hi i'm john green this is crash course
world history and today
in our final episode of this world
history series we're going to return to
some of our favorite themes like the
rise of the state
maybe the idea of the west and also
we're going to speculate a little bit
about the future disagree mr green no no
i i thought
you were from the future nope i'm from
your future me from the past so i know
that in sync doesn't stay together but
i'm from my
present although now i i'm from my past
no present again that's the problem
with the future me from the past it
keeps briefly becoming present
and then becoming past and then of
course people watching the videos will
be watching them in their present which
will be my
ever more distant past and they could be
watching them in 10 years and the things
that i have predicted will have come
true or not come true and i will look
like a genius or an idiot i'm freaking
out stan just roll the intro
man i'm glad that intro pulled me out of
that logic loop i could have been stuck
in there forever which reminds me that
that forever itself is a very weird
concept i think the only thing we can
say about forever is that the future is
forever so americans are pretty proud of
their democratic government and its
history but in world historical terms
democracy has
not been the norm like the 20th century
was the high tide for democracy
worldwide with the number of democratic
governments increasing dramatically
but the 2000s so far have seen something
of an anti-democratic renaissance with
the number of democracies that shouldn't
actually be called democracies doubling
between 2006 and 2009. like the people's
democratic republic of korea despite
having democratic in the name not
particularly democratic i'm sorry for
saying that kim jong-un but
it's true he's behind me isn't he
standing you'll be gone in 20 years
that's my first prediction also while
democracy can sound great no countries
have ever actually
practiced pure democracy unless you
count ancient athens which a was not a
country it was a city-state and b
it excluded women and slaves from the
political process so it wasn't really a
pure democracy because you know like
most people didn't get to participate in
the government what we call democracies
today are actually the result of a
number of revolutions in political
thought that happened mostly in the west
between the 17th and 20th centuries like
we've talked a lot about the first of
these revolutions in political thought
which happened in the 17th century with
the creation of the centralized
nation-state in europe and then there
was the political breakthrough put forth
by john stuart mill who envisioned a
night watchman state that was like too
small to infringe on individuals
freedoms but efficient enough to be
functional and useful as a government
then in the late 19th and early 20th
century the west developed the idea of
the modern
welfare state enshrining the belief that
the state should provide things like
education
health and unemployment insurance to
enable citizens to lead fulfilling lives
the welfare state relies on government
planning and bureaucrats who get their
jobs not based on high birth but on
merits and also
data-driven answers to problems and so
we saw the rise of technocrats and
intellectuals influencing government
policy quote from a book called the
fourth revolution
there were two things new about this
welfare state the taxation of the entire
population to provide benefits for the
unfortunate and the removal of the poor
law stigma from social welfare
the poor were now victims not layabouts
so in contemporary europe and the united
states
everyone pays taxes right whether it's
consumption taxes or property taxes or
income taxes or whatever
and we don't view poverty merely as
personal failing but as a problem that
needs to be addressed and although
imperialism certainly made it
problematic for these ideas to spread
completely throughout the world the
ideas did prove very powerful like
india adopted a heavily top-down welfare
state based on
british principles once it became
independent and even when the liberal
democratic state came
under ideological attack from fascists
and communists it was able to triumph by
mustering the resources to win world war
ii and meet the soviet challenge during
the cold war and for most of the 20th
century western democracies have been
on the whole pretty successful in
providing peace and stability
and prosperity to their own citizens and
yet many parts of the world are turning
away from these ideas now
why well one of the reasons democracy
may be falling out of favor is that many
of the most successful countries in the
world at least in terms of economic
growth are not democratic
there are democracies experiencing
tremendous economic growth like brazil
and india but then of course there's
china and china along with countries
like singapore
have looked to the west for guidance on
how to create capitalism but they've
been much less
interested in adopting western models of
governance
let's go to the thought bubble so
singapore might only have 5.2 million
inhabitants but it has
very effective government the architect
of its success lee kuan yew has argued
that cultural values are the explanation
and that asians are quote more focused
on the family more devoted to education
and saving and more willing to put faith
in a mandarin elite than the west but
it's probably more due to singapore's
being
more authoritarian more interventionist
and more
