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GEORGE PACKER: I'm George Packer.
I'm a fellow New Yorker.
That's my latest book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History in
the New America." And I'm on staff of "The New Yorker"
magazine, where I've been a staff writer for 10 years.
And it's great to be in heaven at Google.
I was on the West Coast version of
heaven a few weeks ago.
So forgive me if I say a few of the things that I said out
in San Francisco.
But I'm going to leave a lot of time for questions.
And because you're New Yorkers and not San Franciscans, I
don't expect you to be as polite as they were out there.
So "The Unwinding" is a book about the past generation of
American life really from the late '70s up to the present,
and some of the big changes that have passed through the
country and changed people's lives.
It's really a book about how certain institutions that used
to work on behalf of the majority of Americans, sort of
supporting the aspirations of middle class Americans, from
schools, government corporations, to the media,
have eroded, and how the idea of a kind of cohesive society
has begun to fall apart.
And how the deal that used to exist among Americans, which
said that if you worked hard and if you educated your
children, that not only would you have a secure place and
they might have an even better one, but you would have
recognition in society.
There would be a place at the table for you.
And although that deal left out a lot of Americans, it had
within it the tools to correct those injustices and to
include more.
And over the past generation, that deal, which you could
call the social contract, has frayed to the breaking point
so that more and more we are a country of winners and losers.
We are both more free and less equal than a generation ago.
We are more inclusive and more stratified.
Those two things have been happening at the same time.
These are not unfamiliar themes.
And, in fact, you've probably heard of a lot of books that
deal with issues like income inequality, globalization, the
effect of the information revolution on society, the
decline of the middle class, political polarization, the
rise of both organized money in Washington and also an
organized right wing in Washington.
All of those are themes of "The Unwinding." But they're
not talked about explicitly because this is not another
policy book.
It's not another "10 things that are wrong with America
and 10 ways to fix them." I don't have a prescription.
So don't ask me for one.
What this is closer to is a novel.
It reads like a big, panoramic, but also quite
intimate novel about American life over the past generation
except that all of it had to clear fact-checking.
It's all true.
But it has texture and the focus on individual lives that
you expect from a novel.
And I hope it has the narrative power and the pull
of a novel that makes you want to know what happens next, and
what's going to happen to these characters, and how are
they going to recover from the latest setback in their lives.
So I'm going to read from the very short prologue, which
will give you a feel for the language of the book and for
the scope of the book.
And then I'll introduce some of the characters a bit.
And then we should spend most of the time having a
conversation.
No one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil
that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes
stifling grip, first gave way.
Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless
times, in countless ways.
And, at some moment, the country--
always the same country--
crossed a line of history and became
irretrievably different.
If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you've spent
your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding.
You watched structures that had been in place before your
birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible
landscape--
the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the
Mahoning Valley, Florida
subdivisions, California schools.
And other things harder to see, but no less vital in
supporting the order of everyday life changed beyond
recognition--
ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New
York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere.
When the norms that made the old institutions useful began
to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the
Roosevelt republic that had reined for almost half a
century came undone.
The void was filled by the default force in American
life, organized money.
The unwinding is nothing new.
There have been unwindings every generation or two, the
fall to earth of the founders heavenly republic in a noisy
marketplace of quarrelsome factions, the war that tore
the United States apart and turned them from plural to
singular, the crash that laid waste to the business of
America making way for a democracy of
bureaucrats and everymen.
Each decline brought renewal.
Each implosion released energy.
Out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.
The unwinding brings freedom more than the world has ever
granted and to more kinds of people than ever before.
Freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your
story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high,
marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business,
have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the
ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it,
fail abjectly and try again.
And with freedom, the
unwinding brings its illusions.
For all these pursuits are as fragile as thought balloons
popping against circumstances.
Winning and losing are All-American games and in the
unwinding, winners win bigger than ever, floating away like
bloated dirigibles.
And losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom.
And sometimes they never do.
This much freedom leaves you on your own.
More Americans than ever before live alone.
But even a family can exist in isolation, just managing to
survive in the shadow of a huge military base without a
soul to lend a hand.
A shiny new community can spring up overnight miles from
anywhere, then fade away just as fast.
