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tv   Fareed Zakaria GPS  CNN  August 18, 2013 10:00am-11:01am PDT

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>> right. about that game friday night, the saints beat the raiders, 20-28. thank you for watching "state of the union." i'm candy crowley in washington. next week i'll have an exclusive interview with senator ted cruz from his home turf in texas. if you missed any part of today's show find us on itunes. just search state of the union. a special programming note. catch prince william in his first interview since the birth of baby george tomorrow on "new day." 'fareed zakaria" starts now. this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the would recall. i'm fareed zakaria. we have a great show for you today. we will start with violence in egypt. bret stephens and peter beinart disagree as usual. then, is america overregulated? does the government have altogether too much of a say in how we live our lives? i'll ask the man who put many of the obama administration's regulations in place, cass sunstein.
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also underneath the violence, is the arab world the new start-up society? that's what an american venture capitalist believes. and while we're at innovation, is north korea going to beat apple at its own game? obviously no, but i will explain. but first, here's my take. if there is one crisis that both the american left and right agree is real, it is of declining mobility. the american dream is at heart that someone no matter his or her background can make it in this country. a few weeks ago, four economists at harvard and the university of california at berkeley released a path-breaking study of mobility within the united states. and last week, the "journal of economic perspectives" published a series of essays tackling the question from an international perspective. the research is careful and nuanced, yet it does point in one clear direction. the question is, will washington follow it? for over a decade now, it has been documented that northern
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european countries do much better at moving poor people up the ladder than the united states. they point out that the united states cannot be compared with denmark, an ethnically homogeneous country of five million people. but in an essay published last week, canada is a very useful point of comparison for the united states because it is much like america. the percentage of foreign-born canadians, for example, is actually higher than americans. and recent research finds that people in canada and australia have twice the economic mobility of americans. what is intriguing is that many of the factors that seem to explain the variation across countries also explain the variation across the united states. the most important correlation in the harvard/berkeley study appears to be social capital. cities with strong families, civic support groups and a community service orientation do well on social and economic
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mobility. that's why salt lake city dominated by mormons has extremely high mobility rankings. this would also explain why america in general fares badly. the u.s. has many more broken families, single parents and dysfunctional domestic arrangements than canada and europe. the other notable feature in the harvard/berkeley study is the design of cities. places that are segregated, where the poor live far from the middle class do much worse than those that are more mixed. this probably has to do with geography. it's hard to physically get to jobs when they're far away. it might also mean that people in poor neighborhoods end up in a self-reinforcing cycle of underfunded schools, high crime and social breakdown. in any event, these factors, while important, might be difficult to change in any reasonable period of time. so should capital cannot be rebuilt in five years. cities cannot be quickly
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redesigned to integrate them or to create greater density. that leaves the last large factor in explaining the decline of mobility in america, and that is public policy. and here professor corrick explains the united states is the great outlier. simply put, america spends much less on the education and health of poor people, especially poor children, than any other rich country. and that retards their chances of escaping poverty. a recent oecd report points out that the united states is one of only three rich countries that spends less on disadvantaged students than others, largely because education funding for elementary and secondary schools in america is tied to local property taxes. so by definition, poor neighborhoods end up with badly funded schools. in general, america spends lots of money on education, but most of it is on college education and most is directed towards
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those already advantaged in various ways. what's clear from all this research is that countries that invest more heavily in all their children's health care, nutrition and education, well-being more generally, end up with a much stronger ladder of opportunity and access than america. now, that is something we can change and with relatively little money. so if we want to restore the american dream, we now have the beginnings of a path forward. for more on this, go to cnn.com/fareed, where you will find a link to my "washington post" column. and let's get started. the united states strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by egypt's interim government and security forces. we deplore violence against civilians.
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>> let's get right to it with peter beinart, a senior political writer with "the daily beast" and associate professor at the city university of new york and bret stephens, the pulitzer prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for "the wall street journal." when you look at what's going on in egypt, you now have a military coup, it's very difficult to make the case it was a soft coup. i understand the niceties of the american government not calling it that, but you had the military take over a democratically elected government. you now have the military appointing 17 out of 19 generals as governors. how should we think about this? >> look, first of all, it's a problem with no good solutions. you have in egyptian politics a zero sum game. efforts by senators mccain and graham, by the administration itself to try to finesse a power-sharing agreement between the military and the brotherhood have clearly failed.
