this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you from the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. today on the show, the state of america. it's a nation divided, a nation in tumult. but is it a nation in decline, a nation whose glory days are behind it? or is america as strong and innovative as ever? i'll talk to three authors who set out to explore the real america, beyond the beltway and

beyond the headlines. jim and deborah fallows and steven brill join me to discuss this. and reading, writing, and arithmetic from around the world. global lessons from the one man who has spent his career studying the best education systems from around the globe. what the u.s. can learn from others. tick-tock, tick-tock. seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. just what is the nature of time? and are our days truly numbered? i will talk with the brilliant physicist carlo rovelli. >> time really goes at a different speeding defending how you move and where you are. but first, here is my take. in september, google will celebrate its 20th birthday. when it was founded in 1998, it

was one of many search engines. but it quickly became the chief gateway to the internet and is now one of a handful of tech companies that dominate not just the american economy but also increasingly american life. it recently received a birthday present from the european union, a record $5 billion fine for violating antitrust laws. that came just a week after the u.k. slapped facebook with a fine for allowing cambridge analytica to mine personal data from as many as 87 million facebook users. the penalty was much smaller, $660,000, but it was the maximum allowed under british law. these punishments are one sign that the era of unbridled faith and optimism in the technology industry is coming to an end. as the information revolution took off in the 1990s, we all got caught up in the excitement of the age, along with the novelty of the products and their transformative power.

and yet as these revolutionary technologies created new industries, destroyed others and reshaped communities and cities, we simply assumed this was the way of the world and nothing could be done to change it or shape it. that would have been socialist-style interference with the free market. but the result does not seem to be one that a libertarian would celebrate. we now have a tech economy dominated by just a few mammoth companies that effectively create a barrier to entry of new comers. then there is the erosion of privacy. because technology companies deal with billions of consumers, any individual is a speck, a tiny data point. for most technology companies, the individual consumer is also a product whose information is sold to others for a profit. so he or she is doubly

disempowered. change is likely to come from two directions. regulatory action in the west will force companies to play by the rules and create new rules that give more control to the individual. in may, the european union instituted the general data protection regulation, which makes it easier for people to know how their data is being used and how to limit that use. violators can be find up to 4% of their global annual sales. importantly, these rules apply to any company working with europeans' data. so american tech companies have had to change their policies too. the second direction is even more intriguing and comes from the east. until recently, as an indian entrepreneur pointed out to me, there were just a handful of companies with more than 1 billion users on their platforms. all companies based in the united states or china, google

facebook, tencent. but now india has a biometric i.d. system. it is the only one of these massive platforms that is publicly owned. that means it does not need to make money off of user data. it's possible to imagine that in india it will become normal to think of data as personal property that individuals can keep, rent, or sell as they wish, in a very open and democratic free market. add innovations in blockchain technology, and we are likely to see even more challenges to the current gatekeepers of the internet in the near future. change is coming to transform the world of technology. properly handled, it can produce freer markets, lower barriers for new entrepreneurs, and fresh technologies combined with greater individual empowerment. now that's something even the technologists in silicon valley should be celebrating.

for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my column. let's get started. okay. i want to step away from the fray of minute to minute, second to second news for a moment and talk about the big picture of america. the 30,000-foot view. let's forget about the partisan rancor for a bit and look at what is really going on in the country outside washington, outside the beltway. and i suppose the big question is, is america in decline? is it headed for trouble? is it in a nationwide depression of sorts? or is it vibrant as ever, thriving, growing, innovating? joining me now are james and deborah fallows, the husband and wife authors of "our towns: a 100,000-mile journey into the heart of america." and steven brill, the author of "tailspin: the people and forces behind america's 50-year fall and those fighting to reverse it."

