Why Nations Fail Or Succeed When Facing A Crisis - Jared Diamond (Noema magazine)

Jared Diamond: 
Why Nations Fail Or Succeed When Facing A Crisis

An interview with Jared Diamond about his latest book: 
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

John Karborn for Noema Magazine, July, 28, 2020

The following interview, between Noema Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels and author (previously of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”) Jared Diamond, has been edited for clarity and length.

Nathan Gardels: In assessing how nations manage crises and successfully negotiate turning points — or don’t — you pass their experience through several filters. Some key filters you use are realistic self-appraisal, selective adoption of best practices from elsewhere, a capacity to learn from others while still preserving core values and flexibility that allows for social and political compromise.

How do you see the way various nations addressed the coronavirus pandemic through this lens?

Jared Diamond: Nations and entities doing well by the criteria of those outcome predictors include Singapore and Taiwan. Doing poorly initially were the government of Italy and now, worst of all, the federal government of the U.S.

Gardels: What is the main lesson from how nations dealt with this pandemic?

Diamond: The main new lesson concerns an extension of national identity, which is important for nations facing a crisis. The current crisis may help us develop a global identity by making it obvious that we are all in the same boat, all people everywhere in the world. We are realizing now that COVID-19 is everyone’s problem — as is climate change, resource depletion, inequality and the risk of nuclear weapons.

Gardels: In the historical frame, what are some examples of nations successfully navigating challenging experiences?

Diamond: Germany is high on my list. Over decades, it came to grips with the legacy of World War II, while at the same time laying the groundwork for reunification when the Cold War ended. Germany acknowledged the Holocaust in such a convincing and thorough way, including in its education system, that it left no doubts about all those “never again” pledges. I remember Willy Brandt kneeling in humility and penance in 1970 at a monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. By contrast, though Japan has been successful on other counts, it has really failed in this respect.

Though no West German chancellor alone was able to bring about reunification, Brandt’s “Ostpolitik” in the 1970s prepared the way. If he had not opened to the East, Russia and even France and Britain would not have tolerated reunification later on. This is another element in how nations resolve crises: the qualities of leadership at historic junctures.

So Germany has exhibited both the qualities of realistic historical self-appraisal and national identity, while adjusting to evolving geopolitical circumstances.

“The current crisis may help us develop a global identity by making it obvious that we are all in the same boat, all people everywhere in the world.”

Gardels: In Japan, there has been a kind of seesaw experience. First, you had the Meiji reforms of the 19th century, which had the quality of a realistic self-appraisal and selective adoption: Its leaders understood they had fallen behind the West in industrial modernization but gradually renovated their system by borrowing from the West, cognizant of the restraints of local resistance from the traditional political order. They didn’t go too far, too fast.

Then, within decades, you had the next stage, an overbearance and an overconfidence on the part of the military elite after the Russo-Japanese War, in which an Asian nation bested a European power for the first time. That led in turn to overreach, which resulted in the disaster of World War II, total defeat and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But then, after the war and the American occupation, you had yet another phase of adaptation based on realistic self-appraisal, making Japan a prosperous member of the advanced nations. Is there a pattern there?

Diamond: Well, yes, in the sense of recurrent crises. The fact that Japan succeeded so well in the Meiji era didn’t guarantee that it would succeed or fail later on in the period between the wars. And the jury is still out on how Japan will fare in the years ahead.

There are some major areas where Japan has been dragging its feet. The Japanese did the opposite of Germany by not achieving a meaningful reconciliation with Korea and China. The remaining hostility seems dangerous. As a result, Japan remains relatively underequipped compared to heavily armed neighbor countries that have good reason to loathe it.

Japan has also never really come to terms with the role of women in modern society. Then there is Japan’s policy of immigration — or, rather, of non-immigration. It’s perfectly OK for any country to decide whether it wants to take in immigrants. There are pros and cons. But in a shrinking nation, who will provide childcare so women can reenter the workforce, or eldercare in a society where people live longer on average than almost anywhere else? Then, of course, there are the large fiscal issues of how to pay for pensions when the active workforce is shrinking.

I’d say Japan is at yet another turning point.

Gardels: At one point in your book, you raise the generational factor in change, noting that a succeeding generation may either complete or reverse the changes of the previous generation.

Diamond: Yes and no. The pattern is not always consistent. Let’s look at the case of Germany, where there were four intervals of generational change.

Otto von Bismarck, the conservative Prussian statesman who came to be known as the “Iron Chancellor,” learned from the Revolution of 1848 that Germany, then a confederation of small states, was not going to become unified as one nation unless it became a military power. He made this clear in his “iron and blood” speech in 1862. Germany’s consequent rise as an economic and military power in Europe led to wars with the other powers, France and Austria, and finally to World War I.

It took a generation for Hitler and the Nazis to attempt to reverse the defeat of World War I. Then after the end of World War II, it took the post-war generation of students born after 1945 who revolted against their parents — like Joschka Fischer, a radical student leader in the 1960s who became foreign minister in 1998. In this way, Germany is a clear example of the effect of a generational change.

Yet, I don’t think one can generalize about some cause and effect of successful and then failing generations. In the case of Japan, you’re correct that after their victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese learned the wrong lesson. But there is the opposite case: After being defeated in Vietnam, the U.S. nonetheless didn’t learn the lessons and went on to invade Iraq and suffer many of the same consequences.

Gardels: The Japanese military leaders misread not only how America would react to being attacked at Pearl Harbor but also woefully underestimated the industrial might it could mobilize behind the war effort. In your book, you cite the story of a Japanese businessman who visited the U.S. in the prewar years and was astonished to learn it had 50 times the capacity for steel production than Japan. He knew then and there that Japan would never prevail.

