Welcome.

I'm David Kertzer.

I'm happy to welcome you to this event.

It's actually the first in a series of activities

that we've organized jointly between the Watson

Institute and the Population Studies and Training Center

as we explored initiative in political and demography

at Brown.

And our guest today is one of the most active promulgators

of that field and one of the most influential people

in that field, Jack Goldstone.

Jack is currently the Hazel Professor

of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George

Mason University.

He began his career teaching at Northwestern University

throughout most of the 1980s, then moved on

to University of California Davis,

where he was professor of sociology

and international relations from 1989

until 2004, when he moved to George Mason.

He's held a series of visiting positions.

I won't list them here.

I'll just mention last year he was

in Hong Kong involved in consulting

on forming a public policy program in Hong Kong.

But he held in-- let's see, what was it-- in 2011,

the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished

Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.

And I hope you realize that Holbrooke was a Brown alumnus.

So we have some connection anyway there, however indirect.

Jack has won many awards for his work

and his publications, his books and articles

in political sociology, historical and comparative

sociology.

I won't go through those.

He's also been deeply involved in the application

of social science to the policy world

and has consulted for various US an international governmental

and NGO organizations.

Among his many important books, I'll just mention a couple--

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World

that the University of California Press

published a number of years ago, then in 2008, Why Europe,

The Rise of the Western World History from 1500 to 1850.

So as you see, Jack thinks big, which we appreciate.

He's also, as I mentioned, the author

of a number of influential works on political demography

and promoting the further work in political demography.

I'll Just mention here his recent co-edited volume titled,

Political Demography, How Population Changes are

Reshaping International Security and National

Politics that Oxford University Press published.

His talk today, after which we'll

have the usual opportunity for questions, which I'll

ask Jack to handle directly, his title

is "A World in Revolution, the Inevitable Backlash

Against Global Elites."

Please join me in welcoming our guest, Jack.

Thank you very much, David.

And it's a real pleasure to be here.

I thank so many of you for coming

to this talk when you could be waiting for the latest

update on current events.

It seems like almost hourly there's something

that grabs our attention.

But I'm going to try and do the reverse here,

and that is to step back and place what's

happening in the world today in a longer-term context.

I actually thought about what might

be happening when I did the first edition of this book.

It's now out in second edition just last month.

It's called Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern

World.

But the argument that it makes, first,

is that population trends make a big difference in driving

cycles of instability.

But the bigger point is that cycles of political instability

are not driven by kind of a long-term movement

toward progress.

They're not driven by some inevitable conflict of forces.

They're driven by the ability of institutions

to adapt to the demands that we put upon them.

And I believe that for the last 20 or 30 years,

the institutions of the post-world War II global order

have been failing.

And so the wave of political changes

that we're seeing across the world now

should not be a shock, although some of the individuals

may command all the attention.

I think if Donald Trump had not become president,

I'd still be giving a very similar to today.

It might have been about President Sanders.

It might have been about something else.

But what we're seeing everywhere is

a collapse of what had been the mainstream political center.

So in France, the main political parties now

appear to be out of the race.

It looks like Marine Le Pen is going to be

one of the main protagonists.

And the other, Macron, is from someone

who started a new political party essentially

in just the last couple of years.

We've seen in Britain, the Labour Party go through

something of an internal collapse under Jeremy Corbyn.

They're losing constituencies they've never lost.

And yet the Tory Party itself was

driven into a kind of sudden disgrace with Brexit

that vote and David Cameron's sudden resignation from office.

So if you're a mainstream party politician these days

almost anywhere in the world, you're either

changing the dialogue yourself or you're

having it taken away from you.

So how did this come about?

Well, I actually wrote in the first edition of this book

about revolution and rebellion, there

was a chapter, now expanded for the new edition,

on the decline of the United States.

And what I wrote is that nations that

had been the richest countries in their day

and suffered fiscal crises because elites preferred

to protect their private wealth got into trouble.

The elites would separate into competing factions

and starve the national state of resources

that were needed for public improvements

and international competitiveness.

I wrote that factionalism within the elites paralyzed decision

making and struggles for prestige and authority

took precedence over a united approach.

