A thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade
In Defense of Failure
By Megan McArdle Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
America allows its citizens room to fail — and if they don't succeed, to try, try again. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Americans report that they have considered starting their own business, whereas in Europe that number is only 40%. While the E.U. publishes documents on "overcoming the stigma of business failure," executives in Silicon Valley proudly make their bygone start-ups the centerpieces of their résumés. And when those start-ups shut down, America stands ready with corporate and personal bankruptcy systems that are the most generous in the world.
But after the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that has followed it, many Americans are no longer feeling so exceptional. At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix.
That's a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. Our bankruptcy system's generosity, for instance, has been convincingly linked to higher rates of entrepreneurship. Similarly, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation system created during the New Deal has largely put an end to the bank runs that destroyed many sound banks; all it took was simply promising depositors that they can't lose all their money. This is costly, of course. But the bank runs were worse. It's telling that countries with less generous deposit insurance, like Britain, suffered bank runs during the recent crisis and were forced to raise their insurance limits or nationalize banks.
Yet instead of celebrating all our successes in building systems that fail well, we've become wedded to the fantasy of a system that doesn't fail at all. Look at our underwhelming response to the financial crisis. Bubbles and financial crises are natural features of markets, and while there has been some real suffering on the part of millions, the truth is that as these things go, we've gotten off lightly. When financial systems fail badly, you get the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, GDP falling by about a third, life savings wiped out, livelihoods lost. Largely because we studied the failures of that era, our financial policymakers learned that a whole bunch of things didn't work — and avoided a repeat.
We should be searching for the lessons of this crisis, but we can't because we're too busy searching for bad guys. Watch a hearing held before the House Financial Services committee, and you don't see legislators absorbing sound policy advice; you see them mouthing talking points and beating up on bankers. There isn't really much evidence that the "unsafe" financial products vilified by some proponents of financial reform played a large role in the meltdown. While exotic loans certainly helped make the bubble larger, there's no reason to believe that we could have avoided it entirely. But the architects of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency have made it very clear that they think they can tamp down bubbles by nudging people toward "plain vanilla" products. Many financial innovations eventually turn out to be bad ideas. But as with Edison's lightbulb filaments, the failures point the way to our successes.
And so rather than launch a quixotic war on failure, we should be using what we've learned to build a system that fails better: increasing the reserves financial institutions hold against a crisis, improving our tools for modeling system-wide risks, creating better mechanisms for winding down the operations of failed institutions without triggering a market panic, and making better provisions for the people who are hardest hit.
The real secret of our success is that we learn from the past, and then we forget it. Unfortunately, we're dangerously close to forgetting the most important lessons of our own history: how to fail gracefully and how to get back on our feet with equal grace.
Two competing narratives dominate our debate about the ongoing ethnic and demographic transformation of America. The first holds that non-European immigrants — O.K., let's be honest, Mexicans — will rip apart the nation's social fabric. The second has it that the diversity of younger generations of Americans will inevitably lead to a more integrated, postracial era.
But both of these narratives are off the mark. With some minor differences, today's immigrants are assimilating into U.S. society in ways not terribly unlike those of millions before them. At the same time, it's likely that decades from now, Americans will still invest a lot of meaning in group distinctions.
The most profound changes in American race relations, however, will revolve around the other side of the equation: native-born white Americans. As much as Americans pride themselves on the notion that their national identity is premised on a set of ideals rather than a single race, ethnicity or religion, we all know that for most of our history, white supremacy was the law of the land. In every naturalization act from 1790 to 1952, Congress included language stating that the aspiring citizen should be a "white person." And not surprisingly, despite the extraordinary progress of the past 50 years, the sense of white proprietorship — "this is our country and our culture" — still has not been completely eradicated. Even though we now have an African-American President, we still tend to treat minorities as parts and whites as representatives of the whole. This, along with the luxury of rarely feeling obliged to think self-consciously about one's racial background, has been one of the perks of belonging to the demographic majority.
But according to the Census Bureau, by 2050 whites will be a minority group in the U.S. How the current majority reacts to its incipient minority status is the most crucial sociodemographic issue facing the country in the decade to come.
