tv Fareed Zakaria GPS CNN July 21, 2013 7:00am-8:01am PDT
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last year i won an award given by the american newswomans club of the i had not seen helen for some time. she was frail and the sheer effort it must have taken for her to get there overwhelmed me. i hugged her and thanked her for coming. she had that "i'm up to something" smile of hers and told me i wouldn't have missed it. i'm so proud of you. good for you. helen thomas had a full life. she did not live perfectly, but she lived passionately and she made a difference. thank you, helen, for hacking your way through the thicket to make a path for the rest of us. thank you for being my friend. this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. you hear all the talk of paralysis and partisanship, but underneath all that clamor, is america back? for most of this year, markets
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have been going up, debt and deficits down, and growth is steady. so why are so many people still unemployed? and what about the dangers to growth from abroad, from europe, from china? i've got a great panel and they don't agree on much of this. also, american football starts in just two weeks, and the celebrated thinker and writer malcolm gladwell has a controversial proposal. he says we should shut down college football. just end it across the country. why? because he says it is damaging students' brains. plus one of the world's most popular presidents faces the end to his honeymoon. i'll explain. finally, how do you showcase the mood of an entire nation? especially when it's a nation of ov over one billion people. here is one beautiful idea. but first here's my take. we are all going to watch over the next year or two one of history's great political experiments. it will test the proposition
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does authorize tear january capitalism work. for the past few decades the chinese economy's meteoric rise, faster than any economy in human history, has dafld the world. it's made many people wonder if china's model of a pro-growth dictatorship is the best path for developing countries. some have even wondered whether western democracies with their dysfunctions and paralysis can ever compete with china's long-range planning. now, as china's growth slows to almost half its pace in 2007, its political system faces its most significant test. over the past three decades, china's growth has averaged 10% a year. crucial to beijing's success has been its ability not to pander to its people to gain votes or approval. you see, unlike most developing nations, china spends little money subsidizing current consumption, fuel and food subsidy, for example. instead it spends massively on
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export-free soens, highways, airports. it is investing in education and training and soon will turn to health care. no developing democracy has been able to ignore short-term political pressures and execute a disciplined growth strategy with such success. but the chinese model is no longer working that well. partly this is a product of success. china has become the world's second largest economy. its per capita income is that of a middle income country. it cannot grow at the pace it did when it was much poorer. but growth has dropped faster and deeper than many predicted, and it could slow further because the truth is china's authoritarian system has made some significant mistakes in recent years. when the financial crisis hit in 2007 and growth began to drop from a giddy 14%, beijing responded with a huge expansion of credit and a massive stimulus program. as a percentage of gdp, it was twice as large as the 2009
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stimulus bill in america. these two forces have created dangerous imbalances. to economists the solution is obvious. stop favoring state-owned be he muts and exporters, open up the economy, encourage the chinese people to spend more money at home. but all the sib sydys to companies in the past decade have made entrenched strees and sectors that resist any change. can beijing turn off the tap in the face of opposition from economically powerful groups, many of whom are politically well connected, even related to members of its bureau. it could be made by its leaders. li keqiang has given speeches that would open up sectors of the economy to the market, reduce the state's role, provide incentives for domestic consumption. the question is whether these goals can be met and whether the
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reforms will be implemented after opposition gathers, as it surely will. reform is hard in any country, as can be seen from italy to brazil to india, countries are very reluctant to impose short-term pain for long-term gain. china has been the exception to this rule, but now it faces its biggest test. success will suggest that there is still life in its unique brand of authoritarian capitalism and will extend the power of its ruling communist party. and if it fails, well, china becomes just another emerging market with a model that worked for a while. for more go to cnn.com/fareed. there is a link to my column in the "washington post" this week. let's get started. when we look around the world, the emerging markets are slumping, europe is stagnant, japan is finally moving but it
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could be another false start. the one place that does seem to be growing steadily is the united states of america. why? i've got a very smart panel who will tell me if that's true, and if not, explain everything. glenn hubbard was mitt romney's chief economic adviser. he is the dean of the business school at columbia and the author of "balance the economics of great powers from ancient rome to modern america." rona fruha is cnn's global economic analyst. ed luce and zachary carrabell writes the edgy optimist column for reuters and the atlantic. all right, zach, tell me, is this a story of kind of american resilience and bounce-back? >> first of all, it's a story of an economy that is essentially muddling through. in a world that four years ago thought that it was going to implode, muddling through and having the space to think about future problems is not a bad
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thing. it's not the economy that americans dreamed should be their economy. it's not this world of endless prosperity opening up like a funnel going forward and that sense of limitations i think is a cultural issue. we need to separate the cultural issue which is we don't have the economy we had 30 years ago with the structural issue. we have a very stable system that has lots of flaws and problems but is certainly not going to implode, is likely to modestly expand and should at least give us the space to deal with all these issues of health care and immigration reform and wealth inequalities. >> and the american private sector is extraordinarily resilient. it manages to adjust its balance sheet, it sheds jobs when it needs to, it adjusts. >> it does. you know, if you stripped out the government and the public sector, you would be closer to a 3% economy right now. the private sector numbers have been great. last monday's job numbers were really stellar. i think it's a bifurcated recovery.
