The End of Power (13 page)

And then, of course, there is the Internet. Its expansion and the surprising new ways in which it is used (and abused) don't need much elaboration. In 1990, the number of Internet users was insignificant—a mere 0.1 percent of the worlds' population. That number rose to 30 percent of the population worldwide in 2010 (and to more than 73 percent in developed countries).
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By 2012, eight-year-old Facebook was on its way to having more than 1 billion users (with more than half of them accessing it via their mobile phones and tablets), Twitter (launched in 2006) had 140
million active users, and Skype—the voice-over-Internet service created in 2003—boasted almost 700 million regular users.
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The Twitter and Facebook revolutions in the Middle East and the impact of social media on politics are much discussed, and we examine their role in the decay of power. But in terms of this initial discussion of the Mobility revolution, we should also consider the impact of another tool that does not get the credit it deserves for changing the world: the prepaid phone card. Web users need electricity, a computer, and an Internet service provider, things that most of us take for granted but that are too expensive for most of the world's population. Calling-card users need only a few cents and a pay phone to connect with the rest of the world regardless of how isolated or remote their own location. The growth of calling-card usage and global reach leaves the Internet's growth in the dust. Prepaid phone cards were invented in Italy in 1976 as a response to the shortage of metal coins and to curb pay phone theft and vandalism. The new product took off and in 1977 was also launched in Austria, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and, five years later, in Japan (also prompted by a coin shortage). But truly explosive growth took place once prepaid calling cards became popular among the poor of the world. Driven by gains in the poorer countries, industry revenues skyrocketed from $25 million in 1993 to more than $3 billion in 2000.
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Now prepaid calling cards are giving way to prepaid mobile phones. In fact, prepaid cellphones have displaced those that require a long-term subscription and bound the user to a service provider through an elaborate contract.
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The less-well-off who choose to leave home for better, or merely some, work far away no longer face as stark a choice between staying close to their families and communities and improving their fortunes.

Two characteristics shared by all of these mobility-enhancing technologies are the speed and extent of the drop in costs of moving goods, money, people, and information. Airline tickets that used to cost thousands of dollars can now be had at a fraction of their prices twenty or thirty years ago, and the cost per mile of transporting a ton of cargo today is ten times lower than in the 1950s. Wiring money from California to Mexico in the late 1990s cost about 15 percent of the sum being transferred; today it is less than 6 percent. Mobile-phone platforms through which money can be transferred from one cellphone to another will make remittances almost cost-free.

And what exactly do all these revolutionary changes in mobility and communication mean for power? The Mobility revolution has a profound
effect that can be just as intuitively grasped as that of the More revolution. Exercising power means not only maintaining control and coordination over a real or figurative territory but also policing its borders. That is true for a nation-state, but also for a corporation that dominates a given market, a political party that depends on a geographically bound constituency, or a father who wants to keep his children within reach. Power needs a captive audience. In situations where citizens, voters, investors, workers, parishioners, or customers have few or no alternative outlets, they have little choice but to consent to the terms of the institutions they face. But when borders become porous and the governed—or controlled—population more mobile, entrenched organizations have a harder time retaining their dominance. The most radical example is migration, whereby people simply remove themselves from one distribution of power to another, thus putting themselves in a position they believe will give them better options.

Inevitably, the ease of travel and transportation and the faster, less costly ways of moving information, money, or values make life easier for challengers and harder for incumbents.

In the late 1960s, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington famously argued that a fundamental cause of social and political instability in developing countries—which he preferred to call “rapidly changing societies”—was that people's expectations expanded much faster than the capacity of any government to satisfy them.
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The More and Mobility revolutions have created a new, vast, and fast-growing middle class whose members are well aware that others have even more prosperity, freedom, or personal fulfillment than they do—and who hope and expect to catch up. This “expectations revolution” and the disconnect it breeds are now global. They affect both rich and poor countries alike; indeed, the overwhelming majority of the world's population lives in what could now be called “rapidly changing societies.” The difference, of course, is that whereas in developing countries the middles class is expanding, in most wealthy countries it is shrinking. And both growing and shrinking middle classes fuel political turmoil. The embattled middle classes take to the streets and fight to protect their living standards while the expanding middle classes protest to get more and better goods and services. In Chile, for example, students have been rioting almost routinely since 2009, demanding cheaper and
better university education. It doesn't matter that a few decades ago access to higher education was a privilege reserved for a tiny elite and that universities are now flooded with the sons and daughters of the new middle class. For the students and their parents, access to higher education is no longer enough. They want better and cheaper education. And they want it now. The same is happening in China, where protests over the poor quality of new apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools are now common. Here, too, the argument that a few years ago those apartments, hospitals, and schools didn't even exist does not placate the ire of those who want improvements in the quality of the medical and educational services being offered. This is a new mindset—a change in mentality—that has profound consequences for power.