The most obvious impact will be political. If California's demographic transformation is any indication — Anglos dropped below 50% of the population there in 2000 — whites elsewhere may increasingly develop a stronger consciousness of their political interests as a group. In 1996, California's white voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that sought to eliminate state-sponsored affirmative action, because many of those voters felt that the playing field had begun to tilt against them. That decade, California also passed two other ethnically charged ballot measures, against illegal immigration and bilingual education. It's difficult not to conclude that these initiatives were part of a white backlash against the state's ethnic transformation. However, the very demographic trend that inspired those ballot initiatives has ensured that there haven't been any racially charged propositions since. With so-called minorities outnumbering whites, mainstream politicians have been reluctant to endorse any initiative that would invite a backlash from nonwhites.
But California's ethno-political détente may not be in the cards for other regions of the country. Though whites will become a minority in the national population, the vast majority of individual states will probably remain majority white. (This is because the most profound demographic change is happening in a handful of the most heavily populated states.) A strong white-minority political consciousness is most likely to arise in regions that are nowhere near actually becoming majority-minority. It is in these regions, where white-minority status is more phantom than reality, that politicians and demagogues can best employ the rhetoric of white ethno-nationalism.
This won't take the form of a chest-thumping brand of white supremacy. Instead, we are likely to see the rise of a more defensive, aggrieved sense of white victimhood that strains the social contract and undermines collectively shared notions of the common good.
Way back in 1991, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote the best-selling book The Disuniting of America, in which he argued that identity-based multiculturalism threatened the integrity of the nation. "The cult of ethnicity," he wrote, culminated in an "attack" on a shared American identity. He decried the "separatist impulses" of nonwhites, "or at least their self-appointed spokesmen." Nearly two decades later, one can hear evidence of white grievance in many corners of the country. And it's not coming just from fringe bloggers. In the spring of 2008, candidate Hillary Clinton appealed to "hardworking white Americans" to help her campaign against an ascendant Barack Obama. Last March, conservative commentator Glenn Beck suggested that the white man responsible for the worst workplace massacre in Alabama history was "pushed to the wall" because he felt "silenced" and "disenfranchised" by "political correctness."
The past decade has also seen a rise in the number of accusations of reverse discrimination and the emergence of high-profile court cases — like the one filed by firefighters in New Haven, Conn. — in which white men claim they were denied promotions because of their race.
Over the next decade, we're likely to see more antidiscrimination suits filed and growing anger over reverse discrimination. Not only will traditional affirmative action run into greater resistance, but there will be demands for whites to be included in affirmative action and even in government set-aside programs. In the face of growing demographic change, new groups will be dedicated to defending the interests and rights of European Americans. Candidates of both major parties will increasingly appeal to this sense of white grievance.
This means race will continue to be a defining feature of our politics, but the dynamic will be the precise opposite of what it was a generation ago, when angry nonwhite activists were a centrifugal force in America. Instead, with the election of Obama, blacks are polling as more optimistic than they were before. Having pretty much abandoned their counter-cultural stance, Latino activists are not fighting against U.S. power but are instead demanding that immigrants be allowed to become part of it. Meanwhile, even though they are still the majority and collectively maintain more access to wealth and political influence than other groups, whites are acting more and more like an aggrieved minority. Schlesinger would be turning in his grave.
TV Will Save the World
By Charles Kenny Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around. Indeed, for many of the poorest regions of the world, it remains the next big thing — poised, finally, to attain truly global ubiquity. And that is a good thing, because the TV revolution is changing lives for the better.
Across the developing world, around 45% of households had a TV in 1995; by 2005 the number had climbed above 60%. That's some way behind the U.S., where there are more TVs than people, but it dwarfs worldwide Internet access. Five million more households in sub-Saharan Africa will get a TV over the next five years. In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban, which had outlawed TV, 1 in 5 Afghans had one. The global total is another 150 million by 2013 — pushing the numbers to well beyond two-thirds of households.
Television's most transformative impact will be on the lives of women. In India, researchers Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that when cable TV reached villages, women were more likely to go to the market without their husbands' permission and less likely to want a boy rather than a girl. They were more likely to make decisions over child health care and less likely to think that men had the right to beat their wives. TV is also a powerful medium for adult education. In the Indian state of Gujarat, Chitrageet is a hugely popular show that plays Bollywood song and dance clips. The routines are subtitled in Gujarati. Within six months, viewers had made a small but significant improvement in their reading skills.
Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike.
The Twilight of the Elites
By Christopher Hayes Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.
In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible.
For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it. The mistrust of élites extends to élites themselves. Every year, public-relations guru Richard Edelman conducts a "trust barometer" across 22 countries, in which he surveys only highly educated, high-earning, media-attentive people. In the U.S., these people show extremely low levels of trust in government and business alike. Particularly distrusted are the superman CEOs of yore. "Chief-executive trust has just been mired in the mid- to low 20s," says Edelman. "It started off with Enron and culminates in Citi."
Such figures show that the crisis of authority extends beyond narrow ideological categories: Big Business and unions, Congress and Wall Street, organized religion and science are all viewed with skepticism. So why is it that so much of the country's leadership in so many different walks of life performed so terribly over this decade? While no single-cause theory can explain such a wide array of institutional failures, there are some themes — in particular, the concentration of power and the erosion of transparency and accountability — that extend throughout.
Few people know this better than Terry McKiernan, 56, the founder of Bishop Accountability. Like nearly all Irish-American boys of his generation, McKiernan was raised in the Roman Catholic Church — altar boy, confirmation, a lifetime of Sundays. His uncle was a priest. When allegations of sexual abuse in the priesthood surfaced in 2002, McKiernan says, "the whole thing honestly hit me kind of hard." So he quit his job as a management consultant and started Bishop Accountability, which is in the process of procuring more than 3 million pages of records about the Church's sex-abuse scandal. According to McKiernan, the main institutional characteristics that produced the crisis were the Church's obsessive secrecy and its hierarchical nature. Those at the top of the pyramid, the bishops, were exempt from any corrective accountability from below. This dynamic isn't unique. "There are various ways in which the Church is a peculiar institution," McKiernan says. "But," he adds, "it is also simply an institution in which the rules of power apply and the effects of secrecy apply. I'm not surprised that people doing unexamined things do bad things."
That dynamic has played itself out throughout society. Look at CEO pay. In 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of average CEO pay to average wage was about 35 to 1. By 2007 it was 275 to 1. Nell Minow, a lawyer and corporate-governance expert, has for decades waged a one-woman crusade against excessive CEO pay. She has watched as CEOs have found ways to manipulate the levers of governance and devise ingenious methods of guaranteeing themselves windfalls regardless of their company's performance. "It's like going to a racetrack and betting on all the horses, except you're using someone else's money," Minow says. "You know one of them is going to win. As long as you're not paying for the tickets, you're going to come out ahead."
Of course, it's not really news that very gifted and talented people can make poor, even colossally catastrophic judgments. But the fact is, a complex society like ours requires many tasks to be performed by experts and élites, and tackling some of the most difficult and urgent problems we face requires repositories of authority that can successfully marshal public consensus.
Take the problem of climate change. It's beyond our ability to recognize the imperceptible upward creep of global temperatures, so we must rely on the authority of those who are doing the highly complicated measuring. But at a moment when we desperately need élites and experts to use their social capital to warn the populace of the dangers of catastrophic climate change, skepticism is rising. A comprehensive Pew poll released in October found that only 57% of respondents think there's evidence of warming (down from 71% last year), and just 36% think it's because of human activity (down from 47%). This is the danger of living in a society in which the landscape of authority has been leveled: it's not there when you actually need it.
The élites' failures of the past decade should teach us that institutions of all kinds need input from below. The Federal Reserve is home to some of the finest economists and brightest minds in the country, and yet it still managed to miss an $8 trillion housing bubble and the explosion of the subprime market. If, say, the Federal Reserve Act required several seats on the board of governors to be reserved for consumer advocates — heck, even community organizers — it would have been harder to miss these twin phenomena.
If there are heartening countertrends to the past decade of élite failure, they're the tremendous outpouring of grass-roots activism across the political spectrum and the remarkable surge in institutional innovation, much of it facilitated by the Internet. In less than a decade, Wikipedia has completely overturned the internal logic of the Enlightenment-era encyclopedia by radically democratizing the process of its creation. Farmers' markets have blossomed as a means of challenging and subverting the industrial food-distribution cartel. Charter schools have grown for the same reason; local school systems are no longer viewed as transparent and democratic.