bossy in following lee's hobbesian view
that human beings regrettable though it
may be are inherently vicious
and have to be restrained from their
viciousness although singapore isn't
technically a one-party state it's also
very far from a traditional democracy
like in 2011 lee's people's action party
won
60 percent of the vote and 93 of the
seats in congress that may sound
terrible but it has an
upside knowing that their party will win
elections allows singapore's politicians
to focus on something else
namely long-term planning if any of the
particularly
asian traditions cited by lee have
fueled singapore's success it's that
mandarin ideal of choosing and promoting
skilled bureaucrats based on merit the
most interesting thing about singapore's
government is that at least by western
standards it's remarkably small with
like for instance a world-class
education system that consumes only 3.3
percent of gross domestic product
they also have a required retirement
fund in which singaporeans contribute 20
of their paychecks and their employers
kick in another 15.5 percent and as
you'll already know
if you watch our show healthcare triage
singapore has one of the most efficient
and fascinating healthcare systems in
the world
thanks thoughtbubble and then there's
china with its gleaming skyscrapers
enormous number of billionaires and what
is now the second
largest economy in the world now of
course there's also the air pollution
the growing income disparity the
terrible working conditions but hundreds
of millions of people in china have
emerged from poverty in the last 50
years
and this was all accomplished by a very
repressive state so repressive in fact
that they can't see this video the
chinese model of governance has often
been called authoritarian capitalism and
its architect was deng xiaoping he was
very impressed by singapore and sought
to copy them and in many ways the
chinese communist party has been very
successful at that despite some official
corruption the chinese state
is very efficient and has presided over
an incredible economic and social
transformation in the past 30 years so
we expect like rigid central planning
from communist parties right but
in china rather than setting goals for
every facet of the economy the party
makes sure that it's represented in most
big companies private
and state-owned and the biggest
companies owned by the government
dominate strategic industries like
energy and transportation and
telecommunications the communist party's
organization department appoints all
senior corporate figures in china and in
general they've done a good job of
promoting
good managers that help companies to
grow and china certainly wants this
model to go
global since its state-owned companies
have funded 80
of china's direct foreign investment in
the last 30 years which allows commerce
to advance
chinese diplomacy extending the nation's
so-called
soft power so who knows if this will
actually work but when chinese state
companies are able to build the new
african union headquarters in ethiopia
for instance it sends a powerful signal
to african nations that this is a system
where people can get things done
meanwhile in the united states and much
of europe
there's a little bit of a struggle to
get things done so chinese state
capitalism may sound like the wave of
the future or at least a wave of the
present but
maybe not it has some serious drawbacks
first the close ties between business
and politics opens the system up to
massive corruption fortunately here in
the united states we don't have any ties
between business and politics so you
won't see any corruption here but there
are also other drawbacks to
authoritarian capitalism like state-run
industries tend not to be responsive to
investors which limits private
investment and in the long term that may
limit the money available to them to
keep growing
also with a lot of these state-owned
industries it's not actually clear that
they're productive or
profitable because they rely so heavily
on government subsidies
and finally state-owned industries don't
do a great job of encouraging the
freedom of expression that fuels a lot
of like
cultural and intellectual industries
like for instance hollywood which is
more cultural than intellectual the
fourth revolution quotes one chinese
commenter as saying we have kung fu
and we have pandas but we could not make
a film like kung fu panda also this kind
of state-run industrial policy is very
effective sometimes but it's not clear
that it's going to be effective all the
time like it may work better for
building
roads and cell towers than for creating
software for instance so it seems to
work for less developed nations that
need to build
infrastructure and industry it's much
less clear that it will be effective
when they need to move
over to being service economies and what
i find fascinating is that china has
created this new path to economic growth
in part
by looking to its ancient past to
revitalize its government because
they've created a new
education-based meritocracy which is a
modern version of the han examination
system it's sort of like a state-run
version of plato's republic and
polls indicate that most chinese people
are pretty comfortable with it i mean
things are getting better in china like
philanthropist nicholas bergrin argues
that chinese-style meritocracy is good
at focusing on
long-term problems and bringing in
independent experts that said china's
government isn't always as meritocratic
