INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF PROSPERITYRead more at location 252
Do we feel a great emotional tug for our country? Many Americans seem to feel a greater emotional attachment to other things. If asked, “What are you?” their hearts might answer, “I’m an iPhone guy.” Or “I’m a fantasy football fanatic.”Read more at location 259
If an airplane skidded on the runway and passengers had to evacuate quickly, how many would first save their iPhone, their football picks, or their tasty gluten-free muffin instead of an American flag?Read more at location 261
patriotism has drifted steadily lower, especially among young people.Read more at location 263
nearly half of Millennials say the “American dream” is dead.Read more at location 264
Bono of U2, who claims great pride in his Irish heritage and still speaks with a brogue, skipped out of Dublin so that his band could reincorporate in the Netherlands and pay lower taxes on their music royalties.Read more at location 267
anyone who works in international sales or computer software development might naturally feel more anchored to ephemeral cyberspace than to some cobblestoned Main Street with flags flying from the lamp poles and local merchants scrambling to compete against Amazon.com.Read more at location 270
In the Conclusion I will introduce a new term, patriotist, which I define as someone who affirmatively believes that it is a good thing to be patriotic about one’s country.Read more at location 275
Among British Muslim students, 40 percent support introducing sharia law.Read more at location 287
Charles de Gaulle wondered, “How can anyone govern a nation with 246 different kinds of cheese?” Like the France that de Gaulle bellyached about, the United States no longer coheres. We have a thousand television channels, 1 billion websites, and 330 million citizens with no reason to listen to each other. Talking heads on MSNBC and Fox News shout as if they are attending UFC wrestling matches. It is hard to get a country to “rally around the flag” when everyone stomps off in his or her own direction.Read more at location 289
The splintering is even more profound in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other “advanced” nations.Read more at location 294
Many commentators blame an obvious villain for polarizing civil society: new technologies, especially the Internet, which offers infinite choices and distractions. The Internet raises two separate threats: it can radicalize loners and it can also fracture communities.Read more at location 296
Former Obama official and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein warns that when “like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thoughtRead more at location 299
Picture an old black-and-white photo from the 1930s, with grandparents, parents, and children gathered around one RCA family radio in the living room listening to the revered voice of President Franklin Roosevelt. Even RCA’s mascot, a terrier named Nipper, perked up his ears to listen. Now look around a home today, with each individual tuned to a personal smartphone or iPad.Read more at location 301
But to blame technology is too simple, convenient, and recent an explanation. In the chapters ahead I will show that throughout history prosperous nations have suffered from a powerful tendency to fissure, splinter, and lose their unifying missions—even without the help of electrons zipping through wireless devices. This entropy explains why nations have collapsed,Read more at location 307
I will uncover five key forces that tend to undermine nations after they have achieved economic success.Read more at location 311
Paul Kennedy’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers hit bestseller lists with tales of countries overextending their military,Read more at location 312
Recent bestsellers like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century target inequality, while Why Nations Fail by James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoglu focuses on poor countries struggling to achieve prosperity.Read more at location 314
I will also argue that a splintering among the population matters: it induces people to cheat, swindle, and focus more on the short term than on their long-term responsibilities, which ultimately undermines the economy and a cohesive civil society.Read more at location 316
As a national spirit recedes, opportunism creeps in and shows up in everything from the housing market to school admissions to how congressmen handle national budgets.Read more at location 320
But faltering spirits and a lack of faith in the future kindle kidnapping, burglary, and murder more than do falling incomes.Read more at location 326
During the 1930s, as families gathered around to listen to President Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, they felt a greater sense of cohesion and mutual support.Read more at location 326
splintering of such powers as the Ming dynasty in the 1600s, Venice in the 1700s, the Habsburg monarchs and Tokugawa shoguns in the 1800s, and the Ottomans on the eve of World War I. In these examples, we will see how disintegrating national goals led to opportunistic behavior,Read more at location 329
A more complex international economy disintegrates traditions and a community ethos. Globalization has ignited the forces of entropy.Read more at location 337
our ability to predict behavior has collapsed.Read more at location 344
the characteristics of peoples and nations? For example, divergent beliefs in religion, magic, the rights of women, the use of violence, and obligations to parents. Here, too, leakages and mixing incite a more volatile, combustible situation.Read more at location 345
No wonder our globalized world has witnessed more terrorism, religious furor, broken states, and anarchy in the last twenty years than in the period from World War II to 1990.Read more at location 347
Mexico bankruptcy and bailout (1995); East Asia crash (1997); Russia bankruptcy (1998); dot.com stock crash (2000); Argentina crash (2002); housing bubble and crash (2004–9); commodity bubble (2007–8); world stock market crash/collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (2008); Iceland bankruptcy (2009); Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, and Spain crash (2009); Cyprus bankruptcy (2013); energy crash (2014–2015); China stock market crash (2015). All these bubbles and crashes were fomented by the entropic forcesRead more at location 350
many also struggle with internal immigration debates. How can a country feel stable and sustainable when so many diverse newcomers are unpacking their bags?Read more at location 355
part I of this book, I will set out the five potent forces that can shatter even a rich nation: (1) falling birthrates, (2) globalized trade, (3) rising debt loads, (4) eroding work ethics, and (5) the challenge of patriotism in a multicultural country.Read more at location 357
An explosion of media splinters national cultures.Read more at location 368
Back in the days of yore, when families could tune into just ten stations, television delivered a greater feeling of unity.Read more at location 370
Here’s the challenge: How do you keep community in a world that seems so different from the one faced by the so-called Greatest Generation and its children, the boomers? “To each his own” has morphed into the “Age of Whatever.”Read more at location 376
I want you to think about standing too close to a painting, let’s say Georges Seurat’s pointillistic A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. You simply see dots of color. They may be pretty, but they make no sense.Read more at location 381
But what if you backed up and all you saw were those same dots and they never formed a portrait or scene that made any sense to you?Read more at location 384
Here’s another way to look at it: In the past our political system and our culture might have alternated between waves of classicism and romanticism,Read more at location 386
But how can a country survive if it starts to reflect, not classicism or romanticism, but a more modern chaotic trend, for example, expressionist art? Or a Jackson Pollock painting, where the drips do not clearly cohere?Read more at location 391
A hundred years ago life expectancy was just fifty years of age. There were virtually no antibiotics and only crude dentistry and yet young people felt more confident that they could get a job and support a family, in a local mill, a factory, a farm, or a mine.7 If they stumbled into trouble, their neighbors or their church would step in to lift them up, offering a bed to sleep in or a chair at the breakfast table. Traditional “old economy” jobs have faded away and so has the community spirit that encouraged people to take risks and dream big dreams.Read more at location 398
Can a community spirit be restored in the United States and in Europe today? In the pages ahead I will share the lessons of history to show that it can.Read more at location 404
Using the latest research in neuroscience and economics, we can identify policies that will make kids smarter and grittier, better able to carve out a good paycheck and a happier life in a confusing, apersonal, high-tech world.Read more at location 406
