It's great to welcome to the program today, Ross Douthat, who's a columnist at The New
York Times and also author of the recent book The Decadent Society How We Became the Victims
of Our Own Success.
Great to have you on, Ross.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So a lot of what you write about applies to the situation in which we find ourselves today.
But in order to kind of get into that conversation, when you talk about a decadent society, what
do you mean by that?
Because it may it may not be obvious to some in our audience.
Right.
So I'm trying to use the word decadence, not to just mean, you know, chocolate covered
strawberries and, you know, bondage dens and orgies and so on.
But I'm trying to use it as a kind of technical label for a stage that really successful civilizations
tend to reach when they become very rich and powerful.
And all of their sort of systems, governmental, economic, are well established, hard to change.
And moronic.
You cannot essentially victims of their own success.
They're so powerful and rich that they stopped doing the kind of things that you need to
do to innovate both in politics and science and culture.
They stop having as many babies because, you know, people have other things to do with
their time.
And so they enter into periods of sort of torpor, stagnation and repetition, which the
book argues we've been in at least up until, you know, the current crisis that we entered
into while I was on my book tour.
How does this relate to some of the systems that up until three months ago, many of us
maybe assumed were pretty strong and whose fragility has actually been exposed by the
Corona virus?
Does that in any way play into this stagnation, sort of that that you apply to economies that
in countries that are in this decadent phase where we very quickly realized, hey, that
great looking stock market was actually not quite so strong?
The supply chain for me, many consumer products and even some food items was not nearly as
strong as we believed.
Employment was not as strong as we believe.
How does that play into this idea?
It plays in I mean, in a lot of different ways.
But I'll give you a couple of examples.
One is, you know, the point that you made about supply chains, one of the things that
the Western world has been doing basically over the last 40 years is overall growth has
been slowing down.
Growth hasn't been nearly as impressive as it was, you know, in the heyday of the industrial
revolution or the postwar boom.
And so we've been trying to essentially do two things.
One, spend way more money, way more public money, basically, and take on way more debt
in order to sort of create the sense that we're still growing quickly.
And too, we're trying to wring out sort of maximal efficiencies everywhere we can find
them in order to, again, sort of goose growth and with supply chains and, you know, things
like our our basic supplies of medical equipment and masks and so on.
You can see the danger in the second trend where you're you know, you're so focused on
efficiency because you know that, you know, you won't get strong growth without maximal
efficiency, that you aren't actually prepared to be flexible when a real crisis comes along.
And it turns out that efficiency isn't the only good.
It's also good to have stockpiles of medical equipment.
So that's one one sort of pattern.
And another pattern is just the way sort of large bureaucracies by their nature are built
to pursue safety rather than innovation.
And that's not a bad thing for, say, obviously, you want the FDA and the CDC to be focused
on making sure that medicine is safe and vaccines are safe and so on.
But it makes them inflexible, not particularly adaptable.
And you end up, in this case with a sort of temporary catastrophe like the kind we had
with testing in this country over over the critical two months when we missed the opportunity
to contain the virus, where the bureaucracy's default mode is sort of the status quo is
fine.
And we just need to make sure everything's safe.
And when you actually have a new challenge, you can't adapt to it particularly quickly.
Now, when we think about the first element you mentioned with the medical supplies, it
doesn't seem to me as though the countries that are not yet at a at a level of what you
describe as decadence uniformly did better on that issue.
I mean, there was certainly a mix.
There were countries that were more proactive.
South Korea not not trying to Taiwan.
I believe that within Europe.
Greece certainly was one that moved earlier and sort of more aggressively.
But what other factors should we be looking at?
Because it's not it can't simply be that it was decadence that sort of prevented us from
being properly ready for that.
No, it's also just immediate experience.
Right.
I mean, you have a clear division between how quickly and seriously East Asian societies
and East Asian politics took this challenge.
And how seriously the U.S. and Western Europe took it, mostly because it's not just the
East Asian countries were in closer proximity to China.
They also had sort of direct experience of stars, you know, in the immediate past.
So they had sort of some knowledge and a sense of how bad things could get and sort of, you
know, a sense of the need to act quickly in a crisis.
Whereas in the US and Western Europe, there was a sense that, well, you know, something
can happen in China and it must be, you know, well, it's just a Chinese problem.
