Good evening. Welcome. Happy fat tuesday. Thank you all for spending your tuesday with us. Im joe, the executive director. The institute here has been hert over three years now. Ross has been an important member of the institute. Since our founding, hes been our media fellow and hes helped coordinate some of ourur events some more contentiouste event hs been involved in. We are super pleased ross is joining us today. The release of his latest book. All of you know ross is one of the most important commentators on American Culture today, he writes for the New York Times opinion page, hes written more than a few books at this time. They seem to all, at least a couple of them have the title how we became something. Ow you may want to steer clear of that were explained sometime. Anyway, the format is going to be i will engage ross in the conversation about the r book. I had the pleasure of reading it, it is an interesting book. Its not thest typical conservative the ring on the way things are but it takes a nice tact to explore whats going on in our culture. Once he andce i have exhausted each other, we will then open up the conversation to the rest of you so there will be people here with microphones so if you have a question, please use your hand and they will approach q you and dont be alarmed. Maker question and ross will engage you. As i always do, i implore you to frazier question two people, the mark time has ross to explain, the more for everybody. Dont make a speech if possible. Just a nice question. Thank you all for coming. [applause] the book is called excellent society with decadence. What is decadence in the book . Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you so much for doing this. Its really a pleasure to be back in a situation where i am not moderating between two embodiments of modern american conservatism are as delightful as that was but i promise midway through, we have some sort of wrestlemania style faceoff. Well give people their moneys worth. Decadence, basically the conceit around documents is listed from a definition offered about 20 years ago of the y term by the great cultural critics who wrote a book from dawn till decadence. He basically made the argument that we should think of decadent not in terms of just catastrophic moral collection not just in terms of luxury goods and weakens in las vegas and the perks andnd the faculty found here must be outrageous stuff but as a kind of clinical term that describes a civilization that has achieved a certain level of Wealth Development and proficiency and finds itself in effect stuck. Without clear lines of advance. So in the book, its basically to say that decadent properly understood, it refers to stagnation, drift and repetition at a high level of civilizational development. The argument then is that this term very reasonably applies to america, the west, the developed world encompassing the pacific rim since the late 1960s, early 1970s and for the sake of convenience but also, i think for the sake of the month ending. This kind of particular peak of american and western achievement that was expected at the time to be not a peak beginning. The opening of a new frontier and instead it quickly turned out that our capacities weret more limited than we hoped no space a tiny bit bigger and colder and less unitive especially once there wasnt a soviet threat to compete with. The stage space age heatet out that frontier was closed and week really entered into what im describing is decadence. You identified four areas, four indicators almost that support the claim that we are in a period of decadence. If you could just name a few of them. Repetition, stagnation, economic and technological stagnation. Political fluorosis, i thinkl, its one interest derivative. Just talk about one. Sure. The easiest one to start with is political sclerosis. Thusus the one i think everyonen the western world and especially the u. S. Recognizes and agrees upon but over the last few generations, its become a lot harder to effectively govern western countries and effectively reform or transform or build new or unbilled government programs. So an age when it was possible to elect president and have a Dramatic Program of reform from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson through Ronald Reagan has given way to an age when president s are lucky if they can pass one major piece of legislation across their presidency. If they succeed as obama did with obamacare, they may pay a political price for that last or duration of the presidency. Overall, politics has dominated by various stalemates, polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities within the United States, congressional applications and an increasing form of government that consists of basically negotiations between the executive branch and the judicial branch, which i think is how a lot of american policy markets made by think theres a version of this, a somewhat different version in europe where you have theav institution of the european union, which is advanced to the point where it is too big to fail, it is all kinds of problems but no onene expects te wild and crazy english are willing to take the step of leaving, evenin this fearsome populace and nationalists of Eastern Europe dont actually plan to leave the eu but meanwhile, it creates common currency in all kinds of economic problems that are obvious to everyone but it can either moveo forward nor back, i cant shrink back toward a more sensible arrangement, he cant move forward toward the kind of actual european superstate the the architectsct envisioned so t sort of has this stalemate. So thats what im describing as sclerosis and it thats the easy one. The people one not along too. The others are a little bit more debatable. So stagnation, economic stagnation is not as a reality of sclerosis. You do to have periods of Economic Growth, we imaged a respectable pace of growth and basically since the rate Great Recession in 2008 but overall, you do see a o pattern of real deceleration, lower