“To promote innovation through scientific and technological advance is also to
promote social change—often radical social change.”
Destructive Creation
and the New World Disorder
Paul Harris and Daniel Sarewitz
Much of the global economy melted
down in 2008. Three nuclear reactors
at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power
plant melted down in 2011. This pair of catastrophes,
though very different, sprang from the same
fundamental cause: a proliferation of complexity
and uncertainty in the
world, produced largely
because of humankind’s
increasing prowess in
science and technology.
Before the two disasters occurred, mathematical
models that help manage the economic risk
of highly leveraged investments, and nuclear
reactors that help power the global energy system,
were both seen as important contributors to
the economic growth that in recent decades has
raised standards of living for hundreds of millions
around the world. After the meltdowns, the
unavoidable question was: “How could we have
been so stupid?”
Because humanity depends on complex technological
systems to survive and thrive, and because
this dependence creates ever-expanding domains
of uncertainty and unpredictability, an inescapable
incoherence lies at the core of modern society. The
incoherence ensures a tragic element in the modern
world’s quest for progress and control, and
this tragedy is woven as intricately into the web
of human affairs as were the mood swings of the
gods into ancient Greek dramas.
The key to the modern tragic dilemma is this:
Market democracies depend on technological
advance for the economic growth that undergirds
their political stability. But technological advance
is also the source of societal and economic disruption
that can threaten such stability. This inherent
tension plays itself out every several generations
in paroxysms of economic decline and social
unrest.
The rationale for technological advance is clear.
According to the functionalist logic of a consumerist,
globalized, capitalist system, technological
advance is understood to be a key catalyst for
wealth creation, especially through boosting economic
productivity and adding novelty and value
to the economy via new types of processes and
products.
Thus, governments increasingly have gotten
into the act of promoting technological advance.
Since World War II, most market democracies
have invested directly in research and development,
and have sought to develop a portfolio
of policy tools—such as intellectual property
regimes, technical standard-setting, technology
procurement programs, tax incentives, and rules
for public-private collaborations—aimed at accelerating
technological innovation in the private
sector. The global economic downturn has only
magnified the political and cultural obsession
with innovation as the secret sauce for future
growth.
But to promote innovation through scientific
and technological advance is also to promote
social change—often radical social change. Since
the Industrial Revolution, spectacular growth in
market economies has been powered by wave after
wave of technological transformation: textiles and
water power; railways and steam power; steel and
electrification; automobiles and mass production;
and, most recently, information and communication
technologies. The economic, political, social,
and cultural differences between today’s world
Paul Harris is deputy director of the HC Coombs Policy
Forum at the Australian National University. Daniel Sarewitz
is a professor at Arizona State University and codirector
of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.
Science
Global Trends, 2012
30 • CURRENT HISTORY • January 2012
and the largely agrarian society of, say, the midnineteenth
century cannot easily be overstated.
Gaining steam
Technological change is social change. A quick
look at what railroads did to the structure of
society in the mid-nineteenth century suffices to
illustrate. Aspects of life as fundamental as the
assumed relations between space and time, relations
that had been stable for much of human
history, were annihilated. The effects were both
literal, as coordinated time zones had to be
invented to accommodate scheduling, and cultural,
as the reliability and speed of railroads
restructured expectations about communication,
mobility, behavior, and predictability.
The modern corporation was created to a significant
extent by the new demands of managing
railroads. Railroads were also at the center of an
enormous expansion of both innovative and economic
activity, as new markets were created in
sectors as diverse as steel production, telegraphy,
machine tools, and agriculture.
In the process, railroads destroyed livelihoods
and social structures by replacing slow, local-toregional
networks of industry, commerce, and
transport with fast, national ones. They helped
create modern, total warfare by enabling rapid
movements of large numbers of troops and facilitating
reliable and rapidly extendable supply lines.
They stimulated overinvestment, new models of
debt financing, and commodity price deflation
that in turn led to economic depression and social
disruption in the United States and Europe in the
1870s and 1880s—which in turn contributed to
the rise of the union movement and socialism and
a destructive resurgence of nationalism.
And as the economic and social importance
of railroads was displaced by new waves of
technological change—electrification and steel;
automobiles and oil—these led to additional
“adjustments” whose economic, social, political,
and technological consequences were factors
behind the Great Depression and World War II.
Economists, and indeed Western societies more
generally, have sought to come to terms with the
dual nature of technological change by insisting
that the social and economic devastation wrought
by such change is more than compensated for by
the wealth creation and social opportunities that
technological transformations make possible. An
evocative term for this complex tension is “creative
destruction,” a concept formalized by the
Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter,
who, updating Marx, made groundbreaking efforts
during the 1930s and 1940s to explain how technological
change has driven the apparently cyclical
nature of recent economic history.
New technological tools and opportunities
quickly render existing modes of economic activity
inefficient and even nonsensical. They create
completely new modes of generating wealth,
along with cultural shifts and new social relations.
And while most societies have come to view the
cumulative impact of these waves of change as
the underlying dynamo of modern progress—each
wave leading to a new level of productivity, wealth
creation, and material benefit—this view conceals
the reality that tens of millions of people will pay
a high cost for such progress.
In the trough
Thus the economic, cultural, and social disruption
that much of the industrialized world (and
beyond) is now experiencing can be usefully
understood as, in significant part, a consequence
of the past 50 years of extraordinarily rapid technological
change and resulting economic growth.
From a Schumpeterian perspective, we may now
recognize ourselves as being within the trough of
a wave of creative destruction.
To escape from the trough, leaders prescribe an
acceleration of technological change in the hope
that this will create the next wave of expanded
prosperity. Our dominant, often heroic cultural
narratives of innovation—just think of the public
outpouring of grief after the death of Steve Jobs—
focus on the creation, not on the destruction.
From within the trough, however, the consequences
of world-transforming innovation
look more like destructive creation than creative
destruction. With worries about economic
prospects rising over the past few years in many
countries, awareness of the destructive effects of
innovation has started to grow. In market economies,
this awareness finds particular expression in
concerns about jobs and the equitable distribution
of the benefits of economic growth—hence new
protest movements like the indignados in Spain
and Occupy Wall Street in America.
But even when policy debates about manufacturing
jobs in countries such as the United States
and Australia pay brief, euphemistic attention to
the “replacement rate” by which businesses replace
human workers with new technologies (particularly
through information and communication
Destructive Creation and the New World Disorder • 31
technologies, but increasingly with robots as well),
they quickly return to the paramount importance
of science- and technology-led innovation in helping
companies climb up global value chains.
In seeking to assess innovation performance at
the national level, policy makers generally prefer
to highlight startups rather than shutdowns—
industrialization rather than deindustrialization—
even though we know that a commitment to shiny
new factories through innovation is also a commitment
to old, empty, rusty ones.
This asymmetry is understandable. At best,
it reflects a shared belief in the value of the
human desire to inquire, explore, understand,
and explain. The better angels of our nature, we
tell ourselves, invent, innovate, and improve. At
worst, however, this glossing-over the incoherence
at the heart of modern society produces an
obscured view of options and alternatives, and an
unquestioned faith that the best cure for the victims
of progress can only be more progress.
The perspective of destructive creation provides
an alternative lens to
bring into clearer focus the
complex and tragic essence
of our commitment to innovation.
It allows us to see the
essential similarity of the
2008 financial meltdown
and the 2011 nuclear meltdown,
and also to bring into the discussion such
apparently disparate events as the terrorist attacks
against the United States in September 2001,
the levee system failure that devastated New
Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. All of
these events were products of incomprehensible
complexity—uncertainty—created by new technologies
and technological systems, and by the
dependence of humans on such technologies for
their economic prospects and day-to-day needs.
Sophisticated risk models once looked like
a useful tool for allowing banks to lend money
to people of modest means who wanted to own
homes. Air travel once appeared merely to be
an important mode of global transport and commerce.
But after the financial meltdown, risk
models looked like enablers of the irresponsibility
and corruption that brought the global economy
to the brink of disaster. And after 9/11, jet aircraft
looked like terrorist weapons, ones that launched
a decade of warfare and geopolitical realignment—
contributing mightily, in the process, to a
US budget deficit that is a central focus of debates
on how to deal with the ongoing downturn.
Technological complexity thus cuts across disparate
levels of experience and action and does
so in ways that yield neither to prediction nor
control. The complexity is comprehensible only
in part, and often only in retrospect.
Opportunities for disaster
People can benefit from new technologies in
direct and relatively immediate ways—from the
enjoyment of a new iPad, for example, or the
economic benefits of a job in the consumer electronics
industry. But even at the individual level,
we can experience what in 1928 Lewis Mumford
termed the “ambivalence” of the machine—we
enthusiastically make use of new tools and processes
while also experiencing longer-term consequences
unrelated to the machine’s apparent
function. We avidly adopt new information and
communication technologies, for instance, while
also experiencing a sharp
decline in privacy.
At larger scales of consideration,
the chains of causation
between technological
choices and societal consequences
become impossible
to apprehend in their particulars.
Yet it is apparent that
the rusted-out factories of the American industrial
heartland—and the persistent unemployment,
underemployment, and income inequality that
result—are as much a consequence of the information
technology revolution as the iPad is.
In making automobiles affordable for the middle
class, Henry Ford did not set out to create
an economic bubble that would contribute to
the Great Depression, or erode the vitality of the
American urban neighborhood, or modify the
chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere. But he assuredly
played a part in each of those developments.
