Nathan Gardels — Economist Editors: How To Fix Our Broken Democracy

Recently, the Berggruen Institute’s Dawn Nakagawa interviewed John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist about their new book, “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.” Micklethwait is The Economist’s editor-in-chief. Wooldridge is the magazine’s management editor and writes the Schumpeter column.

The WorldPost: The title of your book is “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.” What were the three earlier revolutions, and why do you see a fourth on the horizon?

John Micklethwait: Briefly, these three revolutions were the birth of the modern nation state, then the liberal state and then the welfare state.

Now that the welfare state has grown too large to afford, the fourth revolution involves forging a limited state that reduces costs, for example by applying new technology to the delivery of education and health care. This more limited state needs to engage citizens more deeply by devolving powers as much as possible toward localities. At the same time, certain decisions concerning the long-term and common good, such as monetary policy or getting entitlement spending under control, should be delegated to non-partisan technocrats or specially appointed commissions not beholden to raw public opinion, special interests or political patronage....

More neoliberal nonsense.  

This, then brings us to the fourth revolution, a kind of return in modern times to the liberal conception of the state that no longer believes in big government, but protects the individual while competently and efficiently delivering limited public goods.

We think the state is incredibly important: we don’t agree with libertarians who argue that he governs best who governs least. If it's incredibly important, you have to actually make it work better. And one of the ways to make it work better is to make it do fewer things. The state simply cannot afford to do everything and be a person’s perennial accomplice in life.

Otherwise, the state is going to run out of money. Since 2007, the West –- America and Europe -– has borrowed 16 trillion dollars! That simply can’t go on forever.

Half that amount is on Central Bank balance sheets, but the rest is for outright spending.

 Oh, the horror.

The other big reason for optimism is competition -- going right back to the first revolution of Western nation state in competition with each other. Today, the Western nation-state is in competition with another way of governing and providing services -- the Asian model of Singapore and China.

Which historically has usually led to conflict.

The future should, and probably will, lie with democracies and liberal capitalist countries, but only if those liberal capitalist countries get a bit fitter and shed our flabby and self-indulgent ways.

We need to shape up. That means shrinking the state a bit, making it smaller and more focused, and thus much better at providing services. More focus will actually make the state more legitimate in the eyes of voters, because it will stop promising more than it delivers.

"Soft" austerity.

The Huffington Post / World Post
Economist Editors: How To Fix Our Broken Democracy
Nathan Gardels