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the brotherhood aims to topple the military. the military understands that it's in a kind of death match with the brotherhood and is going to exert itself forcefully and, as we've seen this week, violently on the brotherhood to stop them. the question is, can we help -- can we show the military that it is in their own interests to have a political process that if it doesn't quite include the brotherhood, doesn't suppress them as violently. because the government, especially the general, would not be doing himself favors with the rest of the world, certainly not with europe and the united states if protesters continue to be massacred in the streets, so how do you soften those blows? that being said, i think that the united states ultimately has an interest in seeing his government succeed. we do not want to have the brotherhood return to power. we saw repressive tendencies by the brotherhood. those would become hyperrepressive if they get back -- >> imagine if the brotherhood had killed people on the open street.
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yes, the brotherhood was not very democratic often. but killing hundreds of people is not very democratic either. >> right. no, it's terrible. we should -- we should stress that. and if the brotherhood had -- look, the brotherhood would have acted in the same way. we saw there was a clear tendency in the way the morsi administration had been conducting itself until the point it was deposed. it's not for nothing that 14 million people came into the streets. on the whole, though, i think that this is one, and this might surprise you, this is one country and one area where the obama administration would be wise to the extent possible to follow a hippocratic do no harm, intervene less and speak less policy. >> which is pretty much what it's doing. >> and rightfully so. and so i think conversations about let's cut off aid are not helpful. let's have an inclusive process, it's not helpful. sometimes it be behooves the
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united states to shut up. >> i think the policies have been a disaster. it was people like john mccain and robert kagan to say we don't know how many leverage we had and maybe not so much. but it was right when the coup happened and there was a possibility that we could allow the muslim brotherhood to come back and still be a player. we didn't use that leverage. we certainly didn't use it by coming out and saying we are going to stop aid. we could have said we're going to stop aid in fact and we still would have had a grace period we could have brought it back the next year. we didn't do that. we had john kerry going out and calling the military an instrument of democracy. and now it turns out that the military is incredibly repressive and the muslim brotherhood is not going away. what's going to happen is the most radical elements of the muslim brotherhood come to the fore and we'll face a
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syria-like -- >> do you think it was a viable path for the obama administration? >> i do not know. at the time i also was not wise. i also did not recognize the importance of being willing to put this on the line. but in retrospect, we should have used whatever leverage we possibly have. now i think the horse is out of the barn. now at this point after they killed this many people and they basically moved conclusively towards a military regime, now it seems to me we have little leverage left. it's over. >> there are people who say that, you know, neo-conservatives like you love democracy until muslims started voting. >> and many neo-conservatives do and i like democracy a great deal, i just don't like liberal democracies. and i think what's important is to emphasize -- look, leave aside the term neo-conservatives because they come in a great many varieties. what's important is to support processes that lead to liberalism.
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and you know better than most the distinction between liberalism and democracy. so in countries like tunisia, which are, quote, democratic but in which opposition leaders are being killed, in which women no longer have the same kinds of freedoms that they did five or six years ago, those are the real tests of whether a country is moving in the right direction or not. simply having a ballot should not be the kind of litmus test as to whether we are going to support a government or not. we support -- the question is what is that government going to do when it comes to women's rights, gay rights, minority rights. their attitudes towards their neighbors. so i think because of essentially a semantic failure, very much that the bush administration was a part of it, we got behind a democracy agenda whereas we should have been getting behind a liberalism agenda. >> but there will be a liberal element and tendencies in middle eastern politics. there are liberal tendencies in our own politics, maybe not quite as great.