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there are jobs at the top and a lot at the bottom. eight of the ten fastest growing category of jobs tend to be low paying. you're still as zachary says in a rather sluggish recovery. this recovery has taken longer than any of the past three and it's going to be 15 months more before we reach pre-crisis job creation. >> glenn, bernanke addressed this issue of stripping government out of this. for the first time i thought was pretty clear that the federal government's cut backs, the sequester, have been bad for the economy. he said if not for this, if government spending were what sort of it should be, there might be a percent or maybe a percent and a half more growth. so he's saying we're growing at 2%. we could be growing at 3.5%. strikes me as a pretty tough critique of the republican party, which has been insistent on all these cuts. >> well, it is a tough critique and i think it's a fair one from chairman bernanke. we have a fiscal policy that's
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oriented toward near-term austerity but not about solving long-term problems. i think if you really probed what ben was saying to the congress, it was look at the long term. let's get things right. don't be so obsessed about the near term. congresses, please act and stop asking me to do all the acting. the economy is sluggish and we could be doing better. >> ed, you took this even one step further and said this whole obsession with debts and deficits that started with simpson-bowles might have been completely wrong. one way i read your column was to say if simpson-bowles had their fantasy and their plan had been enacted, it would have been a terrible thing. >> not necessarily for the long term. there is a long-term debt problem in the u.s., don't get me wrong. but the impact of short-term austerity here in the last 18 months, particularly this year with sequestration and with the expiring of the payroll tax cut has -- i mean we're in danger of all agreeing here, but has slowed this recovery unnecessarily. it's taken a point off it.
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and that, of course, has dilatory u.s. impact on the deficit. >> there's a degree to which some of that government cutting is a good thing done ineptly. why we should have defense spending geared toward two wars in a world no one is attempting to fight one conventional one so there's cutting that can be done there. so much of the u.s. economy is within the nongovernmental sector, much less than in europe of the and that remains fairly vibrant. i think this may look optically bad, i detracts from this thing called economic growth and gdp but it could be constructive. >> we need to see are private companies going to start to invest more strongly and you're starting to see that in things like shale gas and the energy sector in america which is going to create a boom and manufacturing as well. i think also housing will be very, very important because most americans still keep moest of their wealth in housing. >> is it going to go up?
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>> ooin that's the question. the next couple of months you may see a little pull back as a result of mortgage rates going up. >> in order to get investment, we really have to improve business confidence. there's plenty of profits. there's plenty of wealth to support higher investment. what there's not is the confidence in business leaders. i think that requires this long-term move. i agree that the near term deficit news is welcome and positive, but it frankly, the long-term news is still bad. >> i think business confidence is one of the great today naurds business leaders use saying this is why we're not spending. a few years ago it was impasse in washington. i think there's less investment because businesses are making a lot of money and they're fully capable of making the kind of profits they're making without investing heavily in infrastructure or in hiring. >> i think that's a crucial point. the growth prospects of america's top companies are disconnected in some ways from america itself and that's very important. >> because they can find demand around the world. >> they're globally hedged. >> but u.s. demand can be
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improved too. i think that's what business leaders are saying. >> we've got to take a break. there's lots more ahead. malcolm gladwell is on the show and he makes the case for something that might strike you as crazy, boycotting college football. it's a pretty compelling argument. up next, more with our panel. we've talked about the u.s. economy. now we'll look at how the rest of the world is doing and how it affects us here. we'll be right back. atlanta, and chicago, we're revving people up to take a lap around the legendary nascar race track with drivers from the coca-cola racing family. coca-coca family track walks give thousands of race fans the chance to get out, get moving, and have fun... all along the way. it's part of our goal to inspire more than three million people to rediscover the joy of being active this summer. see the difference all of us can make... together. i'to guard their manhood with trnew depend shields and guards. the discreet protection that's just for guys. now, it's your turn.