It's the kind of thing that, you know, could only happen in.
You know what?
I think a lot of people in the West still think of China as a developing country, a
country that sort of fundamentally different from the developed world, which it is in certain
ways, but obviously not in others.
So there's just, I think, a level of sort of recent experience and realism about the
real state of the world that was stronger in East Asia than in the U.S. and Western
Europe.
And I also think you could say in at a larger level that there are ways in which generally
the economies of East Asia do look a little less decadent generally than well, certainly
than Western Europe, but also than the U.S. in terms of sort of their general willingness
to sort of embrace innovation, their sort of state capacity, this term of art that people
used to refer to, you know, how good a government is getting things done.
State capacity seems like it's been in decline in the US over the last few decades and maybe
less so in East Asia.
So there's a lot of different dynamics going on.
So as we see in the in the United States, even though at the country level we could
say we are certainly one of the richest countries in the world.
We have achieved a degree of what you describe as decadence.
The reality about inequality means that for a large number of people, only maybe a sliver
of some of these benefits are actually reaching them.
When you look at, you know, wage growth over the last 40 years and how it disproportionately
has been for a small upper echelon of the economy, so to speak, or of workers, as the
case may be.
What is the relationship between a country that top level has achieved the status that
you identify to the degree to which it uniformly or not uniformly distributed amongst the people?
I think it depends.
I think there are a couple of different ways that you can get inequality.
And one is more decadent and one is less decadent pride.
So if you look at a period like late 19th century America, you had soaring inequality,
you had the hero of the robber barons, the great fortunes of the Rockefellers and Carnegies
were being made.
And that created all kinds of social problems that eventually sort of led to the labor movement,
the populist and progressive era, the New Deal.
But it wasn't an inequality that really reflected decadence.
It was an inequality that reflected this age of innovation where you had sudden innovations.
A few people were capturing the returns and it took a while for those returns to spread
throughout the population.
Our own era, the last 30 years or so, it looks like that a little bit with Silicon Valley
where you have, you know, Internet innovation, de Zuckerbergs and so on, get rich.
And it doesn't spread out to the rest of society.
But a lot of what we've seen outside the Internet economy is a stagnant general stagnation,
slowing rates of growth where rich people aren't getting rich by embracing innovative
new technologies.
They're getting rich just through the power of investments and compound interest and so
on.
And this is and Thomas Piketty, this is sort of the argument is this is not this is the
more libertarian, in a way, version of the argument that he made in his book, Capital
in the 21st Century, where he basically said, you know, as societies sought, as growth slows
down and societies get older and people have fewer kids, great fortunes become more and
more consolidated and rich people live off ramps.
And that kind of inequality is more decadent and more stagnant and less likely to ultimately
benefit society as a whole than the inequality you get when you know people are building
the transcontinental railroad and a lot of opportunists are getting rich off that innovation.
One of the things you talk about in the book is the degree to which a lot of the same political
arguments just continue to be had over and over again with no real progress.
Once a country reaches this level of decadence.
And I think we can intuitively see that if we follow politics, a lot of issues that are
merely political footballs, you know, debt and deficit, just kind of tossing it back
and forth.
What should the role of the United States military be around the world, do low taxes
on the rich, trickle down, or do we need demand sites that, you know, a lot of these it's
the same arguments over and over and over again.
Can you talk about why the repetitive nature of these arguments is reinforced by the decadence
you write about?
I mean, I think debt.
Creates a world in which, I mean, among other things.
There because there isn't tremendous change going on.
There aren't sort of it.
It becomes hard to win an argument to sort of decisively win one way or another.
Systems are really hard to reform and change.
So, you know, you'll get.
Barack Obama will be elected president and everyone will say, oh, this is you know, the
new new deal is a new Franklin Roosevelt.
You're gonna have a new age of liberal governance.
And he passes Obamacare, which is sort of a jerry rigged apparatus tacked on to an existing
welfare state passing.
It is incredibly difficult and politically costly and you get a huge backlash.
And effectively, his presidency as a legislative force is over two years in and then immediately
the Tea Party sweeps in and everyone says, well, it's a new libertarian era.
And, you know, Paul Ryan is the new you know, he's the new great reformer.
And he's going to, you know, undo the Great Society or something.