Now I wrote that 20 years before we had the sequester.

But that was what we saw coming.

When you have struggles between different elite factions to put

their own interest in escaping taxation ahead of all else,

you cannot govern.

And the results are growing public debts,

even as private individuals become enormously richer.

And at the same time, basic public services

that support the economy as a whole

are neglected, overburdened, and deteriorating.

Now how did I see that coming?

This was written in 1991.

We had a baby boom.

The baby boom generation was moving into the workforce.

And one of two things were going to happen.

We were either going to greatly increase productivity, so

that the output of goods and services

would grow enough that taxation didn't have to expand

and the government would still be

able to provide all of the infrastructure and public goods

that a rapidly expanding workforce would need.

Or, and this is what I've seen in countries

that ran into revolutionary problems in the past,

you'd have a struggle in which the government would not

raise taxes as needed to keep up with this demographic change,

productivity would falter, wages would stagnate,

and incomes would become polarized while government

would become dysfunctional.

And that is what has indeed come to pass.

And I say the key element in this decay--

and people have sometimes said, well, this

is the decline of the West.

It's a decline of America's manufacturing.

We just have to fix this or that.

I don't believe that's true.

I think what happened was an erosion of public institutions

and public services.

And this decay threatens to undermine the foundations that

supported American economic growth for the first three

quarters of the century.

And I wrote, "If unchecked, the long-term results,

which are now only slightly apparent,

will be a relative decline in living standards,

freedom of decision, and international position

of the US."

Now, is the US still the most powerful country in the world?

Yes, I don't want to be accused of overstating or being

a decline.

However, the advantage that the United States

and particularly that the average citizen of the United

States has with regard to the global income distribution

has certainly deteriorated.

Now that was the a lot of text up there.

I won't do that again.

Don't worry.

We have shorter bullet points now.

So what happened?

We've seen rising inequality to be sure.

And a lot of people have pointed to that.

But I don't believe in equality per se is the social problem

that people think it is.

Why do I say that?

Because people judge their life opportunities in comparison

to the people they know.

They look at their families, their friends, their parents,

their children.

And that's where they judge, are things getting better or worse?

Frankly, it's irrelevant to them whether billionaires

have 95 foot yachts or 125 yachts or 150 yachts,

or whether they have gold fixtures in their bathrooms

or not.

What matters is, do they see their own lives getting better?

And that we have not seen.

Instead, in the last 20 years, we've

seen stagnant real incomes for about half of Americans.

The other half have still continued to move forward.

But about half of Americans have seen virtually stagnant incomes

and, this is important, a decline in social mobility.

Stanford recently came out with a new study

showing that the proportion of people

who could count on having higher incomes than their parents

has fallen from about 80% to 45%.

That is it used to be most people who did reasonably well

could look forward to living with more

resources than their parents and their children more than them.

And that was a great source of faith in the future.

But when it's now less than half of people

do better than their parents, and they're

worried that their kids may not do better than themselves, that

takes away faith in the future.

We have had a changing labor market.

And a lot of people talk about, well, you know,

we'll bring manufacturing jobs back,

or we'll train people for higher tech jobs.

It's actually more complicated than that

because we've had a shift in the nature of the labor market

itself.

The service sector is now dominant.

So Wal-Mart employs about 2 million people domestically.

All the major auto firms in the US

together employ about 50,000 hourly workers.

So what happens to Wal-Mart in terms of productivity

and wages, their labor force, that's

more of the exemplar of what's happening than what

happens to workers at General Motors or Cummins

or Caterpillar.

Service sector suffers from great difficulties

in raising people's productivity.

There are things that can be done, but for service jobs,

whether it's retail, food preparation, tourism,

medical care, even university teaching,

it's not as easy to simply amplify productivities

by adding power tools or by mechanizing processes.

It's true that I no longer have a secretary

since we have wordprocessing.

I have to do all my own correspondence and book

all of my own travel.

That saves the university a secretary.

But I don't think it makes me any more

productive as a teacher, as a faculty member.

So we've seen efforts to bring automation

to the social sector, but we haven't really succeeded.