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we are back with glenn hubbard, rana, ed luce and zachary karabell. china. is the chinese economy going to slow even more than it is and won't that have huge ripple effects? zach, you used to run a china fund, because it seems to me that china is basically the world's manufacturer. and it is the world's importer of commodities. so you take those two forces and you say you're going to suddenly slow those down. there's going to be much less importing of all these commodities around the world, bad for brazil, bad for australia, and much more manufacture of goods. >> some of that will happen and will happen but it's happening
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by intent and by design. it's not as if the model ran aground and suddenly the chinese are going, oh, my god, we're not making what we should be making and the system is falling apart. this is a managed transition from an economy driven by exactly what you mentioned, irchgts e. exports, manufacturing and extra structure to an economy that's supposed to be grounded on the activity of 1.4 billion chinese consumers. that transition is not going to happen as if you flip a switch and you're going to go from one economy to the next. but you have to assume that either it's going to implode, which a lot of people think, or the technocratic leadership is capable of managing that transition just as they managed the transition to the economy you mentioned. while that may put pressure on various aspects of the world, brazil has got to find a sustaining model as does australia, as does canada, pe ru, chile and the chinese need a domestic base of consumption in order to succeed long term. >> so you're not as worried. you think they will manage this transition?
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>> you know, i think it's the most important moment since the 1980s when they opened up markets. i was in china reporting recently, and i was cautiously optimistic, i would say. two things strike me. the fact that they're not jumping in with a big stimulus plan is actually ironically a good sign. it means they're willing to take some short-term pain in order to make this transition. there are also other things happening. there's reform of the migration system. more rights are being given to migrant workers so there are steps that are saying we're trying to get to a consumption economy. >> what does your book tell you about china? >> i'm much more nervous about china. the transition that's being managed would be much better in a, quote, resilient economy, while we were talking about before the break, where individual financial institutions and entrepreneurs were managing it. the history of governments managing difficult transitions like this is somewhat mixed. i think there's a real risk in the chinese financial system. >> i think one important point to stress is the president has
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been in since march and how much more dynamic a figure he is an hu jintao. it's very clear that they have diagnosed what the problem is. they know what needs to be done. he has ten years in office. he knows he has ten years in office. this is one sort of process that works and is predictable in china is term limits. and he's got ten years to structurally transform this economy and that's a good place to start. >> the other thing he needs to do which is very difficult is what you were saying, the financial reform. because one of the things in order to create a domestic consumption economy, you have to give the chinese the ability to take their excess income and spend it on something other than real estate, stocks and gambling and that requires financial reform, banking reform and dealing with interests. >> let me ask you about europe. this is the dog that hasn't barked. since everyone has assumed europe will collapse, the euro will fail, but somehow they sort of muddle along. can they keep going? >> well, they can keep muddling
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along, but look at the cost of it. the eurozone is in a recession. the labor markets are in shambles. there's a failure to, again, like we were talking about in the united states deal with long-term issues and excessive focus on short-term fiscal issues. i'm very worried about -- >> but austerity here and in europe. >> i don't think the problem for europe or the united states is today's budget situation. it's a glide path toward a better budget situation. it says a lot about politics. the politicians are more willing to put the economy in a recession than to really tackle serious long-term problems. >> that's a very important thing. so they cut stuff now because to cut the big benefits, the pensions and health care, that's much harder politically. what about the politics of all this? what i'm struck by is if you had said to me five years ago, there's going to be 50% youth unemployment in spain, probably some number close to that in italy, 50% unemployment in some parts of greece, wouldn't you
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see the rise of massive protests, nationalist parties, socialist parties? and in fact while there's been some of that, the real story in europe is there hasn't been that much sustained organized protests that is overturning political systems. >> there has been sort of a progressive fragmentation of politics. you're seeing more and more coalition governments, weaker and weaker governments and the rise of anti-politics, not just in italy but in france, britain, in many places. and that's worrying. but yeah, facism i think has had its day and i don't think that's except in places like greece, that's not really a significant force and i hope it remain that say way. >> last word, zach. >> europe is going test this presumption. if you have a shrinking population with sufficient affluence, why should you have growth, right? and the whole model that we live in, the whole political model, the whole economic is pred dated on growth is normative, growth is good. europe has huge issues and we've talked about all of them. but it's a stable, affluent
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society by any spectrum of hum existence over history. so what exactly should the model be going forward. >> does europe want to be a giant venith? i think it has more ambition than that. >> very nice place to visit, one of the world's greatest. thank you, all. lots more ahead on "gps." would you be okay if your kids had to double their way to play a sport that would then destroy their brains? malcolm gladwell says we're doing that to other people's kids by supporting college football. but up next, what in the world. a world leader that has managed to get his opposition to support all of his legislative moves. how did he do it? what can washington learn? we'll be right back. efficient trucking networks," "with safe, experienced drivers." "we work directly with manufacturers," "eliminating costly markups," "and buy directly from local farmers in every region of the country."