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but you can't say because there are political elements that have liberal tendencies you're going to shut down the democratic process. yes, there's a lot to be worried about about islamist rule. but if there's going to be any prospects of a middle east, islamists are going to have to be part of the game. the important question is how do you divide those islamists who are willing to participate and abide by the rules of the game from those who will pursue radical jihad. if i was the al qaeda folks i would be thrilled by what's going on. a couple of years ago people were saying islamists can win through the ballot and al qaeda was being marginalized. now they can say we told you violence is the only way. >> so if you were an islamic fundamentalist or politics, i realize that's a stretch, but wouldn't you read history this way. there were elections in algeria, the islamists were going to win. basically they were jailed, there was a marshal or declared hamas, the islamists won. you know, the u.s. and europe
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cut off aid. the brotherhood -- in other words, every time they seem to win in the polls, somehow that election is nullified. >> there's no question that al qaeda will take ideological sucker and rhetorical sucker in what has just happened in egypt. we'll find a reason one way or the other. what was worrying is that when the brotherhood did have an opportunity to rule, morsi was moving with remarkable swiftness. as it turns out, foolish swiftness to establish an autocratic state. the line was the only way i can impose democracy is by taking authoritarian methods. so democratic islamism when it was in power wasn't so democratic. >> all right. we'll have the two of you on to disagree another time. lots more ahead. i have a great story about a reform movement in the united states that is being embraced by both left and right. i'll explain, but right up now, is america overregulated? if you think so, you will want to hear my next guest, who helped put many of those regulations in place. stay with us.
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i hear the complaints all the time from businessmen the obama administration has put in place too many rules for health care, energy, finance, the list goes on and they say it is killing confidence, which is the motor for robust growth in this country. so who better to answer those charges than the man who oversaw many of those regulations as they were put into place. cass sunstein was the white house regulation czar for most of the first obama administration. he has now returned to the harvard law school. welcome, cass. >> thank you, fareed. >> so you remember -- forget about these businessmen whom you may regard as, you know, kind of irredeemable republican. the economist magazine, which twice endorsed president obama, had a cover, which i'm sure you saw, which was called "overregulated america." and the argument is whether it's health care, whether it's finance, whether it's energy,
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the huge amount of new regulation, businesses are trying to figure it out. is that fair? >> i should say that i worked very well with the business community in the obama administration and they were great partners in a lot of the things we did and they had great ideas. numbers don't lie. the number of rules issued in the first term of the obama administration actually lower. the number in the first term of the bush administration. the bush administration wasn't thought to be regulation happy. also the cost of regulation in the first term of the obama administration very much in accord with standard numbers over the last 25 years. so there hasn't been an explosion of regulation recently. >> does that include obamacare? >> yes, that does include the regulations that have been issued. having said that, it is true that there are many areas that are overregulated. it's not widely known, but president obama did embark on a regulatory lookback, which has already saved billions of dollars in regulatory costs and eliminated a large number of regulatory controls, thus freeing up business from
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restrictions that really weren't doing anybody any good. >> you can imagine, i think i can imagine what some businessmen friends are thinking as they are listening to this. but, but, but, they're going to say obamacare, thousands of pages of regulation, dodd-frank, 800 pages of new regulation. all the new epa rules, hundreds of pages of new regulation. isn't that part of -- is that part of the problem? >> well, i think it is true that there are new regulations, fewer than under bush, but there are new. and the question is whether these are good regulations. so in the environmental context, there's rules that are increasing the fuel economy of cars. so the united states can have a pretty clean fleet going forward. it's already cleaner than it was a number of years ago. that imposes costs, but the benefits are just worth the costs in terms of air pollution reduction, energy security so the united states is closer to energy independent and consumers are saving money at the pump
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because their cars aren't going to cost them as much to operate. actually for consumers, they're net winners. there's a rule that involves illnesses that salmonella from food which is going to prevent up to 79,000 illnesses a year, including dozens of deaths. that rule -- that's a good rule. so the fact that it's a rule that imposed costs doesn't mean it's a bad idea. the question is, is the individual rule doing more good than harm. >> you have a book called "simple," the future of government, and that's the thesis as i see it. the question isn't good regulation, it isn't more or less, but it's smart regulations. >> basic idea is that you have technologies now, like an ipad, which has a great deal of complexity in it. probably 15 years ago it would have been very hard even to fathom all of the technical capacity that went into drawing it up. but it can be navigated even by a young child.