The essence of realistic self-appraisal is to know others and how, as a nation, you fit into the balance of power that exists. How did Japan’s leaders miss this before the war?

Diamond: Realistic self-appraisal was lacking for a particular reason. In the Meiji era, the reformist leaders had all been to the West after the opening of 1853. One of the first things that Meiji Japan did was to send out an observer team that spent a year and a half going around the West, studying best practices. They made a conscious effort to learn from the West. In the 1930s, many of those in the Japanese military who took control had not spent much time in the West. Isoroku Yamamoto, who had been the naval attaché in Washington and knew better than to risk challenging America’s industrial capacity, which dwarfed Japan’s, warned against the consequences of the Pearl Harbor attack — to no avail. Nonetheless, he designed and carried out the attack as instructed.

What matters is whether those in charge in the governing class share a worldview based on knowing the world, not just the part of it that fits with their inclination.

“What matters is whether those in charge in the governing class share a worldview based on knowing the world, not just the part of it that fits with their inclination.”

Gardels: Clearly, the Japanese militarists, with little understanding of the U.S. mindset or the depth of its industrial bench, misread the challenge they were inviting.

A parallel strikes me today. While Deng Xiaoping followed the notion of “bide your time and hide your strength” as China developed, Xi Jinping has discarded any such restraint and boasted that the Middle Kingdom has returned to the center of the world stage and would even overtake the U.S. in technological supremacy. This proved too much for the Washington foreign policy establishment, no less Donald Trump and his team, who fought back with a trade war.

Xi’s problem is that he seems to have moved too soon — China’s technology advances still depend heavily on the West, for example with semiconductor chips. This seems a costly misapprehension not unlike the Japanese militarists vis-à-vis American steel production capacity before World War II.

Diamond: What was true of the Japanese militarists and may be true of Xi as you suggest, also applies to the U.S. today — people’s mindset, the narrative they choose to believe, often overrides their perception of reality and the facts in front of their faces. This is likely true of the virtual paranoia many Americans feel today about China and the prospect of an “Asian century” in which it dominates.

China’s disadvantage, however, is that, having never been a democracy, it is much harder to challenge any misperception of reality. Despite its faults, in a democracy, you can debate big ideas and alternative scenarios. There is no real experience of the body politic as a whole debating big ideas in China. What springs from the top rules.

In the millennia since state government was first established in the Fertile Crescent, the record certainly shows that dictatorships can do things faster. Yet no one has yet figured out how to ensure that the faster decisions of dictatorships are good ones. China seems a good illustration of the problem.

Democracies also make bad decisions, of course. But they can more easily correct them — or at least we have been able to do so in the past because of the checks and balances of our governing institutions.

Gardels: Yet, as you point out in the book, democracies can and have unraveled virtually overnight. The most chilling example is Chile, Latin America’s longest-standing democracy, where in only the matter of a few years, polarization led to social breakdown and a brutal military coup that lasted 17 years.

Diamond: That’s true. I saw it all unravel quickly between the time I lived in Chile in 1967 and the coup in 1973. But polarization had been building up for quite a long time before those years. In 1967, tension was already in the air. Eduardo Frei, the president at the time who was respected then and respected also in retrospect, was too conservative for the radicals and too radical for the conservatives. Salvador Allende came to power by a tiny margin — 36 percent of the vote versus 35 percent of his closest challenger, followed by 28 percent of the next candidate. Though he had only a bit more than a third of the vote, he made the big mistake trying to lead Chile in a direction most Chileans rejected.

Allende was perhaps deluded in what he could accomplish by his popularity as minister for public health and his early success when he was elected president in 1970, getting the Chilean parliament to vote for major measures such as nationalization of the copper mines within a few months of his coming into office. So that’s part of it. The other part is that Allende’s supporters themselves were polarized — shadows of the U.S. today, not just Republicans versus Democrats but splits within the parties. He felt he had to satisfy the radical wing of his party, even though he should have known better that this was not going to fly with the Chilean military.

Gardels: But the lesson for the U.S. these days, and for other divided democracies, is that peril beckons when the spirit of compromise evaporates. Compromise and the ability to arrive at a governing consensus fails when the civic discourse is degraded and there’s no trust in impartial institutions. The whole thing can collapse.

Diamond: I see the possibility of that in the U.S. today. It is a process of erosion that at some moment reaches a point of no return. If democracy ends in the U.S., it’s not going to be the way it ended in Chile with a military coup. It will end through a slow erosion, a continuation of trends we see now: restrictions on the ability of people to register to vote, decreasing voter turnout, executive interference with the judiciary, struggles between the executive and the Congress. I don’t take it for granted that democracy in the U.S. is going to overcome all obstacles. I see a serious risk.

Yes, things have accelerated since Trump’s election, but the decline of compromise in the U.S. has been happening for some time, dating back to when Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House. He explicitly embarked on a policy of “no, no, no” in his relationship with the Clinton administration. Gingrich, of course, was only one person. He was leveraging and amplifying what had become sharp divisions in the political culture.

So we must ask, why the breakdown? My best analysis all these years later is that we had then already entered a period of sharp decline in face-to-face communication in the U.S. — more than in any other country and before any other country. This was a result both of the culture of mobility — people moving far from their original communities, often to the other end of this large country — as well as growing inequality resulting from de-industrialization in the Rust Belt and the rise of the global economy that had the impact of segregating communities along class and educational lines.

John Karborn for Noema Magazine

Gardels: I would add that, today, you have two elements reinforcing each other: the demise of socializing institutions and the rise of polarizing ones. For example, we don’t have a military draft anymore, or nearly universal attendance in public schools, where once all ethnicities, races and classes were thrown together in face-to-face interaction. At the same time, the mainstream media plays to cultural niches in highly competitive markets while the big social media conglomerates promote virality among the like-minded as their business model.

