a book that you're ready to share with the world? get published now, call for your free publisher kit today! this is gps, the global public square. happy new year, and welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria coming to you live from new york. today on the show an in-depth look at what 2019 may bring with it, for america and the world. a nuclear treaty with north korea? a big beautiful wall on the southern border? a new middle east crisis? i will ask ian brehmler, ranna if a rue ha and dana gillibrand about that and much more.

this week china landed a rover on the dark side of the moon. and weak chinese sales made apple miss its target. what can we expect from the other super power in 2019? i will talk to the man trump calls the leading authority on china. >> he was saying that china has total respect for donald trump and for donald trump's very, very large brain. also, 2019 will surely bring some momentous decisions. how should house democrats approach their investigations of the trump presidency? how should trump deal with china? how should countries deal with the climate crisis? how should anyone approach any decision? well, steven johnson has written the book about just that. but first, here's my take. it is nearly the mid-point of

donald trump's four-year mandate a good time to take stock of what has been the most unusual presidency in modern times. in fact, one would probably have to go back to andrew jackson to find anyone who has occupied the white house with as much nult, drama and disruption. watching his first two years in office what is striking about donald trump is watching any u.s. president i have watched or read about, he is a gambler, unconstrained by press department, history, norms, or official advice, trump simply acts on his impulses and his ideas. sometimes this can be refreshing. he has forced washington to take a closer look at assumptions about china. he asks what exactly is being accomplished by america's military interventions in the middle east. he has focused attention on the problems of the working class in an age of globalization and technological revolutions. but the problem is that trump's same style, impulsive, erratic, disruptive, means he has no

thoughtful policies of his own. his management style is so impeerious and narsest issic that he struggles to retain talented official. he has no background in policy nor any inclination to learn anything about it. so he simply wings it. the result is that he has many balls up in the air and no clear plan as to how to catch them. he took us to the brink of war with now, hoping to get pyongyang to cave. when it didn't, he simply declared victory and moved on. he has begun a trade war with china with no clear sense of the deal he actually wants. he insults key allies for no reason in service of no strategy. and now he has shut down the government with rhetoric that leaves him little room for a face-saving compromise. so far the effects have mostly been rewilleder men and a sense of unease as people try to understand where all this is leading and whether thing will settle down. let me tell you, they won't. trump thrives in an atmosphere

of chaos where all the attention is focused on him and nothing is ever normal or settled. as the pressure increases from the house democrats, robert mueller, china, expect more impulsive, emotional decision making, not less. the greatest risk, of course is that one of these days in one of these arenas one of those balls drops. we have experienced donald trump in normal times. what will it be like for america and the world to watch donald trump when some great international crisis hits, as it so often does. buckle your seat belts for 2019. and let's get started. ♪ let's bring in my terrific guests to get their thoughts on 2019 and what the year ahead will bring. david miliband is the president and ceo of the international rescue committee. he was the foreign secretary of the united kingdom from 2007 to

2010. ranna if a rue that, cnn's global business columnist. yean brehmner is the founder and president of the your asia group of political risk consulting that operates around the world. ranna, let me ask you, when you look at 2019 it does seem economically we are entering a more troubled period. >> yeah. >> the two great engines of growth over the last decades have been the united states and china. >> yep. >> both economy ises seem to be slowing. and central banks around the world which have been providing cheap money so that people could get low-interest mortgages and loans seem to be turning off the tap sning you are right. i think we are at a real inflection point. if you look historically, recovery cycles tend to go in eight to 11 year periods. we are ten years into a recovery cycle. if you take it on historical

data we are due for a slowdown probably this year or next year. i think that probably is going to be the case. how quickly it comes and how sharp it is depends on a couple of things. one, how the u.s./china trade conflict goes. china is definitely slowing down. it was even before there was conflict with the u.s. it is feeling short-term pain. i think loranger term pain is going to be felt by the u.s. already you are seeing apple downgrading results. you are going to see more companies saying it is slowing our business is not as good there. that's going to hurt the u.s. economy. the other thing is interest rates. we have seen donald trump trying to trump the federal reserve. the central bankers in the world are at a difficult balancing point. regardless of politics there is a debate how much inflation we can expect to so. the numbers are good in the u.s. we have a slowdown in china and europe. that could affect the global

