The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

The institutional crisis is rooted in two things. First, the governing class, and the technocrats, accumulate power and wealth, and they begin to shape the institutions to protect their interests. The second problem is that the expertise that won World War II and built the postwar world is now encountering its own problem of inefficiency—diffusion. Diffusion is the distribution of authority among several departments or agencies. At a lower level, it is the diffusion and fragmentation of knowledge among individual experts. Knowledge of what is happening is diffused rather than integrated. Diffusion ties in with the problem of expertise. Expertise is needed. But experts are experts in different things, and when entities are constructed with specific expertise, barriers are built between entities that are sometimes dealing with the same issue. Instead of creating a single perspective on a problem, experts have perspectives on different parts of a problem, and the entity they represent has parallel responsibilities for fragments of an issue. This creates diffusion with the federal government and frequently contradictory directions for entities. What had begun in World War II as an effort that was highly focused on war and tightly controlled turned into a highly diffused undertaking frequently lacking a center from which it can be understood. This is not unique to the federal government. It happens in all, particularly large, organizations. Expertise has this inherent defect.