Diamond: I agree. There are things that were worse in Chile, and there are things today worse in the U.S. In Chile, the army had a history of intervening in politics from time to time. So there was a precedent, though not at the scale and scope of what Pinochet did in 1973. The army in the U.S. has never intervened, so that’s something in our favor.

But in the U.S., we have a long-standing low level of social capital and trust compared to other countries, partly because of our geographic distances. Sometimes when Americans move, they move 3,000 miles away, from coast to coast. When Germans move, they move a short distance, like from Hannover to Berlin. You can still take the train for the day and see your friends in Hannover.

An example: At my 65th high school reunion this year, there’s not a single member of my class of 23 who lives within 600 miles of me. Most are scattered all over the country. That’s pretty typical of the U.S. We move often, and we move long distances, whereas Germans and Italians, for example, move less often, and their countries are small so they go shorter distances.

I stress this because spatial mobility in America is so common, we take it for granted and don’t grasp its social consequences. Now they are coming to bear.

Gardels: In the last presidential election, analyses show that one indicator of sympathy with Trump’s populist agenda was how far voters moved from their birthplaces. In the upper Midwestern states, there was a clear correlation between Trump voters and those who hewed to home. The British journalist David Goodhart discovered the same correlation in the Brexit vote, between the “anywheres” — mobile elites — and the “somewheres,” who remained local. The mobile folks voted to remain in the European Union, while the locals voted to exit.

Diamond: This is not at all surprising. And it is worsening since the anywheres and the somewheres have little crossover in their daily life experience.

Gardels: To return to the Chilean case, do you see an analogy between Allende pressing ahead with a more radical agenda that much of society didn’t support and Trump’s radical policies, for example on the environment, immigration and international relations? After all, he lost the popular vote and won by only a few tens of thousands of votes in the key upper Midwestern states.

Diamond: I’d say Allende was more unrealistic than Trump, especially as a small country taking on the U.S., large multinational companies and stoking the fears of the conservative military establishment. Trump has a better chance of getting his policies across than Allende.

Gardels: Let’s move on to the planetary crisis of climate change. You note in your book that the ability to properly assess realities and take effective action is most successful for those individuals and nations who have a precedent for coping with a crisis. “We were challenged in the past and surmounted the challenge, so we can again,” goes the logic.

There have been empires, superpowers and multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations and the G20, that faced international challenges. But on the planetary scale, there is no precedent for all nations and societies facing a common crisis and overcoming it. What resources or experience can we draw on in this present challenge to civilization as a whole?

Diamond: When I discussed this issue in the first version of the book, I was pessimistic because I said that there is no precedent; the world has never faced and dealt with a challenge of the scope of climate change. However, I revised my thinking by the time I finished the book.

In fact, the world has a track record over the last 40 years of having solved really difficult problems in diffuse and unflashy ways — for example, eradicating smallpox. To eradicate the threat of smallpox contagion, you had to eradicate it in every country in the far reaches of the world, including Somalia, where the last cases appeared.

Then there was the agreement about defining economic zones in shallow waters. So many countries in the world have overlapping zones to which they claim sovereignty. Nevertheless, though it took quite a while, an agreement was reached by international treaty.

All nations also joined an agreement to eliminate chlorofluorocarbons from the atmosphere to reduce damage to the ozone layer. Mining the seabed is another case where international agreement was reached, even by landlocked countries.

Still, in the end, what has enabled nations to face and surmount a crisis is a sense of common identity that can mobilize allegiance to a course of action. Today, especially given the revival of nationalism, there is no such solid global identity. That is the chief challenge in battling climate change.

“What has enabled nations to face and surmount a crisis is a sense of common identity that can mobilize allegiance to a course of action.”

Gardels: What about the fundamental cultural attributes that contribute to a failed or successful nation? I’m thinking of how the Confucian-influenced societies of East Asia — Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, China — all rose from underdevelopment to prosperity over recent decades. Yet many nations in Africa or Latin America seem to have stalled.

Diamond: This is a valid point, though mainstream anthropology disdains any talk of “sick societies,” only those with different cultural roots and practices.

Confucian cultures have a low level of individualism and a higher level of community compared to others. There’s an interesting argument that attributes this to the development of rice agriculture, a form of economic activity that requires cooperation and collective effort, in contrast to wheat agriculture, which needs only individual farmers.

As a geographer, I have other thoughts on North America and Latin America. In my undergraduate geography course, I have one session on North America and then a session on South America in which I discuss why North America is more successful economically. There are several factors involved.

One factor is that temperate zones, in general, are economically more successful than the tropics because of the higher productivity and soil fertility of temperate agriculture, which in turn relates to the public health burden. All of North America is a temperate zone. South America only has a small temperate zone. It’s in the far south in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Those are the richest countries in Latin America. The richest part of Brazil also lies in the temperate zone.

The second factor is a historical one related to the sailing distance from Europe to the Americas. The sailing distance was shorter from Britain to North America. It was longer from Spain to Argentina and still longer from Spain around the horn to Peru. A shorter sailing distance meant that the ideas and technology of the Industrial Revolution spread much more quickly from Britain, where it originated, to North America, than from Spain to Latin America.

Still another factor is the legacy of Spanish government versus the legacy of British government. One could argue why democracy developed in Britain rather than in Spain, but the fact is that democracy did develop in Britain rather than Spain, and so North America inherited British government and British democracy while Latin America inherited Spanish centralist government and absolutist politics.

Then still another factor is that independence for the U.S. was a more radical break than it was in South America. After the Revolutionary War, all the royalists in the U.S. either fled or were killed. So there was a relatively clean break from Britain. Canada did not have that break, and the break in Latin America was much less abrupt and came later.