This, one hopes, is just the beginning. All these new institutions are inspired by a desire to democratize old, big oligarchic hierarchies and devolve power downward and outward. That's our best hope in the decade to come. For at the end of the day, it's the job of citizens to save élites from themselves.
The Boring Age
By Michael Lind Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
Viewing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year 2010 is a depressing experience. According to this 1968 movie, by now we were supposed to have moon colonies and regular passenger service on space planes. And anyone who struggles with automated receptionist messages or programmable televisions knows that today's computers are just as psychotic as HAL 9000, only dumber.
We like to believe we live in an era of unprecedented change: technological innovation is proceeding at a rate with no parallel in all of human history. The information revolution and globalization are radically disruptive. Just as Barack Obama would like to be a transformational President, so the rest of us like the idea that we live in a thrilling epoch of transformation. But the truth is that we are living in a period of stagnation.
Surprisingly, this stasis is most evident in an area where we assume we are way ahead of our predecessors: technology. In fact, the gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative effects on life and industry that indoor electric lighting, refrigerators, electric and natural gas ovens and indoor plumbing produced in the early to mid-20th century. Is the combination of a phone, video screen and keyboard really as revolutionary as the original telephone, the original television set or the original typewriter was?
Genuinely revolutionary technological innovations are rare, and when they appear, there is a long time lag before they begin to transform the economy and daily life. The steam engine was used for nearly a century to pump water from British mines before it was successfully applied to manufacturing and transportation. The gasoline-powered car was invented in the 1880s, but mass automobile use had to wait until the 1920s in the U.S. and the 1950s and '60s in Europe and Japan. There was a similar delay between the invention of the computer and the microprocessor and the widespread adoption of the PC in the 1990s and 2000s. Even if there are dramatic breakthroughs in nanotech or biotech tomorrow, we may not enjoy the benefits for decades, or generations.
Technology has been remarkably stagnant in the areas of transportation and energy. As energy expert Vaclav Smil has pointed out, global jet transportation relies on the gas turbine, which was developed in the 1930s, and global shipping uses the diesel engine, invented in the 1890s. The fastest commercial airliners ever to fly reside in museums. The most cost-effective forms of mass transit everywhere, except for a few dense urban areas, are buses and planes.
Whether the heat source is coal, natural gas or nuclear energy, most electricity today is generated by a variant of the steam turbine that has been around since the 1880s. The wind turbine and the solar-thermal and photovoltaic technologies beloved by greens are old enough to qualify for Social Security. And these elderly technologies are limited to those privileged enough to live in industrialized countries. A substantial minority of the human race still derives heat and warmth from wood and dung.
In developing countries, the 21st century is likely to be the second age of the automobile. Everyone talks about China's money-guzzling high-speed-rail projects, but of far greater consequence is the less glamorous system of national highways it is building. Today there are nearly 668 million cars in the world; by 2050 there may be 3 billion. Many cars, perhaps most, will be powered by energy sources other than gasoline and may eventually come with robot brains connected to smart highways. But absent the appearance of the long-awaited flying car, the cars, buses and trucks of the future will probably be variations of today's automobiles.
What about politics? For decades, it has been possible to make headlines by predicting the imminent replacement of the ethnically or linguistically defined territorial nation-state with some radically different form of political organization, like city-states or supra-national federations along the lines of the European Union. Manhattan, however, has yet to declare its sovereignty, to the disappointment of many of its residents and other Americans alike. Another perennial strain of geopolitical futurism involves predicting the rise and fall of great powers. We are often told that China will surpass the U.S. in a few decades and usher in a Chinese century. But China's growth model, like Japan's, is based on exports, and in a saturated global market in which American consumers are tapped out, the Chinese export machine may choke. Even if China continues to grow, the country will be far poorer in terms of per capita income than the U.S., Europe or Japan for generations to come. In a decade or two, predictions about Chinese world domination may seem as quaint as those about Soviet global hegemony.
