Re: Where are we?

Description: How many people can the planet fit?

When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

WALT:             I think there are several.  I think . . .  I’ve already alluded to a couple.  I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living.  And I think the major constraint there is environmental.  The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios.  Does that end all life on the planet?  No.   But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world?  I think that’s . . . that’s there.  I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia.  The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so.  I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality (44:51) scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are.  And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people.  So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing.  Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world.  They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right?  The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means.  And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously.  So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable.  And I’d add one final little problem in there is the capacity for small groups of people to cause large amounts of destruction has gone up for a hundred years or so.  You think about what you needed to kill 3,000 people in an afternoon.  Well if you wanted to do that in 1900, you pretty much had to be a government with an army.  But now of course 18 people or 19 people can fly planes in and kill 3,000 people in an afternoon or a morning.  And if you marry that up with either biological weapons or some kind of crude nuclear device, again you could imagine terrorist groups or other non-state actors having much more destructive impact.  And that’s, I think, gonna be something we tend to worry about a lot over the next few decades.

HOPKINS:       (46:18) Now you raise an interesting point that I want to touch on quickly.  And there is this sort of a humanistic interest both in development as well as in environmentalism.  But do you think that these two issues are going to become oppositional?  And how might that play out?

Card: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

WALT:             I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially _________I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

HOPKINS:       (47:52) Right.  And do you think . . .  Where do you see that cultural change beginning?  Who do you think will drive it?

Card: What will change the way we think?

WALT:             I don’t know.  It’s . . .  I don’t know I . . .  But this gets sort of at some other questions about . . . about where revolutionary figures come from.  Revolutionary figures don’t always just come from either the ranks of, you know, sort of political activists.  They come from the arts.  They come from the scientific community.  They come from novelists.  You know I regard the Beatles as revolutionary figures in some respects, and they were musicians who came from Liverpool.  So I can’t really foresee who’s going to be . . . or who’s going to be the set of people that begin to sell this.  But I think it’s gonna be an . . . again, an issue that has to be confronted simply because there are some real limits.

HOPKINS:       (48:39) Now you spoke to this earlier and I wanna readdress it.  But you said that . . . that global . . . that American institutions in particular – and also that hinted a sense that global institutions as well in your viewpoint – aren’t ready to deal with these cultural, political shifts that are before us.  What needs to be done in your mind to ready ourselves for the challenges of globalization?

Card: Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

WALT:             Well the set of global institutions that we have now are all sort of leftover from World War II.  And they were created for particular contexts.  _________ the World Bank, the United Nations,     (49:15) particularly the structure of the Security Council.  And everybody understands that these are kind of outmoded in terms of either their membership or their powers.  What no one has done yet is been able to devise sort of, “Here’s the blueprint for how we should fix all of them.”  I think the biggest issue there, of course, is you have to devise a set of institutions that are sufficiently inclusive of the new power centers, right?  A Security Council in which India is excluded in 2030 doesn’t make a whole lots of sense to me.  A Security Council in which Brazil is not a player, again, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So one part of it is just reforming the overall global architecture.

                            (49:58) The second part of it, which I can only sort of point to – I can’t give you the answer – is that I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled.  This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast.  And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information.  You could buy a newspaper.  You could buy a broadcasting network.  You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that.  And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less.  I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard.  Not all of them, right?  The blo

Description: How many people can the planet fit?

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: I think there are several.  I think . . .  I’ve already alluded to a couple.  I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living.  And I think the major constraint there is environmental.  The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios.  Does that end all life on the planet?  No.   But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world?  I think that’s . . . that’s there.  I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia.  The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so.  I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are.  And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people.  So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing.  Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world.  They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right?  The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means.  And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously.  So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable.  And I’d add one final little problem in there is the capacity for small groups of people to cause large amounts of destruction has gone up for a hundred years or so.  You think about what you needed to kill 3,000 people in an afternoon.  Well if you wanted to do that in 1900, you pretty much had to be a government with an army.  But now of course 18 people or 19 people can fly planes in and kill 3,000 people in an afternoon or a morning.  And if you marry that up with either biological weapons or some kind of crude nuclear device, again you could imagine terrorist groups or other non-state actors having much more destructive impact.  And that’s, I think, gonna be something we tend to worry about a lot over the next few decades. 

Question: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

Transcript: I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially diminution I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

Question: What will change the way we think?

Transcript: I don’t know.  It’s . . .  I don’t know I . . .  But this gets sort of at some other questions about . . . about where revolutionary figures come from.  Revolutionary figures don’t always just come from either the ranks of, you know, sort of political activists.  They come from the arts.  They come from the scientific community.  They come from novelists.  You know I regard the Beatles as revolutionary figures in some respects, and they were musicians who came from Liverpool.  So I can’t really foresee who’s going to be . . . or who’s going to be the set of people that begin to sell this.  But I think it’s gonna be an . . . again, an issue that has to be confronted simply because there are some real limits. 

Question: Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

Transcript: Well the set of global institutions that we have now are all sort of leftover from World War II.  And they were created for particular contexts.  I’m thinking of the World Bank, the United Nations, particularly the structure of the Security Council.  And everybody understands that these are kind of outmoded in terms of either their membership or their powers.  What no one has done yet is been able to devise sort of, “Here’s the blueprint for how we should fix all of them.”  I think the biggest issue there, of course, is you have to devise a set of institutions that are sufficiently inclusive of the new power centers, right?  A Security Council in which India is excluded in 2030 doesn’t make a whole lots of sense to me.  A Security Council in which Brazil is not a player, again, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So one part of it is just reforming the overall global architecture. The second part of it, which I can only sort of point to – I can’t give you the answer – is that I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled.  This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast.  And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information.  You could buy a newspaper.  You could buy a broadcasting network.  You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that.  And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less.  I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard.  Not all of them, right?  The blogosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads.  But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions.  And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well.  But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

gosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads.  But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions.  And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well.  But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.