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so one thing i tried to do was for every regulation have a simple, short, executive summary so everyone can get it and that not only made navigatability easier but it also made accountability better because if a rule was simply described and seemed to have terrible flaws in it, then we'd hear from the people who were going to be regulated or maybe the people who were going to be benefited. they would say here's what you can do and then we could fix it. so that simplification can be a great engine of democratic self-government as well as reduce the risk that i think a lot of people are rightly concerned about, which is the regulatory system can be so messy that it can impair economic growth. >> you worked with president obama close up in the white house. is he -- is he friendly to business? >> very much so.
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you have to keep in mind that when he came into the presidency, the economy was in freefall and the stock market has exploded, in a good way, since he's been president. and that's because economic growth and increasing employment have been top priorities for him. so i think the rhetoric about unfriendliness to business and excessive regulation doesn't really fit with reality. the proof of the pudding really lies with implementation and that continues to be a challenge. things that have gone well in both domains and in others that i worked on were ones where the business community was a partner and someone to whom we listened very closely. >> cass sunstein, pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. up next, what in the world? some good news from a very dark place, american prisons. i will explain. jackie: there are plenty of things i prefer to do on my own.
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but when it comes to investing, i just think it's better to work with someone. someone you feel you can really partner with. unfortunately, i've found that some brokerage firms don't always encourage that kind of relationship. that's why i stopped working at the old brokerage, and started working for charles schwab. avo: what kind of financial consultant are you looking for? talk to us today.
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tonight i'm using the just the two of us setting. electrolux. be even more amazing. see the electrolux kitchen and laundry appliance collection at the home depot today. now for our "what in the world" segment. i was struck by a piece of news recently that was good for
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america, shows that our politicians are learning from their mistakes and are actually cooperating with each other, on both sides of the aisle. sounds too good to be true? well, listen in. for many years, the united states has had a growing problem in its criminal justice system. as i've pointed out before, we are number one in the world when it comes to incarceration, by far. in 2009, for example, for every 100,000 citizens, 760 americans were in prison. that was five times the rate of incarceration in britain, eight times the rate in germany and south korea and 12 times the rate in japan. it began about 40 years ago. in 1970 state prisons had a combined total of 174,000 inmates. by 2009, they had 1.4 million, an eightfold increase. these correctional systems cost a lot of money. nearly $80 billion a year.
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more than the entire gdp of croatia or tunisia. well, it seems that finally common sense has prevailed. >> thank you. >> attorney general eric holder made an important speech this week, admitting that our prisons are overcrowded and costly. he specifically called for a reduction in mandatory sentences for low-level drug offenders. >> will no longer be charged with offenses that impose draconian mandatory minimum sentences. >> it's important the attorney general brought up drugs, because the numbers are startling. federal prisons, the group holder was referring to, account for 14% of our total inmates. in these prisons, the most serious charge for nearly half of all inmates is a drug offense. compare that with state prisons, where only 20% of the inmates have a drug offense as their most serious charge. now here's what's interesting. the federal prison population has increased every single year since 1980.
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on the other hand, state prison populations have been declining in recent years, so much so that the overall number of inmates, state plus federal, is actually down over each of the past three years. here's the best part. the declines encompass 28 states, red and blue. part of the declines were because budgets were simply collapsing. it could also be because of a growing acknowledgement that the war on drugs has failed. according to the pro-reform drug policy alliance, the united states spends about $50 billion a year on the drug war, adding up to a trillion dollars in the last four decades, but there has been no real change in addictions rates. americans are not more prone to drugs or crime than citizens of other countries so why should we put so many people in prison? well, the good news is that the numbers are finally too large to ignore. the states are already reacting and holder's comments will add momentum to a growing chorus for reform.
