Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

The large pool of immigrant men and women who furnish most caretakers of senior citizens and most hospital nurses and other hospital staff in the U.S. also doesn’t exist in Japan. (I write these lines while recovering from the horrible experience of the death of a terminally ill Japanese relative, whose family was expected to provide her meals and do her personal laundry while she was in the hospital.)

If Japan does decide to re-evaluate immigration, a model palatable to Japan might be Canada’s policy, which stresses evaluating applicants for immigration on the basis of their potential value to Canada.

Long before Japan’s “official” declarations of war on December 7, 1941, Japan was carrying out a full-scale undeclared war on China from 1937 onwards. In that war, the Japanese military killed millions of Chinese, often in barbaric ways such as using tied-up Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice to toughen the attitudes of Japanese soldiers, killing several hundred thousand Chinese civilians at Nanking in December 1937–January 1938, and killing many others in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Although denial of these killings is widespread in Japan today, they were well documented at the time, not only by Chinese but also by foreign observers, and by photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves.

As a result, hatred of Japan is widespread today in China and Korea. In the view of Chinese and Koreans, Japan hasn’t adequately acknowledged, apologized for, or expressed regret for its wartime atrocities.

For an Asian perspective on Japan’s view of World War Two, here is an assessment by Lee Kuan Yew, a keen observer of people who as prime minister of Singapore for several decades became familiar with Japan, China, and Korea and their leaders: “Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologize for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intent...

Every year, my undergraduate classes at the University of California in Los Angeles include students from Japan, who talk to me about their schooling there and about their experiences on coming to California. They tell me that their history classes in Japanese schools devoted little time to World War Two (“because that war lasted just a few years in the thousands of years of Japanese history”), said little or nothing about Japan’s role as aggressor, stressed the role of Japanese as victims (of the two atomic bombs that killed about 120,000 Japanese) rather than as responsible for the deaths of millions of other people plus several million Japanese soldiers and civilians, and blamed the U.S. for somehow tricking Japan into launching the war. (In all fairness, Korean, Chinese, and American schoolbooks present their own skewed accounts of World War Two.) My Japanese students are shocked when they join Asian student associations in Los Angeles, meet Korean and Chinese students, and hear for the first time about Japan’s wartime deeds that still arouse hatred of Japan by students from those other countries.

ask why Germany’s approach has largely convinced its former enemies while Japan’s approach has not convinced its main victims China and Korea. Chapter 6 described the many ways in which Germany’s leaders have expressed remorse and responsibility, and in which German schoolchildren are taught to face up to what their country did.

Until 1853, while Japan was closed to the outside world and did negligible importing, it was self-sufficient in natural resources. Forced to depend on its own forests, and alarmed by their declines in the 1600’s, Japan pioneered in developing scientific forestry methods independently of Germany and Switzerland, in order to manage its forests. Now, because of Japan’s population explosion since 1853, rise in living standards and consumption rates, large population crammed into a small area, and need for raw materials essential for a modern industrial economy, Japan has become one of the world’s biggest importers of natural resources.

As any of these resources becomes depleted worldwide, Japan will be the first or one of the first countries to suffer the consequences. Japan is also the major country most dependent on imported food to feed its citizens. Japan today has the highest ratio (a factor of 20) of agricultural imports to agricultural exports among major countries. The next highest ratio, that for South Korea, is still only a factor of 6, while the U.S., Brazil, India, Australia, and quite a few other major countries are net food exporters. Japanese thus have good reason to view their country as resource-poor.

In particular, the rational policy would be for Japan to take the lead in sustainable exploitation of the world’s fisheries and forests on which Japan depends. Paradoxically, the reverse is true.

Japan appears to be the developed country with the least support for and the strongest opposition to sustainable resource policies overseas.

Japan is a leader in opposing prudent regulation of ocean fishing and whaling.