A profound change in expectations and standards has come about, and not just in liberal societies but even in the most hidebound ones. Most people look at the world, their neighbors, employers, clergy, politicians and governments with different eyes than their parents did. To some degree, that has always been the case. But the effect of the More and Mobility revolutions has been to vastly broaden the cognitive, even emotional impact of more access to resources and the ability to move, learn, connect, and communicate more broadly and inexpensively than ever before. Inevitably, this sharpens the intergenerational gaps in mentality—and in worldview.

Consider divorce, anathema in many traditional societies but today more common everywhere. A study conducted in 2010 found that divorce rates have risen even in the conservative Persian Gulf states, reaching 20 percent in Saudi Arabia, 26 percent in the United Arab Emirates, and 37 percent in Kuwait. In addition, these higher divorce rates were correlated to education. Specifically, the increased number of educated women was putting a strain on conservative marriages, leading to marital conflict and summary divorces pronounced by threatened husbands. In Kuwait, the rate of divorce soared to 47 percent among couples in which both spouses held a university degree. “Women used to accept social sacrifices,” Saudi sociologist and report author Mona al-Munajjed said, comparing Gulf society thirty years ago and today. “Now they will not accept that anymore.”
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The Muslim world is just one rich source of examples of how the Mentality revolution is transforming long-held traditions, from the rise of a fashion and glamour industry aimed at hijabi (veiled or covered) women
to the spread of no-interest banking in Western countries where large Muslim immigrant communities have formed. Meanwhile in India, the transformation in attitudes is spreading back from the young generation to their elders: a country where divorce was once considered shameful—and women, in particular, were discouraged from remarrying—now has an increasingly robust matrimonial advertising industry devoted to listings by divorced senior citizens, some as old as their eighties or even nineties, seeking love late in life and without embarrassment. Mature adults are leaving the arranged marriages into which they were inducted when they were teens or young adults. Late in life, they are at last able to rebel against the encoded powers of family, community, society, and religion. They have changed their mentality.

Changes in mentality and attitudes toward power and authority are also taking place among youths—a segment of the population that is now more numerous than ever before. According to the US Intelligence Council, “Today, more than 80 states have populations with a median age of 25 years or less. As a group, these countries have an over-sized impact on world affairs—since the 1970s, roughly 80 percent of all armed civic and ethnic conflict . . . has originated in states with youthful populations. The ‘demographic arc of instability' outlined by these youthful populations ranges from clusters in the mid-section of Central America and the Central Andes, covers all of sub-Saharan Africa and stretches across the Middle East into South and Central Asia.”
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THE PROPENSITY OF THE YOUNG TO QUESTION AUTHORITY AND
challenge power is now amplified by the More and Mobility revolutions. Not only are there more people than ever under thirty, but they
have
more—prepaid calling-cards, radios, TVs, cellphones, computers, and access to the Internet as well as to travel and communication possibilities with others like them at home and around the world. They are also more mobile than ever. Aging baby boomers may be a feature of several industrialized societies, but elsewhere it is the young—irreverent, change-seeking, challenging, better informed, mobile, and connected—who comprise the largest demographic group. And as we have seen in North Africa and the Middle East, they can have a powerful impact.

Complicating this picture in some advanced societies are cross-cutting demographic trends driven by immigration. The 2010 US Census revealed that the American population under eighteen would have undergone a decade-long decline had it not been for the inflow of millions of young
Hispanic and Asian immigrants. These young immigrants are an important factor behind an unprecedented transition: in 2012, white babies were a minority of all US births.
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According to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, inasmuch as the share of immigrants in the US population was at its lowest level in the twentieth century from 1946 to 1964,

In short, old folks today not only just don't get it, they can't even speak it. But for those seeking to acquire, wield, or retain power in the United States and Europe, an understanding of the mindsets and expectations of these new constituencies will be essential.

A number of global public opinion surveys are providing a clearer picture of the extent and velocity of these attitudinal changes. Since 1990, the World Values Survey (WVS) has been tracking changes in people's attitudes in over eighty countries containing 85 percent of the world's population. In particular, Ronald Inglehart, the director of the WVS, and several of his co-authors, notably Pippa Norris and Christian Welzel, have documented profound changes in attitudes concerning gender differences, religion, government, and globalization. One of their conclusions about these changes in peoples' mentality is that there is a growing global consensus regarding the importance of individual autonomy and gender equality as well as a corresponding popular intolerance for authoritarianism.
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On the other hand, there is ample survey evidence pointing toward an equally profound but more worrisome attitudinal trend: in mature democracies (Europe, the United States, Japan), public confidence in leaders and institutions of democratic governance such as parliaments, political parties, and the judiciary not only is low but shows a secular decline.
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Reflecting on this trend, Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that