Gardels: Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel laureate poet, always added the cultural element when he spoke about “the border of time” between north and South. The U.S. was a child of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, he often said, while Latin America was the child of the Counter-Reformation. This imprinted a distinctive mentality on each culture, one with a mind open to the future and less enamored by authority, the other closed and traditional.

Upheaval: novo livro de Jared Diamond (não creio que resolva a decadência brasileira)

Já li o "sample" oferecido pela Amazon, e não me parece que o Brasil chegou a tal ponto de deterioração para ser instruído por meio de um manual de "salvamento" da decadência.
Mas, aproveito para recomendar este livro do autor: Guns, Germs and Steel.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Kindle Edition

A "riveting and illuminating" (Yuval Noah Harari) new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of the landmark bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.

In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises.

Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals -- ranging from the forced opening of Japan by U.S. Commodore Perry's fleet, to the Soviet Union's attack on Finland, to a murderous coup or countercoup in Chile and Indonesia, to the transformations of Germany and Austria after World War Two. Because Diamond has lived and spoken the language in five of these six countries, he can present gut-wrenching histories experienced firsthand. These nations coped, to varying degrees, through mechanisms such as acknowledgment of responsibility, painfully honest self-appraisal, and learning from models of other nations. Looking to the future, Diamond examines whether the United States, Japan, and the whole world are successfully coping with the grave crises they currently face. Can we learn from lessons of the past? 

Adding a psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology, and anthropology that mark all of Diamond's books, Upheaval reveals factors influencing how both whole nations and individual people can respond to big challenges. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal book yet.

Raizes do colapso brasileiro, um texto de 2006 - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Um texto de 2006, que na verdade atendia a um pedido de jornalista para comentar o livro de Jared Diamond, sobre o colapso de civilizações, para oferecer comentários à obra e aplicá-la ao caso brasileiro. A despeito dos dez anos decorridos, creio que o diagnóstico e as prescrições se mantêm quase integralmente.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 11/01/2016

Raízes do Colapso

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Doutor em Ciências Sociais. Diplomata.

(www.pralmeida.org)

Respostas a perguntas colocadas por jornalista

do jornal do agronegócio Raízes (São Paulo, SP).

Perguntas e respostas, tendo como referência o livro:

Jared Diamond

Colapso: como as sociedades escolhem o fracasso ou o sucesso

2ª edição; Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2005.

1) Gostaria de contextualizar o livro de Jared Diamond, para o empresário do agronegócio entender porque este livro é nossa referência aqui e por que o senhor foi chamado a analisá-lo. Em sua opinião, o que esta obra trouxe de novo e por que se tornou tão comentada? Por que ela chamou a sua atenção especificamente?

PRA: Eu já conheço a obra desse autor americano, um cientista-pesquisador da área da biologia evolutiva, desde muitos anos, como editor da revista de divulgação científica Discover, da qual eu tinha assinatura nos anos 1980. Mais recentemente li o seu primeiro best-seller Armas, Germes e Aço (ainda na primeira versão americana), que aprecio particularmente, ainda que eu possa criticar a ênfase talvez excessiva nos fatores ambientais, e menos naqueles sócio-culturais ou econômicos, que explicam como as sociedades humanas evoluíram de maneira diferenciada ao longo dos últimos dez mil anos. Trata-se, em todo caso, de uma pesquisa original, de amplo escopo explicativo, trazendo uma macro-história ecológica global da humanidade, nesse percurso muitas vezes milenar que conduziu algumas sociedades à abundância e à liderança tecnológica e outras ao atraso relativo ou mesmo à miséria temporária. Um livro brilhante, sem dúvida, mesmo descontando a já referida ênfase no meio ambiente, em detrimento dos fatores moldados pelo próprio homem.

Era natural, assim, que eu me interesse por este novo livro, sobretudo contendo um título tão accrocheur, como diriam os franceses, ou appealing, no dizer dos americanos. Sempre somos fascinados pelos desastres, pelos fracassos, tanto quanto pelo sucesso e pela prosperidade. Este livro trata do “lado errado” das sociedades, que deveria ser estudado tanto quanto os motivos de sucesso, pois aprendemos mais pelos erros do que pelos acertos. Como se diz, a vitória tem muitos pais, o fracasso tem uma só mãe, quando não é órfã, ou solitária. Casos de insucesso nos negócios, de fracasso completo nos empreendimentos deveriam ser estudados nos cursos de administração, de forma tão detalhada, ou talvez até mais, do que os casos de executivos brilhantes ou de grandes realizações no mundo dos negócios, pois é pelos fracassos que podemos medir nossas chances de sucesso futuro, ou evitar os erros mais comuns.

Como eu acho que o Brasil configura, nos últimos anos, um notório caso de “fracasso” econômico, com um baixo crescimento cumulativo há praticamente duas décadas, fui buscar no livro alguns motivos de reflexão que poderiam me dar algumas luzes sobre as razões do nosso insucesso no crescimento econômico e na inclusão social.

2) O que o senhor destacaria como principais pontos do livro?

PRA: No plano metodológico, a visão macro-histórica já destacada, pois ela permite ver o mundo evoluindo no longo prazo, a trajetória das civilizações, que reproduzem certo ciclo de vida. Ainda no plano metodológico, a perspectiva comparada, que permite ver como algumas sociedades enfrentam problemas de modo criativo, enquanto outras não conseguem superar problemas prosaicos, como pode ser o do simples equilíbrio ecológico, ou da subsistência em meios materiais, que deveria ser objeto de simples planejamento elementar.