A single big imported tuna fish recently sold in Japan for the stunning price of more than $1,000,000. Those tuna stocks are in steep decline from overfishing, and that’s stimulating counter-efforts to preserve this valuable resource by agreeing on sustainable catches and by imposing fishing quotas. Incredibly, when those tuna stocks were proposed in 2010 for international protection (so-called CITES listing), Japan wasn’t the initiator of the proposal. Instead, Japan viewed it as a diplomatic triumph to have succeeded in blocking the proposal.

The International Whaling Commission determines quotas for hunting whales. Every year, Japan legally circumvents those quotas by killing large numbers of whales for the supposed purposes of research, then publishes little or no research on those dead whales and instead sells them for meat.

Japan especially does not want to be seen as giving in to the anti-whaling campaigns of Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd, and to international pressure to regulate the Bluefin Tuna fishery. One could describe Japan as “anti-anti-whaling” rather than pro-whaling.

When one adds the intra-coastal waterway to the Mississippi / Great Lakes system, the U.S. ends up with more navigable internal waterways than all the rest of the world combined.

U.S. has not been involved in a war on our mainland with a foreign power since the 1846–1848 Mexican War, which we ourselves initiated. Even mere raids on the U.S. mainland have been negligible: just a British raid on Washington during the War of 1812, Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus in New Mexico in 1916, one shell fired by a Japanese submarine in World War Two onto the U.S. coast at Santa Barbara, and six American civilians killed by an explosive-laden balloon launched from Japan also during World War Two.

Today, it’s increasingly easy to get disillusioned with democracy, and Americans sometimes envy China’s dictatorship for its ability to decide and implement good policies quickly. There’s no doubt that decisions and their implementation take longer in democracies than in dictatorships, because the essence of democracy is checks, balances, and broad-based (hence time-consuming) decision-making. For instance, China’s adoption of lead-free gasoline took just one year, whereas that policy required a decade of debates and court challenges in the U.S.

Those disadvantages of democracy are real. But dictatorships suffer from a far worse, often fatal, disadvantage. No one, in the 5,400-year history of centralized government on all of the continents, has figured out how to ensure that the policies implemented with enviable speed by dictatorships consist predominantly of good policies. Just think of the horribly self-destructive policies that China also implemented quickly, and whose consequences were unparalleled in any large First World democracy. Those self-destructive policies included China precipitating the large-scale famine of 1958–1962 that killed tens of millions of people, suspending its system of education, sending its teachers out into the fields to work alongside peasants, and creating later the world’s worst air pollution.

Winston Churchill quipped, in response to someone expounding to him the usual complaints about democracy’s disadvantages, that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for all of the alternative forms that at one time or another have been tried.

while I was growing up in the northeastern U.S. state of Massachusetts, the first Californian whom I met explained to me that California had become the only U.S. state to adopt a law permitting cars to make right turns on a red light at an intersection, after coming to a full stop. In the U.S. such traffic laws are the prerogative of individual American states, not of the national government. To my fellow Massachusetts citizens of the early 1960’s, and to the citizens of all other American states, that seemed an insanely dangerous idea that only those crazy freaked-out Californians would even dream of trying. But when California did try the experiment, it proved safe, other states were able to learn from California, and all states eventually adopted the same law (Plate 9.6). You may object that being permitted or forbidden to turn right on a red light after a full stop isn’t important enough to convince you of the advantages of our federal system.

I also acknowledge that democracy isn’t necessarily the best option for all countries; it’s difficult for it to prevail in countries lacking the prerequisites of a literate electorate and a widely accepted national identity.

Corruption is bad for a country or for a business, because decisions become influenced by what’s good for corrupt politicians or business people, even though the decision may be bad for the country or the business as a whole. Corruption also harms businesses because it means that they can’t count on contracts being enforced. That’s another huge disadvantage of China, which has much overt corruption. But the U.S. does have much covert corruption, because Wall Street and other rich entities and individuals influence U.S. government policy and actions by means of lobbying and election campaign contributions. While those money outlays are legal in the U.S., they achieve results similar to those achieved illegally by corruption. That is, legislators or officials adopt policies or actions harmful to the public good, but beneficial to the donor of the money, and sometimes beneficial to the legislators or officials as well.

