The End of Power Read online

  HOW DOES IT WORK?

  Consider divorce, anathema in many traditional societies but today more common everywhere. A study conducted in 2010 found that divorce rates have risen even in the conservative Persian Gulf states, reaching 20 percent in Saudi Arabia, 26 percent in the United Arab Emirates, and 37 percent in Kuwait. In addition, these higher divorce rates were correlated to education. Specifically, the increased number of educated women was putting a strain on conservative marriages, leading to marital conflict and summary divorces pronounced by threatened husbands. In Kuwait, the rate of divorce soared to 47 percent among couples in which both spouses held a university degree. “Women used to accept social sacrifices,” Saudi sociologist and report author Mona al-Munajjed said, comparing Gulf society thirty years ago and today. “Now they will not accept that anymore.”27

  The Muslim world is just one rich source of examples of how the Mentality revolution is transforming long-held traditions, from the rise of a fashion and glamour industry aimed at hijabi (veiled or covered) women to the spread of no-interest banking in Western countries where large Muslim immigrant communities have formed. Meanwhile in India, the transformation in attitudes is spreading back from the young generation to their elders: a country where divorce was once considered shameful—and women, in particular, were discouraged from remarrying—now has an increasingly robust matrimonial advertising industry devoted to listings by divorced senior citizens, some as old as their eighties or even nineties, seeking love late in life and without embarrassment. Mature adults are leaving the arranged marriages into which they were inducted when they were teens or young adults. Late in life, they are at last able to rebel against the encoded powers of family, community, society, and religion. They have changed their mentality.

  Changes in mentality and attitudes toward power and authority are also taking place among youths—a segment of the population that is now more numerous than ever before. According to the US Intelligence Council, “Today, more than 80 states have populations with a median age of 25 years or less. As a group, these countries have an over-sized impact on world affairs—since the 1970s, roughly 80 percent of all armed civic and ethnic conflict . . . has originated in states with youthful populations. The ‘demographic arc of instability’ outlined by these youthful populations ranges from clusters in the mid-section of Central America and the Central Andes, covers all of sub-Saharan Africa and stretches across the Middle East into South and Central Asia.”28

  THE PROPENSITY OF THE YOUNG TO QUESTION AUTHORITY AND challenge power is now amplified by the More and Mobility revolutions. Not only are there more people than ever under thirty, but they have more—prepaid calling-cards, radios, TVs, cellphones, computers, and access to the Internet as well as to travel and communication possibilities with others like them at home and around the world. They are also more mobile than ever. Aging baby boomers may be a feature of several industrialized societies, but elsewhere it is the young—irreverent, change-seeking, challenging, better informed, mobile, and connected—who comprise the largest demographic group. And as we have seen in North Africa and the Middle East, they can have a powerful impact.

  Complicating this picture in some advanced societies are cross-cutting demographic trends driven by immigration. The 2010 US Census revealed that the American population under eighteen would have undergone a decade-long decline had it not been for the inflow of millions of young Hispanic and Asian immigrants. These young immigrants are an important factor behind an unprecedented transition: in 2012, white babies were a minority of all US births.29 According to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, inasmuch as the share of immigrants in the US population was at its lowest level in the twentieth century from 1946 to 1964,

  boomers had minimal involvement with people from other countries. Today, immigrants are 13 percent of the population, and they are far more diverse. That created an isolation that persists. Among Americans older than 50, 76 percent are white, and the black population, at 10 percent, is the largest minority. Among those younger than 30, 55 percent are whites. Hispanics, Asians and other nonblack minorities account for 31 percent of that age group. Younger people are much more likely to be first- and second-generation Americans of non-European ancestry and able to speak English and other languages.30

  In short, old folks today not only just don’t get it, they can’t even speak it. But for those seeking to acquire, wield, or retain power in the United States and Europe, an understanding of the mindsets and expectations of these new constituencies will be essential.

  A number of global public opinion surveys are providing a clearer picture of the extent and velocity of these attitudinal changes. Since 1990, the World Values Survey (WVS) has been tracking changes in people’s attitudes in over eighty countries containing 85 percent of the world’s population. In particular, Ronald Inglehart, the director of the WVS, and several of his co-authors, notably Pippa Norris and Christian Welzel, have documented profound changes in attitudes concerning gender differences, religion, government, and globalization. One of their conclusions about these changes in peoples’ mentality is that there is a growing global consensus regarding the importance of individual autonomy and gender equality as well as a corresponding popular intolerance for authoritarianism.31

  On the other hand, there is ample survey evidence pointing toward an equally profound but more worrisome attitudinal trend: in mature democracies (Europe, the United States, Japan), public confidence in leaders and institutions of democratic governance such as parliaments, political parties, and the judiciary not only is low but shows a secular decline.32