No plano substantivo, o livro fornece um amplo painel sobre diferentes caminhos de sociedades do passado e algumas do presente, mostrando, finalmente, que nada é muito novo na trajetória do homem e que os mesmos problemas sempre se colocam de forma recorrente, ainda que os meios técnicos e as paisagens se tenham alterado por vezes de maneira fundamental ou radical, desde a antiguidade, ou na era dos descobrimentos, e em nossa própria época.

3) Que paralelos podemos estabelecer entre a realidade brasileira e os exemplos bem-sucedidos e catastróficos descritos por Diamond?

PRA: O Brasil, como economia ou sociedade, não está exatamente apontando para algum colapso iminente, ainda que “pequenos colapsos” possam ocorrer, talvez nas contas públicas, como resultado dos crescentes déficits previdenciários, ou no terreno dos investimentos em infra-estrutura, onde obras importantes deixaram de ser feitas nos últimos anos por insuficiência orçamentária ou, mais exatamente, por incapacidade administrativa. Mas, o Brasil não está na iminência de uma grande catástrofe como as descritas no livro de Diamond, problemas de tal monta que acabam desestruturando toda a sociedade de forma irremediável. Nossos problemas são de natureza cumulativa, basicamente de organização, mais do que falta de meios ou de inteligência.

O que chama a atenção na experiência brasileira dos últimos vinte anos ou, praticamente, no último quarto de século, é a incapacidade do país de crescer de modo sustentável, primeiro pela aceleração inflacionária e pelo descontrole econômico ocorrido nos anos 1980 e na primeira metade dos 90, depois pela ausência de poupança e de investimentos produtivos, justamente. O que mais chama a atenção, de fato, é a nossa própria cegueira, mais exatamente da classe política, em continuar aprovando aumento de gastos públicos, não para fins produtivos, mas para alimentação dos “meios” tão simplesmente, em total descompasso com o crescimento da economia ou com a disponibilidade de recursos. A classe política tem demonstrado uma brutal insensibilidade para os efeitos cumulativos do baixo crescimento, do acúmulo de despesas obrigatórias sob responsabilidade do próprio Estado, do tributarismo e do regulacionismo excessivos, que na verdade “empurram” milhares de pessoas e de pequenas e médias empresas para o lado informal da economia, não porque elas ali queiram estar, mas porque não podem fazer de outro modo, em vista dos constrangimentos que teriam nos planos fiscal, tributário, regulatório. se desejassem, por acaso, ascender ao plano da formalidade e da plena legalidade.

Nossas pequenas “grandes” catástrofes estão nessa miríade de regulamentos burocráticos, de obrigações legais e, sobretudo, de regimes tributários que tornam a vida do empreendedor um inferno digno de Dante.

4) O Brasil está destinado ao fracasso ou há caminhos que indicam uma luz no fim do túnel? Ou ainda: que saídas temos para reverter nosso "colapso"?

PRA: O Brasil, certamente, não está, a priori, condenado ao colapso. Emprego este conceito num sentido bem mais metafórico do que real. Mas, o Brasil está, sim, condenado ao baixo crescimento, a uma quase estagnação do crescimento per capita, a uma deterioração sensível e contínua das instituições públicas, a uma erosão continuada da qualidade de sua educação, tudo isso ao mesmo tempo e cumulativamente, a persistirem os mesmos sintomas que indicam baixo crescimento da produtividade, desrespeito à lei, carga fiscal muito elevada, pesadas barreiras à entrada para novos negócios, corrupção generalizada no setor público, caixa 2 no setor privado – geralmente mantido mais em função do excesso de tributos de origem estatal do que por “necessidades” da própria empresa – e uma pesada herança do burocratismo de outras eras que ainda não foi extirpado de nossa cultura. Todos esses fatores podem não levar, exatamente, ao fracasso do Brasil, enquanto sociedade ou economia, mas indicam, sim, uma incapacidade desta nação de se adaptar ao mundo dinâmico da globalização contemporânea e podem, ao contrário, levar uma indefinição persistente quanto às reformas necessárias para superar esse tipo de impasse.

No campo das reformas, eu indicaria um conjunto de tarefas que nos permitiriam superar os problemas apontados, mas confesso desde já que sou totalmente pessimista quanto à capacidade dos governos – quaisquer que sejam eles – e da própria sociedade de aprová-las e implementá-las. Essas reformas, sinteticamente expostas, seriam as seguintes:

1. Reforma política, a começar pela Constituição: seria útil uma “limpeza” nas excrescências indevidas da CF, deixando-a apenas com os princípios gerais, remetendo todo o resto para legislação complementar e regulatória. Em vista dos seus custos para o País e os cidadãos (que pouco sabem do nível real de despesas), seria conveniente operar uma diminuição drástica dos corpos legislativos em seus vários níveis (federal, estadual e municipal). No campo da reforma eleitoral, introduzir a proporcionalidade mista, com voto distrital em nível local e alguma representação por listas no plano nacional, preservando o caráter nacional dos partidos.

2. Reforma administrativa com diminuição do número de ministérios, e atribuições de funções a diversas agências reguladoras. Retomada da privatização das empresas estatais que ainda existem e que são fontes de ineficiências e corrupção. Fim geral da estabilidade no serviço público, salvo para algumas carreiras de Estado (estritamente definidas).

3. Reforma econômica ampla, com diminuição da carga tributária e redução das despesas do Estado; severo aperto fiscal nos criadores de despesas “inimputáveis”, que são os legislativos e o judiciário. Reformas microeconômicas de molde a criar um ambiente favorável ao investimento produtivo e ao lucro e para diminuir a sonegação e a evasão fiscal.