growth rate compared to what was the norm prior to the 1970s and you have those growth rates achieved through a kind of perpetual parlor where you can get to 2 growth with massive deficits whs in the 1950s, you connect four and a half growth then were sometimes complains about massive deficits were really deficits at all. I think the deficit may be more sustainable than conservatives think but they are sustainable in effect, a rich society paying itself to maintain a form of progress but itsm own fundamental, they dont really justify. Talk a little bit also fun and stagnation about the technological stagnation, you refer back to the future, to exemplify this, walk through that. This is an argument im basically stealing from a group of economists and non economists, over the last ten years made the case that in spite of the iphone in your pockets and all the resources of the internet, Technological Progress the apollo era has been disappointing and this is anee argument that george mason has made and peter teal, very famously paid his line about how we expected flying cars, lorient making their way into the future and said, we got the 140 characters on twitter which is now 280 characters. So theres no great stagnation. [laughter] Robert Gordon and economist at the university of chicago northwestern, it was written at a sweeping thousand page book and the. They make, its not the Technological Progress that ceased. The internet era has demonstrated a lot of incredible breakthroughs in communication and information transmission and stimulation. Its more that Technological Progress has become model dimensional. Its all tech and nothing else. Areas like transportation, energy, agriculture and the belton environment dont see the progress we took for granted between 1840 1970. Then further, when Tech Companies leave the world of tech and try to revolutionize realworld industries, those of the companies that often end up being the supposedly unicorns that turn out to be frauds or failures. The attempt to bring big tech to bear on a very oldfashioned with solving problems, how you conduct those. But it doesnt work and you end up with multibilliondollar company evaporating or we were trying to revolutionize office space, a similar story. That piece of the stagnation is that again, progress hasnt ceased but its progress along a particular imagine that then feeds back into the larger pattern of documents because it leads people to spend more time in Virtual Reality into simulations of reality and to retreat from both certain kinds of Economic Activity but also to bring us to another force, retreat from family formation, romance, sex, childbearing which is the aspect of decadence article stabilitych. You have a wonderful comparison of margaret atwood, they involve a sterilelv landsce which i thought was really brilliant and fun. But lets think critically abouo what you wrote. What would china counter . Youre giving a kind of excuse me. Thank you. Provide indicators in a decadent society, hundred indicators. Signs of life that you engage in. Lets give examples. One of theof key indicators to suggest that we are not living through a period of immense technological transformation, the fact that productivity growth and economic measurement that tries to get how technology is affecting the way people work has been stagnant and pathetic for a long period of time in the early 21st century. That was not true in the late 1990s and the initial flush of the internet revolution, there was a surge of productivity growth in the developedge world from flood say 1996 to 2001. That suggest one, i was alive then, i was a teenager in it really was this window where there was this sense of a possibility of dramatic growth returning. Had that continued, i think the argument im making today, i would be making a different argument that that window was a non document exception that then didnt have a cascading effect that people expect that it too. Or another example, i mentioned stability, the defining feature of demography in the western world against since the baby boom arm of the 1960s and 70s, is fertility. People having too few children to essentially replenish the population and this is trueg, everywhere but for a long time, america was something as an exception. Down to the early 2000, american conservatives especially like to say look, because america has retained a more dynamic economy in western europe, its not the socialist and sclerotic and it has retained a certain amount of optimism about the future and religion practice, thats why our birthrate is still above replacement, we are still country oriented toward the future in the way that francis or sweeting or japan or not. In that sense, the United States was not docketed by my definition as long as it birthrate was exceptional. Over the last ten or 15 years, our birthrate has ceased to be an Industry Ministry those are two examples, under my attempt to create a statistical understanding of documents, there are things that could happen would have happened that would be on document. If that happened again, it would count us at least a shift, a change but the other point i would think, im not trying to examine each of these n forces s forces that are just existing on their own, every society has some decadence in it. Me whats distinctive about our home, the weight that the forces are converging so that slow Economic Growth feeds political unhappiness and distrust in government which makes it harder to pass effective political policy program, which in turn sums Economic Growth further and drives down birthrates because people dont have feel like they have the economic capacity to have kids. Makes it harder to make political changes, you follow me. As a conversion of eggs it more decadent, more decadent than. In the past that has these source. Talk to me about how we became the victims ofbo our success in this. Who is the week here . Is something i wonder as i proceeded through the book that at times, it could be the United States, some times it would seemed