experiences, too. i embraced south africa and its diversity and all oversight america fantastic people all over the world. fantastic food. and beyond border hassles or you know challenges which i call opportunities anyway, we can get through those things. and great stuff all over the world >> allen carl did you ever get treated poorly because you were an american? >> never once was i treated poorly. in fact, i was in brazil at cafe chatting and there was another american who brought up the fact i cannot believe we are always getting tossed under the bus so to speak and mistreated or misunderstood. and what this brazilian said was i am actual getting very tired

of hearing americans think that people are mistreating them or looking at them differently. he said you know, i think that is all in your minds, you americans. and i found that very similar with other travelers i met from all over the world. people are more interested in learning about us. although it is no amazing fact but you know i would meet people who had tried many times to go through the lottery of get agting a visa. they want to come here and not push us away. ...

sudanese still had his money. it had been two years. call this guy and after he left the hotel he was like when is john going to be back in sudan so i went back to the hotel and picked up the money they left in

the face. there was a little bit from allen is the name of the book a question of culture close the net connection. this is book tv on c-span2. the minister of trade and minister of trade and industry and executive director of the world bank was on booktv "after words" to discuss his book the end were. in the book he argues that the power no longer lies with the leaders of strong stable governments or heads of large corporations and the potential for widespread of people is greater today than ever before. >> host: it is my pleasure to interview moises naim for this episode of "after words." you are in the columnist,

international economics and globalization. the urls of a scholar at the carnegie endowment for international peace and formerly editor of foreign-policy magazine and for trade minister in venezuela. all that said, you have also retained a new book called the end of power and that's what we are here to talk about today. let's start at the beginning which i think is how did you come to write this book and how did all of those various experiences and forms go into this? >> click >> i'm delighted to be here. >> in that interaction, you encapsulated by doing all those things as you mentioned by riot that having an instinct intuition about what was going on with our. we all know the power is shifting from the west to the east, north to south from very big companies to startups and

people in presidential palaces to people in the streets. we know that's happening in the world. that is nothing new but i detected that there was something more profound happening to the power. that have to do with power much less than it used to in the past. people could do less with it. the pope and the head of the pentagon and president of china russia, the united states are powerful people. but they are more constrained in what they can do and therefore i started looking at that and it also coincided with a period. i had been the editor of the foreign-policy as you said. so i was trying to distill what did i learn, what are the important trends that came into my mind as i was trying to

summarize the experience. >> host: why don't we stop for a moment and tell me a bit about how you define power because the definition of ual in the book is central to your thesis of how it is declining and it is different from how we talk about power conversationally today. >> guest: right. as you know, power has been discussed in the memorial as many definitions and it can get complex and developed that idea and it has become very but he did. for the buck and conversation is to say that power is the ability of one actor to make all of the others do or stop doing something. and influencing and in powering the influence also is interrelated and influencing the book i used the influence use the influence as the ability to change the perception of the

situation. it is the power of creating the incentive in order to get people to behave in a certain way. >> host: how exactly is it declining because i think that if you asked a lot of people today, they would say okay maybe there are new ceos at the top of the organizations that they are still making enormous paychecks and yelling a lot of power and we see more and more countries that seem to be emerging as strong players on the global stage. so how is that not just a shift in the redistribution of power? how is actually a decline click >> each one of the players that you mentioned in the heads of state and of the new countries that are coming to play the individual politics arena all

of them have less than before. pick any one of those and you will see that they are more constrained. there were just a few going to came on top. but the banks that navigated in the crisis and the ceos became the top leaders in the financial sector. many of them today lost their job and they are quite constrained. and others are out of a job. they continue to be well played.

it's very slippery at the top post in the corporate world it is hard to stay on top for a long time and there is statistical evidence about all these things. >> host: severity is a scientific principle that math is neither created nor destroyed, it is just transferred. you wouldn't say that applies to power as well. >> guest: again i would never deny a power continues to exist and there are some important players. it's not america who didn't is an important and powerful player that today has more constrained than black mayor putin himself -- black mayor putin. so the power is there and it's easier to get it harder to use and far easier to use. >> host: and what is driving this decline?