Modernity’s dependence on technological
change is not only linked to what economists
euphemistically call “structural adjustment”—as
old industries, employment patterns, and allocations
of wealth and power give way to new ones. It
also affects the evolution of what Thomas Hughes,
the historian of technology, termed “large technological
systems.” These make up the infrastructure
on which humans depend for their survival, infrastructure
whose continually growing complexity
We make sense of complexity via
notions of progress that celebrate
the creative and sweep aside the
destructive aspects of innovation.
32 • CURRENT HISTORY • January 2012
defies not just control but even comprehension:
energy systems, food and agricultural systems,
transport systems, national defense systems, medical
systems, and so on.
And while we acknowledge with awe humanity’s
ability to manage elements of these systems
(such as civil airline safety or vaccine efficacy)
with incredible reliability and effectiveness, we
also see that, as these systems become more
sophisticated and complex, they generate new
opportunities not just for benefit but for disaster.
Impacts range from the merely inconvenient and
costly (like the effect of Icelandic volcanoes on
global air travel), to the disruptive (economic
and employment inequity as some industries shut
down and others prosper), to the momentous and
apparently intractable (nuclear weapons proliferation;
climate change)—and increasingly global.
Such complexities cannot be understood in an
analytically coherent way. Rather, societies tend
to make sense of complexity through narratives
of self-identity, through custom, belief systems,
myths, and taboos. In the industrialized world we
make sense of complexity
via notions of progress that
celebrate the creative and
sweep aside the destructive
aspects of innovation.
Of course this sensemaking
in part reflects
shared cultural values—the
Enlightenment commitment to rationality and
progress—but it also reflects the interests of those
with the power to shape our guiding cultural
myths and narratives. Thus, the choices we make
about how to deal with “destructive creation” are
strongly political. To navigate the socio-technical
complexity at the core of modernity, we ought to
depend on the vitality of democratic institutions.
Yet modern societies have increasingly tended to
go in a different direction, often handing responsibility
for coping with destructive creation to
their most culturally authoritative sense-maker:
scientific research.
Risky business
From the scientific perspective, the “destruction”
of destructive creation often goes by the
name “risk.” The implication is that undesirable
aspects of technological change can be controlled
through rigorous quantification and rational management,
making the world safe for continued
technological change and economic growth.
Through, for example, research on climate
change, nuclear waste, or the health effects of
toxic chemicals, we are supposed to comprehend
the consequences of destructive creation, so that
we can act to prevent or redress the unintended
negative consequences of endless growth. The
notion of “risk” thus reinforces the creative and
redemptive aspects of technological change by
marginalizing the destructive aspects as something
to be measured and managed, like the side
effects of a drug.
But science can never be more than one of
many means to navigate the irreducible complexity
of the world. As science is called on more and
more to “solve” unsolvable problems, it becomes
increasingly political—not because its facts are
not objective, but because they are partial and
often disconnected. Even a cursory examination
of debates around issues like climate change,
embryonic stem cell research, and the regulation
of pharmaceuticals and toxic chemicals shows
that contesting sides, in advancing their positions,
invoke a mélange of factual assertions, value preferences,
vested interests,
and, perhaps most importantly,
beliefs about how the
world works and ought to
work.
Consider the broad rejection
of genetically modified
foods (GMFs) in Europe.
Public opinion research shows that in rejecting
GMFs, Europeans have focused not on economic
benefits but on concerns like preserving their
landscape, the taste of their foods, and the viability
of their farmers—value commitments that
could be strongly affected by processes of destructive
creation.
So, while debates over GMFs in Europe have
often been carried out in the language of scientific
assessments of risk to health and environment,
the main reasons for public opposition have to do
with values about the sort of society that people
prefer. The scientific patina is required by the
rules of the World Trade Organization, which prohibit
blocking GMF imports for reasons other than
scientific assessment of risk.
A comparison with the politics of climate
change is revealing. Opponents of GMFs share
with skeptics about climate change a commitment
to arguing against the weight of conventional
science, although the two groups’ political and
economic perspectives are likely to be in sharp
Rusted-out factories are as much a
consequence of the information
technology revolution as the iPad is.
Destructive Creation and the New World Disorder • 33
opposition. Because determinations of risk are
always uncertain and never fully resolvable, and
because one person’s risk is another’s opportunity,
science becomes a battle that is really about
the nonquantifiable, value-based consequences
of destructive creation—about who gets to determine
how the world will be transformed.
Indeed, the core challenge of destructive creation
is that it presents us with, to borrow from
Hegel’s definition of tragedy, the need to choose
between two rights. What cherished aspects of our
ways of life are we willing to give up in the pursuit
of growth and wealth creation? This definition of
tragedy does not imply inevitable doom, but it
does entail an inescapable process of balancing
conflicting values.
As the ancient Greeks knew, this choosing is
made more difficult—and potentially disastrous—
if we fail to recognize and understand our situation.
In the case of genetically modified foods, the
use of scientific analysis and language in a debate
really about conflicting values only serves to further
cloud what is at stake in efforts to manage the
destructive creation that follows.
Democratic imagination
The Enlightenment tradition at the core of
modernity values progress and scientific rationality—
but not alone. Democracy is another prized
scion of the Enlightenment, and the commitment
to democracy is an explicit acknowledgment that
unmediated rationality can become a source of
tyranny. Democracy provides the pluralistic discourse
that can prevent rationality from being
captured by a particular ideology or set of interests.
It provides the balance to ensure that one
incomplete way of looking at the world does not
through over-weening confidence become dominant.
It allows us to integrate many factors that
make life meaningful—the tangible and intangible,
the factual and the fanciful.
Historically, during periods of social disruption
accompanying structural readjustment, those disenfranchised
by technological change have made
new demands for a voice. The historian Carroll
Pursell describes the ways in which science
and technology were perceived during the Great
Depression, and the pervasive ambivalence about
the social impacts of innovation that fed into a
movement for a science moratorium. In his second
inaugural address in 1937, President Franklin
Roosevelt felt the need to address concerns about
“moral controls over the services of science,” a
perspective that would find little resonance amid
today’s dominant political and economic rhetoric.
The catastrophe of World War II put an end to
this debate. It may be only slightly melodramatic
to note that not until they lived under the shadow
of the mushroom cloud did certain industrial societies
begin to enjoy a return to economic growth,
from which reemerged a prevailing cultural narrative
about the “endless frontier” of science and
technological development, and its contribution
to a prosperity that could be shared by all.
The redemptive myths of technological progress
have attained a status—reinforced by asymmetries
of political and economic power—that
stifles complementary myths of humility, pluralistic
debate, and cooperation. Evidence for this
is to be found precisely in the consequences of
structural adjustment, which our cultural identity
seems able to interpret only as motivation for the
next wave of destructive creation.
We are looking toward that next wave even
now. From fields like nanotechnology, synthetic
biology, robotics, genomics, and cognitive technology
we will be creating new industries, vast
new wealth, and marvelous new conveniences,
even as we are adding to global-scale technological
complexities that will transform society and
bring us our next versions of the dot-com and
housing bubbles, 9/11, oil spills, and Fukushima.
So perhaps now is the time to engage in a
rebalancing of the assumptions about how much
destruction we are willing to put up with as we busily
try to stoke the next fire of creation. How can
we improve democratic steering of powerful technologies
and technological systems, and who will
make the choices about our priorities? Who will
get to capture the new wealth we create, and who
will be left on the sidelines? How big will we allow
speculative bubbles to grow? How much of the new
wealth will we put aside to help those who are disenfranchised
by technological change? Whose jobs
will be forfeited? Whose cities will rust?
There are, of course, no single right answers to
these questions. What is important is to ask them
seriously and openly, and not pretend that they can
be avoided. They are not questions for science, but
for a revitalized democratic imagination. Perhaps
the indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and even the
Tea Party are signs of a reawakening of that imagination.
We do not know how deep the current
trough will go, but our view of the modern tragedy
is much clearer from down here than it will be
when we reach the crest of the next wave. ■
CURRENT HISTORY
The Danger of Decline
Global Progress Report, 2012
At the start of a new year, debt woes and Arab uprisings have
hung ominous clouds over the planet, including risks of another
economic downturn, fracture of the European Union, and
protracted instability in the Middle East. It doesn’t help matters that, at
the same time, much of the world thinks the United States is in decline.
Declinists point to America’s dysfunctional politics, its stagnant
economy, its ebbing power. They are right to worry. But a point they
often miss is that much of the decline is relative or reversible.
After all, this is not a world in which others succeed only at one’s
own expense. Globalization remains the paramount trend, and it
draws people into ever wider and more complex webs of interdependence.
Thus a country that relies on international security and
commerce, as the United States does, has reason to celebrate its own
relative decline to the extent that it results from the rise of stable
market economies.
Some in America pine for days when they could impose their will
on humbler nations. As power disperses, decision making and problem
solving do become more difficult, especially if some actors, such as
China, resist assuming responsibility commensurate with their economic
importance. There is, however, no returning to the economic
and military dominance that the United States enjoyed at the end of
World War II and the cold war. The world has benefited enormously
from US leadership, and desperately needs it still. But leadership will
have to be shared.
If America cannot dictate to others, it can still promote shared values.
Even Enlightenment thinkers, who articulated the ideals of political
liberty, free markets, and peace, never viewed these as exclusively
Western possessions. The eighteenth century’s Marquis de Condorcet
looked forward to a time when the sun would shine on “an earth of
none but free men, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves,
priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will have disappeared.”