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>> this isn't just unacceptable, it is shameful. >> the greatest challenge will be the prison lobby. believe it or not, many of our prisons are run by private companies, that then lobby state legislatures massively for bigger prisons, larger budgets and of course more prisoners. according to the nonprofit justice policy institute, the two largest private prison companies in america together generate revenues of $3 billion a year, paid by taxpayers, of course. these private prison companies also happen to be major donors to a number of state campaigns, lobbying for more resources. if our politicians can take on the prison lobbies, there really is hope for america. up next, a different way of looking at the middle east. it's the new hotbed of innovation. how? stay tuned. i have a great guest who explains. ♪
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0 &vo:remember to changew that oil is the it on schedule toy car. keep your car healthy. show your car a little love with an oil change starting at $19.95. hello, everyone. this is a check of the top stories. millions of people in cairo are on edge worried protest marches are going on right now will end in blood shed. the demonstrations follow days of violent clashes between
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muslim brotherhood supporters and security forces. the muslim brotherhood canceled one march citing concerns over snipers on rooftops. and thousands of people in parts of central idaho are being told to get out of the way of a fast moving wrild fire. the sheriff is telling people in the wood river valley they need to grab pets and exception belongings and move now. evacuation orders cover 2200 homes in six communities. the beaver creek fire is only about 9% contained. and the 1972 dole pphins ar going to the white house. we'll talk to don led the '72 d to a perfect season. entrepreneurial is not the first word or one of the first ten words that come to my mind when i think of the arab world,
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but my next guest is here to tell me that i'm wrong and the media is missing a big story in that part of the world. chris schroeder is a washington-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist himself. he has a new book called "start uprising, the entrepreneurial revelation, remaking the middle east." as i say, when you tell people this, their first reaction must be you're talking about -- >> as you know from your travel there are multiple generations of entrepreneurship but people don't think of it as a technology hub which i think is a mistake i've even made. software is everywhere. when a new generation gets hold of software, it does very, very interesting things. >> give me of sense of what is the basic evidence for this? because i would agree with you, this is an old trading culture. mohammed was a merchant. but the states of the arab world are highly status.
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they are the state tends to own large swaths of the economy. i don't think of them as places where you'd see the growth of entrepreneurship. >> one of the great stories about entrepreneurship now is the fact that so much is happening bottom up, again enabled by technology. as you know better than anyone, all emerging markets have tremendous complexity and history and legacy which is hard to work at. all of a sudden when young people have these devices in their hands and access to technology, they can collaborate, share ideas and solve problems in very, very different ways. >> so what have you found? >> i have found three buckets of entrepreneurs. this is as true in north africa as in yemen. as you see often you have entrepreneurs who are taking things that have been successful elsewhere and taking it to the middle east. so there's a wonderful company which is the yahoo! of the middle east. by the way, yahoo! bought for almost $200 million.
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there's another great company which is a multi hundred million dollar company very much like amazon.com of the middle east. one of the most exciting things i see are the young people who look at the problems around them and use technology to solve them. traffic is terrible in cairo, as you know. now there are several wonderful apps to crowd share how you can get through and navigate traffic. i would say as much as 15% of the startups i see are education. a lot of people don't realize in egypt alone, tutoring is already a $2 billion business. now technology is coming in to not only bring courses and videos online in arabic, now it can reach hundreds of thousands if not millions more people. of course everything is one click away which means some companies i'm seeing are reaching american audiences. i discovered i had been using for six months a weather app. i had no idea that it was made by 30 young people in alexandria, egypt. >> and the youth is a large part of your story. we often heard about the youth bulge in the middle east, about 60% of the middle east is under 35. but you see that as actually one of the advantages powering this entrepreneurial revelation.
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>> it's an advantage with a caution. if you compare it compared to the opposite in japan, i'm very, very optimistic about the potential there. but as you know better than anyone, when you have a youth bulge that is unemployed or not working, this has other very interesting ramifications. what is important is, as more and more young people have access to technology, they have more and more opportunity to take initiative into their own hands and create things that are very, very powerful which ways i do not believe government or traditional business will absorb that bubble. >> another piece you see as very important is women. that this entrepreneurship is empowering women in societies that have many structural barriers to women's empowerment. >> yes, it's absolutely true. i've seen studies that say from all the startup competitions i've seen over there as many as 35% of these are women. mit had a great startup competition that they have in the arab world every year. last year over 40% were women, which i can't find an event in silicon valley that can boast that.