>> guest: the common co the common wisdom about this is the main driver is the internet and twitter and facebook and we have seen that presumably in other aspects. and of course i don't deny that. that's very important. the internet is a very powerful transformational tool that alters the way power is acquired and used in deployed. but there are other things going on. it's often just a tool made more important. and i'm thinking for example increasing the size of the middle class around the world. there is a very important restructuring of the social economic distribution both negative and positive in the

rich countries, the middle class is expanding very rapidly so all of that is rising. it's one of the factors that is driving the issue on the tower and then i talk in the book about three important resolutions. >> host: you have the mentality and more. >> guest: we just have more of everything. there is more guns and medicines, computers, there is more income per capita, more wealth and trade, containers, everything. so more countries and political parties and ideas and there is more of everything. if you have more of everything and try to mean team power is more complicated to keep the

control when there isn't so much of everything then when there is an explosion of everything so that's the first thing. the second revolution is the mobility revolution and that is in the cell phone to social media but also the migration and trade and the constant movement of the ideas and people and money. there is far more that's harder to control. and and the one to mention first is the mentality that all of the strengths in general they rise in the middle class, more information changes in the way people think, the way in which the authority is treated and

people relate to alters and customs have changed and so the first revolution overwhelms the barriers. it's too much, just more overwhelmed. the mentality the mobility revolution circumvents the barriers that shielded the powerful from the rifles and the mentality undermines them. so, those are the forces that are the factors that either either overwhelm, overwhelmed, circumvent or undermine the barriers that allow them to stay in power. >> host: take the air arab spring for example and the

social programs like twitter and facebook that catalyze change that what you talk about in the book and what you talked about now are much bigger, slower building but more important forces that work underneath that so if we can spring as an example and talk about what is really going on there beneath the surface. >> host: >> guest: it was driven by the social media. they were important writers as you say. but it all started in tunisia and then we know the story in the small town as a street vendor or of the food vendor. he was set up with abuses.

if you think about tanisha you find that they had the fastest economic growth, the fastest expansion of the middle class that has the most stable economy in terms of ethnic city and the social characteristics. so it was a very social place for this to happen. and yet that's where it all started and then it spread. so, what happened there is essentially it was rapidly expanding. educational opportunities have been expanding very fast. you have a cool class of professionals but couldn't find

work and that have expectations when they were nurtured by the entertainment that created a stronger stability. of course then when that happened other things, other factors played into the explosion. for wiki leaks they learned that the practice was very corrupt and that created a cauldron that ended up in that example then moved to egypt and libya and elsewhere and we know the story. there's an interesting reason to study called the u.s. at the u.s. institute of peace. they tracked these revolutions and discovered the commentary

was taking place outside of the countries. it was people talking about what was going on. that was the bulk because of course they were on facebook but they were in the different shifts taking place in the society that created the conditions that enabled twitter and facebook and social media to play the role they did. >> host: given all of this what did you you see as the implication for leaders today not just arab leaders but if you look across at the head of state to the heads of business, military is another example to give him the book. if you sit at the top of a big institution today i mean what

should you be thinking about doing? >> guest: look at the bigger scope and your competitor will come from places you cannot even imagine. if you are excessively -- and there is a tension between being specialized into and good at what you do that requires that the tension to that highly specific and highly concrete set of things that make your organization successful. it's very difficult to then start looking sideways or behind you or a foreground to see where is it coming and where is the challenger to your position coming from and so first is to pay attention to the balance between how specialized and attend if you have to be to the core competencies but at the same time, do not neglect the

forces that can surprise you. so that's one. and the second is be aware that people like you lose their jobs very often. >> host: do you think that it looks good today or tomorrow from what it looks like ten years ago? >> guest: i think so and i think that you have translated that leaders now are leading by the sheer force of authority and just trying to get things done. it's not that effective anymore. you're dealing with employees and competitors and suppliers that are far more reactive and less prone to be accepting.

so the hierarchy and authority has declined the main features of how to deploy the power in the organizations. >> host: can you think of specific leaders that when you look out across the country, around of the world, you think that they are getting it right for others you could point to and say they are trapped in the old mode. >> guest: the example has become a cliché but it deserves to be repeated as nelson mandela. someone that when he was freed from the decades of imprisonment can't the first reaction is to build consensus. not to use revenge to fuel his

followers that to try to have the view that wasn't based on the use of force and he ended up being very powerful and influential in a very cunning way. >> host: what do you think about within the organizations themselves have you seen anything about mostly when we talk about the business leaders being effective, we are talking about within the industry that they are in and other players how adaptive are or not but have you seen anything within the organization of the leader that is more or less damaging to the people that work for him or her and as is that dynamic changing?