An old city can lose its industrial foundation and 2/3
of its people while all its mainstays--
churches, government,
businesses, charities, unions--
fall like building flats in a strong wind,
hardly making a sound.
Alone on a landscape without solid structures, Americans
have to improvise their own destinies, plot their own
stories of success and salvation.
A North Carolina boy clutching a Bible in the sunlight grows
up to receive a new vision of how the countryside could be
resurrected.
A young man goes to Washington and spends the rest of his
career trying to recall the idea that drew him there in
the first place.
An Ohio girl has to hold her life together as everything
around her falls apart until in middle age she finally
seizes the chance to do more than survive.
As these obscure Americans find their way in the
unwinding, they pass alongside new monuments where the old
institutions once stood.
The outsized lives of their most famous countrymen,
celebrities who only grow more exalted as
other things recede.
These icons sometimes occupy the personal place of
household gods.
And they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how
to live a good or better life.
In the unwinding, everything changes and nothing lasts,
except for the voices--
American voices--
open, sentimental, angry, matter of fact, inflected with
borrowed ideas, God, TV, and the dimly remembered past.
Telling a joke above the noise of the assembly line,
complaining behind window shades drawn against the
world, thundering justice to a crowded park or an empty
chamber, closing a deal on the phone, dreaming aloud late at
night on a front porch as trucks
rush by in the darkness.
So that prologue gives you a map of the entire book.
It introduces you to all the key people and places that
you're going to meet.
And what I wanted to do was to combine the very obscure
people you've never heard of--
and would be unlikely to hear of if not for
reading about them--
to the most famous people in the country, from Tammy Thomas
who is the Ohio girl growing up in Youngstown amid the
collapse of the steel industry and the collapse of the city,
trying to survive and raise three children on one of the
last good assembly line jobs left.
To Newt Gingrich, who stands, I think, more than any other
politician, for the toxic atmosphere of demonization
that we've come to expect as normal in our politics.
From Jeff Connaughton, who's the Washington guy who arrives
there full of idealism and becomes an aide to a young
senator named Joe Biden, thinking he will ride Biden's
charisma into the White House, and then gradually becomes
disillusioned and ends up becoming a lobbyist and
passing through that revolving door that so many people in
Washington do, makes a lot of money, loses a lot of money in
the financial crisis, which is sort of the critical moment--
the reckoning--
for almost all the characters in the book, and decides to go
back into government one last time as the chief of staff to
Biden's successor, Ted Kaufman, in order to try to
make Wall Street pay for what it did in
the financial crisis.
From him to Alice Waters, the food evangelist of local
cuisine and organic food.
From Peter Thiel, whom you probably know is the founder
of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook
and a libertarian philosopher of sorts in his own right, to
Jay-Z, who as much as anyone sort of represents the culture
of coming from nowhere to the top and what it says about
celebrity today.
So you move between people you don't know
and the most famous.
You also move between the power centers--
Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley--
and some of the forgotten parts of the country, such as
the textile and tobacco region of North Carolina where you
meet a man named Dean Price, who is the
son of tobacco farmers.
His father was a failed fire-and-brimstone preacher
who eventually took his own life.
And Dean grew up in the shadow of his father's failure,
determined to become independent and to make his
own way as an entrepreneur.
And Dean's set up a chain of truck stops and fast food
restaurants along a stretch of US 220 between Greensboro,
North Carolina and Martinsville, Virginia.
And for a while, he was making a go of it selling gas and
fried chicken until he realized that Walmart up the
hill on the interstate or on the state road and Sheet's Oil
next door with low-cost gasoline were squeezing him so
that he couldn't compete.
The word he used was hogtied.
The multinationals had him hogtied.
And meanwhile, the economy of the region was plummeting so
that people were more and more dependent on Walmart for
everything that they needed.
So in the middle of his career, with his chain of
truck stops beginning to topple with the financial
crisis, Dean Price, who in unconventional ways is a very
religious man and sees his life as a kind of a quest, had
an epiphany.
And that epiphany was he needed to get away from this
model of selling imported oil and fast food.
He needed to move into alternative
energy, into biodiesel.