Arabs in 2011 showed they want sunshine like everyone else. With
masses bravely seeking self-determination and elites violently resisting,
the Middle East for a time will be more disorderly and dangerous. But
the future holds more promise as a result. Why would Arabs risk death
to demand democracy at a time when the United States seems barely
able to govern itself, when the EU risks breaking up, when publics in
Latin America and Africa scorn their elected governments? Because
the yearning for dignity and freedom springs from human nature—and
patience with autocrats is running out. It will run out one day, too, in
Tehran, Riyadh, Moscow, and Beijing.
Many worry because Islamists have seized political advantage from
the Arab Spring. This has happened, however, mainly because regimes
that suppressed opposition for decades left mosques as the only outlets
for organized dissent. Popular sovereignty constitutes an essential
CURRENT HISTORY
The Danger of Decline
Global Progress Report, 2012
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
4
In normal times, advanced economies can be
expected to march at a lively pace, generating
growth and prosperity, until at some point they
succumb to the pressures of the business cycle
and retreat for a quarter or two. These retreats
occasion considerable heartache—but they are
brief. After the tears are dry, economies resume
their orderly advances.
These economic times are not normal and
threaten to get less normal yet.
In 2008 the collapse of the investment bank
Lehman Brothers revealed that the preceding
years’ prosperity in affluent countries had been
illusory, based on fanciful asset prices and magical
lending practices. Suddenly, ordinary people
found themselves cowering beneath massive overhangs
of other people’s debt.
Thanks to the coordinated efforts of nations,
the precarious ice mainly stayed in place and
the gods of the mountain maintained their frozen
perches, though the people of the valley
were pelted with debris. Today, the world once
again huddles under vast creaking icepacks of
debt. These potential avalanches stretch from the
Balkans to the Pyrenees and beyond.
For this we may thank many wise individuals.
We may thank the arithmetic wizards of Athens
who, two and a half millennia after Pythagoras,
devised novel approaches to rudimentary ciphering;
the pallid bureaucrats of Brussels, who
thought monetary without fiscal union a very
fine thing for the European Union, pretending
that northerners’ clockwork approach to fiscal
issues could easily be reconciled with the
southern view of budgets as enchanted boxes
from which miracles can be expected to issue;
Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas
Sarkozy, to whom the road ahead seems an endless
depository for well-kicked cans; and international
bankers, who now assume their favorite
posture in times of crisis, that of presenting to
the public one hand in trembling supplication
while brandishing in the other the hatchet of
collective calamity.
Admittedly, things seem bleak today partly
because 2011 delivered to the world economy
unanticipated shocks like Japan’s triple disaster
and the Arab Spring’s disruptions to petroleum
prices. Still, the International Monetary Fund
reports in its most recent World Economic
Outlook that today’s dismal economic prospects
in the rich countries spring mostly from feeble
recoveries and fiscal and financial uncertainty,
not from exogenous bad luck. Governments
are retrenching; private demand is failing to
compensate. Bad sovereign debt is affecting
banks’ ability to gain financing. The IMF thus
forecasts that in 2012 rich-world GDP growth
will amount to 1.9 percent—a distressing figure
after the blood of 2008 and the bloodless
recovery since.
In the emerging and developing world things
are brighter. There, the IMF predicts 2012 GDP
growth of 6.1 percent—very solid—with China
impulse behind the uprisings, and people must advance via trial and
error. As liberal norms take root, Islamists who stand for reelection will
have to choose between pragmatism and defeat. Secularization eventually
should follow.
Today, amid the tumult and tragedy, it seems evident that respect for
self-government, economic innovation, and collective security is growing
across the world, along with distaste for violence and fanaticism.
Progress depends, however, on the continuous banishment of ignorance.
And globalization accentuates the consequences of skill gaps.
The United States, if it is to remain a global exemplar, must fix its
politics, renew growth, and restore fiscal order—but underlying all these
challenges is an urgent need for educational improvements. Americans
are falling behind in science and math; poor schooling for poor children
belies the dream of equal opportunity. In the United States as everywhere,
learning provides the greatest bulwark against decline. A.S.
ECONOMY
Silence in the valley
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
recording 9 percent and India marked down for
7.5. Sub-Saharan Africa, so often the uncomfortable
afterthought in discussions of world economies,
is projected to keep up its run of decent
performances with GDP growth of 5.8 percent.
But even in the fast-growing economies of the
developing world, trouble lurks. China has made
little progress in rebalancing its economic structure
toward private consumption. Beijing must
worry about inflation on the one hand, flagging
exports on the other; bad debts over here and
overheated housing over there. Little wonder that
China has told Europe in so many words not to
expect a rescue from the east.
Meanwhile, in the world’s largest economy, the
housing sector remains sick and the public sector
useless. Far too many workers sink into the pit of
depression and obsolescence otherwise known as
long-term unemployment. Few remedies for this
are advanced by people in positions of power.
They do not entirely seem to care.
As 2011 becomes 2012, things look more perilous
than at any time since the death of Lehman.
Gather your loved ones. Look out above. L.C.
5
POLITICS
The blind leading
Tomorrow is a certainty, but it does not seem
that way to everyone. Small children find tomorrow
an unmanageable abstraction. To test this,
offer a child a lollipop today or two lollipops
tomorrow. It is a great way to save yourself a lollipop.
Similarly, if you task a democratic politician
with solving a severe problem today, he is likely
to convert it into a worse problem tomorrow.
Children can be forgiven for acting childish.
Grown-ups cannot.
Blindness to the future is rampant today across
the wealthy, democratic nations of the world. In
Europe, Merkel and Sarkozy will do whatever it
takes to save the euro, for about a week at a time.
The weeks have now added up to a couple of long
years. The German and French leaders continue
urging drastic austerity on nations where conditions
are austere already, hectoring them to sabotage
their own economic growth so that, in some
distant fairy land, unpayable obligations can be
paid. Merkel and Sarkozy meanwhile coddle their
own publics, pretending to the burghers of Bavaria
and the bourgeoisie of Brittany that distant debts
will not in the end be made good from local wallets.
Bankers too have been coddled, as if monetary
losses were unconscionable things to ask of
people whose excellent standards of living proceed
from lending money at, theoretically, risk. In
Merkel and Sarkozy’s world, the banks are to be
made whole, with northern taxpayers subsidizing
nothing, because southern nations through the
application of good sense and moral fiber will generate
cash they do not have. Oh, and forget those
eurobonds. There is no such thing as eurobonds.
Instead, there is a December agreement among all
EU nations except Britain to impose tighter oversight
on governments’ spending. This seems likely
to avert future debt problems in a euro zone that
may not survive its past profligacy.
Japan’s sovereign debt dwarfs that of Greece
and all the other European debtor nations. But at
least the Japanese debt is mostly owed to Japanese
people, who kindly continue trusting their savings
to a government most notable for fecklessness and
confusion. No ideas seem on offer in Japan that
would fix the country’s fiscal problems. Nor that
would address the demographic trends threatening
to deposit Japan into a hole from which it
cannot climb out. Increased immigration and an
end to patronage politics might do much to rouse
Japan from its malaise. Just do not mention these
things to Japanese politicians.
Washington remains gridlocked (mostly)
because a once-grand party refuses to contemplate
raising taxes for any reason, such as the
federal government’s lack of money. Republicans
adopt this stance because they are extremely concerned
about the growing power of government,
as many of them have been since Brown v. Board
of Education. But Republicans are not solely to
blame. Most politicians on both sides of the aisle
believe that America cannot be safe from its “enemies”
unless the country’s military expenditures
roughly equal those of the rest of the world combined.
Earlier generations of politicians share culpability
too—the cowardly, striving vote-grubbers
of the past found it expedient to endow mammoth
debts on the cowardly, striving vote-grubbers of
today. Meanwhile, though the American economy
so obviously exhibits a need for further stimulus,
stimulus has become a filthy word.
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
6
All this is normal, about what you would
expect. But it is not what is required. In these
parlous times, roomfuls of somber individuals
should ponder hard questions, suppress personal
interests, discuss and debate, and in the
end arrive at compromises that satisfy no one
but do at least confront tomorrow’s problems
today.
This is not to say that authoritarianism is better.
It is far worse. Even at its most effective, authoritarianism
combines with the greed, stupidity,
and selfishness of democratic politics a corrosive
unaccountability. Democratic governance remains
the only hope we have and a stunning achievement
of history. But at times like these, oh how
tiresome it grows. L.C.
The decline of warfare and the diffusion of
power are the most important trends in global
security today. Even as observers fret over the possibility
of a spreading economic crisis, virtually no
one predicts a return to the 1930s, when protectionist
and nationalist pressures helped unleash
war among great powers. Conflicts and skirmishes
persist, especially in Africa. Humanitarian interventions,
such as NATO’s successful provision
of aid to Libyan rebels in 2011, occur when
they are feasible. In general, though, armed violence
is diminishing. And when it does occur, it
increasingly reflects the weakness rather than the
strength of states.
Following on the American withdrawal from
Iraq, the coming year will see reduced US troop
SECURITY
More stable and decent
How Is the World Doing?
CEconomy
The future of the euro zone remains uncertain, and Washington for now seems
incapable of spurring growth and restoring fiscal order. Even as developing
economies expand briskly, the rich nations’ heavy debts and lagging demand limit
global prospects.
B
Politics
The courage of Syrians and others reminds us that longing for liberty is universal.
Moscow’s protests suggest no authoritarian can feel secure. Unfortunately, mature
democracies these days exemplify sound governance less than protracted malaise.