>> guest: it is a broad question ended his set or specific. you have the culture that is determined by technology, the dissolution channels cut the structure of the business that means you have a start up somewhere in the silicon valley. it is a web-based site that was just about $4 million in a few and a few years of existence and not many employees. kodak went bankrupt but at one point was almost a monopoly for photographic equipment and all that. compare the difference when it went bankrupt so just imagine how different is the culture and

the way of behaving and the difference is i'm sure with the respective ceos and customers and competitors. >> host: going back to the nelson mandela consensus and coalition building you talked about in the book as well as being important aspects for being in a world the world where power is declining to actually be able to get something done. could you elaborate a little bit more on the ball at the increasingly important well like coalition building backs >> guest: that is an important aspect of what i'm saying. i mentioned that there is

something which there's a lot to celebrate in the decade of power and it's now shifting into spreading and new actors are coming into the frame and you have less dictators and class monopolies, less authoritarian and ways of doing things. so there is a lot to celebrate. and when you move in that curve you grow up in terms of the benefits to society in the event of the dissemination and the decade of power and the benefits to society. so, you move up and the more you move towards more dissemination and dispersion and power the better it is for society because you avoid from the monopolies and concentration and all that to the point which more if that

becomes negative and starts sloping down. >> you have to consult everyone and then everyone has the power that we do. but no one really has any power therefore q. and that's what the giants and we can see the governments are government accountable and politics around the world in some companies which you have a distribution of power between the shareholding groups and management groups which nothing gets done with the speed and quality because you have someone that can make things happen. i don't worry as much about that as it happens in government and we are seeing it happen in washington how difficult it is

to make the decisions that are quite obvious. we are talking about the decisions of the government tuesday we are imposing very negative costs that are irrational you just can't see the difficulty of making the right decisions. and i think that is because we are overdosing on the checks and balances. we have just developed this wide array of checks and balances. you find the minimum common dominator but that doesn't solve the problem. you find the decisions that are ineffective and that creates the illusion of the decision-making that infects not much is happening.

>> host: i love that idea, i mean i hate the idea that we are overloaded with checks and balances. i would like to stay on the congress for the moment which capitol hill was just a few blocks away from here and once the seat of so much a symbolic power but if you look at the definition of what it means to have power which is to to get something done and it seems like one of the most powerless institutions we have right now. so what is going on in that dynamic and how much dysfunction is attributed to these deeper systemic ties. >> i think that you put your finger on the essence of the story and i do really that what

we see now is in the congress and the manifestation of the three revolutions in many on the forces that i discuss in the book. essentially we have these organizations that is very powerful and that seems unable to get anything done and anytime american people are recognizing that americans support and respect for the u.s. congress with all-time lows and it has a lot to do in the book i discuss and i make it one of the centerpieces of my concluding chapter it has a lot to do with trust. so if you have the place with checks and balances and controls to take the initiatives that are quite significant without including everybody else to bother coaster twice, limited the constraints in the powerful.

as the decline and the competitiveness of the political party. >> i do want to return to the concept of trust. the first thing kerry is curious if you think that we elected leaders right now and put them in congress, do you think that we would see it function better or is it something in the deeper level in the instant change? >> i am always suspicious of hoping and looking for the proverbial good leader. the notion that things will get solved if we only had better people. is the work force instructive

that defines who gets interested in this, who gets the call who wants to run for congress and be a senator or congressperson does are the forces that are far more powerful. so rather than looking for hoping that we can get good leaders out of some process i would look at the structure of incentives that determines who gets interested who is willing to spend his or her life in congress and what does it take for that person once he or she decides to run to really make it quick >> host: you mention in the buck that of book that of the decline of power is opening up more opportunities for bad leaders to get some foothold.

is that even though we can't search for the mythical great leader do you think that is still true that we do have more bad options? >> guest: i refer to the call that has been out for a while that's important and that is the concept of the signifier is the leader that comes up with the ideas or one-liners that end up capturing the imagination and the support of the people with very bad ideas and we have a bunch of them around and you see them resurfacing and becoming embraced. that takes me to the point of the political party. i think what happened in the decline of the political party the lack of competitiveness i

would like to explain what they mean by the lack of competitiveness. it is limiting the influence into the potential of the terrible signifiers and in limiting the gridlock we have. >> host: what you mean by the lack of competitiveness? did you mean that we should have more parties? >> guest: i mean we need to have better parties. i say that political parties need to learn from the success of the organizations. they are in the endangered fixation. raise your hands those of you that would like to help in saving that butterfly and you'll find that among the 20-year-olds and others you will find they were interested in doing that

and that was great. then go and ask the same group who wants to join me in a political party, who wants to join me in the republican or democratic party and you will see that far fewer would be willing to do the time and effort and passion in joining a political party and that's very bad. we need to modernize and become more attractive to people. >> host: we are going to take a short break and come right back.