And that the source of it was all around him, these fallow
tobacco farms that could be used to grow canola.
And out of canola oil could come biodiesel.
All the fast food and barbecue joints around him that threw
out their waste oil at the end of the night, that waste oil
could be used to make biodiesel.
So at the passage I'm going to read now, Dean is just on the
cusp of this epiphany of moving out of his old business
into this new one, still an entrepreneur, but with a
vision of not just how he could make a fortune, but how
he could remake the countryside which had fallen
on these hard times.
The landscape Dean had returned to where he planned
to live out his life was very old and also new, as
particular as anything in America and also as generic,
as beautiful and as ugly.
In his imagination, it had become a nightmare, so
profoundly wrong that he called it sinful.
And he hated the sin more than any casual visitor or distant
critic possibly could.
Yet he also saw here a dream of redemption so unlikely and
glorious that it could only fill the mind's eye of a
visionary native son.
Once, driving through Cleveland County, Dean
happened to pass the hardshell Baptist Church that his father
had once tried to get but failed, the failure that had
broken his father's will.
Dean had gone down with them to Cleveland County and heard
the sermon that his father had given for his audition back
around 1975.
So that decades later, he recognized the church.
And he also noticed that there was now a *** Bojangles
right next door.
For Dean, Bojangles had come to represent everything that
was wrong with the way Americans lived, how they
raised their food and transported it across the
country, how they grew the crops to feed the animals they
ate, the way they employed the people who worked in the
restaurants, the way the money left the community.
Everything about it was wrong.
Dean's own business--
gas and fast food--
had become hateful to him.
And he saw the error of his ways as his father never had.
And the conjunction of his father's legacy and his own
struck him with bitter irony as he drove past.
He was seeing beyond on the surfaces of the land to its
hidden truths.
Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass
of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220
carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughter
houses always under cover of darkness, like a vast and
shameful trafficking.
Chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too
big to walk.
And he thought how these same chickens might return from
their destination as pieces of meat to his floodlit Bojangles
up the hill from his house.
And that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by
employees whose hatred of the job would leak
into the cooked food.
And that food would be served up and eaten by customers who
would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro
with diabetes or heart failure, a
burden to the public.
And later, Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan
Walmart in electric carts because they were too heavy to
walk the aisles of the super center, just
like hormone-fed chickens.
Somehow in North Carolina, that passage got a big laugh.
Maybe not in Google New York.
Dean's story, the story of Tammy Thomas in Youngstown,
Jeff Connaughton in Washington, Peter Thiel in
Silicon Valley are the backbone of the narrative.
And you move between them as their lives move from the late
'70s to the present and as you also meet the VIPs, the
celebrities, who cast a different light on the big
events and trends of the period.
And I hope that the overall feeling is not completely one
of darkness and despair.
I've been accused of peddling a pessimistic message here.
But when you know someone like Dean Price or Tammy Thomas,
when you listen to Peter Thiel talk about the future, when
you see someone like Jeff Connaughton coming back to try
to right the wrongs of Washington, it's very hard to
be completely pessimistic about America.
I get pessimistic when I think about the big picture, like
the 10 things wrong with America and how to fix them,
when I think about Washington and Wall Street.
But when I'm writing about these individuals, there's a
certain resilience and a resourcefulness in them, a
refusal to quit that might be particularly American and that
tells me there's still people who have an investment in what
used to be called the American Dream.
So that's "The Unwinding." And now I am happy to try to
answer whatever questions you might have.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
GEORGE PACKER: Hi
AUDIENCE: So one of the things that your prologue was making
me think about was the connection between the
breakdown of community structures and the lack of
money caused by the financial collapse.
Our CEO Eric Schmidt, one thing that he's said from time
to time is more money solves all known problems.
GEORGE PACKER: All known problems.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
GEORGE PACKER: Right.
AUDIENCE: I don't necessarily agree.
But do you think, without the financial collapse, this
breakdown of community would still be going on?
Do you think it was just unmasked by
the financial collapse?
Or do you think it was brought about by
the financial collapse?
GEORGE PACKER: I think it was unmasked by it.
That's why my book begins in 1978.
My guess is most people in this room
were not born in 1978.
I was a teenager.