picture. at the same time you have technology spreading throughout lots of different industries that may be slowing inflation. should they hikind? should they not? >> when you talk to american chief testimony officers most of them expect a recession this year. >> yes. more than half of cfos at u.s. big companies expect a recession. about 80% of economists think we are going to see a slowdown this year or next year. >> david miliband looking at the world geopolitically what do you see? >> i think in 2018 we saw what it means for the global ship of state to have no anchor. and the great danger for 2019 is that we have an age of impunity. in 2018 we saw the murder of khashoggi, but also the emiss rags of the people in yemen. we saw hospital runs by the international rescue committee in syria again bombed by russian and assad forces. the idea that we are living in a world where not just the institutions but the norms and values of the post war period

are no longer upheld is a very dangerous prospect. when you'd a it to the economic picture that ranna has produced what you see is economics and politics pulling in opposite directions and dangerous directions. >> david how much of that was inevitable with the rise of china, with the resurgence of russia? in other words, these norms were western norms, they were american norms. is this inevitably the world we are entering? >> no, i don't think so. a man who has nam i can't remember talked about the post american world. who was that man, a famous -- >> a brilliant man. >> ten years ago. but the post american world doesn't need to be the wild west. talk about china, the first country you mentioned. they have had enormous benefit from the global multilateral system but they are also investors in the global multilateral system. i would argue that we are seeing in global politics the old adage that nature abhor as vacuum. when you create a vacuum all

sorts of actors can move in and it is easier for maligned actors to move in an benign actors. the pivot to asia that president obama announced ten years ago was based on a reality of shifting economic power. the great danger is that the china leadership calculate that apart from investigating in the global multilateral system they are better off building on their own or opting out of it. russians are a different case. they are exploiting weakness and there is no sanction. when there is no sanction that's how you end up with the bombing of hospitals or the killing of journalists. an age of impunity is one in which global rules are not enforced. >> ian brehmner, what we have watched is a rising pop you list tide in the last two years, almost everywhere. people think this is going to run its course, these guys have no answers. what do you see when you look at populism around the globe? >> two thing are are running their course.

china with the norms and values that newark texture that competes with the u.s. second, the democracy don't have the leaders, those leaders don't have the legitimacy. the institutions themselves are eroding. that's what the populism is all about. for those who had happened that people like may krone in france represented a shift in tide in pop you list support -- his approval ratings are 23% right now. let's face it. that's not where trump is today. merkel, angela merkel isn't going nip anywhere soon but had to abdicate the chairmanship of her party. she is already weaker in 2019 than she was in 2018. if you look around the world, even canada, where dougford is the premier today. it is a softer form of populism in the united states but that's the-second most powerful position in the country. trudeau himself is weaker. japan is the only exception. they haven't had the immigration. their population is shrinking.

per capita even though the economy is not growing they are feeling better. the military is constitutionally not allowed to participate in wars around the world. add to that the lowest adult social media participation rate than all of these countries and suddenly you say this isn't a model we could even try to adapt to in the united states. 2019 is going to see more populism unfortunately for those that hope that the center is going to hold than 2018 experienced. >> david when they look around the world at the united states, i mean you have had to do this when you were foreign minister of britain, what do they -- if you were advising a foreign government on how to deal with donald trump, what would you say? >> you would say three things, obviously. one, this is an unpredictable super power. we have never had experience with an unpredictable super power. it's been predictability that has given it power in the past. secondly, transactions matter more than values. it is absolutely evident in a the administration has no

preference for dealing with liberal democratic nations over autocratic nations. thirdly, i think what's interesting is that in the end president trump wants the deal. and he often advertises that he wants the deal more than anything else. we will see this tested in the hot shutdown which obviously is in some way as domestic question. if you think about the china trade, quote, unquote, war, in the enhe doesn't want to go over the edge. i think people are figuring that out. when we come back president trump said as he were departing from camp david if anybody else but him were president we would be at war with north korea. will trump get a deal with kim in 2019. i will ask the panel. and of course i will ask david miliband about brexit when we come back. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. healthier brain. better life.