B+
Security
Warfare increasingly reflects not statecraft but state failure. US interventions in Iraq
and Afghanistan are winding down. Revolts will make the Middle East less stable for
a while. But global security can survive Islamist fanatics, a nuclear Iran, and a rising
China.
D
Resources
As the human condition improves, the conditions that enable such improvement
deteriorate. The cost of extracting key resources is growing. Paltry efforts to address
climate change expose an inadequate capacity to act collectively for posterity’s sake.
B
Science
Globalization is making evident to everyone the importance of research and
innovation for economic success. Emerging economies are rapidly building academic
facilities, investing in R&D, and producing more scientific publications and patent
applications.
Current History’s report card on global trends at the start of 2012.
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
7
levels in Afghanistan. (It is hard to see how
outright military victory against the Taliban is
possible as long as Pakistan offers havens for
the insurgents, or as long as the government in
Kabul remains corrupt and detached from most
Afghans.) President Barack Obama, while taking
out the world’s top terrorists, also has made
clear that the security policies of his predecessor,
George W. Bush, represented a temporary
deviation from US support for the global spread of
norms against torture and military adventurism.
Diplomacy and sanctions, meanwhile, constitute
the main tools for discouraging nuclear proliferation
and for dealing with rogue states, such
as North Korea, that acquire weapons capability.
International efforts to block Tehran’s nuclear
ambitions will continue, as will planning for containment
when Iran does gain the bomb. (A military
strike, as advocated in some quarters, would
prove disastrous.) Pakistan’s possession of nuclear
arms appears increasingly hazardous—but again
because the state is weak, not because it is strong.
Washington and some East Asian nations have
begun pushing back against China’s recent assertiveness
in Asia. Regional economic integration
continues, however, and Beijing benefits as much
as anyone from an international order conducive
to peaceable commerce. Ideologues who believe
China and America are destined for armed conflict
overlook Beijing’s commitment to avoid the errors
of Imperial Japan.
Security in the twenty-first century, in sum,
requires collective effort to render an increasingly
networked and multipolar world more
stable and decent. In an August 2011 essay,
Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich summarized
a few of the most pressing tasks in this
regard. Among them: “negotiating boundaries—
constraints, for example, on the use of
force—that will limit great power prerogatives;”
establishing norms to govern competition for
resources; reducing arms and curtailing the
global weapons trade; and focusing diplomatic
efforts on trouble spots (such as Kashmir and
the Palestinian territories) where armed conflict
seems a threat. Continuous crisis management
and dwelling on the balance of power hold far
less strategic promise. A.S.
People who follow world events closely devote
most of their attention to three big issues: how we
are governed, how prosperous we are, and how
safe we are. But in coming decades these three
issues may be challenged in importance by a different
set of questions.
How long can our planet continue to produce
the natural resources that we need to survive and
thrive? As key resources become depleted or more
costly to secure, can substitutes be identified?
Will segments of our natural environment become
so toxic as to be virtually useless? Will we so
radically alter the earth’s atmosphere that human
existence becomes problematic?
In a way, these questions recall the state
of human consciousness during the millennia
before civilization was invented. Then, our attention
was monopolized by weather, water, food,
and personal safety. Modernity and increasing
prosperity were supposed to deliver us from
these tyrannical concerns, but today we can
imagine a future in which weather, water, food,
and personal safety again monopolize our attention.
History establishes for humankind an impressive
capacity to learn from mistakes and to innovate.
This is as true in the environmental realm as
in any other. Advanced countries no longer clearcut
their forests so enthusiastically. New factories
use energy more efficiently than old ones. But
such advances in attitude and technology are not
achieved according to a schedule. We can encourage
but not force them.
Meanwhile, the global population grows and
grows. Industrialization spreads ever wider. Newly
middle-class people the world over care more
about purchasing cars and providing proteinrich
diets to their children than about intensified
drought on poorer continents or the disappearance
under seawater of far-flung atolls.
The human condition improves, even as we
witness a deterioration in the conditions that
enable such improvement. And what is done in
response? Too little. A late-year climate conference
in Durban began in an atmosphere of pitifully low
expectations, and met them. The International
Energy Agency warned in November that the
world must implement a carbon emissions treaty
RESOURCES
Sins of the fathers
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
8
by 2017 or face intolerable temperature increases.
That warning provoked no general urgency.
Civilization’s key genius is that it allows each
generation’s ingenuity and accomplishments to
accrue to the next generation. But the deleterious
effects of our actions accumulate along with
the accomplishments. Humankind’s technological
mastery is so powerful today—literally, worldaltering—
that we are called on to contain our own
power through measures that benefit only posterity.
Is our capacity for self-abnegation big enough
for the task? L.C.
Judging by political news from the United
States, one might think science is imperiled.
Rick Perry, the Texas governor seeking the GOP’s
presidential nomination, deems creationism and
evolution equally credible. In 2011 he mocked the
notion that the world should take climate change
seriously “just because you have a group of scientists
who stood up and said here is the fact.”
Such remarks prompted Princeton’s Robert
Socolow to lament in the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists: “Distortions abound regarding both
what science understands and how science is
conducted. Of even greater concern, however, is
the rejection of the scientific way of knowing—or
rather its relegation to the status of just one of
many equally valid ways of knowing. If the scientific
method loses its place as a privileged way of
knowing, the consequences will be devastating.”
The consequences could include increased
sway for superstition. Religious fervor provoked
centuries of bloody warfare in Europe; it inspires
Islamist extremists today. More insidiously, it
impairs democratic decision making. As the psychologist
Steven Pinker (who has contributed an
essay to this issue) has observed, “the elevation
of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is
a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and
an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”
Fortunately, global trends suggest no unseating
of scientific authority. The globalization of
research and development continues, even as
hard times constrain budgets in Western nations.
Emerging economies are building new academic
facilities and programs. More countries are producing
patent applications and scientific publications.
China has achieved double-digit annual
growth rates in R&D investments. If support for
science and innovation were to falter in the United
States, other nations would pick up the slack.
And in most domains, the authority of evidence
grows stronger. Perry himself sabotaged his presidential
prospects by empirically demonstrating
his unfitness for the office. A.S.
SCIENCE
Ways of knowing
A Statistical Snapshot of the World
Sources: Economist Pocket World in Figures (2012); Freedom House; Inter-Parliamentary Union; National Counterterrorism Center; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Ploughshares Fund; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; Transparency International; US Patent and Trademark Office
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
US China France UK Russia
Annually, in billions of dollars
Annual Defense Spending,
Five Highest
0 100 200 300 400 500 8,500 11,000
Israel
India
Pakistan
France
UK
Russia
US
Total nuclear weapons 2011 estimate
N. Korea
China
Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011*
*As of June 30, 2011. Data include Iraq/Afghanistan
Global Fatalities from Terrorist Attacks Security
0
20
40
60
80
100
Free Partly Free Not Free
Number of countries in each category
2000 2010
Freedom in the World
0 2 4 6 8 10
Somalia
Myanmar
Afghanistan
Iraq
Sweden
Finland
Singapore
New Zealand
Denmark
10 = L ea s t c orrup t
Political Corruption,
Least and Most Corrupt
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
South Cuba Iceland
Africa
Rwanda Sweden
Highest Percentage of
Women in Parliament
Politics
0
3
6
9
12
15
US China Japan India Germany
In trillions of dollars, at PPP
Five Largest Economies
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
120000
Luxembourg Norway Qatar Switzerland Denmark
GDP Per Capita, Five Highest
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
Burundi Congo DR Liberia Somalia Malawi
GDP Per Capita, Five Lowest
Economy
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Saudi US Iran China
Arabia
Russia
Million barrels of oil per day
Oil Producers, Top Five
0
5
10
15
20
US China Japan India Russia
Million barrels of oil per day
Oil Consumers, Top Five
0
5
10
15
20
Saudi Venezuela Iran Iraq Kuwait
Arabia
Percentage of world total
Proven Oil Reserves,
Top Five
Resources
0
15
30
45
60
75
90
Russia Poland Romania Slovakia Mexico
As a percentage of R&D expenditures, 2009
0
75
150
225
300
375
450
US China Japan Germany France
In billions of dollars at PPP, 2009
R&D Expenditures Public Funding of R&D Expenditures
0
25
50
75
100
125
150
South Taiwan
Korea
US Japan Germany
In thousands, 2010
US Patents Awarded by
Country of Origin
Science
to content. | Skip to navigation
promote social change—often radical social change.”
Destructive Creation
and the New World Disorder
Paul Harris and Daniel Sarewitz
Much of the global economy melted
down in 2008. Three nuclear reactors
at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power
plant melted down in 2011. This pair of catastrophes,
though very different, sprang from the same
fundamental cause: a proliferation of complexity
and uncertainty in the
world, produced largely
because of humankind’s
increasing prowess in
science and technology.
Before the two disasters occurred, mathematical
models that help manage the economic risk
of highly leveraged investments, and nuclear
reactors that help power the global energy system,
were both seen as important contributors to
the economic growth that in recent decades has
raised standards of living for hundreds of millions
around the world. After the meltdowns, the
unavoidable question was: “How could we have
been so stupid?”
Because humanity depends on complex technological
systems to survive and thrive, and because
this dependence creates ever-expanding domains
of uncertainty and unpredictability, an inescapable
incoherence lies at the core of modern society. The
incoherence ensures a tragic element in the modern
world’s quest for progress and control, and
this tragedy is woven as intricately into the web
of human affairs as were the mood swings of the
gods into ancient Greek dramas.