It seemed like a dreary, formless, impossible to define
kind of dismal time.
Jimmy Carter was in the White House.
The big song was the Bee Gees from "Saturday Night Fever."
And yet, looking back, that was a key moment.
Several things were happening at once.
And so to answer your question, it's been a
generation-long development that the financial crisis
accelerated, brought out in the open, but didn't cause.
De-industrialization really began to take off.
Tammy Thomas' story from Youngstown is about what
happened when the steel mills started
shutting in the late '70s.
The rise of the personal computer--
the Apple II in 1977 was like the beginning of, really, the
popularisation of computers, which led to what you do.
And big money coming to Washington began around '78
with lobbying as a major force.
So did the rise of the new right.
Gingrich came to Washington in '78--
that's one reason why he's profiled in the book--
with a purpose not to build up the institution of Congress,
but to tear it down and out of the rubble to build his own
base of power and the power of the conservative movement.
So what you see is the beginning not of building
institutions, but of tearing them down.
And you see the physical results in towns
all over the country.
But you also see the social results in the lack of
structures that people can count on.
Now one thing we might talk about is whether the structure
called the internet is beginning to replace those old
social structures.
And we can discuss that.
But I think you were getting at
something with your question.
And if so, I agree with you that this has been something
much longer than just a five-year process, as you will
find out if you ask anyone from the Midwest or from rural
North Carolina.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
GEORGE PACKER: Yes?
AUDIENCE: You alluded to the public school system in
California.
But my sense was that while California may be the worst of
it, the public school system all over the country has
degraded since the '70s.
Why pick on California?
And what do you have to say about the public school system
in the US overall over the last few decades?
GEORGE PACKER: Well, I'm picking on California because
I'm a product of the California
public school system.
And I graduated, again, in that key year of 1978.
Maybe I've started the book then because I think
everything began the year I got out of high school.
But, in fact, that was also the year of Proposition 13,
which was the first big shot fired in the tax revolt and
which initiated a wave of anti-tax initiatives across
the country.
And in California, the results were almost immediate and
devastating.
It went from being the best public school system in the
country and then over the following decades to being
down there close to Mississippi.
Now there are other reasons, too.
There are social reasons.
There's reasons of poverty, of how people raise their
children, of family structure.
But without the funding--
and I know this because my son goes to public
school here in New York.
And I have to bring in the paper towels at the
start of the year.
When I was in school, the parents did not have to bring
in the paper towels.
So there's been a starving of resources of public schools
across the country, which is maybe what you're getting at.
But California is the most egregious case, so they
deserve to be picked on.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: One of the reasons that I'm excited about your
book is that when the folks that I know in Silicon Valley
and myself talk about the institutions that you're
talking about, we talk about them in a very
technocratic way.
When we talk about government, we talk about externalities
and nudges and things like that.
And certainly in your book-- and it seems like the
characters that you're talking about-- there are the VIPs and
then there's the rest--
it seems like there's a thread that these things have some
sort of moral significance.
And I was wondering if could talk about that distinction.
GEORGE PACKER: That's a great way to put it.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, institutions are complicated things.
And they're made up of rules, of traditions and precedents,
of the technical ways in which they function, but also of
deals between people and of people's attitudes toward each
other, and what corners they're willing to cut, and
how much they're willing to get away with.
And one of the things that's happened over the past
generation is our leaders have been willing to get away with
more and more.
And the taboos and sort of social stigmas
have dropped away.
And once that happens, it's hard to put them back because
people don't want to be the sucker at the table.
I wrote a piece that maybe some of you saw in "The New
Yorker" about the political culture of Silicon Valley.
And there seems to be more and more interest in government in
Silicon Valley.
And one expression of that is an idea of using technology as
a model for how government can be organized and how to fix
what's wrong with government.
So that we have new apps that are there really more for
citizens to use in order to interact with government and
to improve the way it works.
I have nothing against those.
I think they're all good steps.
I just don't want to over-hype them.
Because government really comes down to power and
resources and conflicts of interests and conflicts of
values, which don't really yield to technological fixes.
It has an engineering component, but it also has a
moral and a social component.
Issues of justice and fairness can't be solved by computers.
