The Fourth Revolution Quotes

“Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“The desire to control everything is giving way to pluralism, uniformity to diversity, centralization to localism, opacity to transparency, and immobilisme, or the resistance to change, to experimentation. The state is beginning to move in each case (though it could move a lot faster).”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“George Bernard Shaw once quipped that politicians can always rely on Paul’s vote if they give him money that they steal from Peter. This understates the problem with democracy because Paul is an old man and Peter is either a child or unborn.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Not many people in Washington are thinking beyond the 2016 presidential election. It is sometimes argued that an American administration operates strategically for only about six months, at the beginning of its second year—after it has gotten its staff confirmed by the Senate and before the midterms campaign begins.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Angela Merkel’s favorite statistic is that the European Union accounts for 7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP, and 50 percent of its social spending.12 But the politics of introducing change will be bloody, pitting cash-strapped governments that have to trim services against disgruntled voters who want to maintain their social rights, and taxpayers who want more value for their money against powerful public-sector unions that want to preserve their privileges.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“without serious reforms of its public sector America will turn into “an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army,”11 with all the money going to entitlements and defense and none left for education or anything else.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“twenty-to-sixty-four-year-olds) will rise from 28 percent to 58 percent—and that is assuming that the EU lets in more than a million young immigrants a year.9 Across the Atlantic, America continues to tax itself like a small-government country and spend like a big-government one while hiding its true liabilities by using tactics that would have made Bernie Madoff blush. With the baby boomers aging, the Congressional Budget Office reckons the bill for medical benefits alone will rise by 60 percent over the next decade—its deficit may be manageable now, but the United States faces a choice: Rein in those entitlements, raise taxes to extraordinary levels, or stagger from crisis to crisis. Every”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“only increased the debt, as governments rightly have borrowed. By March 2012 there were some $43 trillion of government bonds in issue,8 compared with only $11 trillion at the end of 2001. That is only a fraction of Western governments’ true liabilities, once you factor in pensions and health care. The numbers for many cities are even worse: San Bernardino in California and Detroit in Michigan both filed for bankruptcy because of these off-balance sheet obligations. And who will pay for all this? In “old Europe,” for instance, the working-age population peaked in 2012 at 308 million—and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060. These will have to support ever more old people: The old-age dependency ratio (the number of over-sixty-fives as a proportion of the number of”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“WHY IT HAS TO CHANGE Why should this time be different? Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better. Debt and demography mean that government in the rich world has to change. Even before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Western governments were spending more than they raised. The U.S. government has run a surplus only five times since 1960; France has not had one since 1974–75. The crunch has”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“There are powerful demographic and economic reasons why many people think that the state will continue to grow. Entitlements grow as populations age. Governments dominate areas of the economy, like health and education, that are resistant to productivity improvements. But the other reason for the state’s sprawl has been political. Both the Left and the Right have indulged its appetites, the former singing the praises of hospitals and schools, the latter serenading prisons, armies, and police forces, and both creating regulations like confetti. The call that “something must be done,” i.e., that yet another rule or department must be created, comes as often from Fox News or the Daily Mail as it does from the BBC or the New York Times. For all the worries about “benefit scroungers” and “welfare queens,” most state spending is sucked up by the middle classes, many of them conservatives. Voters have always voted for more services; some people just resent having to pay for them more than others. The apocryphal sign at a Tea Party rally warning “big government” to “keep its hands off my Medicare” sums up many Americans’ hypocrisy about the state.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“There have been periodic attempts to stop the supersizing of the state. In 1944 Friedrich Hayek warned that the state was in danger of crushing the society that gave it life in The Road to Serfdom. This provided an important theme for conservative politicians from then onward. In 1975 California’s current governor, Jerry Brown, in an earlier incarnation, declared an “era of limits.” This worry about “limits” profoundly reshaped thinking about the state for the next decade and a half. In the 1990s people on both the Left and the Right assumed that globalization would trim the state: Bill Clinton professed the age of big government to be over. In fact, Leviathan had merely paused for breath. Government quickly resumed its growth. George W. Bush increased the size of the U.S. government by more than any president since Lyndon Johnson, while globalization only increased people’s desire for a safety net. Even allowing for its recent setbacks, the modern Western state is mightier than any state in history and mightier, by far, than any private company. Walmart may have the world’s most efficient supply chain, but it does not have the power to imprison or tax people—or to listen to their phone calls. The modern state can kill people on the other side of the world at the touch of a button—and watch it in real time.