let me introduce frank fukuyama three or four time alumnus. i can't remember the research staff there. he's the author of many rand reports and best-selling books including the 2-volume set on political order that we are going to get into today. the second volume of the set has just been published. sheila bair is two francs left also a rand -- sheila shares the systemic risk council and the federal deposit insurance corporation in 2006 through 2011, critical time. she is the author of bull by the horns, fighting to save main street from wall street and wall street from itself. she has another book coming out. it will come out this next spring that will explain the financial crisis and its implications for young adults. and it's title is the bullies of wall street. this is how greedy adults messed up our economy. [laughter] i told sheila she has made it easy for reviewers with that title. nicolas berggruen is next to sheila's left. investor, philanthropist impressive founder and president of the berggruen institute on governance and he has laun

in fact, that was frank fukuyama to my left. he wrote an essay here at rand in fact right across the hall from me entitled "have we reached the end of history." ultimately a very famous book. the original rand paper, which i still have has a question mark at the end. [laughter] it was the end of history and i noticed that over time as it went from paper to article to book, the question mark was dropped. [laughter] we may ask him about that. but i read that frank recently said that the year 2014 feels different than 1989, and how true that is. russia, of course, now has become an electoral authoritarian regime. it seeks to take back territory that it lost when the soviet union dissolved. china has an economy that rivals ours but remains authoritarian. the transition to democracy or the transition of the path to democracy in many countries has proven now anything but smooth or straight. in the united states, we've, of course, experienced a prolonged recession, gridlock no end in sight to that, declining confidence in our public of