So although I'm interested in Citizenville, I don't look to
it for all the answers.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: In your introduction, you talk about
the unwinding and subsequent renewals
throughout American history.
Given that you've studied the unwinding, what are you seeing
as being what could potentially be the renewal?
GEORGE PACKER: You know, there's several models that
I've seen out there.
And I'll talk about them.
And then I'll tell you why I don't see in any of them a
really convincing long-term solution.
One is localism, which is to say Washington does not have
the answers.
It's just a paralyzed place.
And it is.
I was just there a week ago on my book tour.
And as soon as I got out at Union Station, I just felt
this heaviness settle over me like this is not
where things get fix.
This is where problems are made.
So it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do you remember Ronald Reagan's
first inaugural address?
He famously said government is not the
solution to our problems.
Government is the problem.
By saying that, he guaranteed that it would be true.
And it's become true because there are a lot of people in
Washington who want to see government fail.
Imagine if you had people at the head of tech companies who
wanted to see technology fail.
It would fail.
So in response to that, there is a sense among people,
including people like Dean Price in North Carolina, that
they have to find answers where they are for the
problems that they have.
And one thing I really admire about Dean and Tammy Thomas in
Youngstown is they have not left.
They've stuck it out in these hard-pressed areas and
improvised answers.
For Dean, the answer to the failure of tobacco is not
tobacco or a cash crop.
It's to use the land, to revitalize the land, doing
something that needs to be done, which is to create fuel
in order to get us off foreign oil and off our
dependence on it.
So that holds some promise, I think, for North Carolina.
But is localism multiplied across the country going to
solve these bigger institutional erosions?
I'm skeptical because we're just too complex a society.
We're too intertwined.
We're too interconnected, and not just by technology.
For every little region to have its own Dean Price as an
entrepreneur with an idea, it's a good thing.
But it doesn't have, to me, the makings of something that
can really re-bind the country in the way that, say, the New
Deal did after the Wall Street crash.
And another model is the internet.
There's some writers like Steven Johnson who hold the
internet up, and the concept of peer networks, of breaking
down hierarchies and establishing connections with
people across different groups by virtue of something like
Kickstarter, something like Wikipedia, something like a
new currency that don't rely on centralized models and on
government structures, but are much more happening in civil
society and happening through technology.
And there, too, you know, Peter Thiel is in my book
because although he's a tech billionaire and one of the
most successful tech investors in the world, he asks the
skeptical questions that need to be asked, and that should
be asked, above all, at a place like this.
How much of a change are we really making?
How broad is it?
Why is it that the 35 years from the Apple II to the
present, to the apotheosis of Google and Facebook, have also
been 35 years of middle class decline?
Is there a relation between those two phenomena?
Are they independent?
These to me are key questions, and questions that all too few
people in Silicon Valley are answering or even are asking
because their success has decoupled them, to some
extent, from the fate of the rest of the country.
So Thiel is a skeptic that the internet is more than a net
positive, but not a big one, as he put it to me, which is a
shocking thing to hear from the founder of PayPal.
He doesn't think the internet has done enough to raise
living standards and bring broad prosperity in the same
way that the earlier industrial age did.
Maybe it's too soon.
You know, maybe in the next generation
we'll see the benefits.
But when I hear some people it tech talking about, well, cash
value is overrated.
And what we really need to focus on is all the social
value of technology companies.
That's when I get a little bit suspicious.
Because it seems as if you're saying as long as you have
very cool new ways to hang out with your friends online and
otherwise by mobile, you shouldn't worry too much about
whether there's a job for you.
Because jobs are overrated.
Well, tell that to Tammy Thomas in Youngstown.
So that's a long way of saying there are new ideas about how
society is reorganizing itself in this wide
open and chaotic time.
I haven't seen the outlines of a convincing reorganization
that actually will bring broad benefits to most of us.
Any more?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So as institutions are declining that people used
to rely on, what did you find?
Were there any patterns in the characters of your books on
what people were falling back on to do what they needed to
do in their lives?
GEORGE PACKER: That's a great question.
You're on the right track.
Yes, Dean Price does not have a business association or a
newspaper or union or a local college behind him.