steven, let's start with you because i think you paint a very important picture that i think people don't adequately understand. which is that a core element of what has made america great, the kind of upward mobility, the social mobility, the ability for bright, hardworking poor people to move up has kind of been arrested or stagnated in various ways and for various reasons. so lay out what that problem is. >> well, what i decided to do when i set out to write this book was try to understand why it seemed that the core values, the core things that made america great seemed to be in decline, whether it's the ability of washington to get anything done, the kind of

bipartisanship we used to enjoy on big issues, whether it's the income mobility that you just mentioned, whether it's the monetization of our democracy, the inability of people without money to have anything that approaches an equal voice. and what i found was that our core values in many ways had been hijacked. the first amendment had been used by corporate interests to dominate our politics. meritocracy itself had some unintended and not good results. >> so when you hear this, jim fallows, i know you and deborah went out into the country and you saw some surprisingly optimistic things. but you've lived, both of you, in washington on and off. you know this world that steven brill is talking about. how do you make sense of that piece of it? >> so i think over the years we've talked china, where deb and i used to do live, and have

made the point that in china everything is simultaneously true someplace in the country. i think that's the case in the u.s. the u.s. is not quite as chaotic as china, but we agree that all the pressures steve is talking about are distorting distribution of income, opportunity, the corruption of politics in the past generation. and we feel that is becoming better and better understood. it's an obvious part of politics. steve has laid it out in his book. we're talking about a part that we think is not as well understood or realized, which is this contrary renewal, reform, dispersed effort across the country of people saying we can find ways to create different opportunities for people whose parents may have worked in giant factories, but these people can have jobs in the wind turbine industry and despite the

poisonous rhetoric, cities that voted for trump, citizens and refugees are stipulating the economy, running the civic government. they're important civic leaders. there are two americas, but in a different way than we usually talk about. there's national politics which is so dispiriting. and there's this other america people are not recognizing of getting things done at the local level. >> deborah, describe the journey. what exactly did you guys do? >> it wasn't 35,000 feet, it was actually 2,500 feet across the country. we were in our small plane for four to five years, not nonstop, but going from -- >> this is a tiny single prop plane. >> a little propeller plane. we would hop from town to town and stay in these towns for one

or two to three weeks at a time. and coming in at very low altitude, a soft entry to the town to get a sense of what it was like. and then staying at the motel 6, going around to see a lot of the -- all kinds of people in the town. we spent time in classrooms in schools, with the mayor, with people who ran the ymca, at brew pubs, in the hospitals, in the clinics with the doctors, to get a sense of, as much as we could, the variety of things, and a sense of the energy or lack thereof that was going on in the communities. >> and when you looked at it, what did you think was the telltale sign of vitality? was there something you could look at to say, this is going to be a better story than we might have thought? >> at the end of the book we have 10 1/2 signs of civics success, the half being whether

a craft brew industry, that being a certain type of proxy for urban expansion, some type of entrepreneur. one way or the other, all the signs come down to are there people who view the welfare of that town, that region, the state, as something that matters to hem in the long run. they're not just consuming what is there, they're not just living in their own household and maximizing their own wealth but saying, it matters to make plans 20 years from now to build a community college in central oregon. >> long term proprietary interest in the society. >> yes. >> everyone is so short term oriented right now. >> not really, because the older people in the town are looking to the young people who they want to come to the town to save it, to move it forward. when we come back, i'm going to ask steve brill how these bottom-out forces are going to solve the big top-down problems that we face. when we come back. who would have thought,

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and we are back with jim and deborah fallows and steve brill, talking about nothing less than the future of america. you heard the fallows perspective, which i characterize as the friedman one from a different column, which is, if you want to be optimistic about this country, stand on your head because everything looks better from the bottom up. but the kind of problems you outline, that the government is deeply partisan, it can't get anything done, we haven't built any serious infrastructure for 30 or 40 years, you have a deadlock, you can't get scientific research done, you have money problems. these are all big problems that i mean, i hate to say it, but the fact that the mayor of sioux falls is doing a good job, or

some community has a good public library, it isn't going to so have these huge problems. >> i don't agree. i think it will, because i think the solutions come from the bottom up, especially when the "up" is totally paralyzed. and people who see those solutions and are disgusted about the macro picture will start to support political leaders who want to spread those solutions. you don't have to go far from this studio -- i don't have a prop plane, even -- to find examples of that. there's a converted zipper factory in queens that i write about, where a veteran of the iraq war, who went to harvard, a harvard graduate, decided to start a job training program where he takes people who are sales clerks or they're out of work baristas, people with average incomes of $18,000 a