The key to the modern tragic dilemma is this:
Market democracies depend on technological
advance for the economic growth that undergirds
their political stability. But technological advance
is also the source of societal and economic disruption
that can threaten such stability. This inherent
tension plays itself out every several generations
in paroxysms of economic decline and social
unrest.
The rationale for technological advance is clear.
According to the functionalist logic of a consumerist,
globalized, capitalist system, technological
advance is understood to be a key catalyst for
wealth creation, especially through boosting economic
productivity and adding novelty and value
to the economy via new types of processes and
products.
Thus, governments increasingly have gotten
into the act of promoting technological advance.
Since World War II, most market democracies
have invested directly in research and development,
and have sought to develop a portfolio
of policy tools—such as intellectual property
regimes, technical standard-setting, technology
procurement programs, tax incentives, and rules
for public-private collaborations—aimed at accelerating
technological innovation in the private
sector. The global economic downturn has only
magnified the political and cultural obsession
with innovation as the secret sauce for future
growth.
But to promote innovation through scientific
and technological advance is also to promote
social change—often radical social change. Since
the Industrial Revolution, spectacular growth in
market economies has been powered by wave after
wave of technological transformation: textiles and
water power; railways and steam power; steel and
electrification; automobiles and mass production;
and, most recently, information and communication
technologies. The economic, political, social,
and cultural differences between today’s world
Paul Harris is deputy director of the HC Coombs Policy
Forum at the Australian National University. Daniel Sarewitz
is a professor at Arizona State University and codirector
of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.
Science
Global Trends, 2012
30 • CURRENT HISTORY • January 2012
and the largely agrarian society of, say, the midnineteenth
century cannot easily be overstated.
Gaining steam
Technological change is social change. A quick
look at what railroads did to the structure of
society in the mid-nineteenth century suffices to
illustrate. Aspects of life as fundamental as the
assumed relations between space and time, relations
that had been stable for much of human
history, were annihilated. The effects were both
literal, as coordinated time zones had to be
invented to accommodate scheduling, and cultural,
as the reliability and speed of railroads
restructured expectations about communication,
mobility, behavior, and predictability.
The modern corporation was created to a significant
extent by the new demands of managing
railroads. Railroads were also at the center of an
enormous expansion of both innovative and economic
activity, as new markets were created in
sectors as diverse as steel production, telegraphy,
machine tools, and agriculture.
In the process, railroads destroyed livelihoods
and social structures by replacing slow, local-toregional
networks of industry, commerce, and
transport with fast, national ones. They helped
create modern, total warfare by enabling rapid
movements of large numbers of troops and facilitating
reliable and rapidly extendable supply lines.
They stimulated overinvestment, new models of
debt financing, and commodity price deflation
that in turn led to economic depression and social
disruption in the United States and Europe in the
1870s and 1880s—which in turn contributed to
the rise of the union movement and socialism and
a destructive resurgence of nationalism.
And as the economic and social importance
of railroads was displaced by new waves of
technological change—electrification and steel;
automobiles and oil—these led to additional
“adjustments” whose economic, social, political,
and technological consequences were factors
behind the Great Depression and World War II.
Economists, and indeed Western societies more
generally, have sought to come to terms with the
dual nature of technological change by insisting
that the social and economic devastation wrought
by such change is more than compensated for by
the wealth creation and social opportunities that
technological transformations make possible. An
evocative term for this complex tension is “creative
destruction,” a concept formalized by the
Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter,
who, updating Marx, made groundbreaking efforts
during the 1930s and 1940s to explain how technological
change has driven the apparently cyclical
nature of recent economic history.
New technological tools and opportunities
quickly render existing modes of economic activity
inefficient and even nonsensical. They create
completely new modes of generating wealth,
along with cultural shifts and new social relations.
And while most societies have come to view the
cumulative impact of these waves of change as
the underlying dynamo of modern progress—each
wave leading to a new level of productivity, wealth
creation, and material benefit—this view conceals
the reality that tens of millions of people will pay
a high cost for such progress.
In the trough
Thus the economic, cultural, and social disruption
that much of the industrialized world (and
beyond) is now experiencing can be usefully
understood as, in significant part, a consequence
of the past 50 years of extraordinarily rapid technological
change and resulting economic growth.
From a Schumpeterian perspective, we may now
recognize ourselves as being within the trough of
a wave of creative destruction.
To escape from the trough, leaders prescribe an
acceleration of technological change in the hope
that this will create the next wave of expanded
prosperity. Our dominant, often heroic cultural
narratives of innovation—just think of the public
outpouring of grief after the death of Steve Jobs—
focus on the creation, not on the destruction.
From within the trough, however, the consequences
of world-transforming innovation
look more like destructive creation than creative
destruction. With worries about economic
prospects rising over the past few years in many
countries, awareness of the destructive effects of
innovation has started to grow. In market economies,
this awareness finds particular expression in
concerns about jobs and the equitable distribution
of the benefits of economic growth—hence new
protest movements like the indignados in Spain
and Occupy Wall Street in America.
But even when policy debates about manufacturing
jobs in countries such as the United States
and Australia pay brief, euphemistic attention to
the “replacement rate” by which businesses replace
human workers with new technologies (particularly
through information and communication
Destructive Creation and the New World Disorder • 31
technologies, but increasingly with robots as well),
they quickly return to the paramount importance
of science- and technology-led innovation in helping
companies climb up global value chains.
In seeking to assess innovation performance at
the national level, policy makers generally prefer
to highlight startups rather than shutdowns—
industrialization rather than deindustrialization—
even though we know that a commitment to shiny
new factories through innovation is also a commitment
to old, empty, rusty ones.
This asymmetry is understandable. At best,
it reflects a shared belief in the value of the
human desire to inquire, explore, understand,
and explain. The better angels of our nature, we
tell ourselves, invent, innovate, and improve. At
worst, however, this glossing-over the incoherence
at the heart of modern society produces an
obscured view of options and alternatives, and an
unquestioned faith that the best cure for the victims
of progress can only be more progress.
The perspective of destructive creation provides
an alternative lens to
bring into clearer focus the
complex and tragic essence
of our commitment to innovation.
It allows us to see the
essential similarity of the
2008 financial meltdown
and the 2011 nuclear meltdown,
and also to bring into the discussion such
apparently disparate events as the terrorist attacks
against the United States in September 2001,
the levee system failure that devastated New
Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. All of
these events were products of incomprehensible
complexity—uncertainty—created by new technologies
and technological systems, and by the
dependence of humans on such technologies for
their economic prospects and day-to-day needs.
Sophisticated risk models once looked like
a useful tool for allowing banks to lend money
to people of modest means who wanted to own
homes. Air travel once appeared merely to be
an important mode of global transport and commerce.
But after the financial meltdown, risk
models looked like enablers of the irresponsibility
and corruption that brought the global economy
to the brink of disaster. And after 9/11, jet aircraft
looked like terrorist weapons, ones that launched
a decade of warfare and geopolitical realignment—
contributing mightily, in the process, to a
US budget deficit that is a central focus of debates
on how to deal with the ongoing downturn.
Technological complexity thus cuts across disparate
levels of experience and action and does
so in ways that yield neither to prediction nor
control. The complexity is comprehensible only
in part, and often only in retrospect.
Opportunities for disaster
People can benefit from new technologies in
direct and relatively immediate ways—from the
enjoyment of a new iPad, for example, or the
economic benefits of a job in the consumer electronics
industry. But even at the individual level,
we can experience what in 1928 Lewis Mumford
termed the “ambivalence” of the machine—we
enthusiastically make use of new tools and processes
while also experiencing longer-term consequences
unrelated to the machine’s apparent
function. We avidly adopt new information and
communication technologies, for instance, while
also experiencing a sharp
decline in privacy.
At larger scales of consideration,
the chains of causation
between technological
choices and societal consequences
become impossible
to apprehend in their particulars.
Yet it is apparent that
the rusted-out factories of the American industrial
heartland—and the persistent unemployment,
underemployment, and income inequality that
result—are as much a consequence of the information
technology revolution as the iPad is.
In making automobiles affordable for the middle
class, Henry Ford did not set out to create
an economic bubble that would contribute to
the Great Depression, or erode the vitality of the
American urban neighborhood, or modify the
chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere. But he assuredly
played a part in each of those developments.
Modernity’s dependence on technological
change is not only linked to what economists
euphemistically call “structural adjustment”—as
old industries, employment patterns, and allocations
of wealth and power give way to new ones. It
also affects the evolution of what Thomas Hughes,
the historian of technology, termed “large technological
systems.” These make up the infrastructure
on which humans depend for their survival, infrastructure
whose continually growing complexity
We make sense of complexity via
notions of progress that celebrate
the creative and sweep aside the
destructive aspects of innovation.
32 • CURRENT HISTORY • January 2012
defies not just control but even comprehension:
energy systems, food and agricultural systems,
transport systems, national defense systems, medical
systems, and so on.
And while we acknowledge with awe humanity’s
ability to manage elements of these systems
(such as civil airline safety or vaccine efficacy)
with incredible reliability and effectiveness, we
also see that, as these systems become more
sophisticated and complex, they generate new
opportunities not just for benefit but for disaster.
Impacts range from the merely inconvenient and
costly (like the effect of Icelandic volcanoes on
global air travel), to the disruptive (economic
and employment inequity as some industries shut
down and others prosper), to the momentous and
apparently intractable (nuclear weapons proliferation;
climate change)—and increasingly global.