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now for our "what in the world" sg meant. elected leaders around the world are struggling. they're down in the polls, their economies are stagnant, their people are protesting and their oppositions are betting on their failure. there is, however, one leader who has seemingly bucked that trend, and it's not by jailing his opposition or shutting down the press. he's the president of a free democratic capitalist country.
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is this person superman? i'm talking about the young and highly successful president of mexico, enrique pena nieto. just compare him with our president. obama's approval ratings recently hit their lowest since 2011. 45%. seven months into the job, pena nieto is sitting pretty at 57%. and it's not just average mexicans who have given their president an extended honeymoon. the opposition has as well. two major rival parties joined pena nieto to form what they called a pact for mexico. together they put through a ground-breaking set of reforms and education, telecoms and tv. just this week the government announced an infrastructure deal worth $316 billion to build roads and railways. imagine that happening in washington, where we spend months deciding whether or not we should have filibusters. drug-related homicides are down
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in mexico 18% during pena nieto's term. this week local authorities brought down the leader of a deadly zeta cartel. it's been an extraordinary start to a presidency and it comes at a time when experts are hailing mexico's rise. tom friedman says that mexico could be one of the 21st century's big economic successes. of course on this show, we have been championing mexico's prospects for the last two years. but signs are emerging that perhaps pena nieto's honeymoon is coming to an end. let me explain. it all goes back to that pact for mexico i mentioned earlier. across party lines to push through much-needed reforms. now it faces a hurdle, energy. one company has a complete monopoly over mexico's oil and gas. state-owned pemex. its hold over drilling is enshrined in mexico's constitution. but like many state-owned behe
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muts it's an ailing, failed enterprise. its production is below par. it literally fuels corruption. therein lies the problem. any attempt to reform the sector is being rejected not only by the opposition parties but also by factions within pena nieto's own party. pressure is building. local elections turned sour last week with allegations of corruption, with the opposition parties threatening to abandon the alliance altogether. the irony is that perhaps pena nieto is a victim of his own success. democracy is catching up with him. the opposition wants to be an opposition. now, it would be a real tragedy if the president's reform plans fall apart. we all know they make economic sense. but this is how politics works. there are competing interests, there are oppositions and democracy, not everyone wants to pull in the same direction. so it's honeymoon over and back to reality.
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maybe pena nieto should come up north and we will explain to him how to live in a world of polarization, paralysis and gridlock. up next, the case for banning a great american pastime, college football. sounds outlandish? not if you listen to malcolm gladwell. >> why on earth are you playing this 19th century game? designed for women's health concerns as we age. it has 7 antioxidants to support cell health. one a day 50+. these chevys are moving fast. i'll take that malibu. yeah excuse me, the equinox in atlantis blue is mine! i was here first, it's mine. i called about that one, it's mine. mine! mine. it's mine. it's mine. mine. mine. mine. mine. it's mine! no it's not, it's mine! better get going, it's chevy model year-end event. [ male announcer ] the chevy model year-end event. the 13s are going fast, time to get yours. right now, get this great lease on a 2013 chevy cruse ls for around $149 a month.