year, if they have incomes. and he has a job training program for them where they learn to be coders, computer coders. and 11 months later, it's a free program, they graduate into jobs averaging $85,000 a year in the tech industry. now, that can be done. >> all right. i still remain somewhat skeptical that with all these microefforts, the estimates are we need to spend something on the range of $3 trillion to rebuild american infrastructure to make the economy competitive. >> actually a little more. >> more. so where is the money going to come from? >> first, exactly what steve is describing around new york is what we've seen in mississippi, in south carolina, in fresno, all of the other places. our experience is exactly the same on that. i can imagine two futures. here is the future i hope for, which is that the accumulation of real world, real time experiments happening in thousands of places right now, will produce both ideas and sort

of identify problems and produce leaders who will say, i've done this in brooklyn, i've done this in fresno, i've done this in minnesota, and these people will have more influence on national politics. that's one future i hope is the case, that national politics will be leavened in a positive way by this constructive effort from the bottom up. the other possibility is that national politics remains in crisis and then at least it's better if we have this healthy local fabric than if we don't. so one way or the other, it's worth paying attention to this part of america that's been missed in the national media, which i think in different ways we're all trying to do. >> the one thing i would add is, if you look at the 2016 election, what is crystal clear is that people were frustrated and disheartened with government. now, they decided to choose, you know, the same person who convinced people that they should enroll in trump

university to solve their problems. but i think that the country is learning that lesson, that you really need people who are qualified, who are prepared, and who have the kinds of answers to the problems that plague america that we need. >> and the 40% who still support trump? >> 40% means there's 60%. so i don't think you can thread the needle with 70 votes in the electoral college with 70,000 votes scattered among three states every time. the other thing i'll add is, you ask where's the money. we're undertaxed in this country. the tax burden for wealthy people in this country, and even for the middle class, is way below what it is in any other developed country. >> but there isn't the political will to do that. >> well, you know, if enough water mains break at the same time and enough bridges collapse

at the same time and enough of the power grid goes out at the same time, we will understand that it's an emergency. we have a slow moving emergency with infrastructure that is fast accelerating. and people will get disgusted. >> deborah, let me ask you, when you talk to these people, you know, at the local level, what did they -- what was their feeling about national politics? were they sort of hoping that they could then go on and run it? were they deeply frustrated? >> when we went into the towns that we visited, we never asked people about national politics. we went in asking about, what's your town like, what's going on here, what drives you, what do you need, what are your problems, how did you fix them. and national politics did not come up, either from -- certainly not from us or from the people we talked to except for a very few times. we started this in 2013, and it was really about 2016, at the time of the conventions, that

people started talking about national politics. and it really felt to us like there was a distinct disconnect. the energy, the drive, the thoughtfulness, was about what can we do locally, how can i have an impact on my town. then there was this other thing that was national politics, which if you ask that question, you'll get an answer like you can hear on any cable news show. but it wasn't what was driving the energy of the pineapple. and it felt more like when you go to make your national vote, are you republican or democrat. you're what you've always been. or it's -- >> so no matter what you're doing day to day on the ground, when it came time to vote, you were tribal and you just voted for your tribe? >> exactly, yes. >> which has become more and more bitter.

you were mentioning texas. we saw very conservative areas in kansas, columbus city, ohio, people voted themselves tax increases to improve the library, improve the downtown city infrastructure. if people can have confidence in their leaders, there is a willingness to say, yes, we should do our part. >> we have to close it on that. one thing i can say is that the hopeful note is that these books, and very different ways, illuminate america so much more interestingly than the kind of focus on washington politics. so thank you for writing these terrific books. next on "gps," the united states has an education problem. if you don't believe me, listen to my next guest. he's been studying education systems around the world for decades and he says the u.s. has a lot of learning to do. that story when we come back. alright guys let's go! let's do this directions to the greek theater (beep) ♪can i get a connection? ♪can i get can i get a connection?♪