Such complexities cannot be understood in an
analytically coherent way. Rather, societies tend
to make sense of complexity through narratives
of self-identity, through custom, belief systems,
myths, and taboos. In the industrialized world we
make sense of complexity
via notions of progress that
celebrate the creative and
sweep aside the destructive
aspects of innovation.
Of course this sensemaking
in part reflects
shared cultural values—the
Enlightenment commitment to rationality and
progress—but it also reflects the interests of those
with the power to shape our guiding cultural
myths and narratives. Thus, the choices we make
about how to deal with “destructive creation” are
strongly political. To navigate the socio-technical
complexity at the core of modernity, we ought to
depend on the vitality of democratic institutions.
Yet modern societies have increasingly tended to
go in a different direction, often handing responsibility
for coping with destructive creation to
their most culturally authoritative sense-maker:
scientific research.
Risky business
From the scientific perspective, the “destruction”
of destructive creation often goes by the
name “risk.” The implication is that undesirable
aspects of technological change can be controlled
through rigorous quantification and rational management,
making the world safe for continued
technological change and economic growth.
Through, for example, research on climate
change, nuclear waste, or the health effects of
toxic chemicals, we are supposed to comprehend
the consequences of destructive creation, so that
we can act to prevent or redress the unintended
negative consequences of endless growth. The
notion of “risk” thus reinforces the creative and
redemptive aspects of technological change by
marginalizing the destructive aspects as something
to be measured and managed, like the side
effects of a drug.
But science can never be more than one of
many means to navigate the irreducible complexity
of the world. As science is called on more and
more to “solve” unsolvable problems, it becomes
increasingly political—not because its facts are
not objective, but because they are partial and
often disconnected. Even a cursory examination
of debates around issues like climate change,
embryonic stem cell research, and the regulation
of pharmaceuticals and toxic chemicals shows
that contesting sides, in advancing their positions,
invoke a mélange of factual assertions, value preferences,
vested interests,
and, perhaps most importantly,
beliefs about how the
world works and ought to
work.
Consider the broad rejection
of genetically modified
foods (GMFs) in Europe.
Public opinion research shows that in rejecting
GMFs, Europeans have focused not on economic
benefits but on concerns like preserving their
landscape, the taste of their foods, and the viability
of their farmers—value commitments that
could be strongly affected by processes of destructive
creation.
So, while debates over GMFs in Europe have
often been carried out in the language of scientific
assessments of risk to health and environment,
the main reasons for public opposition have to do
with values about the sort of society that people
prefer. The scientific patina is required by the
rules of the World Trade Organization, which prohibit
blocking GMF imports for reasons other than
scientific assessment of risk.
A comparison with the politics of climate
change is revealing. Opponents of GMFs share
with skeptics about climate change a commitment
to arguing against the weight of conventional
science, although the two groups’ political and
economic perspectives are likely to be in sharp
Rusted-out factories are as much a
consequence of the information
technology revolution as the iPad is.
Destructive Creation and the New World Disorder • 33
opposition. Because determinations of risk are
always uncertain and never fully resolvable, and
because one person’s risk is another’s opportunity,
science becomes a battle that is really about
the nonquantifiable, value-based consequences
of destructive creation—about who gets to determine
how the world will be transformed.
Indeed, the core challenge of destructive creation
is that it presents us with, to borrow from
Hegel’s definition of tragedy, the need to choose
between two rights. What cherished aspects of our
ways of life are we willing to give up in the pursuit
of growth and wealth creation? This definition of
tragedy does not imply inevitable doom, but it
does entail an inescapable process of balancing
conflicting values.
As the ancient Greeks knew, this choosing is
made more difficult—and potentially disastrous—
if we fail to recognize and understand our situation.
In the case of genetically modified foods, the
use of scientific analysis and language in a debate
really about conflicting values only serves to further
cloud what is at stake in efforts to manage the
destructive creation that follows.
Democratic imagination
The Enlightenment tradition at the core of
modernity values progress and scientific rationality—
but not alone. Democracy is another prized
scion of the Enlightenment, and the commitment
to democracy is an explicit acknowledgment that
unmediated rationality can become a source of
tyranny. Democracy provides the pluralistic discourse
that can prevent rationality from being
captured by a particular ideology or set of interests.
It provides the balance to ensure that one
incomplete way of looking at the world does not
through over-weening confidence become dominant.
It allows us to integrate many factors that
make life meaningful—the tangible and intangible,
the factual and the fanciful.
Historically, during periods of social disruption
accompanying structural readjustment, those disenfranchised
by technological change have made
new demands for a voice. The historian Carroll
Pursell describes the ways in which science
and technology were perceived during the Great
Depression, and the pervasive ambivalence about
the social impacts of innovation that fed into a
movement for a science moratorium. In his second
inaugural address in 1937, President Franklin
Roosevelt felt the need to address concerns about
“moral controls over the services of science,” a
perspective that would find little resonance amid
today’s dominant political and economic rhetoric.
The catastrophe of World War II put an end to
this debate. It may be only slightly melodramatic
to note that not until they lived under the shadow
of the mushroom cloud did certain industrial societies
begin to enjoy a return to economic growth,
from which reemerged a prevailing cultural narrative
about the “endless frontier” of science and
technological development, and its contribution
to a prosperity that could be shared by all.
The redemptive myths of technological progress
have attained a status—reinforced by asymmetries
of political and economic power—that
stifles complementary myths of humility, pluralistic
debate, and cooperation. Evidence for this
is to be found precisely in the consequences of
structural adjustment, which our cultural identity
seems able to interpret only as motivation for the
next wave of destructive creation.
We are looking toward that next wave even
now. From fields like nanotechnology, synthetic
biology, robotics, genomics, and cognitive technology
we will be creating new industries, vast
new wealth, and marvelous new conveniences,
even as we are adding to global-scale technological
complexities that will transform society and
bring us our next versions of the dot-com and
housing bubbles, 9/11, oil spills, and Fukushima.
So perhaps now is the time to engage in a
rebalancing of the assumptions about how much
destruction we are willing to put up with as we busily
try to stoke the next fire of creation. How can
we improve democratic steering of powerful technologies
and technological systems, and who will
make the choices about our priorities? Who will
get to capture the new wealth we create, and who
will be left on the sidelines? How big will we allow
speculative bubbles to grow? How much of the new
wealth will we put aside to help those who are disenfranchised
by technological change? Whose jobs
will be forfeited? Whose cities will rust?
There are, of course, no single right answers to
these questions. What is important is to ask them
seriously and openly, and not pretend that they can
be avoided. They are not questions for science, but
for a revitalized democratic imagination. Perhaps
the indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and even the
Tea Party are signs of a reawakening of that imagination.
We do not know how deep the current
trough will go, but our view of the modern tragedy
is much clearer from down here than it will be
when we reach the crest of the next wave. ■
CURRENT HISTORY
The Danger of Decline
Global Progress Report, 2012
At the start of a new year, debt woes and Arab uprisings have
hung ominous clouds over the planet, including risks of another
economic downturn, fracture of the European Union, and
protracted instability in the Middle East. It doesn’t help matters that, at
the same time, much of the world thinks the United States is in decline.
Declinists point to America’s dysfunctional politics, its stagnant
economy, its ebbing power. They are right to worry. But a point they
often miss is that much of the decline is relative or reversible.
After all, this is not a world in which others succeed only at one’s
own expense. Globalization remains the paramount trend, and it
draws people into ever wider and more complex webs of interdependence.
Thus a country that relies on international security and
commerce, as the United States does, has reason to celebrate its own
relative decline to the extent that it results from the rise of stable
market economies.
Some in America pine for days when they could impose their will
on humbler nations. As power disperses, decision making and problem
solving do become more difficult, especially if some actors, such as
China, resist assuming responsibility commensurate with their economic
importance. There is, however, no returning to the economic
and military dominance that the United States enjoyed at the end of
World War II and the cold war. The world has benefited enormously
from US leadership, and desperately needs it still. But leadership will
have to be shared.
If America cannot dictate to others, it can still promote shared values.
Even Enlightenment thinkers, who articulated the ideals of political
liberty, free markets, and peace, never viewed these as exclusively
Western possessions. The eighteenth century’s Marquis de Condorcet
looked forward to a time when the sun would shine on “an earth of
none but free men, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves,
priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will have disappeared.”
Arabs in 2011 showed they want sunshine like everyone else. With
masses bravely seeking self-determination and elites violently resisting,
the Middle East for a time will be more disorderly and dangerous. But
the future holds more promise as a result. Why would Arabs risk death
to demand democracy at a time when the United States seems barely
able to govern itself, when the EU risks breaking up, when publics in
Latin America and Africa scorn their elected governments? Because
the yearning for dignity and freedom springs from human nature—and
patience with autocrats is running out. It will run out one day, too, in
Tehran, Riyadh, Moscow, and Beijing.
Many worry because Islamists have seized political advantage from
the Arab Spring. This has happened, however, mainly because regimes
that suppressed opposition for decades left mosques as the only outlets
for organized dissent. Popular sovereignty constitutes an essential
CURRENT HISTORY
The Danger of Decline
Global Progress Report, 2012
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
4
In normal times, advanced economies can be
expected to march at a lively pace, generating
growth and prosperity, until at some point they
succumb to the pressures of the business cycle
and retreat for a quarter or two. These retreats
occasion considerable heartache—but they are
brief. After the tears are dry, economies resume
their orderly advances.
These economic times are not normal and
threaten to get less normal yet.