So what he has is a very American faith in himself
handed down through different folk philosophers from our
past starting with Emerson and "Self-Reliance" and then, in
Dean's case, this guy Napoleon Hill.
Has anyone here heard of Napoleon Hill?
Very few people have.
He was like the first "how to succeed in business" guru in
American history.
And he wrote a book called "The Law of Success" and
another book called "Think and Grow Rich," which are
codifications of all that he learned from Andrew Carnegie
and Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and the
titans of his age.
He's like the Timothy Ferriss of the early 20th century.
And Dead has imbibed that philosophy of if you can think
it and conceive and believe it, you can achieve it, which
is also the philosophy you find on pop culture figures
like Oprah Winfrey, who is also one of the celebrities I
profile in the book.
And it's a very tenacious American idea.
And I think it is especially prevalent in times when people
feel the normal channels of upward mobility have been
closed off.
So they have to fall back on what might be a kind of
magical thinking about the powers of the mind.
So that's one.
I mean, religion is a key in the lives of many of the
characters in my book, but not organized religion.
They're not really involved--
Tammy Thomas, briefly--
but not so involved in a particular church, but more
in, again, a kind of individual faith that might
connect them to something invisible, but not necessarily
to other people.
There is a real alone-ness to the lives of these characters.
And they are very much carrying the weight of their
lives by themselves.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So there's a conventional wisdom that's been around for
a while that says that first the industrial revolution and
then the information revolution have push jobs up
the educational food chain by eliminating the need for
unskilled labor, but that the high-skilled jobs that
replaced them have been even better.
But then there's been a counter push
to that idea recently.
I know Paul Krugman wrote an editorial recently in which he
warned about the day when computers can take over the
functions of lawyers and doctors
and software engineers.
GEORGE PACKER: Software?
No, not software engineers.
AUDIENCE: Well?
GEORGE PACKER: You can't take that away.
AUDIENCE: Well, as they say, the singularity is coming.
GEORGE PACKER: Yeah, that's sort of a
Peter Thiel idea, too.
AUDIENCE: So I'm just wondering where you stand on
this debate.
And what do you think would happen if computers became so
intelligent that none of us--
GEORGE PACKER: That there'd be no need for us?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, basically.
GEORGE PACKER: No need for writers?
No need for advertisers?
I'd say, we might as well give up.
AUDIENCE: Or does it mean that our concept of capitalism
itself needs rethinking?
GEORGE PACKER: There you get closer to the
Jaron Lanier idea.
I don't know if any of you know his new book, which is
also a critical picture of where technology has brought
the economy over the last generation.
There seem to be a whole bunch of books coming out right now
that are beginning to look more critically at tech, which
I think is a good thing.
Not that it deserves to be torn down, but it's so
powerful and so successful that it needs to be
scrutinized with as much critical energy as the oil and
gas sector or the lobbying industry.
You've just outlined of terrifying portrait of the
future where none of us are necessary.
My editor who's here is not necessary.
None of you are.
I mean, I thought at least the software engineers would be
spared, just running around in the ruins of the singularity.
But is that conventional wisdom?
Or is it wisdom that you just outlined?
I mean, it seems to me that is what's happened.
The industrial revolution took away a lot of jobs and created
a lot of jobs.
And the jobs it created were, for a while, better jobs.
We're now at a stage where a lot of those jobs have
disappeared partly because of technology.
But there are some very good jobs that have been
created in the ruins.
And a lot of them are right here.
I mean, what could be better than working for Google?
You get all these benefits that are just unthinkable to
people in other industries.
But there's not that many of you.
Google's pretty big compared to Facebook and Twitter.
What you're suggesting is with Moore's law, we're getting
closer to the point where even Google could reduce to maybe
200, or maybe 20, or maybe two.
And then the people at the top will continue to tell us that
Moore's law is good.
But the question of good for whom will
be even more pertinent.
So I guess you pretty much answered your question.
No one outside of a tiny, tiny little group could be happy
with the picture that you've portrayed of the future.
I think there will have to be some rethinking about the idea
of inevitable progress coming with technological change,
which is not necessarily an argument.
But it's almost a faith that people in the tech world have,
and which people outside it might be a little more
skeptical of.