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we are back with david miliband, rana foroohar and ian bremmer. just to pick up on the point david was making, does trump want a deal on north korea? it seemed as though he raised the temp took us to the brink of war in the hope that the north koreans would cry uncle and make a deal. when they didn't he sort of lost interest and now they seem to be going through unending negotiations that are going nowhere. >> there is going to be another summit. trump is happy to be the one leader that can say i am the guy that has gotten through to the north korean leadership. he has small wins like the fact that the north koreans continue

to not test nuclear weapons or missiles like they were before. when you talk to secretary pompeo privately he will say he met with kim jong-un four times has gotten absolutely nothing from the north korean leader and the north korean leader who is a smart guy in his view is planning to play out the clock on one full trump term. if trump as president wants to decide that's a deal even though the north koreans aren't dealing though they are moving a lot with the south koreans and the chinese and building their economy then that's what they are and he is right, there is not going to be a war. >> at least on the substance i am somewhat sympathetic to truck although the manner in which he did it i think he gets failing grades for it. the question of syria, what exactly was the u.s. doing in syria? we weren't winning. assad was comfortably in power and consolidated. he is right to say look if it is not clear what you are doing there staying there unending

makes sense? >> it is certainly right to say that the fight is against isis and that's what congress approved was a fight on terror. the idea that we are there to defend the kurds that's not a legal military intervention. and that's not what the american people ever signed up for. i do think that having 2,000 special forces on the ground in syria, it is not like we are sending enlisted men and member. these are people that are signed up for that kind of action. they actually are kind of into it and they are providing a lot of intel on what's happening on the ground, hoz bowla for the united states and the other allies. we will lose that when we pull the troops out. i am sympathetic to the fact that trump pulled the wool off. assad won. he won because a not point did the americans have anywhere close to the interest on the ground that the iranians the turks and the russians have had. >> david? >> there are 230 international rescue committee staff on the ground in northeast syria, and

another group in idlib. the u.s. presence on the ground was undoubtedly upholding an uneasy balance of power. it is a four, five, six-way balance of power. but the fight against isis is not over in northeast syria. we shouldn't believe that. and the danger, obviously, is either that you have conflagration in the northeast or that there is some kind of deal where the northeast is given over to the assad forces. but then in idlib, where you have 3.5 million people and there are isis presence as well as the vast predominance of civilians, that you have some kind of trade-off that allows for a fight there. that creates the danger refugee crisis going into turkey or worse. i think this was a decision that brings greater instability at a time when there were two parts of the can unthat still had the hope of being places of relative calm, stability and each in the case of the northeast a place that the refugees would go back to. >> if i could add in one point.

trump has added a tremendous amount of instability but this is not -- the idea of the u.s. pulling back from the middle east is not a trump phenomenon. if you look at it economically the u.s. was the number one global producer of crude oil this year because of the shale revolution. that's galvanizing people on the right and on the left to say hey maybe we shouldn't be as dependent on the middle east. >> and then the local actors become more prominent, and they are not particularly wise or strategic. rana, speaking of instability, one of the five largest economies in the world, i think, britain, is on the precipice of brexit. what do you think that means? >> it is a real disaster for the uk. and it is something, frankly that the leadership on both sides, on both sides of the political spectrum has yet to kind of quully grapple with. i think there is a lot of willful blindness still amongst the british elite that there can

be a good deal. nobody likes the current deal. that may be postponed as david is suggesting. i think the idea of a crash out is a real idea because you have to grabwell the fact that europe cannot give the uk a great deal. it cannot allow there to not be hardship associated with leaving. >> it is a four-way game of chicken going between mrs. may with her inadequate deal, the brexiteer ultras saying let's crash out. there is a further middle group saying lets have a soft landing with a safe harbor in the norway option and the fourth group including myself as a participant saying look the deal that was promised for brexit in 2016 is not on the phone. as you buy a house and you do a survey and you are not bound to buy the house until the results of the survey come through so when you decide that you are going to leave the european