Let me offer some predictions of my own. I predict that in the year 2050, the nation-state will still be the dominant form of political organization, with a few new nation-states added to the U.N. The U.S. will still be the dominant global economic and military power, even if China has a somewhat larger GDP because of its larger population. Most energy will still be derived from fossil fuels, and nuclear power will account for an increasing share of global electricity production, while wind and solar power will still be negligible. Most people will get from place to place by means of cars, buses, taxis and planes, not fixed rail. Thanks to biotech advances, people will live longer and healthier lives, and consequently the largest single occupation in 2050 will be — drumroll, please — nursing!
I know, that's a boring vision of the future compared with a Chinese century in which everybody is a genetically modified immortal who rides monorails and eats algae grown in skyscrapers. But hey, in the future, phones will be really cool.
Australia: MasterChef Australia
A competitive-cooking game show based on the British series MasterChef, MasterChef Australia has enjoyed steadily climbing ratings since it premiered in April 2009. In a roundup of the most popular shows that have aired in Australia since 2001, MasterChef is outranked only by the 2005 Australian Open tennis final between Aussie Lleyton Hewitt and Marat Safin and the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, in which Australia was beaten by England. The show's first-season finale was the most watched television program of 2009.
Afghanistan: Afghan Star
The same kind of singing competition that has made a huge success out of American Idol in the U.S., Afghan Star attracts an estimated audience of around 11 million, or approximately one-third of the country's population. Currently in its fifth season, the show offers a form of democracy by allowing the winner to be decided by viewer votes. It also breaks ground by promoting women's performances, a rarity in Afghanistan's highly traditional society.
India: Yeh Rishta Kiya Kehlata Hai ("What Is This Relationship Called?")
Airing nightly at 9:30 p.m., this soap-like show revolves around the lives of two young women, using their lives to explore the dynamics of arranged marriage and marriage for love in modern-day India. On the air since 2009, the show recently taped its 300th episode.
France: Les Guignols de l'Info ("News Puppets")
A puppet show known for its sharp political satire, Les Guignols de l'Info has appeared on France's Canal+ channel since 1988, though it did not find a large audience until a few years later when, during the first Gulf War, it began to perform skits based on the news. Though it is now closely tied to another popular Canal+ offering, the political talk show Le Grand Journal, neither program can truly lay claim to being France's most watched television show. That would be the Amnerican import House, with Hugh Laurie.
Russia: Zhdi Menya ("Wait for Me")
There is nothing more beloved by Russians than a long, sad story (think Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), and this show, now entering its seventh year on the air, delivers it in powerful bursts with each and every episode. Structured like a television newsmagazine, Zhdi Menya relates the story of a family or friends who have been separated by a tragic event — quite frequently, something that took place during during the oppressive Stalin years or World War II — then tells the story of their reunification. The stories typically include long descriptions of the tragedy that caused the separation, followed by details of how the producers tracked down the missing person, and end with tearful hugs, accompanied, of course, by shots of the studio audience, almost all of whom are weeping.
England: EastEnders
Depicting more often than not a depressing view of life in East London, the long-running BBC soap opera just celebrated its 25th anniversary with a live episode. The comings and goings of the residents of Albert Square, Walford, contained all the usual elements of a 30-min. episode (characters attempting to sort out issues, many scenes taking place in the Queen Vic pub) as well as some uncommon ones (fumbled lines! Hey, it was live TV), culminating in the grand reveal of who had killed someone else just after another character had plummeted to his death. This particular episode — one of four shown each week — drew 15.6 million viewers and was the BBC's highest audience figure in nearly six years. The show regularly pulls in more than 10 million, though its glory days of three times as many watching "Dirty" Den Watts walk out on his wife during the 1986 Christmas Day episode is clearly behind it.
South Africa: Generations
Airing since 1994, this soap is set in the cutthroat world of media communications, its stories revolving around a single family, all of whose members have passed on, leaving things in the hands of a sole surviving member: a young, beautiful woman played by the model Connie Ferguson. Originally airing one night a week, the show was extended to five nights because of its popularity and has pulled No. 1 ratings since virtually the beginning of its run. A recent audit showed that it is viewed by almost 5 million people daily.