4. Reforma trabalhista radical, no sentido da flexibilização da legislação laboral, dando maior espaço às negociações diretas entre as partes. Extinção da Justiça do Trabalho, ela mesma uma das fontes de criação e sustentação de conflitos. Eliminação do imposto sindical, que alimenta organizações de papel, de comportamento rentista.

5. Reforma educacional completa, com retirada do terceiro ciclo da responsabilidade do Estado e concessão de completa autonomia às universidades públicas (mantendo-se a transferência de recursos para fins de pesquisa e projetos específicos). Concentração dos recursos públicos nos dois primeiros níveis e no ensino técnico-profissional, cuja valorização passa pelo treinamento e qualificação adequados dos professores e a introdução de sistemas de remuneração por mérito e rendimento (diretamente aferidos pelos resultados dos alunos).

6. Prosseguimento da abertura econômica e da liberalização comercial; acolhimento do investimento estrangeiro e adesão a regimes proprietários mais avançados.

5) Se é possível escolher entre o fracasso ou sucesso, como observa Diamond, temos exemplos acertados do Brasil em direção ao sucesso?

PRA: Certamente. O Brasil é uma sociedade extremamente maleável, receptiva a quaisquer inovações que possam ocorrer no resto do mundo, capaz de adaptar e incrementar bens, serviços, modas ou quaisquer outras coisas que surgem nos mais diferentes quadrantes do globo, geralmente melhorando o próprio original. Começamos que somos uma verdadeira sociedade multirracial, o que é uma qualidade e um atributo extremamente positivos no plano interno, ainda que isso possa não ser ainda devidamente valorizado em outros países. Nossa proverbial tolerância e acolhimento da chamada “alteridade” também é um valor que devemos preservar e ampliar.

No quadro dos países em desenvolvimento, fomos uma das sociedades mais bem sucedidas na construção de um sistema produtivo industrial e agrícola de excelente qualidade geral. Nosso establishment científico também rivaliza, em qualidade intrínseca, com os melhores do mundo, faltando apenas maiores investimentos na pesquisa para levá-la a patamares ainda superiores de descoberta e inventividade. Temos sérios problemas quanto à transposição do conhecimento científico para o plano de suas aplicações tecnológicas, mas poderemos melhorar esse aspecto também, uma vez que as condições técnicas parecem já estar dadas para tanto.

Destruímos muito nossa natureza no passado e, de certa forma, continuamos ainda a dilapidar nossos recursos naturais, mas a sociedade já se conscientizou dos problemas e parece pronta para inverter o ritmo e a direção da “insustentabilidade” que estava sendo criada. Mais um pouco e teremos estabelecido um padrão de convivência com os recursos da biodiversidade que nos colocará no caminho do desenvolvimento dito “sustentável” (com toda a carga de “politicamente correto” que esse conceito possa ter).

De certa forma, a maior parte do establishment científico, dos técnicos de alta formação, dos formadores de opinião, dos pesquisadores sociais em políticas públicas e, certamente, muitos quadros governamentais, todos esses personagens da nossa vida social e governamental têm perfeita consciência dos problemas brasileiros, da origem de nossos problemas macroeconômicos, setoriais, das deficiências educacionais, enfim, dos “males de origem”, e já traçaram diagnósticos corretos e até “manuais de correção” dos problemas detectados. Os obstáculos parecem situar-se muito mais no plano político-institucional, do que no âmbito da própria sociedade civil, que poderia estar disposta a enfrentar um programa de reformas, desde que bem explicadas e justificadas como necessárias, para retomar antigos patamares de crescimento e de desenvolvimento econômico e social.

6) Quais as principais lições a serem tiradas desta obra, tendo em vista a situação do país?

PRA: A principal lição é a de que a persistência no erro é o caminho mais rápido para a decadência, a estagnação e, possivelmente, o colapso. Antes do Brasil, outras sociedades declinaram durante décadas, senão séculos: nos três séculos que se seguem ao Iluminismo europeu e à emergência de sociedades avançadas e conquistadoras na Europa, a China constituiu um desses exemplos de notável declínio, mais até do que econômico ou tecnológico, propriamente civilizacional. No século XX, tanto a Grã-Bretanha “imperial” e a Argentina “periférica” passaram por décadas de lento mas constante declínio econômico, industrial e, para esta última, até político, processo que neste caso não está totalmente revertido. Em todos esses casos de retrocesso ou de estagnação, o que primeiro experimenta disfuncionalidades são as próprias instituições públicas, que deixam de operar em condições de racionalidade aceitável, passando a acumular problemas operacionais e algumas vezes até conceituais que impedem essas sociedades de conduzir as reformas necessárias para reverter o declínio (que é sempre relativo, no começo, antes de converter-se em absoluto).

Deve-se dizer que a maior parte dos exemplos citados por Jared Diamond se refere a desequilíbrios das sociedades estudadas com o seu próprio meio ambiente natural ou social e geográfico, o que não é absolutamente o nosso caso. O Brasil tem, mais precisamente, disfuncionalidades institucionais, de natureza essencialmente política, que inviabilizam atualmente a continuidade de um processo de reformas que de certa forma foi conduzido com sucesso no decorrer dos anos 1990 – estabilização macroeconômica, por exemplo, ou privatizações e criação de agências regulatórias – mas que encontra muitas resistências para ser levado adiante naquilo que se refere ao espectro de contratos sociais – reforma trabalhista, por exemplo – ou naquilo que se refere ao controle dos gastos públicos – aqui envolvendo toda a classe política, nos três níveis da federação –, além de diversas outras reformas que tocam nos famosos “direitos adquiridos” (como a questão previdenciária).

Se não estamos (ainda?) em desequilíbrio com o nosso meio ambiente, estamos há muito em desequilíbrio com as contas públicas e com a qualidade (deplorável) da educação pública. Esses problemas graves precisam ser revertidos urgentemente.