union the people should be given the chance to affirm their support for the deal or not to go ahead it is a game of chicken. >> if there is a second referendum, would you go to britain and campaign? >> i would certainly seek to campaign better than i did last time. i did some campaigning but not enough. i think it would be a moment of national mobilization. here's another point. it would be the moment when the pop you lists would have to be taken on. the brexit idea happened before mr. trump. it would have to confront the delusions the blindfulness. >> willful blindfulness that you seefrd to how a country can have security in the world versus delusions that say we can throw ourselves at the ms.y of the international markets. the truth is there are tree regimes, a chinese one, an american one, and if you are britain you have to choose

between one of them and that's why the stakes are so high. >> we hope to launch dave miliband into a campaign which leads where? many people hope to the prime minister ship. china has landed on the moon this week, and it has had a hand in making apple miss its targets this week? what's going on there. >> i will ask the man who is the leading authority on china. n't b just any cheese. you picked up new kraft expertly paired cheddar and swiss for eggs. beat that! kraft. family greatly. and the golden retriever er are very different. they eat, digest, and process energy differently. at royal canin, we developed over 200 precise formulas to transform every cat and dog into a magnificent animal. royal canin

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my name is mike, i'm in product development at comcast. we're working to make things simple, easy and awesome. jade rabbit two, that is the name of the chinese lunar rover that landed on the far side of the moon this week. the landing was seen as a big step for china's space program, with the nasa chief calling it a first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment. as it was having its triumph in route outer space china was bringing apple's stock back down to earth.

the tech company took a huge dive between wednesday's close and thursday's open after apple said it would miss its revenue forecast in a big way all because of weak sales in china. how to think about china and its relationship to the united states. joining me now is michael pillsbury. he is the hudson institute's director for chinese strategy. president trump has called him the leading authority on china as i keep saying. michael, pleasure to have you on. i have to say i also really enjoyed your book. it is called a hundred year marathon. i advocate people read it because it is a very thoughtful book about what china -- what chinese intentions are in this longer term. >> yes, thank you. it exists in chinese translation but they classified it in china so only party members and military officers can buy it. >> but they can buy it. >> yes. >> they want party members to know what china's plan is? >> yes, because it is sort of an inner history of u.s./china relations over the last 40 years

and i revealed quite a bit from unclassified u.s. document about our interrelation with china. >> let me ask you about the space program. what is the nature of china's space program? >> it is a micro example of their overall strategy. they borrowed heavily from soviet russian technology. many of their components look just like a soyuz. they are not supposed to cooperate with nasa. it is against american law. a lot of human rights were brought up so the chinese can't be part of our international space station. he did acquire american space technology. that doesn't take away credit from them for some innovation. the exquisite control system to be able to maneuver a landing on the far side of the moon, it is extremely impressive. three components, borrow from the russians, steal from us and

have your own engineers. >> it is like a military program? >> they are proud of it. they told us their nasa consists of a sign board and a set of offices whereas their space infrastructure is all military. and they joked with americans, including myself, why do you have two separate programs in america, the air force and the military and then a separate nasa? our concept goes back to president kennedy that the exploration of space should be peaceful and done by civilians mainly for scientific reasons. the chinese say yes but your first astronauts come from the marine corps, and they have us on that, yes, we did borrow. >> let me ask you about the big picture. your book talks about the 40-year history, it is longer but when the united states was trying to integrate china into the american or the global system or the western system. what do you think china is trying to do? what are china's intentions. >> well they have outsmarted us is how i would summarize my book

over and over again. they are much more knowledgeable american politics, american technology and american science than we are knowledgeable about them. part of their approach has been to get what they can through the front door for free, a whole series of national science foundation agreements that required us to, within 30 days, transfer all new american scientific discoveries to china, a government agreement, began with jimmy carter, never changed until fairly recently by president trump. that's part of it. part of it also has been not to be ashamed to have a predatory economy, to not be ashamed of getting $3 trillion in foreign reserves, to may have been as though the 17th century, you know, is still fashionable and a country should build up its economic power and frankly rip off its neighbors and biggest trading partner, us. >> as the second biggest economy of the world they have a very small military budget comparatively speak. >> yes. >> is that because they think