In 2008 the collapse of the investment bank
Lehman Brothers revealed that the preceding
years’ prosperity in affluent countries had been
illusory, based on fanciful asset prices and magical
lending practices. Suddenly, ordinary people
found themselves cowering beneath massive overhangs
of other people’s debt.
Thanks to the coordinated efforts of nations,
the precarious ice mainly stayed in place and
the gods of the mountain maintained their frozen
perches, though the people of the valley
were pelted with debris. Today, the world once
again huddles under vast creaking icepacks of
debt. These potential avalanches stretch from the
Balkans to the Pyrenees and beyond.
For this we may thank many wise individuals.
We may thank the arithmetic wizards of Athens
who, two and a half millennia after Pythagoras,
devised novel approaches to rudimentary ciphering;
the pallid bureaucrats of Brussels, who
thought monetary without fiscal union a very
fine thing for the European Union, pretending
that northerners’ clockwork approach to fiscal
issues could easily be reconciled with the
southern view of budgets as enchanted boxes
from which miracles can be expected to issue;
Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas
Sarkozy, to whom the road ahead seems an endless
depository for well-kicked cans; and international
bankers, who now assume their favorite
posture in times of crisis, that of presenting to
the public one hand in trembling supplication
while brandishing in the other the hatchet of
collective calamity.
Admittedly, things seem bleak today partly
because 2011 delivered to the world economy
unanticipated shocks like Japan’s triple disaster
and the Arab Spring’s disruptions to petroleum
prices. Still, the International Monetary Fund
reports in its most recent World Economic
Outlook that today’s dismal economic prospects
in the rich countries spring mostly from feeble
recoveries and fiscal and financial uncertainty,
not from exogenous bad luck. Governments
are retrenching; private demand is failing to
compensate. Bad sovereign debt is affecting
banks’ ability to gain financing. The IMF thus
forecasts that in 2012 rich-world GDP growth
will amount to 1.9 percent—a distressing figure
after the blood of 2008 and the bloodless
recovery since.
In the emerging and developing world things
are brighter. There, the IMF predicts 2012 GDP
growth of 6.1 percent—very solid—with China
impulse behind the uprisings, and people must advance via trial and
error. As liberal norms take root, Islamists who stand for reelection will
have to choose between pragmatism and defeat. Secularization eventually
should follow.
Today, amid the tumult and tragedy, it seems evident that respect for
self-government, economic innovation, and collective security is growing
across the world, along with distaste for violence and fanaticism.
Progress depends, however, on the continuous banishment of ignorance.
And globalization accentuates the consequences of skill gaps.
The United States, if it is to remain a global exemplar, must fix its
politics, renew growth, and restore fiscal order—but underlying all these
challenges is an urgent need for educational improvements. Americans
are falling behind in science and math; poor schooling for poor children
belies the dream of equal opportunity. In the United States as everywhere,
learning provides the greatest bulwark against decline. A.S.
ECONOMY
Silence in the valley
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
recording 9 percent and India marked down for
7.5. Sub-Saharan Africa, so often the uncomfortable
afterthought in discussions of world economies,
is projected to keep up its run of decent
performances with GDP growth of 5.8 percent.
But even in the fast-growing economies of the
developing world, trouble lurks. China has made
little progress in rebalancing its economic structure
toward private consumption. Beijing must
worry about inflation on the one hand, flagging
exports on the other; bad debts over here and
overheated housing over there. Little wonder that
China has told Europe in so many words not to
expect a rescue from the east.
Meanwhile, in the world’s largest economy, the
housing sector remains sick and the public sector
useless. Far too many workers sink into the pit of
depression and obsolescence otherwise known as
long-term unemployment. Few remedies for this
are advanced by people in positions of power.
They do not entirely seem to care.
As 2011 becomes 2012, things look more perilous
than at any time since the death of Lehman.
Gather your loved ones. Look out above. L.C.
5
POLITICS
The blind leading
Tomorrow is a certainty, but it does not seem
that way to everyone. Small children find tomorrow
an unmanageable abstraction. To test this,
offer a child a lollipop today or two lollipops
tomorrow. It is a great way to save yourself a lollipop.
Similarly, if you task a democratic politician
with solving a severe problem today, he is likely
to convert it into a worse problem tomorrow.
Children can be forgiven for acting childish.
Grown-ups cannot.
Blindness to the future is rampant today across
the wealthy, democratic nations of the world. In
Europe, Merkel and Sarkozy will do whatever it
takes to save the euro, for about a week at a time.
The weeks have now added up to a couple of long
years. The German and French leaders continue
urging drastic austerity on nations where conditions
are austere already, hectoring them to sabotage
their own economic growth so that, in some
distant fairy land, unpayable obligations can be
paid. Merkel and Sarkozy meanwhile coddle their
own publics, pretending to the burghers of Bavaria
and the bourgeoisie of Brittany that distant debts
will not in the end be made good from local wallets.
Bankers too have been coddled, as if monetary
losses were unconscionable things to ask of
people whose excellent standards of living proceed
from lending money at, theoretically, risk. In
Merkel and Sarkozy’s world, the banks are to be
made whole, with northern taxpayers subsidizing
nothing, because southern nations through the
application of good sense and moral fiber will generate
cash they do not have. Oh, and forget those
eurobonds. There is no such thing as eurobonds.
Instead, there is a December agreement among all
EU nations except Britain to impose tighter oversight
on governments’ spending. This seems likely
to avert future debt problems in a euro zone that
may not survive its past profligacy.
Japan’s sovereign debt dwarfs that of Greece
and all the other European debtor nations. But at
least the Japanese debt is mostly owed to Japanese
people, who kindly continue trusting their savings
to a government most notable for fecklessness and
confusion. No ideas seem on offer in Japan that
would fix the country’s fiscal problems. Nor that
would address the demographic trends threatening
to deposit Japan into a hole from which it
cannot climb out. Increased immigration and an
end to patronage politics might do much to rouse
Japan from its malaise. Just do not mention these
things to Japanese politicians.
Washington remains gridlocked (mostly)
because a once-grand party refuses to contemplate
raising taxes for any reason, such as the
federal government’s lack of money. Republicans
adopt this stance because they are extremely concerned
about the growing power of government,
as many of them have been since Brown v. Board
of Education. But Republicans are not solely to
blame. Most politicians on both sides of the aisle
believe that America cannot be safe from its “enemies”
unless the country’s military expenditures
roughly equal those of the rest of the world combined.
Earlier generations of politicians share culpability
too—the cowardly, striving vote-grubbers
of the past found it expedient to endow mammoth
debts on the cowardly, striving vote-grubbers of
today. Meanwhile, though the American economy
so obviously exhibits a need for further stimulus,
stimulus has become a filthy word.
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
6
All this is normal, about what you would
expect. But it is not what is required. In these
parlous times, roomfuls of somber individuals
should ponder hard questions, suppress personal
interests, discuss and debate, and in the
end arrive at compromises that satisfy no one
but do at least confront tomorrow’s problems
today.
This is not to say that authoritarianism is better.
It is far worse. Even at its most effective, authoritarianism
combines with the greed, stupidity,
and selfishness of democratic politics a corrosive
unaccountability. Democratic governance remains
the only hope we have and a stunning achievement
of history. But at times like these, oh how
tiresome it grows. L.C.
The decline of warfare and the diffusion of
power are the most important trends in global
security today. Even as observers fret over the possibility
of a spreading economic crisis, virtually no
one predicts a return to the 1930s, when protectionist
and nationalist pressures helped unleash
war among great powers. Conflicts and skirmishes
persist, especially in Africa. Humanitarian interventions,
such as NATO’s successful provision
of aid to Libyan rebels in 2011, occur when
they are feasible. In general, though, armed violence
is diminishing. And when it does occur, it
increasingly reflects the weakness rather than the
strength of states.
Following on the American withdrawal from
Iraq, the coming year will see reduced US troop
SECURITY
More stable and decent
How Is the World Doing?
CEconomy
The future of the euro zone remains uncertain, and Washington for now seems
incapable of spurring growth and restoring fiscal order. Even as developing
economies expand briskly, the rich nations’ heavy debts and lagging demand limit
global prospects.
B
Politics
The courage of Syrians and others reminds us that longing for liberty is universal.
Moscow’s protests suggest no authoritarian can feel secure. Unfortunately, mature
democracies these days exemplify sound governance less than protracted malaise.
B+
Security
Warfare increasingly reflects not statecraft but state failure. US interventions in Iraq
and Afghanistan are winding down. Revolts will make the Middle East less stable for
a while. But global security can survive Islamist fanatics, a nuclear Iran, and a rising
China.
D
Resources
As the human condition improves, the conditions that enable such improvement
deteriorate. The cost of extracting key resources is growing. Paltry efforts to address
climate change expose an inadequate capacity to act collectively for posterity’s sake.
B
Science
Globalization is making evident to everyone the importance of research and
innovation for economic success. Emerging economies are rapidly building academic
facilities, investing in R&D, and producing more scientific publications and patent
applications.
Current History’s report card on global trends at the start of 2012.
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
7
levels in Afghanistan. (It is hard to see how
outright military victory against the Taliban is
possible as long as Pakistan offers havens for
the insurgents, or as long as the government in
Kabul remains corrupt and detached from most
Afghans.) President Barack Obama, while taking
out the world’s top terrorists, also has made
clear that the security policies of his predecessor,
George W. Bush, represented a temporary
deviation from US support for the global spread of
norms against torture and military adventurism.