One more?
AUDIENCE: In your time travel back to the late '70s, permit
me to observe that that's also the era when deregulation
started to appear and gain momentum, and looked to many
people like common sense.
Because they always pick the horror story of needing five
guys to change a light bulb at Lincoln Center, or whatever
the examples are always phrased as.
Do you believe that contributed to the unwinding?
Or do you think it's part of the unwinding's emphasis on
personal choice and personal freedom?
Why would I want to be regulated if my own personal
freedom is the most important thing?
GEORGE PACKER: Right, right.
Well, one purpose of regulation, actually, is to
create a little barrier between you and the power of
corporations, which could be called a
kind of personal freedom.
So I wouldn't pit regulations against
freedom quite so neatly.
But you're absolutely right that the late '70s--
and it started under Democrats,
too, we forget that--
in which transportation, airlines, telecommunications,
oil and gas were all-- the deregulation began then.
In fact, Edward Kennedy was one of the main champions of
deregulation.
It seemed like common sense.
And perhaps it was at the time because the economy had really
run up against some pretty serious contradictions.
The word stagflation, which some of you might not be too
familiar with, was like mortgage-backed
securities back then.
It was the thing.
It was like the virus that we couldn't get rid of.
And it seemed like deregulation and the
financialization of the economy through unleashing
Wall Street was the answer to that.
So every answer creates a new problem.
And the de-unionization, which also really had its beginnings
in the late '70s with the decline of manufacturing that,
too, to some people, seemed like common sense.
Unions were standing in the way of progress.
Well, unions also created a middle class that would
provide a huge mass of consumers for the products
that were made in this country.
So for every problem you solve, you might
create a new one.
And now, I think we've run up against maybe the outer limits
of maximizing freedom.
There's always a balance between freedom and equality.
And what we've done in the past generation is moved as
far as you can get toward freedom without having society
flying apart at the seams.
And that's what I see happening now.
And yet there is this irony, which is we've also become
more inclusive.
I don't see why we couldn't have become more inclusive
without becoming less equal.
Why we couldn't have gay boy scouts and good public schools
at the same time.
Maybe time for one more question?
Is there one more?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So a lot of the decline of manufacturing, I
guess, in the US correlates, I think, with the decline in the
middle class.
And that correlates, I think, with globalization.
Do buy in to that?
And if you do, should we feel bad about the relative minor
decline in American standard of living when hundreds of
millions of Chinese have significantly better standard
of living because of this?
GEORGE PACKER: Right, right.
Well, you're asking why should we care more about Americans
than about other people, which is a big question.
This book is very insular.
It's very much focused on this country, even though it's
aware of these big changes happening elsewhere.
I guess I feel concerned about my country.
It's like being worried about your family.
You don't want it to fail.
You want your children to grow up in a good place.
We're not all just citizens of the world now.
We still belong to certain physical places that are going
to shape our future.
So that's one motive for my writing the book.
You're right that globalization brought benefits
to a lot of people and that there was something
inevitable about it.
I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying we should
rewind to a period before we had instant communications
around the world.
It'd be crazy.
But what I see happening is along with these macroeconomic
forces sweeping in, there have been social and even moral
changes coming through the back door and taking advantage
of the big upheavals in the economy.
Which is to say our leaders' vision growing narrower and
more self-centered and more willing to do what benefits to
them at the greater expense.
An idea that used to exist in places where you wouldn't
expect to find it, of having some responsibility beyond
one's own most immediate interest.
I don't see that very much.
I don't see it in elected officials.
I don't see it in former elected officials.
And I don't see it in business leaders very much either.
And to ask yourself, did it have to be this way?
You can compare us to a country like Germany, subject
to all the same forces of globalization, immigration,
the pressures on manufacturing.
And yet, they made decisions there that has retained that
social contract among Germans that we have been
willing to tear up.
We decided we're going to let the landscape be denuded and
new things will be built.
And so some new things are being built, like this.
But I'm concerned about the country my children are going
to grow up in.
And I'm not sure there'll be jobs at Google for them.
So that's a long-winded answer.
And I've been a little long-winded in general.
But I really thank you all for your
attention and your welcome.