asymmetrically in space and cyber. >> they have a term for it it means asassin's mays. similar to james bond opening up his briefcase when the kgb guy is about to murder him. it is very cheap. the short range missile, these can are cheap, a few millions per missile compared to 5 or $10 billion for the aircraft carrier. that helped with their grand strategy of keeping economic spending in the forefront, science and technology the most important, and then military spending last, relatively low percentage of the gdp. 1.5% of their gdp compared to 5% of our gdp goes for military spending. that makes a huge difference over 40 years. >> the spending this he do on the economics has helped enormously, science, technology, infrastructure. >> their military strongly support this strategy. in my book i talk about the

hundred year marathon as perceived by the military the hawks in china. they are enthusiastic because they want to get weapons that will work ten or 20 years from now not old-fashioned tasks and artillery. >> you have to ask you about your number one fan. >> yes, sir. >> donald trump. >> i am a fan of his, too, on china. >> there is a debate i think within the administration. >> yes. >> i have heard this, between people who say let's just get -- let's scare the bejesus out of them, get a good deal. and then there are people who say we need to decouple from china we are too interdmendent it has to be a new kind of cold war. >> yes. >> where do you think the president is? >> the president made his views clear long ago. he wrote a book in the year 2000. it is a famous book. in the end he said if i run for president i will pick oprah winfrey as my running mate. in the book he has a chapter on china. the greatest challenge, they are

smarter than we are, they are better negotiators. he thought about china at least 18 years if not longer. his view is closer to the lighthizer navarro view, yes we should get a deal but it should be enforceable, verifiable, lets not get tricked again. the chinese know about all of this, the two factions. it is in their newspapers almost every day. they copy the "wall street journal" reporting on it. chinese view is let's make a low ball offer that will please mnuchin and custody low and exacerbate the split between these two groups and see what happens. because lighthizer and navarro and others, probably myself we would not like an agreement that's like the old salt agreements where there was no verify, it is just trust. >> will trump be tough? >> if his books are any guide from the last 18 years he will be tough. he is closer to lighthizer and navarro than he is to steve mnuchin. >> nice to have you on. i hope we can have you on again. >> thank you fareed.

next on gps, tiny boo ton may not have a gpd but what they strive for is gn, had, gross national happiness. which matters more for measuring a country's success? i will tell you when we come back. [ doorbell rings ] janice, mom told me you bought a house. okay. [ buttons clicking ] [ camera shutter clicks ] so, now that you have a house, you can use homequote explorer. quiet. i'm blasting my quads. janice, look. i'm in a meeting. -janice, look. -[ chuckles ] -look, look. -i'm looking. it's easy. you just answer some simple questions online, and you get coverage options to choose from. you're ruining my workout. cycling is my passion.

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now for our what in the world segment. we start the year with a big question. does being richer make you happier? the answer for individuals and countries seems to be the same. no. the world happiness report asks people across 156 countries to rate their level of life satisfaction. the united states for example, has the largest economy in the world, but since 2015 it has been only the 18th happiest country, beaten by essentially all of northern europe, but also by australia, new zealand, and even costa rica. so money can't buy you love or happiness. this actually highlights a problem with public policy. governments do everything they can to maximize gdp, gross domestic product. but taken alone, gdp is a deeply flawed metric. it counts everything that is

produced in a country and bought there no matter what. it counts al government spending as additive no matter on what the money is spent. it has booked the growth delusion. the gdp includes some things many people would consider negative n. colombia, when escobar's cartel reigned supreme cocaine accounted for 6.3% of its gdp. if the u.s. builds new prisons in response to crime that's a positive for gdp. mafia money actually gooses the gdp of italy. so policy wonks are looking for a better way to measure a nation's success or failure. take the oecd's better life index, which measures 11 indicators, including health, education, and work/life balance across countries. the economists joseph stig list wrote in a recent op ed that it could have a huge impact on redirecting public policy to