>> host: you say that political parties need to learn something from the occupied movement than he did from al qaeda. >> guest: they have to transform the followers into the societal murderers, not at all. it can be at least used to provoke some new thinking about how it do we motivate and re- energize everything.

you take these people around the world and in some places you have some consequences so that it's just an expression of anger and anxiety and disappointment. people want to learn from those examples. it's a very good very good for a number of the organizations.

all that i would say on the basis of the research and about is that it is less powerful than it used to be. there is a recent interview with president obama in which he explains that he was reading the story. that is that he could get it done done and president obama reflected how difficult that is today. at the scrutiny on the media and the commentary would become an important national debate and

distract from all the things. so that i thought was a powerful example of how some workers trained how the president is. all are powerful but i think that the range of things that they can do on their own is shrinking. >> host: we hear a lot today about is china going to be the next superpower, is it overtaking the united states? you point out that isn't a type of conversation we should be having when we talk about power and what is it that we see as fundamentally unhelpful about that way of thinking? >> guest: that is what i call the elevator approached. and it does have him of companies. the rankings into the horse race and then the fact for example if you center that you lose sight of the fact that china is a very

good country that has important problems and challenges that are hard to tackle. you lose sight of the fact that the power of the chinese leadership is also constrained. if you think about the power of the leaders had or some of the successors or the people of the leadership in china that launched a massive the massive opening in china, the economic reform that brought china into the global economy i don't know that the readers can have -- can have the same. again i'm not saying that the chinese leaders in general are more powerful they are just less powerful. they can do less today than the predecessors grable to do.

>> host: let's return to al qaeda for a moment in the topic of the military. and some of the big changes that we are seeing in the way that the war is fought today. right now there is a conversation about cutting the defense budget which is potentially a moment to take a look at the way we as a country have thought about force and how we use it and invest in the power that we hold. what are you seeing as the way that takes place now and for a country like the united united states but has relied on this big hierarchical institution that is the u.s. military for so long what code it code is or should it look like five years from now or ten years from now

>> guest: in the military and what's happening to the military power, i think let's start with a small example. in somalia and the coast these are people with very primitive guns that go out and hijack some of the largest ships in the world. the international community has reacted to that process. that threat by deploying the largest information matter in terms of the technologies in a very modern fleet and everyone is now patrolling them and you have the ukrainians and the chinese, japanese, united states, russians everyone is trying to stop the power from these hijacking issues but they

haven't been able to do it. so, that example does show you quite a bit. we are not even talking about what has become common which is the asymmetrical war in which you have the groups and one of the challengers is far less powerful in the challenges and the asymmetrical way the most powerful army. it is an example of data but to be century is becoming far more common, but it is a bigger example of how you have a lot of the wars that are no longer fought between the armies, the formal armies that represent the nation state. you have the different kinds of technologies and then the capability of succeeding. they would never defeat the armies, but they can get away

with doing what they want to do. and they are constraining the options that the large armies have and we saw that in iraq and afghanistan with the use of the improvised explosive devices that created the largest source of casualties for the united states military and the coalition forces. and the united states and others had to spend billions of dollars in trying to see how they stop and let the damage created by the improvised devices and still some progress was made. another example is drones both because the conversation in the united states is what is the legal framework and while the united states has consumed that debate which i think is

important and valid, they've become in popular and are becoming every one can have one. drones are very inexpensive. >> host: in one of those constrains for something like the u.s. military is that they are constrained by the rules of the war that there are all these players now emerging that don't sort of respect or care about the rules of the war.

>> guest: that's part of the symmetry. you not only have the symmetry in the types of weapons and weapon systems you also have a symmetry in terms of the league of the frameworks by which you abide to conduct the war. >> host: what do you think that you would be looking at for how to make a big institution like the u.s. military adapts to all these changes? >> guest: how much there is in the u.s. military about the transformation, i have been talking to the u.s. military planners and senior officers and it is quite impressive quality of the thinking. it isn't a problem of a lack of ideas but of a power to implement them and that is another example.