  Reflecting on this trend, Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that

  [t]he American National Election Studies group has been asking Americans the same question roughly every two years since 1958: “Do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right, all or most of the time?” Until the mid-sixties, 75 percent of Americans answered yes. A slide then began and continued steeply downward for fifteen years, so that by 1980, only 25 percent said yes. In the interim, of course, were the Vietnam War, two assassinations, Watergate and the near-impeachment of the president and the Arab oil embargo. So there were plenty of reasons for people to feel estranged, even antagonistic. But what matters most is that the trust did not recover. For the last three decades, the approval level has bumped around in the region from 20 to 35 percent. The trust percentage fell below half in about 1972. This means that anyone under the age of forty has lived their entire life in a country the majority of whose citizens do not trust their own national government to do what they think is right. Through four long decades, none of the massive changes Americans have voted for in leadership and in ideology have changed that. Think what it means for the healthy functioning of a democracy that two-thirds to three-quarters of its people do not believe that their government does the right thing most of the time.33

  This drastic shift in attitudes is corroborated by Gallup, which has been tracking public opinion since 1936. For example, it found that in the United States, public approval of labor unions and confidence in Congress, political parties, big business, banks, newspapers, television news, and many other fundamental institutions have been declining. (The military is one of the few institutions that retains the confidence and support of Americans.)34 Even the US Supreme Court, an institution long held in high esteem by Americans, has suffered a sharp decline in public support—from almost 70 percent approval of those surveyed in 1986 to 40 percent approval in 2012.35

  It should not be surprising that, as the survey data collected by the Pew Global Attitudes Project confirms, this decline in trust in government and other institutions is not a strictly American phenomenon.36 In Critical Citizens, Harvard’s Pippa Norris and an international network of experts concluded that dissatisfaction with the political system and the core institutions of government is a growing and global phenomenon.37 The economic crisis that erupted
in 2008 in the United States and then ravaged Europe has also fueled strong sentiments against the powerful actors that the public blames for the crisis: the government, politicians, banks, and so on.38

  None of these surveys is exhaustive, yet each shows at least a few of the ways in which attitudes and values are shifting in the wake of—and perhaps sometimes ahead of—political and material changes in people’s lives.

  The Mentality revolution encompasses profound changes in values, standards, and norms. It reflects the growing importance attributed to transparency and property rights, and to fairness, whether in the treatment of women in society, of ethnic and other minorities, and even of minority shareholders in corporations. Many of these standards and norms have deep philosophical roots. But their spread and prevalence today—though still highly uneven and imperfect—is spectacular. These changes in mentality have been driven by demographic changes and political reforms, by the expansion of democracy and prosperity, by dramatic increases in literacy and access to education—and by the explosion in communications and media.

  Globalization, urbanization, changes in family structure, the rise of new industries and opportunities, the spread of English as a global lingua franca—these have had consequences in every sphere, but their effect has been most fundamental at the level of attitudes. Indeed, the signal effect of these changes is the ever-increasing salience of aspiration as a motivator of our actions and behaviors. Desiring a better life is a normal human trait, but aspiration toward specific examples and narratives of how life could be better, not some abstract notion of improvement, is what drives people to take action. Economists have shown this to be the case in emigration, for instance: People emigrate not because of absolute deprivation but because of relative deprivation; not because they are poor, but because they are aware that they could be doing better. The more contact we have with one another, the greater the extent to which contact breeds aspiration.

  The effects of the Mentality revolution on power have been manifold and complex. The combination of emerging global values and the increase in aspirational behavior poses the strongest challenge of all to the moral basis of power. It helps spread the idea that things do not need to be as they have always been—that there is always, somewhere and somehow, a better way. It breeds skepticism and mistrust of any authority, and an unwillingness to take any distribution of power for granted.

  One of the best examples of all three revolutions simultaneously at work is the Indian outsourcing industry. Young, educated Indians who belong to the country’s burgeoning middle class have flocked to work at urban call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, which in 2011 generated $59 billion in revenue and directly and indirectly employed almost 10 million Indians.39 As Shehzad Nadeem observed in Dead Ringers, his study of the impact of Indian call centers on their workers, “The identities and aspirations of the ICT [information and communications technology] workforce are defined increasingly with reference to the West. . . . Radical in their rejection of old values, conspicuous in their consumption, workers construct an image of the West that is used to benchmark India’s progress toward modernity.”40 Although the jobs pay relatively well, they plunge young Indians into a welter of contradictions and competing aspirations—that is, aspirations to succeed in an Indian social and economic context while sublimating their cultural identities with fake accents and names and dealing with abuse and exploitation at the hands of affluent customers in a different continent.