outcomes that improve well-being and happiness not just economic output. for example, had american policy makers been paying attention 20 years ago to the rising mortality of middle aged white working class americans who was caused in part by the opioid epidemic they might have acted on it sooner. it would not help gdp but it would help human well-being. there is also the genuine progress indicator used in a number of u.s. states as well as japan and finland. it includes gdp, incorporates housework and national processes like wedlands. subtracts for things like pollution, crime, and underemployment. this chart maps gdp and the genuine progress indicator for 17 countries showing that sometimes around 1980, well-being ceased to rise with economic growth. there is one country that allowed well-being to shape policy for years. a tiny country, boo ton. its gross national happiness

index has 33 indicators stressing things like cultural and environmental preservation, values that are en39ed in its constitution. what index should we use? or possibly none? according to the epidemiologists kiet picket and richard wilkinson there is one simple proxy for well-being in most countries that most countries already measure, inquality. in their forthcoming book inner level they detail the toll inquality takes on well-being. take a look at the chart measuring inquality in a sampling of rich countries against rates of mental illness. they argue this isn't an incidence or a correlation. inequality stresses societies and reduces well bag. don't forget, gdp is not some kind of god given statistic. it is a recent idea born in the 1930st when countries were large low industrial, trade was initiated and even in the midwest it was traditionally

poor a. new world and a new era might need a new measure. up next, it took months of consideration before president obama made the ultimate decision to go ahead with the bin laden raid. the best selling author steven johnson will tell you what everybody including our leaders can learn from that decision-making process. >>and 2. yeah, uh...for the team... >>the team? gooo team.... order online pickup in an hour and, now buy one hp ink get one 30% off at office depot officemax you might or joints.hing get onfor your heart... but do you take something for your brain. with an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish, prevagen has been shown in clinical trials to improve short-term memory. prevagen. healthier brain. better life.

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president obama's decision to send seal team six into a compound in pakistan surely wasn't easy. what if the target, osama bin laden wasn't there? what if there were casualties among the specialons soldiers. what if one of the helicopters went doesn't, which ended up happening. what if pakistan retaliated for america's violation of its sovereignty. but the bigger decision to do it and all the smaller decisions how to execute it were made meticulo meticulously. can we make this model on decision making and use it in our own lives. steven johnson wrote about it in his book farsighted how we make decisions that matter the most. >> you argue we make decisions all the time but we don't think about it systematically and as a result we are probably doing it badly. >> the question is when it comes to an important decision in your

life. there are every day decisions we make minute by minute that aren't that important that don't require this level of process but when we hit those moments trying to decide to take a new job or launch a new product or move from the city to the country, whatever it is, those are the kinds of decisions that i argue that we need to have a process in making the choice. in the case the bin laden raid, we tend to celebrate the results of great decisions, right? we celebrate the heroism and the bravery and, you know, the daring of the raid itself. but actually, what made that particular success story a true success was this nine-month process of deliberating. first, is this person really osama bin laden? second, what should we do about it if we determine that it is bin laden? and as a society, i think we don't celebrate that decision process, because it is slower and more contemplative. that's what farsighted is talking about. >> you contrast the raid with

the iran hostage rescue which went badly. it was poorly designed in terms of the decision making? >> you know when they were actually deciding on the bin laden raid they had a number of past decisions that had gone awry. there was the iran hostage decision. there was the weapons of mass destruction during the iraq war all the way back to bay of pigs. and they looked at the kinds of processes you know that went wrong in those situations, the confirmation bias, and overconfidence. and they really tried to challenge their assumptions at every step of the process. that's the kind of thing that i think we can apply in our own lives. we tend to go with our gut, with our first impression of the situation. we actually need to take time, imagine alternate scenarios challenge our assumptions. that's the kind of exercise that i write about in the book. >> you talk about it is important to imagine what things will look like two years, three

years, four years out, not just tomorrow. >> in some accepts, a big life decision or a big corporate decision is on some level a prediction about the future. one of the things i do in the book i went back and looked at people and the ins skoo of prediction, where have we gotten better at making predictions? what can we learn from the studies of people who are good forecasters? one of the things we have learned, from a famous set of studies from guy thamd philip tet lock. people who are good decisions are interested in a lot of different things. those are the people when they are trying to forecast events in a complex system, those are the people who end up being smarter and more farsighted basically in the judgments they make. >> there are some people who do approach their decision making in exactly the kind of analytic way that you want them to.