To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population of any country into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everybody else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment. Hence it comes as no surprise that more than one-third of American Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born, and over half are either immigrants themselves or else the children of immigrants. That’s because Nobel Prize–winning research demands those same qualities of boldness, risk tolerance, hard work, ambition, and innovativeness.

The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise. As I previously explained, political compromise is one of the basic advantages of democracies as compared to dictatorships, because it reduces or prevents both tyranny by a majority and its converse of paralysis by a frustrated minority.

Despite the obvious potential for abuse—i.e., for filibusters to introduce paralysis, and for cloture to introduce tyranny—this system has worked throughout most of our history. Minorities as well as supermajorities have recognized the potential for abuse, and resorted only rarely to filibusters and even more rarely to cloture. Under our first 43 presidents and our first 220 years of constitutional government, our Senate opposed a total of only 68 presidential nominees for government positions by filibusters. But when Democratic President Obama was elected in 2008, Republican leaders declared their intent to block anything that he proposed. That included blocking 79 Obama nominees by filibusters in just four years, more than in the entire previous 220 years. Democrats responded by abolishing the supermajority requirement for approving presidential nominees other than Supreme Court justices, thereby making it possible to fill government jobs but also reducing the safety valve available to a dissatisfied minority. A filibuster is merely the most extreme and least frequent method to prevent confirmation of presidential nominees. In President Obama’s second term of office from 2012 to 2016, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed the lowest number of presidentially nominated judges since the early 1950’s, and the lowest number of appeals court judges (the court level immediately below the Supreme Court) since the 1800’s.

As one disillusioned friend wrote me after retiring from a long career in politics, “Of all the issues that we face, I think that the skew of money in our political system and our personal lives has been by far the most damaging. Politicians and political outcomes have been purchased on a grander scale than ever before… the scramble for political money saps time and money and enthusiasm… political schedules bend to money, political discourse worsens, and politicians do not know each other as they fly back and forth to their districts.”

a second suggested explanation: the growth of domestic air travel, which now offers frequent quick connections between Washington and every American state. Formerly, our representatives served in Congress in Washington during the week; then they had to remain in Washington for the weekend because they couldn’t return to their home state and back within the span of a weekend. Their families lived in Washington, and their children went to school in Washington. On weekends the representatives and their spouses and children socialized with one another, the representatives got to know one another’s spouses and children, and the representatives spent time with one another as friends and not just as political adversaries or allies.

“gerrymandering.” That means redrawing the geographic outlines of a state’s congressional districts so as to favor one party, by assuring that party a proportion of elected representatives higher than the whole state’s proportion of voters choosing that party. This is not a new practice in American politics. In fact, it derives its name from Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration already in 1812 redrew the state’s districts for the sole purpose of increasing the number of elected representatives belonging to Gerry’s party. The resulting districts had geographically weird shapes, one of them resembling a salamander and thereby giving rise to the term “gerrymander”

The consequence of gerrymandering for political compromise is that it makes it clearer in advance which parties and which policies a majority of each district’s voters is likely to favor. Hence candidates are likely to be defeated if they take a middle-of-the-road position appealing to voters of both parties.

But while gerrymandering does seem to make some contribution to current political polarization, there are several reasons why it’s not the whole explanation: gerrymandering can’t explain polarization in the Senate (because states are divided into electoral districts for House but not for Senate elections, but senators are now as uncompromising as are House members);

However, all three of those theories about the polarization of American politics—fund-raising, domestic air travel, and gerrymandering—seek to explain only the polarization of that tiny group of Americans who are our politicians. But the actual problem is much broader: Americans as a whole are becoming polarized and politically uncompromising.

Before blaming TV-viewing for those behaviors, one might object: which is the cause and which is the result, or are the two sets of phenomena just correlated without either being the cause of the other? An unintended natural experiment in Canada illuminates this question. In a Canadian valley were three otherwise similar towns, one of which happened to be out of reach for the TV transmitter serving the area. When that town did gain reception, participation in clubs and other meetings declined compared to participation in that same town before TV arrived, down to levels comparable to participation in the other two towns already served by TV. This suggests that TV-viewing caused the decline in participation; it wasn’t the case that people who were already non-participants then chose to watch TV.

