Why Our Challenge This Century Is Reinventing Everything

We Need to Think a Lot Bigger About a Better World If We Want to Save Our Civilization From Collapse

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When I look around the globe these days, at the state of ideas, politics, economics, there’s a question going unasked. But it’s perhaps the most crucial one of all. It’s as daunting as it is simple to say: what kind of world, future, planet should we want?

“We” just means sane and reasonable people. You can expand or contract that group however you like. Those of us who put the great projects of civilization and progress first — above and before things like pleasure, self-satisfaction, gain, and advantage. If you’re in that group, good. If not, I suppose that maybe you should ask yourself why you aren’t. But I digress. Let’s attack this question — because I think answering it is a lot simpler than it sounds.

Imagine for a moment that the world was run like it’s most successful societies. That’s only reasonable, isn’t it? What else should we model a world after? So imagine that we simply took their social contracts and political economics and values and so forth — and just zoomed them out to the world.

The world’s most successful societies aren’t hard to discern. They couldn’t be clearer. There is a single kind of society which outperforms all the rest. Not just in one way — but in every way imaginable. Not just by a little bit, but by a lot.

Those societies are of course European social democracies. In particular, the Nordics. But even Germany, France, Holland — all these are tremendously successful societies. European social democracy is so remarkably successful in fact that I call its story “the European Miracle.”

Think about it: after the last world war, Europe lay in ashes. It had nothing.Let me repeat that, because it’s important. Europe had nothing. No colonies, no slaves, no resources, no money. And in that way, it serves as a profound and real-world test case. What is prosperity really made of? How was a continent that reduced itself to ashes to ever thrive again?

It’s just one human lifetime later — and Europe, in that short span of time, has gone from nothing, to enjoying history’s highest living standards, ever, period. Now, when I say this — I don’t want to be mean, but I have to scold a little — Americans give me a blank look. But what could be more telling than this story? Europeans enjoy history’s best lives — by a very, very long way. Yet they had nothing just seventy years ago — just devastated cities, barren fields, and lost generations. How did that miracle happen? Isn’t it astonishing? Aren’t you curious? I certainly was and am.

The reason for the European miracle is social democracy. That is, people enjoy — as basic human rights — things that they don’t anywhere else in the world, or never did before in history. Healthcare. Education. Transport. Media. Retirement. Childcare. The list goes on and on. Europeans made a pact after the war to give another these things, beginning in nations, and then across them. Today, we call that the EU, and despite the criticism, the fact remains: the EU is history’s most successful political project, by a very long way.

The difference is so vast, in fact, that it’s astonishing. Today’s young Europeans are probably going to end up living a full decade longer than young Americans. What the? Europeans are happier, healthier, saner, closer than essentially everyone else: put all that together, and European nations simply blow away everyone else.

(The tragedy of the European Miracle, of course, is that even Europe didn’t learn from it, and have now cut their investment levels, so that even Europe is veering far right.)

So if we were to think about what kind of social contract to give the world, we’d decide, naturally, on social democracy. At least if we were wise enough to see the obvious. What would that really mean? Something like this: that every life on planet earth would enjoy what modern Europeans do.

For example, we’d give every child on planet earth an education. We’d give every person on planet Earth healthcare. We’d give everyone retirement, every family a safety net, every person a retirement, make transport public, create worldwide media, and so on.

Are you beginning to see the scale of this vision? And do you also see how different it is from anything that we really talk about much, in say, the august pages of the New York Times or on CNN and so forth? That’s why I say: we don’t ask the question of what kind of world we want, but we should.

To create that kind of world, we’d want moderate levels of inequality. For example, in Scandinavia CEOs tend to earn maybe 40 times what average workers do — whereas in America, they earn 400 times what the average person does. Yes, really: that’s an order of magnitude difference. It’s not too hard to see why America ended up a rich nation of broke people — the ultra rich took all the gains, the middle class imploded, and the working class became a new poor. What else is going to happen when the CEO’s taking 400 times what everyone else is…because they’re mostly on starvation wages?