But that doesn't actually go anywhere because people don't particularly want to undo the
Great Society.
And so you have you know, the libertarian moment quickly turns into stalemate, too.
So it's a combination of society's get older, they're more resistant to change big programs,
long standing systems are more impervious to change.
And so people argue at the margins, they argue about a thirty nine percent top tax rate versus
a 33 percent top tax rate, even while their rhetoric makes it sound like, you know, it's
the great clash between capitalism and socialism.
And so that's been the pattern.
Certainly, I think of the last of of the last twenty five years or so.
The question is whether it's still holds or whether populism on the right and Bernie Sanders
style socialism on the left are actually going to sort of shift the underlying dynamics.
But I don't think they've actually shift in policy debates yet, even if they've shifted
arguments somewhat.
So you talk about candidates as a possible way to shift this.
What about your writing that there could be a crisis moment that actually fix things up?
Is the global pandemic we're dealing with now potentially on the level of what you're
talking about, or is it not even big enough?
I mean, it might not be big enough.
Well, which is one of the things one of the points I make in the book is that decadence
has all kinds of problems.
But sometimes that kind of crisis you need to really shift a society out of decadence
is so big that it's better to stick with that kid and to embrace that catastrophe.
But look, what the Corona virus offers is an opportunity.
You know, it's a it's a horrible human tragedy that in its aftermath there will be an opportunity
to look at all the ways our systems have failed, to look at all the ways our politics has become
stalemated and didn't handle the crisis correctly and say, you know, maybe we can do something
new.
And that could lead to, you know, you could have an era when people say, OK, well, we
really are going to, you know, change how regulations work in the health care sector
to try and get more medical innovation.
You can get a world where people say, look, we spent all this money in a crisis.
Why can't we spend more money on public goods when there isn't a pandemic around?
And so you get a shift to the left in public policy.
You can imagine a lot of shifts coming out of this.
But I do think it's possible that, you know, we will have this this year of turmoil and
then we will get a vaccine and there'll be sort of this sense of relief that things are
back to normal and people will have sort of gone deeper into decadence in certain ways,
like, you know, small businesses, new entrepreneurship, which have been sort of smushed down big companies
will benefited the most from the bailout packages and from the Fed's policies until you'll get
more consolidation, more big companies that aren't particularly innovative and so on.
You know, more people living their lives online instead of instead of getting married and
starting families.
You can imagine a lot of ways in which this deepens decadence potentially even as it offers
a chance to pull out of it.
A couple of weeks ago.
I interviewed Brian GREENE.
And one of the things we talked about because it kind of mixes in well with a few different
things he deals with, was this idea that that I have, which increasingly I think is naive,
that if there was some really life-altering moment, like, for example, intelligent alien
life arrives.
Right.
Something really transcendent that it would finally get humans to do away with these differences
that that as you talk about often or the difference between a thirty six and a thirty nine point
six percent top tax rate or whatever, we would finally get past all this stuff.
But I have to say that the fiasco that has been the reaction to Corona virus, where you
have people who who you know, all sorts of conspiracies and you all we don't even have
to go into it, you know, it that has made me think that even something like intelligent
alien life, maybe for a month would would get us to rethink some of our differences.
Then they'll all just kind of go back to normal to the way things have been.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, the amusing thing is that we have literally had some sort of footage of
not probably not actual aliens, but at the very least, UFOs dropped in the middle of
the coronavirus crisis.
Right.
You had the Navy releasing footage of an unidentified flying objects.
And, you know, except for a few people I follow on Twitter, almost nobody has cared.
But just to be clear that those are not being presented as evidence of aliens.
Right.
But but regardless, you would think that that entire community would have paid more attention.
They're there, right?
They're being presented, but they are they are very mysterious objects.
They go beyond, I think, this sort of normal range of sort of grainy footage of UFOs.
They are probably not aliens, but they certainly are really interesting.
And in a different moment, you would imagine that sort of capturing the imagination of
the Internet.
But really, the Internet is more interested in, you know, figuring out ways to blame everything
about the Corona virus on on people that they dislike.
We've been speaking with Ross Douthat, a columnist at The New York Times and also author recently
of The Decadent Society How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
Ross, I so appreciate your time.
Thanks so much for having me.
It was a pleasure.