it is very hard to convert the idea about how to make the american military moran in bold and effective, less expensive white leather same time maintaining their ability to protect the homeland. so the ideas are there. what is end there is the power. >> host: zooming out a bit from the military, you mentioned some things that seem troubling that come with the decline in power and other things that seem like assets and improvements. so what is at stake? what are we looking at in terms of what we stand to gain and lose because of this seismic shift? >> guest: my biggest worry of what i describe in the national level and i already described my

concern about countries like the u.s. that are overdosing on checks and balances to the point that everybody can meet the initiative and no one can impose a view and get it moving so that's one. but then one striking is when you take that at the global level and the international community to make decisions. what we now have is a situation which the globalization and the declining of the countries and the interdependence and all that is going on with the international integration of economies and societies and so on is creating the great need for the collective decision-making that transcends international and beyond the one border. and while the need created by

the organization to deal with the problems that no country can tackle a loan is the international community to work together in a response to the problem. >> host: let's take as an example climate change and the summit where we saw firsthand the ability for the countries to come to some sort of a consensus to work towards the big pressing global issue. you know what would help us to push past those challenges? >> in the book i propose an idea that i called multilateral which you try to get 192 countries to

agree on something that has some bite and can make a dent in the problem. in order to get that you have to get the minimum common denominator and have a variety of views and nothing happens. as you said, copenhagen was an example. but what if it brings ten 20 15, whatever the number of the biggest players both in terms of causing the problem and also being a part of the solution and trying to get an agreement among those. and climate change for example the number that can create a huge change in the world is the united states and china. so 192 countries why do we push for two countries to reach an agreement on how to move forward which is the united states and china and then hopefully bringing india of the world and brazil and south africa and see

if this number from a smaller number of countries can get things moving that would be announced as anti-democratic and exclusionary. why are you deciding the future of the world in a climate change without including me and they are right. but when we include everyone when hundred 92 countries nothing happens. so, if i have to choose between which one of the two, they are both bad. but i would rather have one that gets the part of the solution going and having a very inclusionary, highly democratic system in which every single country has a vote of hundred thousand inhabitants are the same boat as the united states or china and nothing happens.

i would love to have an inclusionary system but i would rather have things happening because all of these global problems are becoming a crisis. >> host: let's say everyone got on board with that idea. how would that play out and who could put forward an idea like that that is sorry, we care about you but you're not on the list of people that gets to be involved in the decision? >> guest: the number of countries that you would invite to deal with climate change are different than the type that you would invite to deal with the global pandemics or the global financial crisis or immigration and migration close flows of intellectual property. there are some countries that would be but the problems are

defined by different types of countries and so it just takes some government not just for governments, but the populations of the countries to demand that the government to start doing something. governments are run by politicians and politicians are very, very sensitive to the signals that the voters send. so nothing is going to happen until the kitchen tables and homes around the world and the citizens start demanding action to deal more effectively with the global problems. >> host: that i think things us back to trust which you mentioned earlier and you mentioned in your book is one possible pathway forward to helping us and our son

institutions some groups over others. but how i guess let's start with why is trust the linchpin of that is important to capture if we are going to find a way not just to dissolve into alien checks and balances that lead to inaction? >> guest: in many ways it means trusting your leaders to do the right thing and giving them the ability of writing a blank check. to trust and you need to know them and in order to know them you need to interact with them and be very cognizant of what are the issues and the dilemma. one of the problems and eye peering again i going back the political parties. one issue and one issue a loan to have some sort of vague

tunnel vision and my example of the butterfly in the region you can't afford what is happening to that part. the political parties are important training places for leaders especially for young people. and that is where also you can create the knowledge of the issues and you can bring people to understand that you don't choose between a wonderful option and a horrible one but in the government very often you have to choose between the battle and those sort of dilemmas need to be better understood and you need to have more trust and understand that the government is making a decision that isn't making everyone happy and it isn't by choice but because there are

others that are much worse. we have those decisions that we need to pick cutting the size of government and the budget cuts and increased taxes will mean making very terrible choices between that option and an even worse one and that is where the public will be very confused by the terrible simplifier than five demagogues that try to restore it and confuse the issues. >> host: as an average citizen that is confronted with all of this, i mean, how do you even know who to put your trust in especially when we are both in the media a bit and there is just such a proliferation of information and with that

misinformation about making those types of important decisions is not actually getting any easier for citizens. >> guest: there are no silver bullets but there is the need for people to make their homework more get better educated. it is a story that we have too much information and it's very confusing and it's hard to know who is saying the right thing and who is distorting what's happening. but if you do your homework and if you just stand by you will find a guide people that you can trust that don't have necessarily a vested interest but they are looking for a more objective take on the situation. and the other thing has become more active just by sitting at home and complaining isn't going to solve anything. people need to become more activated and participatory