Japan: Shoten ("Jokes for Points")
A comedy airing on Sunday nights since 1966, Shoten consists of six comedians seated in a row who compete to tell the best jokes on topics announced by the host. The comedians are judged on their wit and their ability to respond quickly. Those who tell funny jokes are awarded zabutons, Japanese cushions, which are stacked atop of one another as the show goes on. A zabuton can also be taken away from the comedian for telling a bad joke, which leaves some to sit on the floor uncomfortably without a cushion. The first to stack 10 zabutons wins a prize. According to Yahoo! Japan's TV Guide ratings, this show was the country's second most viewed program in February 2010, bested only by the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.
China: Chinese Paladin 3
Video-game adaptations are usually hit or miss regardless of nationality, but Chinese broadcasters have found a recipe for success in adapting the popular Chinese video game The Legend of Sword and Fairy into the Chinese Paladin television series. Since debuting in 2009, Chinese Paladin 3, based on the third installment of the game, has topped the charts in multiple provinces, such as Hangzhou and Chengdu. The show is set in ancient China and embraces the fantastical side of the wuxia film genre. Midair sword fights, battles with an evil cult and a race to save the world from catastrophic destruction keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
Brazil: Big Brother Brazil
Currently in its 10th season, this Portuguese-language version of the Dutch original, popularized in so many countries, enjoys particularly wide audiences in Brazil. The Brazilian Big Brother house is judged to be one of the most extravagant of all BB houses, and several of its cast members have gone on to much larger careers, most notably Season 5 contestant Grazielli Massafera, who has appeared on more than 100 magazine covers and landed a scripted television role in a soap opera.
Looking Around Corners
By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
This week's cover, our third annual 10 Ideas issue, was itself a new idea: we joined with the New America Foundation to assess the most important concepts that will shape our world over the next decade. The New America Foundation, an 11-year-old nonpartisan think tank in Washington with Silicon Valley roots, emphasizes next-generation thinkers and ideas — and that's what you'll find inside.
There's often something quaint about old ideas of the future — moving sidewalks, cars with wings, jet packs! But for this project, we were less interested in exploring new technologies than new ideas, especially ideas that are not tethered to the next election cycle. And we wanted concepts that range across as many fields and disciplines as possible.
More than a year ago, I had lunch with Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation and a distinguished journalist himself, and we talked about projects we could do together. Time's Lev Grossman, who edited the cover package along with Romesh Ratnesar, started batting around ideas with Andrés Martinez, the director of the foundation's fellows program. In one sense, almost all the ideas are what we sometimes call conceptual scoops. In fact, the package begins with Martinez's essay "The Next American Century," which disputes the conventional wisdom that the U.S.'s best days are behind it.
Even though we cover many topics, there are some broad themes, including how we are adjusting to the new norms of an altered economy. This isn't a matter of just scaling back but also of reconceiving how we live. As Christopher Hayes writes in one of the issue's most passionately argued essays, it's not just the market that has changed. The entire edifice of trust in authority that supported American life has been shaken, and the challenge of the next decade is to rebuild what we can and reroute our lives around what we can't. Reihan Salam writes about how in the 2010s, more and more people will live off the grid, working in a new underground economy that will fill in the gaps of the old one. Gregory Rodriguez speculates that with America on its way to becoming a majority nonwhite nation by 2050, we may see an aggrieved white minority that feels threatened and disenfranchised. In the context of an often risk-averse economy, Megan McArdle writes that we should not let an economic downturn prevent us from trying and failing to start new businesses, because failure, particularly in America, is the key to our culture of innovation.
Stories about the future often paint a picture of wonders that do not exist today. But we've tried to look past the latest gadgets to the social, cultural and economic currents that shape technology. Charles Kenny writes that for many millions of people around the world, old-fashioned television, not iPads or Xboxes, is the next big thing. TV is still a massive agent of social change and, even more than the Internet, is regarded as subversive by totalitarian regimes. Finally, Michael Lind takes exception to the idea that we live in an age of transformation, maintaining that in the ways that really matter, we're still running on the technological innovations of the early 20th and even the late 19th centuries.
Ultimately, gadgets come and go, but it takes ideas to give them meaning and put them to work to make our lives better. This country was founded on an idea, one that will never be obsolete. Ideas were, are and always will be the next big thing.
From Time published on Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