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i'm candy crowley in washington with a check of the headlines. al qaeda affiliated groups are gaining strength in syria. that's the assessment from the deputy director of the u.s. defense intelligence agency. he says islamic militants that have pledged allegiance to al qaeda have been the most successful against syrian government forces. the obama administration has said it will increase military aid to some groups of syrian rebels. israel says it's ready to resume peace talks with the palestinians. the country is laying the groundwork for that by promising to release a limited number of palestinian prisoners as a, quote, good will gesture. a senior palestinian official tells cnn his side still has a lot of questions to be answered, but secretary of state john kerry says both sides could be in washington within the next week or so for talks. the u.s. military dropped four bombs near australia's
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great barrier reef. two marine planes were forced to jetson the bombs because they were running out of fuel and could not land with the amount of equipment on board. two of the bombs were disarmed before they were dropped. the other two were nonexplosive. australia's great barrier roef is a habitat for animals threatened by extinction. "reliable sources" is at the top of the hour. now back to fareed zakaria "gps." nothing is more american han football and it's not just the nation's most popular sport, it's big business even for america's colleges, where athletes are recruited to play in televised spectacles. if the football program of the university of texas were a stand-alone business and if it were for sale, it would be worth more than $760 million. others aren't far behind. that's according to ryan brewer, a professor at indiana university who conducted an exhaustive study of the economics of 115 college
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football teams. with valuations like these, do you think these schools would consider suddenly just shutting down the programs? well, that's what malcolm gladwell wants colleges to do, shut down their football teams. why? he makes a compelling case that is worth hearing. listen in to my conversation with the long-time "new yorker" staff writer and best-selling author of "the tipping point outliars" and the forthcoming book "david & goliath, underdogs, misfits and the art of battling giants." malcolm gladwell, pleasure to have you on. >> it's good to be back. >> what got you interested in football? >> well, i -- i mean for starters, i'm a football fan. and so i have -- but recently i've become aware of how like many people, of how morally problematic being a football fan has become. >> why? what did you start noticing? >> well, i became -- all of this
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stuff on the neurological consequences -- potential neurological consequences of playing football has started to bubble up in the last couple of years and that adds to a whole series of other concerns that have been around for much longer, which is that playing football at an elite level, in college or at the pro level, has all kinds of long-term health consequences. we know from doing long-term epidemiological studies that there's a rate of injury, a rate of disability, a rate of early death. all these kinds of things that are associated with both the massive weight gain and also the consequences of banging into each other on the field over and over again. added to that now, there is all of this, i think, powerfully suggestive evidence that some portion of football players are going to come down with a serious degenerative
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neurological disorder known as cte, which is directly the consequence of being hit in the head repeatedly over the course of playing football. and at a certain point you have to ask yourself as a fan or as anyone who is in any way connected to football, is that -- is it appropriate in the modern day and age for us to support and participate in a game that has such a serious risk of physical harm to its players. >> you compare football to dog fighting. why? >> yeah, i did a piece for the "new yorker" a couple of years ago where i said this was at the time when michael vick was convicted of dogfighting. and to me that was such a kind of -- and the whole world got up in arms about this. how could he use dogs in a violent manner, in a way that compromised their health and integrity. i was just struck at the time by
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the unbelievable hypocrisy of people in football, for goodness sake, getting up in arms about someone who chose to fight dogs, to pit one dog against each other. in what way is dogfighting any different from football on a certain level, right? you take a young, vulnerable dog who is made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner. and you ask him to engage in serious, sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right? well, what's football? we take young -- take young boys essentially and we have them repeatedly over the course of the season smash each other in the head, right? with known neurological consequences. and why do they do that? out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling that they're participating in some grand american spectacle. they're the same thing. the idea that as a culture we would be absolutely quick and sure about coming to the moral
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boiling point over the notion that you would do this to dogs and yet completely blind over the notion that you would do this to young men is to my mind astonishing. so there's a certain point where i just said, you know, we have to say enough is enough. >> and describe the neurological damage. because there are these studies, and you're right, they have proliferated, certainly the last five years we have critical massive studies. >> so what we have begun to do is it starts -- there is a condition known as cte, which is -- was seen first in boxers and now has been seen in football players. basically it's been seen in any situation where people are repeatedly subjected to blows to the head. the difficulty with cte is that it is at the present time can only be diagnosed upon autopsy. so we have no idea what percentage of living former boxers or present boxers or