like the west or something. Then other times it seemed almost level in terms of your description but i wonderedou d m aside from expanding it to include more and more people who might be thisk week, leading to decadence, it might be exclusive, the finer range you go, exclude certain communities who might say were not an age of documents, we are an age of asperity, think of africanamerican trinitys in the United States, an africanamerican president was recently elected. Theres more representation. How inclusive is that we here . To what extent, thinking about that analysis. Ill work backwards. So take the case study of africanamericans, i think, and this of course is a highly debatable proposition but i think there was more progress for African Americans in American Life in the period running from 1940 to the moon landing or 1940 1980, compared like that. Then there has been in the period since. African americans have participated in some extent in tme decadence. This is buried a little and africanamerican on appointment rates are particularly low at the current moment and obviously the election of the first black president was a dramatic breakthrough but if you look at gaps in facial wealth, household wealth, the black, white income gap, test score gaps, all of the things that reformers who are thinking, or interested in racial equality are interested in changing, you get a lot more change and a lot of those cases in the era of the civil rights in particular but really thee whole zone from the great migration through the king excess nation into the 1970s. In essence, i think at least in some socioeconomic way, theres a kind of participation decadence there. And i think its a little more of an open question in culture, obviously in certain ways theres been a big increase in africanamerican representation in cinema but i also think sometimes that is overstated and theres a little bit of forgetting the very recent past, if you go back to the 1980s, the biggest stars in america were africanamerican, not something that is for celebration. The bill cosby, eddie murphy, was not the case that there was no africanamerican representation and the rise of the africanamerican popculture figure really dates to 60s, 70s and 80s and we are getting a further cycle now thats not a complete novelty. Thus the flattest points. One of the questions the book raises and doesnt answer is, is this a western developed world phenomena or is it a global phenomenon . I feel very confident in arguing that there some kind of deceleration and stagnation that japan, the United States and western europe share in common. The harder question is, what is happening with the countries we still call developing . Whats happening with what we of the rising power of the world, china, india and so on . You could make a case that the decadence of the west is whats going to enable the non decadence developing world to develop in some sense past us. We talk about the Pacific Century or asian century, that sort of implicit same time, i think there are ways in which if you look at for instance, demographics, the demographics of china, its in thee same low fertility cap that the developed world is in and there are ways in which you can say china is converging with the west. As our government decays of it, theres a sort of convergent oligarchy, our billionaires compete to be present at the same thing but theres this convergence in stratified low fertility are at higher rates than in the past. With china leapfrogging past us and whats happening with the coronavirus is a further host of questions that we can talk abo about. Theres a question in the back. Another thing i enjoyed about your book, its a book that wasnt saying we are in this decadent society and its only a matter of time before its over. Its a sustainable decadence. That could be a bumper sticker. [laughter] so describe what would make this sustainable decadence. It leads into what wouldld maket that. One of the claims is that people hear the word decadence and they have an idea that theres a logical history, once you become decadent, youre doomed. Theres the absolute cliche version of us in writing on the wall, the palace or orgies in rome. I can make the argument, i think its true that decadent is a normal condition for Successful Society and civilizations to fall into. Once they do, it can have documents but can also lead to a sustainable pace that can last a long time however you want to start a, 400 years. However if you want to chart decadent for the decadence of the chinese empire to the 19th century, these are long historical periods where process and powerful societies look back on it without them being tipped over into crisis and collapse. In certain ways, that is a pessimistic version in a sense isat i think theres an appeal to the idea that youre also doomed. Theres a sense that people want history to follow a morality to lay, even if they are not caught up in it themselves. At the beginning of the book, i quote someone, its right here. So convenient. He says what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not what they want to smash, but managed to last for centuries without creativity or hope. Thats the dark version. But lets qualify advising for centuries rome lasted under decadence, especially from the point of view that founded in the university and the period of dynamic change from within as theres this development, a long decadence religious base that nves the roman empire from ruling for it carries forward roman element into the future down to the present day. When the empire went as a powerfulpi force and i think you can imagine versions of that, you can imagine renewal under decadence that actually we integrate our civilization. You can imagine it documents that are civilization falls and create something new to carry on the best of our own legacy. Thats the optimistic case c, tt in fact, decadent has its virtues, there alternatives that are a lot worse than the lives we have now. We should regard life under decadence, not necessarily as a