  For young urban Indian women in particular, the jobs have provided opportunities and economic benefits that they might otherwise not have had, leading to lasting changes in behavior that are upending cultural norms. Never mind the lurid newspaper article that talked about call centers as “a part of India where freedom knows no bounds, love is a favourite pastime, and sex is recreation.” Closer to the mark would be a recent survey by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce that young working married women in Indian cities are increasingly choosing to put off having children in favor of developing their careers.41

  REVOLUTIONARY CONSEQUENCES: UNDERMINING THE BARRIERS TO POWER

  Plenty of events would seem to suggest that things have not changed all that much, that micropowers are an anomaly, and, ultimately, that big power can and will continue to call the shots. Individual tyrants may be gone in places like Egypt and Tunisia, but the power establishment behind them still wields clout. After all, don’t the repressive ripostes of the Chinese, Iranian, or Russian governments, the consolidation of big banks, and the pattern of government expansion, bailouts, and even nationalization of major companies in many rich and developing nations show that in the end power still follows the same old rules? Goldman Sachs, the US military, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Catholic Church have not gone away. They still impose their will in myriad ways.

  And while some giants have fallen, those that have risen in their place seem to follow the same principles of organization and display the same urge to expand and consolidate. Does it matter that the world’s largest steel company is no longer U.S. Steel or one of the European giants but the outgrowth of a once-marginal Indian player, if it has acquired many of the assets, personnel, and customers of some of these old rivals? Is it fair to argue that the emergence of new giants that are operationally similar to the old ones, especially in business, is simply part of the regular working of capitalism?

  The answer to both questions is yes and no. The trends we are currently observing can be interpreted—or simply dismissed—as the manifestation of what economist Joseph Schumpeter (and before him Karl Marx) dubbed “creative destruction.” In Schumpeter’s words: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation . . . that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”42

  The shifts in power that we see all around us—which include and transcend the ascent and demise of business enterprises—are certainly consistent with Schumpeter’s expectations. They are also in line with the insights of Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who coined the term disruptive innovation, meaning a change—in technology, service, or product—that creates a new market by relying on a completely new approach. The effects of a disruptive innovation eventually spill over to other related or similar markets and undermine them. The iPad is a good example. Using your cellphone to pay for groceries or to send money to your daughter in another continent are two other good examples.

  Yet, whereas Schumpeter focused on the forces of change within the capitalist system in general and Christensen dissected specific markets more narrowly, the argument here is that similar forces are at work in a much broader set of human endeavors. As this chapter tries to make clear, the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions represent change of a much greater magnitude and scale.

  Each of these revolutions presents a specific challenge to the traditional model of power. In that model, large, centralized, coordinated modern organizations that deployed overwhelming resources, special assets, or crushing force offered the clearest path to getting and keeping power. For centuries, that model proved to be the best-adapted one not just for coercing people but also for exercising power in its subtler dimensions.

  As we saw in Chapter 2, power operates through four distinct channels: muscle, or blunt coercion, which forces people to do things they would not otherwise choose to do; code, the power of moral obligation; pitch, the power of persuasion; and reward, the power of inducement. Two of these—muscle and reward—alter the incentives and reshape a situation to move people to act in a certain way, while the other two—pitch and code—shift people’s assessment of a situation without changing the inc
entives. Barriers to power must be in place if muscle, code, pitch, and reward are to be effective. And the effect of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions is precisely to reduce these barriers. The chart in Figure 4.1 offers a summary.

  FIGURE 4.1. POWER AND THE THREE REVOLUTIONS

  As this chart makes clear, the three revolutions pose challenges to power in all four of its channels—muscle, code, pitch, and reward. Coercion, of course, is the bluntest exercise of power—whether exercised through laws, armies, governments, or monopolies. But as the three revolutions progress, organizations that rely on coercion face ever-increasing costs simply to maintain control over their domains and patrol their boundaries.

  The inability of the United States or the European Union to curb illegal immigration or illicit trade is a good example. Walls, fences, border controls, biometric identification documents, detention centers, police raids, asylum hearings, deportations—these are just part of an apparatus of prevention and repression that has thus far proven to be extremely expensive, if not futile. Witness the failure of the United States to curb the inflow of drugs from Latin America despite its long-standing and enormously expensive “War on Drugs.”

  Moreover, the combination of greater well-being and spreading global values is giving people the space, the desire, and the tools to challenge coercive authorities. Civil liberties, human rights, and economic transparency are increasingly cherished values, and there are more and more advocates, experts, supporters, and platforms available to advance them. My point here is not that coercion is no longer possible but, rather, that it has become more costly and harder to sustain over time.