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“The statistics tell part of the story. In America government spending increased from 7.5 percent of GDP in 1913 to 19.7 percent in 1937, to 27 percent in 1960, to 34 percent in 2000, and to 41 percent in 2011. In Britain it rose from 13 percent in 1913 to 48 percent in 2011, and the average share in thirteen rich countries has climbed from 10 percent to around 47 percent.4 But these figures do not fully capture the way that government has become part of the fabric of our lives. America’s Leviathan claims the right to tell you how long you need to study to become a hairdresser in Florida (two years) and the right to monitor your e-mails. It also obliges American hospitals to follow 140,000 codes for ailments they treat, including one for injuries from being hit by a turtle. Government used to be an occasional partner in life, the contractor on the other side of Hobbes’s deal, the night watchman looking over us in Mill’s. Today it is an omnipresent nanny. Back in 1914 “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman,” the historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed. “He could live where he liked and as he liked. . . . Broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.” Today the sensible, law-abiding Englishman cannot pass through an hour, let alone a lifetime, without noticing the existence of the state.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“As it has expanded, the Western state has tended to give people more rights—the right to vote, the right to education and health care and welfare. Things like a university education that a century ago were regarded as a white, male, wealthy privilege are now seen as a public service, in some cases a free entitlement, for everybody.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“1500 only a madman would have bet that the future belonged to Europe. By 1700 only a madman would have bet that it belonged anywhere else.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“there is some evidence that governments are getting even more sluggish. It took America four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, starting in 1933, and fifteen years to build the bulk of the Interstate Highway System, starting in 1956. As Philip Howard points out, a project to build a wind farm near Cape Cod has already been under scrutiny for a decade while seventeen agencies studied it, and it could well be under scrutiny for another decade, while eighteen lawsuits wind their way through the courts.12 Governments are devoting ever more resources to fulfilling inherited obligations rather than investing in the future.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“The Peterson Foundation calculates that, since 2010, fiscal uncertainty—i.e., gridlock—might have slowed America’s GDP growth by one percentage point and stopped the creation of two million jobs.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“This is only the beginning of a huge “Copernican revolution” (to borrow a phrase from Matthew Taylor, one of Tony Blair’s advisers) that is putting the user at the center of the public-sector universe. The current centralized state has been shaped by the idea that information is in short supply: It derives its power from the fact that it knows lots of things that ordinary people do not. But information is now one of the world’s most abundant resources: available in huge quantities and accessible to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, and Jared Cohen, who worked for Hillary Clinton, point out in The New Digital Age, this changes the nature of the relationship between individuals and authority. The top-down state may become more like a network that can mobilize the energies and abilities of thousands or even millions of well-informed citizens—or “prosumers,” as one cyberguru, Don Tapscott, has called them.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“We live and do business in the Information Age,” Barack Obama once complained, “but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black-and-white TV.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“If the eurozone collapses, its epitaph should be the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg, in 2007: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”32”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“If the United States sinks into political paralysis, its epitaph could well be, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Vagueness about numbers is a curse of the public sector. In the worst cases it borders on the criminal. Challenged to find one reliable number in the Argentine government’s books, a group of the most respected economists in Buenos Aires went into a huddle and came back with the answer: “Maybe one of the trade ones, but we are not sure which.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“There are thirty-two closed-circuit television cameras near the flat where George Orwell wrote 1984. The night watchman standing guard at the gate has become the nanny inside the home and the office, hanging over your shoulder in the kitchen, sitting room, boardroom, and even bedroom. But it is not a very good nanny.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“So in both the West and the emerging world the state is in trouble. The mystery is why so many people assume that radical change is unlikely. The status quo in fact is the least likely option. As an American economist, Herbert Stein, once drily observed, “If something cannot go on for ever, it will stop.” Government will have to change shape dramatically over the coming decades. In the emerging world the era of growing by night is over. In the West the era of more is coming to an end. It is time for the Fourth Revolution.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Transparency was a guardian of frugality, just as confusion had been a handmaiden of extravagance.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“The British general election of 2010 returned only three MPs to the Commons who described their professions as “science or research” (compared with thirty-eight barristers).”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“Berlusconi is us,” as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago puts it.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

“the “compendium of learning” set in motion by the Ming Emperor Yongle (1360–1424), which drew on the talents of more than two thousand scholars and filled more than eleven thousand volumes—and remained the largest encyclopedia in the world until Wikipedia surpassed it in 2007.”
― John Micklethwait, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State