and effective as some might want to
believe i mean the chinese version of
twitter is a litany of complaints about
poor schools and dirty hospitals and
inept local officials
and in the wake of the szechuan
earthquake when many children died
because of poorly built schools there
was
widespread outrage over the government's
inability to like
get things built well all that noted
it's important to be aware that
china embodies a challenge to the idea
that the west has
all the answers in terms of economics
and government particularly after the
2008 financial crisis the chinese were
the ones lecturing about
government and fiscal policy and
claiming that the american political
system was rewarding
mediocrity over talent and lots of
americans would agree with these chinese
critics i mean we can't even get a
long-term highway bill passed let alone
like
long-term planning for the overall
economy in a representative democracy
the best way to get elected
is to make promises usually for lower
taxes or
for more or bigger benefits or my
favorite
for both also democratic governments are
very susceptible to interest groups
extracting benefits for themselves just
as autocratic governments are very
susceptible to you know
autocrats extracting benefits for
themselves and the problems of democracy
can be a bit of a vicious cycle like in
the united states at least we're
incredibly dissatisfied with our
government especially
congress and this is partly because
we've come to expect
so much from government that they
constantly let us down
also for the last 35 years or so because
people are so dissatisfied with
government one of the main strategies
for winning political office is to talk
bad about the government and to say that
government is
the problem but of course if we have too
much government that's a problem that
can only be fixed
by the government so where does this
leave us well maybe we have reached the
end of the rise of the west that began
with the nation-state
but it's really hard to predict the
future like when i was in high school i
wouldn't have predicted that so many
people would be learning about history
and science from
youtube videos much less that china
would become the world's second largest
economy
if you'd asked me a 500 million people
would emerge from absolute poverty
between the time i graduated from high
school in the time i started hosting
crash course world history i would have
been like
no way but i wouldn't have said that i
would have cursed in class because i was
a surly terrible student
but here are my predictions i think that
china will continue to be a one-party
state and a very successful one as long
as that combination of state and
industry
continues to provide a rising standard
of living but i don't think it's going
to happen in the u.s or europe even if
it would lead to more efficiency
the major difference between these two
models of governance is that unlike
communism and western-style capitalism
they aren't
in direct conflict like they can coexist
and i think authoritarian capitalism and
western-style capitalism
will coexist but i also think that
probably in that process western-style
democracies will find that over time
they have
money to do less and i think we may have
a lot to learn from countries like
singapore especially as new technologies
enable greater efficiencies in providing
services thereby making a lot of jobs
obsolete
possibly including mine i mean these
days robots are writing some reasonably
good short stories and stan now has
enough tape of my voice that he could
make an excellent artificial me
one of the reasons we've focused so much
in this world history series on the
factors that go into making a nation
state is that while lots of people think
that nation states are about to go away
i don't yes corporations are becoming
more powerful and
multinational but in many ways china's
rise to power was the result of a
nationalistic desire to amass wealth and
power that has its roots going back at
least to the 19th century if not earlier
but i want to make two observations here
at the end
first whatever you think will happen in
the future whatever you think is
happening now even what you think
happened in the past really depends on
what information you
choose to focus on so this year we've
tried to look at really big picture
history and
approaches to the study of history and
how we learn about it because there are
choices involved for instance we focused
a lot on the rise of the nation state
and
trade but we could have focused on the
changing role of the family or the
impact of technology on lifespan or
changes in continuities in religious
practice or any number of other things
the other thing i want to say about
history in the future is that
neither is actually determined 30 years
from now of course we'll know a lot
about what happens in the next 30 years
but we'll also be
looking at the past differently from how
we look at it now and you
are a part of that the choices that you
make over the course of your life will
shape history both in the future
and in the past in short we ask you to
think about history and how to study it
because we are counting on you but
history encompasses a lot and there is
more than one history of the world
i hope you've enjoyed some of the
versions that we've presented thank you
so much for watching
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videos in the future
thanks again so much for watching and as
we say in my hometown
don't forget to be awesome