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in a two-hour window so you're up and running in no time. show me decorating shows. this is staying connected with xfinity to make moving... simple. easy. awesome. stay connected while you move with the best wifi experience and two-hour appointment windows. click, call or visit a store today. some american primary and secondary school students are already back in school. the rest will go back in coming weeks. many in america's public schools will be attending institutions that are underfunded and overwhelmed. therefore the students are likely to underperform. the solution can be found by simply taking lessons from the nations that get education right. my next guest has been schooling himself on education for

decades. he works for the oecd and is the mastermind behind the test which compares school systems around the world. he's written a fascinating book about the lessons he's learned. it's called "world class: building a 21st century school system." welcome, andreas. first, explain the pisa test. the united states does not do very well on this test. i think what people need to understand is, it is a test that measures problem solving, intelligence, creativity. it is not just cramming of facts, right? >> absolutely. we put less weight on content knowledge and more on your capacity to think like a scientist, to think like a mathematician, to solve problems problems, to work together with teams. those are really essential skills for tomorrow.

we combine those data, with information on schools, on teachers, so we cannot only see where countries come out but also what drives success. >> the united states, being one of the richest countries in the world, does pretty badly. is it fair to say, first, unpack that for us, because the thing that strikes me about it is american averages are often low because there's a wide variety within america. the top performing schools do pretty well but it's the bottom performing ones that do really, really badly. >> absolutely. i mean, the american school system succeeds in it preparing some students really well. but there are also many other students falling behind. much of it has to do with the social context from which students come and in which schools operate. that's basically the disparity of outcomes. particularly the greatest challenge are mathematics, where the united states ranks 30th among 35 oecd countries.

there's a lot of room for improvement. >> you've heard the american debate about education going on. there's people who say the schools need more funding, the teachers need better pay. there are people who say no, the structure of the school system is what the problem is, you have this government monopoly, you need more choice, you need more variety. what do you think the answer is? >> well, the first thing has to do with the value you place on education. chinese parents and grandparents are going to invest their last dime, their last effort, into the future, and that is the education of their children. in the u.s., we've already spent that money for our consumption. money only gets you that far. in fact, a lot more is about how you spend that money. it's about prioritizing the quality of teachers and teaching over things like size of classes. in the united states, only every second dollar arrives in the classroom.

so making sure all the money relates to how students do. >> in america, if i recall from one of your reports, america is almost unique in the rich countries in the world in that it spends less money on poorer school districts and more money on rich ones. everywhere else, it's the other way around, you assume that the poorer districts need more money. but because in america we fund education through local property taxes, you actually have the opposite. >> yes, that's actually an outlier. most countries have put more money into disadvantaged schools. more importantly, they try to get better resources. it's not so much the number of teachers, it's do you really make sure every student benefits from excellent learning. >> the places that do really well, china is extraordinary because it's still a middle income country, in many places a poor country, and its educational outcomes have shot up. singapore has done fantastically, south korea. what i'm struck by is, they all have some version of what we would do in america, called the common core, there are national

standards, you have to meet them. does that strike you as important? >> it is very important that we have a clear vision of what good performance really looks like. so students understand what they're studying for, teachers have an idea of what student learning looks like. that's hard to do at the local level. most countries have a clear level of what good performances are. there is the real belief that every student can learn even if it takes students different paths to get there. in the highest performing education systems, neither social background nor context makes much of a difference. >> poor kids can move very quickly. >> think about it this way. the 10% most disadvantaged children in shanghai, china, do as well as the 10% wealthiest americans in age 15 in mathematics. >> one of the things that strikes me in your book, so many countries have moved so far, so fast. this is not impossible, to improve education outcomes. >> your school system today is

your economy tomorrow. most countries have understood it. my own country, germany, used to be where the united states was in the year 2000. it's now at the high end of the performance spectrum. so in europe too we've seen rapid progress, not everywhere. vietnam, nobody would have had vietnam on their radar screen and us included. and it's now a very successful school system. >> but america has to catch up. >> it has a lot to catch up. but rapid progress is really possible. >> andreas, a pleasure to have you on. >> thank you very much. next on "gps," infrastructure, debt, and deficits, oh, my. politicians can never seem to think beyond the next election. and that's why they can't solve the truly difficult long term problems we face. my next guest has some smart ideas to tackle this problem, when we come back. when you're particular, you want things done right. that's why we test all of our paints and stains