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football players or hockey players are carrying around this kind of degenerative neurological disorder. it is a disorder which is similar but not identical to alzheimer's. the difference being it has a different neurological consequence. it affects the brain in a different way. and it seems to be much more aggressive. so you can see neurological degeneration in ex-football players starting in their 40s or even their 30s. we've seen it in football players who were at young as 20 or 21. we've seen it in teenagers. there appear to be some percent of the population that appears to be especially susceptible to it. so you and i could both play football, could both be hit on the head 10,000 times and you could be totally fine and i could suffer from this horrible condition in my 30s. and that's why when we see it in teenagers, we know there must be an extreme form of susceptibility, which means that you only need to be hit on the head a relatively small number
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of times before you begin to show those symptoms. >> and you add to cte, as you said, the other physical damage that having these very large, almost deliberately bulked up people crashing into each other. >> you can't play offensive lineman in the nfl now unless you are well over 300 pounds. we see linemen who are now 350 pounds. well, these are people whose natural weight is probably 200, 210. so we're adding 140 pounds of playing weight over the course of five and ten years. we're starting in high school. there are now high school offensive and defensive linemen who are north of 300 pounds. the long-term health consequences of that kind of extraordinary weight gain in your teens and 20s are known and devastating. i mean you would -- if i were to say to you i would like to take your children and i would like to double their weight over the course of the next five years so they can play a game, what would your reaction be? you would say that's insane,
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right? why would i do that to my child? and yet we're doing this routinely. >> we're going to talk about what we can do about this in a realistic manner in we come back. more with malcolm gladwell when we come back. the legendary nascar race track with drivers from the coca-cola racing family. coca-coca family track walks give thousands of race fans the chance to get out, get moving, and have fun... all along the way. it's part of our goal to inspire more than three million people to rediscover the joy of being active this summer. see the difference all of us can make... together.
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and we are back with malcolm gladwell, who wants college students to start boycotting football games. how can institutions of higher learning devoted to the building up of the human mind be at the same time encouraging a sport that we now know, he says, destroys the human brain. you gave a speech at the university of pennsylvania that's become a kind of youtube sensation. >> what level of proof do we need -- >> what did you say in that speech? >> well, i was invited to give this talk to the undergraduates about the subject of proof. and so i gave a talk which said how much proof do we need about the dangers of some activity before we act? and my argument was that there are times when our demand for proof is inappropriately high. when something that we're doing is not essential, it should only take the suspicion of some kind
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of harmful consequence for us to stop doing it. and i said to them, look, football, college football at a place like penn fits that definition. you don't need a lot of proof, a lot of evidence about the potential risks of football for the kids at penn playing football to stop playing it. there's no reason to play a dangerous, violent game at the university of pennsylvania, right? this is not a school that defines itself by its athletic prowess. it's not a school that depends on football to be some central part of its culture or fund-raising effort. it's a school that wants to be a world class institutional institution that attracts brilliant students from around the world. why on earth are you playing this violent 19th century game? and by the way, the kicker is that two years ago the captain of the penn football team committed suicide. and when they did an autopsy on his brain, what did they discover? cte. >> which is this neurological -- >> the same neurological
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disorder which we were seeing over and over again, now in football players. so here the university had direct experience with the pathological effects of the game of football such that this otherwise happy, healthy, the captain of their team, a guy who was beloved, a guy who had not a whisper of depression in his past, one day goes and hangs himself in his dorm room. they do the autopsy and they find his brain looks like the brain of an 80-year-old with alzheimer's. and what did the school do after this event happened? nothing. nothing. which i just find so morally outrageous. this is what i said to the kids. what are you doing? how did you let your administration get away with this? why didn't you kick it -- why didn't you picket the gates of the football stadium on saturdays and saying nobody should be going in and watching a spectacle.
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we're not watching the glade yarts in roman times. we're more sophisticated than this. one of us died as a result of this game. >> and you don't buy the argument that this is important for part of the culture, alumni relations, fund-raising? >> if penn -- if an elite ivy league school like penn needs to play a 19th century brutal game of football in order to buttress its culture, then they have the wrong culture, right? it's just an anachronism that no one has had the courage to say enough, it is inappropriate in this day and age to be doing this. the pro game is another matter, but there is just do conceivable argument to continue to practice this inhumane spectacle. >> you think college presidents, particularly colleges like harvard, yale, penn, should just get out of this business? >> i see absolutely no reason why any school that has -- and not just ivy league schools, any
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college anywhere in this country or any other country that has even a remote -- has even a remote desire to be -- to have a serious academic mission, they should not be playing sports which have neurological consequences for their students. i mean is that -- is this such an outrageous request? right? >> educational institution that is meant to be building your brain, you shouldn't be encouraging people to play sports that destroy the brain? >> that seems to be reasonable. >> you want kids to boycott college football. are you having any -- the speech was a youtube sensation. when you getting any traction? >> i'm not done yet. what has to happen for this crusade to work, and i think there's a -- it's not just me, there's a whole rising chorus on this subject. but what has to happen is for one prominent school has got to drop the sport, right? and when that happens, i think there will be a domino effect.