charles darwin, when he was deciding how to get married. what did he do? >> this is the seed of the book for me. years ago i was write being darwin's notebooks during the 1830s when he was coming up he takes over two pages in the notebooks and he creates a pros and cons list for getting married. the list is kind of dated a little bit. i reproduced it in the book. one thing he is concerned about if he gets married is he will give up clever conversation of men in clubs. that's one of the concerns. what struck me is the pros and cons list is the one technique that most of us learn for making complex decisions. here darwin was doing it 170, 180 years ago. the techniques have advanced. su surely, there's more techniques we can use in making a decision

like that. >> all the things you say go into making good decisions, listen to the strongest case against your idea, imagine alternative scenarios that are not your preconceived notions, take in outside information, take in information that may contradict what you are looking at, run out what this will look like going forward, it seems to me what we at least if the united states, when we make political decisions as citizens, we do everything wrong. we listen only to the -- to one side of the story. we have reinforced our bias. we never look at the i'alterna e alternative. is it fair to say american civic decision making is particularly broken? >> this book does feel like a book that is useful to read right now at this particular moment in time. i think we don't have enough deliberate decision making. a key point that is a theme that

runs through this is the importance of diversity in making decisions. this is one of the great findings of the social sciences over the last 20 years, that diverse groups make better decisions, make more original decisions collectively. that diversity can be measured in terms of age and ethnicity, gender, but also intellectual diversity. and i think that's one of the reasons why we try to celebrate diversity in terms of social tolerance, in terms equality of opportunity, but we should also remind ourselves that when we have diverse leaders, for instance, when congress gets more diverse, as it is happening right now, we can expect that group to actually make better decisions. that group will be collectively smarter. >> as long as it functions as a group, not two warring factions. >> figuring out a way to communicate and share ideas and collaborate with people with different perspectives, that's

crucial. >> obviously, a good decision to have you on the show. >> thank you. next on "gps" we want you to take everything you just learned from steven johnson and make some of your own decisions and predictions about what will happen in 2019. will you predict the major events of the year correctly? stay here to find out how you can tell us your global prognostications. how good are you at predicting what will happen in the world? >> who are you? to steal your car because, well, that's my job. what? what?? what?! (laughing) what?? what?! what?! [crash] what?! haha, it happens. and if you've got cut-rate car insurance, paying for this could feel like getting robbed twice. so get allstate...

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a crowd sourcing platform that

asks everyday people to predict the future. some 6,400 of you went on line making 35,000 forecasts. here is what you predicted. in november, we held midterm elections. you said the likelihood was about 20% in the beginning of the year, the numbers rose steadily until election day when we saw a 61% chance of democratic house of representatives. after the school shooting in parkland, you were asked if the federal government would ban bump stocks. dropped as the issue fell from the headlines. on average, forecasters became increasingly skeptical. on december 17, people gave it a

7% chance. on december 18, the administration announced the ban. another question highlights how forecasters used the news. by ending the investigation or being removed from the position. odds never went above 50%. what happened before these spikes, jewgiuliani announced t report and released a lengthy report critical of the fbi's investigation into clinton's e-mails and jeff sessions resigned. the forecasters provide a relative stable view of some hot spots. the war in syria raged on, forecasters were confident that bash add would remain president giving him a 95% chance throughout the year.

zntd mean it is time to throw caution to the wind. take the south and east china seas. the wisdom of the crowd held that a lethal confrontation was unlikely with a stable ability of 5 to 15% throughout the year. accurate or nearly not that in october, a chinese ship came within 45 yards of the u.s. ship. go to gj open.com/fareed. will the democratic house, will president trump be impeached. will mark zuckerberg remain facebook ceo? will the u.s. be plunged into a recession this year? as always, tune in to gps as we stay up to date on these and

more. thank you for being a part of my week. >> i'm brian stelter, we are looking at how the news gets made. we have big stories. the national emergency to get the border wall built. what happens over the next few days. the former "time" editor saying the paper is anti-trump. we'll get the reaction. one family's deliberations about 2020, about running for president. the senator is married to the columnist connie schultz. she'll join me. the u.s. government s