7) - Esteja à vontade para acrescentar outras informações e comentários.

PRA: Tenho absoluta consciência de que existe uma enorme distância entre a amplitude dos problemas brasileiros, tal como detectados de modo breve nos parágrafos acima, e as modestas possibilidades de seu encaminhamento satisfatório por meio de um processo de reformas racionais e totalmente voltadas para os fins desejados: a retomada do crescimento em bases sustentáveis, socialmente inclusivo, com transformação produtiva e inserção na economia internacional.

Ao não acreditar que isso seja possível no futuro previsível, só posso antecipar que o Brasil continuará a “patinar” no baixo crescimento e na deterioração ainda maior de suas instituições públicas – entre elas os diversos legislativos, o próprio Judiciário, as polícias, as universidades e as escolas, de modo geral –, com o irremediável comprometimento da qualidade de vida de nossos filhos e netos, que certamente terão de enfrentar um problema fiscal ainda maior do que o que temos hoje. Em vista dos bloqueios persistentes existentes na sociedade brasileira – que não devem ser confundidos com alguns exemplos de “inconsciência societal”, tal como detectados no livro de Jared Diamond – minhas previsões são moderadamente pessimistas, para não dizer virtualmente “declinistas”. Meu maior desejo, sinceramente, é o de ser desmentido pelos fatos e pelos processos futuros.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 7 de agosto de 2006

The last Jared Diamond: aprender com sociedades Tradicionais?

Let Your Kids Play With Matches
Modern society is safe and supporting, but we could learn a thing or two from traditional cultures
Book Review Article
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY
The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2013

The World Until Yesterday
By Jared Diamond
Viking, 498 pages, $36

It must say something about the deep human longing for big ideas that explain everything that books like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997) or Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat" (2005) do so well. Nobody could possibly read them for literary pleasure: Books of this sort are invariably ponderous, plodding, even deathly dull, their authors attempting to leaven the proceedings with gimmicks (lists, cutesy acronyms) and hand-holding authorial intrusions ("let me explain . . .") as a substitute for good writing. They sell like hot cakes.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" transformed Mr. Diamond from an obscure ornithologist and physiologist (his original specialty was the gall bladder) into a star among "public intellectuals." That book's basic premise—which earned Mr. Diamond the enmity of academics in both the humanities and social sciences and from both ends of the political spectrum—was that the global domination of Western societies was mostly geographic and environmental happenstance. Favorable climates and soils and the availability of animal and plant species suitable for domestication largely determined everything that has occurred in the 11,000 years since the rise of agriculture: Food surpluses due to more efficient cultivation led to higher population densities, political centralization and advanced technology.

Mr. Diamond's theory had the virtue of offering a neat explanation for cultural differences that did not rely upon any suggestion of inherent racial superiority of one group over another. It had the vice of embracing an environmentally deterministic idea of cultural evolution that most anthropologists view as naïve or ridiculous, and of ignoring altogether the role of human agency. Leftist social historians pointed out that Mr. Diamond completely swept out of the picture moral choices such as colonialism and enslavement that kept many parts of the world in subjugation for centuries. Conservatives complained that the author discounted the importance of Western moral and political philosophy, particularly the concepts of individual liberty, property rights and free markets, in making scientific and material progress possible.

In "Collapse" (2005), Mr. Diamond extended the idea of environment as a cultural driving force to explain the sudden demise of civilizations, such as the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Easter Islanders, and sweepingly argued that their fate will be ours unless we reduce human population and resource consumption. In "The World Until Yesterday," however, Mr. Diamond backs away some from the search for pat, all-encompassing answers. The book is a much more personal and anecdotal account that draws heavily on his own experiences among the primitive tribes of New Guinea with whom he has lived for extended periods since 1964 while carrying out field work on the ecology and evolution of birds.

Although his stated purpose, as the book's subtitle declares, is to find out "what can we learn from traditional societies?," Mr. Diamond is appropriately cautious about romanticizing the primitive world or suggesting that traditional customs always reflect innate environmental, medicinal or spiritual wisdom. One of the most admirable qualities of this book is, in fact, a refreshing skepticism toward simple explanations. Mr. Diamond notes early on that, while some traditional beliefs and practices may reflect effective adaptations to environmental conditions and social needs, others are more about maintaining internal power hierarchies, while still others have no sane reason for existing at all: They are just unique products of the infinite vagaries of human imagination and the quirks of history.

To take one particularly bizarre and grisly example, up until 1957 the Kaulong people—one of a dozen similar tribes living in identical environmental circumstances on the island of New Britain, just east of New Guinea—practiced the ritual strangulation of widows. None of the adjacent tribes did, and, as Mr. Diamond observes, there is no evidence that "Kaulong widow strangling was in any way beneficial to Kaulong society or to the long-term (posthumous) genetic interests of the strangled widow or her relatives." It was just one of those things, yet it was so firmly ingrained as a custom that the widows themselves perpetuated it, insisting that a male relative strangle them when their husbands died, even taunting or mocking his manhood if he quailed at the task.

Mr. Diamond offers some intriguing evidence to suggest that traditional societies may have a thing or two to teach us about raising children, however. He notes that in most hunter-gatherer cultures children are nursed on demand until age 3 or 4, sleep with their parents, are comforted instantly when they cry, and play together in multi-age play groups. They also are rarely punished and allowed far more freedom than we are generally comfortable with. Among the !Kung and Aka pygmies of Africa, children are never physically disciplined, on the grounds that they "have no wits and are not responsible for their actions," Mr. Diamond writes. "Instead, !Kung and Aka children are permitted to slap and insult their parents." In one tribe in the New Guinea Highlands, Mr. Diamond noticed that most of the adults had serious burn scars. It turned out these were mostly acquired in infancy: The adults made it a practice never to interfere with a baby, to the point of not preventing them playing around or touching a fire. (Other groups let small children play with sharp knives.)