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but that school has got to be harvard or penn or the great prize of stanford. stanford, you know, which has invested in its football program like no other elite school, stanford has got to walk away. if stanford walked away, i think that it would put a dagger in the heart of college football of the and, you know, the way to do this, i haven't done this yet, but all those big-name donors to stanford, people who give the google guys on down the line who give serious money, you've just got to say, look, this is inappropriate. i'm giving money to make this into an elite intellectual institution. it's inappropriate to take the resources i'm investing in and squandering them on the football field. that's what has to happen. >> malcolm gladwell, pleasure to have you on. >> pleasure. we called the university of pennsylvania to ask if it had done anything to combat head injuries and cte in its football program. an athletic spokesman said that two years ago they did make
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changes, but he couldn't say if the changes were related to owen thomas' passing. the main action penn took along with the rest of the ivy league was to limit the number of full contact football practices per week. during the regular season, for instance, they now hold only two such practices, down from the ncaa's limit of five. up next, a mood ring for an entire nation. that's what this purports to be. from yoplait original and light, we were like, "sure. no problem!" and you were like, "thanks, but what about thick & creamy and whips!" and we were like, "done and done! now it's out of everything yoplait makes." and you were all, "yum!" and we're like, "is it just us, or has this been a really good conversation?" and you were like, "i would talk, but my mouth is full of yogurt." yoplait. it is so good!
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regular viewers will have noticed that "gps" has thus far been completely free of any royal baby hype and hysteria but we came up with an interesting question that you might like to try answering. who was the last british monarch still on the throne for the birth of a great grandchild who was in direct succession to that throne? is it henry iii, elizabeth i, george iii or victoria? stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer. go to cnn.com/fareed for more of the gps challenge and lots of insight and analysis. also remember you can go to itunes.com/fareed if you ever miss a show or a special. this week's book of the week
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is "museums matter" by james cuno. it's summertime and maybe you will be tempted into one of the great museums of the world. these museums are under attack from some places for housing stuff from other countries and cultures, often acquiring it in not-so-lovely ways. well, the author, the head of the j. paul getty trust, explains why the great enpsych paidic museums, like the metropolitan museum, are essential to understanding the modern world. understanding globalization, diverse cultures and basically are a force for good. it is a brilliant book, brief and very well written. and now for the last look. it's tough to read the mood of an entire nation. but even tougher with the traditionally stoic chinese. is the national mood cheery or glum? are they as a nation excited or mellow? now we have a way to know, because the so-called water q from the 2008 olympics is serving as a sort of mood ring.
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the artist and designer have co coated the building with l.e.d. lights that change based on how the chinese people feel. how do we know? big data, of course, from china's web users of which there are nearly 600 million. each day software analyzes millions of emoticons from sites like the chinese version of twitter. they analyze data and control the pace and brightness of the lights. fast pulses for a more excited populous, a softer glow for a calm country. next, new world meets old world. the colors, yellows, reds, blues, purples are determined from the ancient chinese text. what it may lack in precision in explaining china's exact national mood, it more than makes up for in beauty. the correct answer to our gps challenge question was d.
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when the future king edward viii was born in 1894, his great grandmother, queen victoria, was still on the throne. indeed she still had seven years left in his reign. edward is the monarch who facebookously an dikated the throne in 1936 to marry the love of his life, mrs. wallace simpson. let's hope history doesn't repeat itself in that respect and that an dication isn't in this baby's future. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. stay tuned for "reliable sources." a verdict in florida provokes questions about race, the criminal justice system and gun rights and leads the president to weigh in. we'll talk about how the media affects what we think about trayvon martin and george zimmerman. a sympathetic photograph of a young man accused in the boston bombings appears on the cover of "rolling stone" magazine, a spot usually rese e reserved for pop culture stars.
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