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democracy is under siege. it's not very difficult to pinpoint countries all over the world where those words have never been more true. there are questions over electoral legitimacy in places like the united states and then there's the problem of short termism, where politicians push through policies that will get them reelected, not ones that will solve current or future problems. take a look at what's happened in america, where national debt is now at the highest level since the post world war ii years. this under a president who said he would eliminate the national debt over eight years. well, in another ten years, the debt is expected to be nearly the size of the entire u.s.

economy. mr. trump's grandchildren and mine will be paying for that. so what to do? my next guest has solutions. they're all to be found in her new book, "edge of chaos: why democracy is failing to deliver economic growth." a pleasure to have you on. >> pleasure, happy to be here. >> you're an economist and you looked at this problem and decided there isn't an economic fix, because everyone knows the common sense economic solutions. the problem is you can't get politicians to do those things that they know you need to do. so you've proposed reforming the political system as the answer to solving some of these problems. >> that's exactly right. essentially my book is born out of frustration. as an economist, i would love to focus on economics, but these issues keep getting usurped. jean-claude juncker has said we all know what to do but we don't know how to get reelected after

we've done it. that's the corrosive problem at the center of politics today. >> what are your solutions to this problem? >> i offered ten proposals, potential solutions. all of them have precedents in the global economy, somewhere somebody is already using these proposals. for example, i talk about potentially increasing the salaries and the compensation to politicians, but forcing them to justify their compensation. in singapore, for example, politicians, members of the cabinet, get 30 to 40% bonuses every year based on long term outcomes like infrastructure, gdp, improvements in life expectancy. >> salaries that are tied in some way to private sector salaries, so it will do quite well. >> yes, the head of state makes $1.4 million a year, the highest paid in the world.

>> and i think singapore has the best rating on corruption, the lowest corruption levels in the world. >> that's exactly right. i think there is something to learn there. we've seen so much reform in compensation in the private sector. why not think about that for the public sector? >> you have some things for voters as well. you say, why don't we ask voters to be more aware and informed about issues. >> i would hope that civic responsibility, people should want to be engaged in the process. we've seen voter participation plummet, how little knowledge voters have about their own rights and about the political system. so i do consider mandatory voting. 27 countries around the world including australia, belgium, luxembourg, greece, they have mandatory voting, where voters are required to go and vote. that's something worth considering. at the extreme we might consider increasing or weighting, more or less, voters based on their engagement. this is not about adjectives such as wealth, race, or gender. it's not about ascribing votes based on those areas.

it's about increasing the vote based on people's engagement, how interested are they, how engaged are they on some of the big prevailing public policy issues. >> if you're aware, engaged, and informed, your vote could count a little bit more, you get a 20% boost or something like that. >> yes, and this is being considered around the world right now. there are lots of variations. it could work for referenda. it's harder to implement in a general election. but you could see how weights could matter more or less based on certain public policy issues. maybe doctors and nurses get a higher weight on issues around health care, for example. >> what will you do for this problem of short-term-ism, which is it's very hard to have short term pain for long term gain. >> you're absolutely right. one of the proposals i have is extending the political terms of the politicians. that seems a little bit odd because we don't want to be authoritarian and have them sit in office as long as possible, but places like mexico have a six-year term for the presidency

and they're only allowed to serve for one term. in brazil, they have eight to nine-year terms for their senators. i think that actually helps to focus their mind, they're not interested in fighting the next election, they're there essentially to focus on the immediate public policy problems. so i think there's something interesting to explore there. >> people will say, this is all pie in the sky. in today's world, are people going to pay politicians like the private sector? will they have mandatory voting? what do you say to that? >> first of all, i'm an eternal optimist. over 150 years ago, people said blacks couldn't vote, women couldn't vote, only landowners could vote. we changed the system. something is fundamentally wrong with the political process. money has seeped into the political process. as you know, 158 families in the united states are responsible for 50% of the political contributions.

voter participation rates are at historical lows. i just think there's -- >> what do you do about the money? >> i think with money, of course campaign finance has been at the top of the agenda. i think it's been a big setback to have citizens united decision from the supreme court. i think there's still scope to have much more curbs on lobbying, that's an area we could put more binds around as well. >> fascinating set of proposals. >> thank you. >> thank you so much. next on "gps," we're all so busy these days. everyone is complaining they don't have time for this, they don't have time for that. well, we are all in luck. my next guest says time is sort of meaningless. what in the world does that mean? a brilliant physicist on time, when we come back. get netflix included. so your family can watch what they love in more places. get an unlimited family plan with netflix on us. and right now, buy one samsung galaxy s9 and get one free.