Diplomacy and sanctions, meanwhile, constitute
the main tools for discouraging nuclear proliferation
and for dealing with rogue states, such
as North Korea, that acquire weapons capability.
International efforts to block Tehran’s nuclear
ambitions will continue, as will planning for containment
when Iran does gain the bomb. (A military
strike, as advocated in some quarters, would
prove disastrous.) Pakistan’s possession of nuclear
arms appears increasingly hazardous—but again
because the state is weak, not because it is strong.
Washington and some East Asian nations have
begun pushing back against China’s recent assertiveness
in Asia. Regional economic integration
continues, however, and Beijing benefits as much
as anyone from an international order conducive
to peaceable commerce. Ideologues who believe
China and America are destined for armed conflict
overlook Beijing’s commitment to avoid the errors
of Imperial Japan.
Security in the twenty-first century, in sum,
requires collective effort to render an increasingly
networked and multipolar world more
stable and decent. In an August 2011 essay,
Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich summarized
a few of the most pressing tasks in this
regard. Among them: “negotiating boundaries—
constraints, for example, on the use of
force—that will limit great power prerogatives;”
establishing norms to govern competition for
resources; reducing arms and curtailing the
global weapons trade; and focusing diplomatic
efforts on trouble spots (such as Kashmir and
the Palestinian territories) where armed conflict
seems a threat. Continuous crisis management
and dwelling on the balance of power hold far
less strategic promise. A.S.
People who follow world events closely devote
most of their attention to three big issues: how we
are governed, how prosperous we are, and how
safe we are. But in coming decades these three
issues may be challenged in importance by a different
set of questions.
How long can our planet continue to produce
the natural resources that we need to survive and
thrive? As key resources become depleted or more
costly to secure, can substitutes be identified?
Will segments of our natural environment become
so toxic as to be virtually useless? Will we so
radically alter the earth’s atmosphere that human
existence becomes problematic?
In a way, these questions recall the state
of human consciousness during the millennia
before civilization was invented. Then, our attention
was monopolized by weather, water, food,
and personal safety. Modernity and increasing
prosperity were supposed to deliver us from
these tyrannical concerns, but today we can
imagine a future in which weather, water, food,
and personal safety again monopolize our attention.
History establishes for humankind an impressive
capacity to learn from mistakes and to innovate.
This is as true in the environmental realm as
in any other. Advanced countries no longer clearcut
their forests so enthusiastically. New factories
use energy more efficiently than old ones. But
such advances in attitude and technology are not
achieved according to a schedule. We can encourage
but not force them.
Meanwhile, the global population grows and
grows. Industrialization spreads ever wider. Newly
middle-class people the world over care more
about purchasing cars and providing proteinrich
diets to their children than about intensified
drought on poorer continents or the disappearance
under seawater of far-flung atolls.
The human condition improves, even as we
witness a deterioration in the conditions that
enable such improvement. And what is done in
response? Too little. A late-year climate conference
in Durban began in an atmosphere of pitifully low
expectations, and met them. The International
Energy Agency warned in November that the
world must implement a carbon emissions treaty
RESOURCES
Sins of the fathers
Global Progr e ss R e por t, 2012
8
by 2017 or face intolerable temperature increases.
That warning provoked no general urgency.
Civilization’s key genius is that it allows each
generation’s ingenuity and accomplishments to
accrue to the next generation. But the deleterious
effects of our actions accumulate along with
the accomplishments. Humankind’s technological
mastery is so powerful today—literally, worldaltering—
that we are called on to contain our own
power through measures that benefit only posterity.
Is our capacity for self-abnegation big enough
for the task? L.C.
Judging by political news from the United
States, one might think science is imperiled.
Rick Perry, the Texas governor seeking the GOP’s
presidential nomination, deems creationism and
evolution equally credible. In 2011 he mocked the
notion that the world should take climate change
seriously “just because you have a group of scientists
who stood up and said here is the fact.”
Such remarks prompted Princeton’s Robert
Socolow to lament in the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists: “Distortions abound regarding both
what science understands and how science is
conducted. Of even greater concern, however, is
the rejection of the scientific way of knowing—or
rather its relegation to the status of just one of
many equally valid ways of knowing. If the scientific
method loses its place as a privileged way of
knowing, the consequences will be devastating.”
The consequences could include increased
sway for superstition. Religious fervor provoked
centuries of bloody warfare in Europe; it inspires
Islamist extremists today. More insidiously, it
impairs democratic decision making. As the psychologist
Steven Pinker (who has contributed an
essay to this issue) has observed, “the elevation
of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is
a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and
an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”
Fortunately, global trends suggest no unseating
of scientific authority. The globalization of
research and development continues, even as
hard times constrain budgets in Western nations.
Emerging economies are building new academic
facilities and programs. More countries are producing
patent applications and scientific publications.
China has achieved double-digit annual
growth rates in R&D investments. If support for
science and innovation were to falter in the United
States, other nations would pick up the slack.
And in most domains, the authority of evidence
grows stronger. Perry himself sabotaged his presidential
prospects by empirically demonstrating
his unfitness for the office. A.S.
SCIENCE
Ways of knowing
A Statistical Snapshot of the World
Sources: Economist Pocket World in Figures (2012); Freedom House; Inter-Parliamentary Union; National Counterterrorism Center; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Ploughshares Fund; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; Transparency International; US Patent and Trademark Office
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
US China France UK Russia
Annually, in billions of dollars
Annual Defense Spending,
Five Highest
0 100 200 300 400 500 8,500 11,000
Israel
India
Pakistan
France
UK
Russia
US
Total nuclear weapons 2011 estimate
N. Korea
China
Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011*
*As of June 30, 2011. Data include Iraq/Afghanistan
Global Fatalities from Terrorist Attacks Security
0
20
40
60
80
100
Free Partly Free Not Free
Number of countries in each category
2000 2010
Freedom in the World
0 2 4 6 8 10
Somalia
Myanmar
Afghanistan
Iraq
Sweden
Finland
Singapore
New Zealand
Denmark
10 = L ea s t c orrup t
Political Corruption,
Least and Most Corrupt
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
South Cuba Iceland
Africa
Rwanda Sweden
Highest Percentage of
Women in Parliament
Politics
0
3
6
9
12
15
US China Japan India Germany
In trillions of dollars, at PPP
Five Largest Economies
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
120000
Luxembourg Norway Qatar Switzerland Denmark
GDP Per Capita, Five Highest
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
Burundi Congo DR Liberia Somalia Malawi
GDP Per Capita, Five Lowest
Economy
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Saudi US Iran China
Arabia
Russia
Million barrels of oil per day
Oil Producers, Top Five
0
5
10
15
20
US China Japan India Russia
Million barrels of oil per day
Oil Consumers, Top Five
0
5
10
15
20
Saudi Venezuela Iran Iraq Kuwait
Arabia
Percentage of world total
Proven Oil Reserves,
Top Five
Resources
0
15
30
45
60
75
90
Russia Poland Romania Slovakia Mexico
As a percentage of R&D expenditures, 2009
0
75
150
225
300
375
450
US China Japan Germany France
In billions of dollars at PPP, 2009
R&D Expenditures Public Funding of R&D Expenditures
0
25
50
75
100
125
150
South Taiwan
Korea
US Japan Germany
In thousands, 2010
US Patents Awarded by
Country of Origin
Science
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World War II and Cold War TimelinesThe links on this page are all from Tualatin High School's virtual reference library. If you want to use these at home, you will need to use the GVRL password. If you don't know what that is, get the password sheet from the library or log in to our secure page with your student eSIS username and password, to down load the password sheet in a pdf file.
World War II - Online ReferencesWorld War II Reference Library. Barbara C. Bigelow, George Feldman, Christine Slovey, and Kelly King Howes, eds. Detroit: UXL, 2000. 970 pp. 5 vols.World War II, 1939-1943. History in Dispute. Dennis Showalter, ed. Vol. 4: Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 304 pp. World War II, 1943-1945. History in Dispute. Dennis Showalter, ed. Vol. 5: World War II, 1943-1945. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 354 pp. Cold War - Online ReferencesCold War Reference Library. Richard C. Hanes, Sharon M. Hanes, and Lawrence W. Baker, eds. Detroit: UXL, 2004. 1205 pp. 6 vols.The Cold War: First Series. History in Dispute. Benjamin Frankel, ed. Vol. 1: Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 347 pp. The Cold War: Second Series. History in Dispute. Dennis Showalter and Paul du Quenoy, eds. Vol. 6: Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 323 pp. The Red Scare After 1945. History in Dispute. Robbie Lieberman, ed. Vol. 19: Detroit: St. James Press, 2005. 427 pp. Encyclopedia of Modern China. David Pong, ed. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009. 2312 pp. 4 vols. Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. Karen Christensen and David Levinson, eds. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. 3268 pp. 6 vols. Online References with information on both WWII and the Cold WarAmerican Decades. Judith S. Baughman, Victor Bondi, Richard Layman, Tandy McConnell, and Vincent Tompkins, eds. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 5690 pp. 10 vols.Dictionary of American History. Stanley I. Kutler, ed. 3rded. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003. 5539 pp. 10 vols. Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, eds. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 1319 pp. 3 vols. Encyclopedia of Russian History. James R. Millar, ed. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. 1507 pp. 4 vols. Timelines and ChronologiesThe People's Chronology. James Trager. 3rded. Detroit: Gale, 2005. - For this project, click on the "eTable of Contents" for a link that will take you to a list of years. (Or you can click here to jump right in to the list. Click on the year you want to investigate.)Document Actions |
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