest groups. And that's where you hope you will have political parties that don't have the luxury of just worrying about one issue, landmines or butterflies in Indonesia or poverty. Political parties need to have an opinion about the exchange rate and about nuclear weapons, about agriculture and pre-kindergarten education. They have to have an opinion about everything. And you don't get that by joining an NGO that has just one very important, very desirable goal but gives you a tunnel vision that allows you to ignore other aspects that need attention. Other questions? Yes. In the back. Hi, Jennifer Sieverson with the Heritage Foundation. You mentioned earlier kind of Twitter shirpas and one thing I kind of worry about is people curating the internet for themselves and kind of shutting them off from other things they're not interested in. Do you see that as a danger and how do you think it can be combated in order to unify people over a broad range of issues in a political party? Yeah, that's a huge question, a huge problem, a huge question, you're right. One of the big issues is the balkanization, the fragmentation of information on the internet and the fact that we only read people that we like their opinions. So tribes just read members of the tribe and so you sometimes just speak at what the enemy is tweeting or saying or blogging but just a little bit, just immediately go back and look at what does a member of your tribe say about that. And so that creates very, very limited ranges of conversations and that limits the proverbial conversation at the water cooler at the office where we all go there in the morning and we have all read at least one article that creates a shared conversation even though we belong to different tribes. So that's a big issue and I don't think we have an answer to that. Arno, make this our final question. In my lifetime, the world population has gone from 2 to 7 billion, in Tom's lifetime it will go well over 10 billion. How do you see this population explosion impacting everything we've heard here this morning? Right, it's huge, it's very important, it's part of my more, it's a very important part of the more revolution. And you see, Binyed Brzezinski has said that it's easier to, these days, it's easier to kill 100 million people than to govern 100 million people. There are issues of scale when you govern, there are issues, you know, how do you govern 2 billion people or more? And so that has consequences for power that are huge. And then of course there is the issue of the uneven distribution of population. So yes, we're going to be more, even though UN predictions indicated at some point is going to flatten and even come down. So it's not, there are reasons to believe that those demographic trends will not continue to grow but stabilize and decline. But still at a very significantly high numbers, 9, 10 billion people on earth. And those 10 billion people are uneven in distribution. And so you have places like Russia, as you know, or Italy where population in fact is declining. And other United States, or not to mention Japan. And then you have other places in the world where population is of course booming, Africa. And so that in itself creates all kinds of consequences for power, the dynamics in the world. Great. Moises, over the last two days I was out of town giving a presentation called Global Threats and Trends and your book figured prominently in a lot of that. It's an incredible tool for business, for government, for citizens, for scholars, for a lot of different communities. And I think it dovetails so well with our program here. And I'd like to take this moment to thank you on behalf of everyone here and a wider audience for providing such an important tool and resource for all of us. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.