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you may have read his last book called, "search brief lessons on physics." i recommended it here on "gps," saying it was exciting and intelligent. he writes with elegance and clarity and now he's out down himself his new book takes on a crucial subject called "the order of time." ready to have your mind blown? listen in. a pleasure to have you on. >> thank you very much. >> to me, the most fascinating point you make is that medieval peasants probably had a more accurate understanding of time than, say, a 19th industry economist or rational scientist. explain why. >> in the early middle ages, in many parts of the world, the time was divided in day and day was divided in hours, but 12 hours was between sunrise and sunset, which means that one hour is longer in summer and

shorter in winter, right? so hours are flexible. and then in europe, people started putting clocks on bell towers, so there was a common time plot measured for the village. but the next village would have a different time, because the 12:00 was set when the sun is at the utmost position. and of course the sun doesn't get to the same utmosts position in different places. when you move toward the west, the sun comes later. >> and this would have been thought to be accurate? >> absolutely. >> every village would have a different time. >> has its own time, right. >> you say that's actually the correct understanding. >> that's the correct understanding of time. people got together somehow and said -- and it was mostly because of trains, because it's hard to set a train timetable if every village has its own different time. there was this agreement, late 19th century, the americans

started it. the first proposal was a single time for all around the planet, so now it's 4:00 all around the planet. people didn't like that, because 4:00 is day somewhere and night somewhere else. so there was this arrangement of dividing the planet in regions, all with the same time. so all of england, all of britain has the same time. this is artificial, obviously, because -- and remarkably, a few years later, there was a guy in switzerland who was checking the patent for synchronizing clocks in different train stations. his name was albert einstein. he realized that if you study carefully time, it's not possible to synchronize clocks. time goes at a different speed depending on how you move and where you are. >> and you can never say there is a specific time.

it is always a specific time in a specific place. >> in a specific place. >> that is what the time-space continuum means. >> that's right. and let me make concrete, i take two clocks, okay, which indicate the same time. i move one up a little bit. i wait. i come down. and if this were much more accurate clocks than what they are, the one up would have measured more time. there's more time up here than down there. >> there's more time at your head than at your feet. >> that's right. >> and you can see this, of course, because the time is different in mountains compared to valleys. why is that? explain that. >> it's because of gravity. the real question is, why not? the name of your show is "gps," right? the gps is this thing we have in our machines, the global positioning system, which works with satellites that have clocks up there. in our car there's a radio receiver that receives a message

from the satellite, and it uses it to locate itself. well, when this was put up by the americans, the physicist told the engineers in the army, be careful, because time up there, there's more time than down here, it passes faster. the army in general didn't believe it, to start with. but it did not work without taking this into account. so there is actually more time when you go away from the earth. the earth is a big mass and slows down time. >> what do you mean time is passing? we -- we always mourning the loss of time? >> i think time for us is a source of openness and possibilities. but it's also very much tied to everything that makes us suffer. we suffer the loss of something, we have a finite life which ends.

i guess buddhism asks us to think that the source of our suffering is the inability to accept permanence. that, so there is something that touches everybody in this truth. it's something that has to do with our deep emotions. it has to do with our sense of identity. we know who we are because we remember our past. we identify ourselves with ourselves in the past. and our very identity is built by these memories and the expectation. our brain keeps using memory in trying to anticipate the future. and this process is what makes us. >> carlo rovelli, a pleasure to have you on. >> thank you very much. >> we will be back. s directions to the greek theater (beep) ♪can i get a connection? ♪can i get can i get a connection?♪ ♪can i get a connection?

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whitfield, witfield, thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. hello, thank you so much for joining me this sunday. right now, senator john mccain's family and close inner circle of friends are saying their final good-byes after a week of public mourning in celebration of the senator's life. the private memorial and burial is happening right now at the u.s. naval academy at the request of mccain himself. his motorcade arriving moments ago. the streets were lined with people waving american flags. his final resting place is right next to his