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again, when you have technology, whether at home or out in the workplace, you have abilities to make things happen that you couldn't even five years ago. >> the other advantage the arab world has, a network effect. i think about one of the things people don't think about is despite the fact these are many countries, 29 countries, it's one language. >> yes. >> which in the world of computers and apps, it provides you with a much bigger market than you would normally be able to have if you were, say, portugal. >> 350 million people in the arab world alone and that's only a part of the opportunity in this great geographic location north, south, east and west. i know great entrepreneurial situations that are building companies in istanbul. in the end it's turkish only. i know one group that decided to take out their e-commerce efforts and shifted them to dubai and all their emphasis is there. i think in large part because of what you just described.
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>> so you say in a sense don't look at the headlines, look at the bottom up entrepreneurship of young people plugged into the world, aspiring to have the same kind of success that their counterparts have had in so many parts of the world? >> the nuance, i would say to anyone who's not been there, is you have to look at the headlines because those hard realities are realities as well. as we know they're hard realities everywhere in the world. but no one is spending enough time looking at something that's happening in parallel just as large and again where the future is going. where do you want to spend your time supporting, solving the 20th century challenges or a lot of times solving what's happening where things are going. so it's as much as be cognizant but question yourself to know that was just happening everywhere else in the world is going to happen here because it's happening here. it's happening in africa. we already know it's happening in south america and europe and elsewhere. this is the world we're entering. >> chris, pleasure to have you on. >> thanks for thinking of me. up next, which cereal should you eat for breakfast, what songs should you listen on your ipod, which shoes should we
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wear? do we have altogether too much choice in our lives? i think so. we'll talk about it when we come back. ts and optimists. for those who love you a little and those who love you a lot. for ultimate flavor and great refreshment with or without calories. for carefree enjoyment. for those who have a lot to say and those who have nothing to add. for those who want to choose and choose. for every generation. for us. for everyone. forever. high fructose corn syrup 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."
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have you ever noticed that president obama only wears dark suits? they're always similar shades of gray or blue. the reason he does this is not just satorial. he is trying to pare down the number of choices he has to make every morning so he can focus on decisions that are actually important. choices can exhaust us. i know business leaders who always eat the same tuna salad lunch every day so they don't have to agonize over what to eat. i've been thinking about the topic so i decided to bring in two academics who study choice. sheena iyengar is the author of "the art of choosing." sheena has been blind from a young age but that hasn't stopped her from becoming a top social scientist and expert on this subject. kent greenfield is a professor of law at boston college. he is the author of "the myth of choice." so, sheena, let me start with you. what is wrong with choice?
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choice seems to be -- you know, it's as american as apple pie, with or without ice cream, so you get the choice. everything about american life today is about choice. think about during the cold war we were always so proud of the fact that when russians would come to america and they would look at a supermarket, they could buy 55 different kinds of cereal, which is now probably up to 200 or something like that. >> i got interested in the question of choice a long time ago. there was a fancy upscale grocery store that i used to go to when i was a ph.d. student at stanford. i did this very simple experiment. we put out either six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at two very simple things. the first was whether -- in which case were people more likely to stop and sample some jam? and the second was in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. what we found was that people
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were likely to stop when there were 24 than when there were 6, but when it came down to buying behavior we saw the opposite effect. so of the people who stopped when they were 24, only 3% of them actually watt a jar of jam. whereas when there were six, 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. so this was the first time that we ever actually saw the possibility of that when people encountered more, they might actually be less motivated to make a choice, that more wasn't always better, it could actually be less. >> kent, does that resonate with your research? >> absolutely. it's easy to be overwhelmed with choice. in fact because we are so easily overwhelmed, so much is noise. and that means that we're open to manipulation by people who know more about our own tendencies than we do. so, for example, that's why sex sells in the marketplace because