The average American cell-phone user checks his or her phone on the average every four minutes, spends at least six hours per day looking at the screen of a cell phone or a computer, and spends more than 10 hours per day (i.e., most waking hours) connected to some electronic device. The result is that most Americans no longer experience one another as live humans whose faces and body movements we see, whose voices we hear, and whom we get to understand. Instead, we experience one another predominantly as digital messages on a screen, occasionally as voices over a cell phone.

This book has already discussed two countries—Chile and Indonesia—where breakdown of political compromise led to one side imposing a military dictatorship whose explicit goal was to exterminate the other side. That prospect still seems absurd to most Americans. It also would have seemed absurd to my Chilean friends when I lived there in 1967, if anyone had expressed fears then of that possible outcome. Yet it did happen in Chile in 1973.

Elections are the essence of any democracy. If a country has a constitution or laws specifying democratic government but the country’s citizens don’t or can’t vote, such a country doesn’t deserve to be called a democracy. By that standard, the U.S. is barely half-deserving of being called a democracy. Nearly half of American citizens eligible to vote don’t vote even for our most important elected office, that of president.

In each of the four most recent presidential elections the number of eligible Americans who haven’t voted has been about 100 million. The percentage of citizens who don’t vote for lesser elected offices is much higher. For instance, my city of Los Angeles (LA) is one of the U.S.’s major cities, and LA’s most important elected official is our mayor. Nevertheless, in our most recent election for mayor of LA, 80% of eligible LA residents didn’t vote.

The highest turnout ever recorded in modern American history, for the 2008 presidential election, was only 62%, far below even the lowest recent turnout in Italy or in Indonesia.

But there’s another reason why many Americans eligible to vote don’t do so: they can’t, because they are not registered to vote. That’s a distinctive feature of American democracy that calls for explanation. In many democracies, eligible citizens don’t have to do anything to “register” to vote: the government does it for them by generating a list of people automatically registered, from government lists of drivers’ licenses, taxpayers, residents, or other such databases. For instance, in Germany all Germans over the age of 18 automatically receive a card from the government notifying them that an election is coming up for which they are eligible to vote.

In case you’re inclined to dismiss such obstacles as a vanished feature of the remote past, in the state of Florida in the year 2000 about 100,000 potential voters, the vast majority of them Democrats, were pruned off the list of registered voters. That pruning had an enormous effect on tipping the Florida 2000 presidential vote, hence the U.S. presidency, to George Bush over Al Gore—a much greater effect than did the subsequent well-publicized arguments over disqualifying mere hundreds of so-called chad ballots to which the election’s outcome is commonly misattributed. The basic flaw in our American system of voter registration is that, in Florida and many other states, our registered voter lists and election procedures are controlled by partisan procedures at state and local levels, not by non-partisan procedures at the national level. Partisan electoral officials often seek to make voting difficult for citizens likely to prefer the opposite political party.

But in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, overturned Congress’s 1965 formula for identifying districts to be subject to oversight, on the grounds that it had supposedly become unnecessary because of progress in registering African-American voters. The result was a rush by state legislatures to adopt new obstacles to voter registration, varying greatly among states. Until 2004, none of the 50 U.S. states required potential voters to show a government-issued photo ID in order to register or vote. Only two states had adopted such a requirement by 2008. But immediately upon the Supreme Court decision, 14 states adopted photo ID requirements (usually a driver’s license or passport) or other such restrictions, and most states now have or are contemplating them. Just as the earlier grandfather clauses did not specifically mention African-Americans but were instead successfully designed to disenfranchise them, modern voting restriction methods have similar designs and successes. The percentage of potential voters who possess the required photo ID is considerably higher (depending on the age group, up to three times higher) for whites than for African-Americans or Latinos, and higher for rich people than for poor people. The

The state of Alabama closed its Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) offices (the offices that issue driver’s licenses) in counties with large African-American populations. In response to the resulting public outcry, Alabama re-opened those offices—but for just one day per month. The state of Texas maintained DMV offices in only one-third of its counties, forcing potential voters to travel up to 250 miles if they were determined to satisfy the photo ID requirement by getting a driver’s license.

