Fareed Zakaria: prediction

Transcript context

…I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback? Or is it just being plowed under by progressivism, wokeism, Trumpism, illiberalism, nationalism? Or are you leading a new trend? I wish I were leading a new trend, but I don’t think I am. I think the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies. If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West. I fear that that whole project is now under threat because of all the forces you described: populism from the right and the left, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that want to manipulate it to serve their purposes. Part of the reason is it’s just been so successful, that it is producing change and transformation — economically and socially and even personally and psychologically — on a scale that is so disruptive and so troubling to people that they search for solutions. If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists. They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history. What’s the most surprising thing you learned writing this book?…

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