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our brain -- parts of our brain are very reptilian and so a view of an attractive person, a spokes model or the smoefl cookies or perfume in a department store counter, it can awaken this part of the brain that really wants to be satisfied. >> that has the sort of non-rational analyzing these choi choices? >> all these studies show when that part of the brain is activated, people get short term oriented but very creative satisfying those choices. almost like we become teenage boy boys. >> when you went to japan you had this story, you asked for tea with sugar, right, at a restaurant? >> i did. >> what did they say? >> i went to this restaurant and i asked for a cup of green tea. then i asked for some sugar and the waiter tries to tell me in japan, we don't put sugar in our tea. we go back and forth. i say, yeah, i understand you're
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not supposed to put sugar in your green tea but i'd really like to have sugar in my green tea. this created such a controversy, the waiter went to have a chat with the manager and they go back and forth. finally the filigreer comes over to me and says, i'm really very sorry but we don't have sugar. so then i order a cup of coffee. when i got the cup of coffee, on the saucer were resting two pacts ofsugar. >> again, the implication of all this in some sense is very much the kind of work that's very hot in economic, which this is way you frame a choice makes a big difference. is that the point you want more paternalism and less individual choice? >> one of the central implications of all this is that context and situation matters. so the recent gains in childhood obesity, decreases in childhood
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obesity in the united states is not because we've been more successful telling kids not to eat. to realize the situation matters. the architecture and design of school lunch line, putting healthy foods the beginning of school lunch lines. a healthier park so that kids go and play rather than watch tv. all these things are important for public policy experts to understand. >> finally, what would you say, what's the take away for somebody listening to your research saying, get it, i can get overwhelmed with choice, i can make bad choices. what should i do? >> i think the most important thing is to realize that choice is not the end. right? choice is really just a tool that help us get where we need to go, to accomplish our goals. so two quick tips, things that we do with a lot of executives to help them improve their decision making. one is when you're making a choice, right, some is good,
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more is too much. so when you're making an important decision, you don't just say don't just choose one option, whether or not i should do this, should launch this product, should i buy this house or not, you have to have at least two choice, maybe even three. they should be meaningful choices. but you don't need hundreds. the second tip that's very important, because we live in this world where we have so many choices, the average american is making at least 70 choices per day, one of the things that's imperative today is you have to be choosey about choosing. you have to think through what are all the tasks your engaging in a day, which ones are worth doing, which are not worth doing, get rid of the choices that aren't worth your time. >> i don't know. wear a blue suit everyday, like president obama does sorrying like that. >> exactly. >> pleasure to have you on. >> thank you very much. up next, north korea's break
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west germans can no longer worship at the church where
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their forefathers were christened and buried. the communists have never learned they can never erect a wall between their faithful and their god? >> 52 years ago this past week, the east german government began construction on what it called its anti-fasship bull wart, the berlin wall. how many miles long was it when it was built? seven miles, 15 miles, 38 miles or 96 miles. go to cnn.com/fareed for the challenge an lots of insight and analysis and follow us on twitter and facebook and remember, go to itun itunes.com/fareed if you miss a special. this week was sponsored by the "washington post" and it got me thinking about the good old days of journalism and that in turn brought to mind evil and wars "scoop" probably the best
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novel ever written about journalism. it's well worth a read or reread this summer. now for the last look. the iphone probably doesn't have much to worry about although the blackberry might. why? this is here. what you ask? it is described by north korea's state news agency as the nation's first indigenous hand phone. and none other than the young dictator, king jong un went on tour of the factory recently. he is said to have out toed the patriotic enthusiasm in the assembly plant and noted how very convenient the cameras would be to use since they have high pixels. only one problem. nobody would ever realistically be able to see those fancy pictures since nobody in north korea has internet access. the correct answer to our gps challenge question was d.
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as of july, 1989, a few months before it fell, the berlin wall measured 96 miles. remember, it not only separated east berlin from west berlin but also west berlin from the rest of east germany. still, the wall couldn't stop over 5,000 people from escaping from east germany. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. hello, everyone. i'm fredericka whitfield these stories are topping our news. investigating new claims involving princess diana. was it an accident or something far more sinister? we're headed to london for details. an out of control fire in idaho is threatening house sands of people. authorities are telling them to get their stuff and get out now before it's too late. the 1972 dolphins super bowl champsnd