All of these selective obstacles contribute to the fact that voter turnout is over 80% for Americans with incomes exceeding $150,000, but under 50% for Americans with incomes under $20,000.

No discussion of modern American democracy would be complete without mention of its most frequently criticized feature: the explosion in costs of election campaigns, due especially to the shift from inexpensive print-media advertising to expensive TV-based advertising. Campaigns have become predominantly funded by wealthy interests. There has also been an explosion in duration of campaigns, which now run virtually continuously from one election to the next. As a result, American politicians must devote most of their time (one retired senator friend of mine estimated, 80% of his time) to fund-raising and campaigning rather than to the task of governing; well-qualified citizens are discouraged from running for government office; and campaign information is reduced first to 30-second sound bites, then to short Twitter tweets. In contrast, the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas for election to the office of senator from Illinois in 1858 lasted up to six hours each.

all quantities compared and all measures yield the same conclusion: the major democracy with the greatest inequality is the U.S. That’s been true for a long time, and that inequality of ours is still increasing. Some of those measures of rising American economic inequality have now become frequently quoted and widely familiar. For instance, the share of unadjusted national income earned by the richest 1% of Americans rose from less than 10% in the 1970’s to over 25% today. Inequality is rising even within the ranks of rich Americans themselves: the richest 1% of Americans have increased their incomes proportionately much more than the richest 5%; the richest 0.1% have done proportionately better than the richest 1%; and the three richest Americans (currently Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) have combined net worths currently equal to the combined net worths of the 130 million poorest Americans. The percentage of billionaires in our population is double that of the major democracies with the next highest percentage of billionaires (Canada and Germany), and seven times that of most other major democracies. The average income of an American CEO, which was already 40 times the income of the average worker in the same company in 1980, is now several hundred times that of the company’s average worker. Conversely, while the economic status of rich Americans exceeds that in other major democracies, the economic status of poor Americans is lower than that in other major ...

That growing skew between rich and poor Americans is due to a combination of American government policies and American attitudes. As for government policies, “redistribution” in the U.S.—i.e., government policies that in effect transfer money from richer to poorer people—is lower than in other major democracies. For instance, income tax rates, and social transfers and spending such as vouchers and subsidies for low-income people, are relatively low in the U.S. compared to most other major democracies. Part of the explanation is the belief, more widespread in the U.S. than in other countries, that poor people are poor because it’s their own fault, that they would become rich if only they would work harder, and that government support for low-income people (such as by food stamps) is rife with abuse and makes poor people unjustly affluent (so-called “welfare queens”). Another part of the explanation is the restrictions on voter registration and voting, and the campaign financing costs, that I discussed on earlier pages. Those issues give disproportionate political power to rich people, by making it easier for them than for poor people to register, vote, and influence politicians.

Closely related to this issue of economic inequality that I’ve just been discussing is the issue of socio-economic mobility: i.e., the likelihood that individual Americans can overcome economic inequality, and that poor Americans can become rich. Americans, more than citizens of other countries, believe that their country is a meritocracy, in which people achieve the rewards that their individual abilities permit them to achieve. This is symbolized by the distinctively American phrase “rags to riches”: we believe that a poor immigrant who arrives in rags can become rich through ability and hard work. Is this central belief of ours true? One method by which social scientists have tested this belief is to compare, among different countries, the correlation coefficients between incomes (or income ranks within people of their generation) of adults and the incomes of their parents. A correlation coefficient of 1.0 would mean that relative incomes of parents and of their adult children are perfectly correlated: all high-income people are children of high-income parents, all low-income people are children of low-income parents, kids from low-income families have zero chance of achievin...