Westerners who have lived with these small-scale societies are "struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children"; they are responsible, articulate and competent, and the "adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren't an issue." But Mr. Diamond admits that all these impressions "are just impressions," hard to measure and prove, and his ultimate verdict is nuanced: "At a minimum . . . one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren't disastrous, and they don't produce societies of obvious sociopaths."

One advantage of Mr. Diamond's anecdotal approach in "The World Until Yesterday" is that the details can be interesting even when they do not offer any larger lessons. This is especially the case when it comes to the many bizarre and varied superstitious traditions he describes, such as elaborate food taboos (eating kangaroo tail, according to one Aborigine tribe, causes premature baldness), and to some of the more hair-raising practices that apparently were the norm in the primitive world. Infanticide, he notes, is a not uncommon practice in traditional societies, a way of disposing of deformed, sickly or simply excess children that would be an unsupportable burden on their parents and the group. In hunter-gatherer societies, the overriding fact of life is a limited food supply, and a woman who is still nursing an older child may abandon or deliberately neglect a newborn so that the older will live; likewise she may abandon one of two twins. Other primitive tribes similarly do away with the old and sick; this is sometimes done by leaving them behind when shifting camp, sometimes by more active means—like encouraging them to jump off cliffs.

The problem with combining a sort-of-anecdotal memoir with a sort-of-big-idea book, however, is that Mr. Diamond insists on trying to milk significance out of everything that happens to him, with considerably varying degrees of success. Although the book has been nominally organized around a series of topics (war, religion, children, danger and accidents, health, language), it really is at heart a ramble. That could be fine, too, except that Mr. Diamond suffers from an all-too-familiar syndrome, albeit one that normally afflicts academic scientists only after they have won a Nobel Prize; he is convinced that everything he has done and every thought that has occurred to him not only is interesting but contains a valuable insight worth sharing with the world. (This includes Mr. Diamond's experience of having recurrent diarrhea in the jungle, from which he draws a considerably less-than-profound conclusion regarding the importance of personal hygiene.)

It also results in much unevenness of coverage. He expends dozens of pages belaboring the utterly obvious—the Western diet has too many calories and leads to high rates of diabetes—while inexplicably devoting little more than a sentence to the entire subject of sex, courtship, love and marriage, offering the single observation that, in most traditional societies, "willing sex partners are almost constantly available." I am sure I am not the only reader who might have been interested in hearing a little more about that.

People who write in order to write a good book, as opposed to those who write to impart their great wisdom, know that the first rule is that most of one's thoughts are not even worth writing down, and a good many that do get written down deserve to be ditched before anyone else sees them. Mr. Diamond's prose, which shows little evidence of ever having been subjected to such discipline, is at times almost comically inept. He frequently sounds like a caricature of a particularly tedious professor, pausing every few paragraphs to interject, "Now, let's consider," "Let's begin by," "Before answering this question," "In the preceding section we discussed," "Having thus addressed the question . . . ." In other places he sounds like a tedious professor lecturing to morons: "There are differences among people of the same age."

The sense of having stumbled into a middle-school textbook is reinforced by the gratuitous inclusion of numerous clunky color photos depicting the obvious, such as a fat American eating a box of fried chicken to illustrate our unhealthy modern diet. He spends pages on didactic definitions of terms: "war," "religion," "tribe." He describes, in mind-numbingly unnecessary detail, the physical appearance and technological amenities of a modern airport in New Guinea (ATM, baggage conveyor belt, X-ray scanners) to make the point that a modern airport in New Guinea now looks the same as a modern airport in the rest of the world. I think we get it.

Some of the "lessons" Mr. Diamond draws, moreover, border on the fatuous, or at least strained. Raise our children bilingually; respect the elderly; have stimulating dinnertime conversation instead of watching TV or playing videogames. "Diet and eating habits are an area in which there is a lot that we can do as individuals to help ourselves," he informs us. No, really? Do we need to read 500 pages about primitive societies to reach such cookie-cutter self-help prescriptions?

But when Mr. Diamond gets done trying to distill everything into a few talking points suitable for a publicity release, he ends with more interesting and subtle observations. I was particularly struck by what the New Guineans themselves had to say about the benefits of having entered the modern world in the decades since their first contact with Westerners in 1931. While they valued much of the technological convenience of the Western lifestyle—matches, clothes, soft beds and especially not having to worry constantly about having enough to eat—it was the non-material benefits that loomed even larger, above all the end of tribal warfare.

"Life was better since the government had come," one Western anthropologist was told by members of the Auyuna tribe, since a man "could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot" by an arrow from a hostile neighboring tribesman. In 1931, Mr. Diamond notes, a New Guinea highlander living a few dozen miles from the coast would never have seen the ocean in his lifetime: The idea of traveling even 10 miles from his village "without being killed by an unknown stranger . . . would have been unthinkable."

And one New Guinean woman told Mr. Diamond that what she valued most of all about life in the U.S. was its "anonymity," the freedom to be alone, to have privacy, "and not to have one's every action scrutinized and discussed." As Mr. Diamond insightfully notes, this is simultaneously one of the greatest disadvantages of the modern world, the loneliness, alienation and tension of constantly being among strangers. One wishes that the author's willingness to confront complexity and avoid simple answers had informed more of this disappointingly uneven book.

—Mr. Budiansky's latest book is "Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-boats and
Brought Science to the Art of Warfare," forthcoming from Knopf.
A version of this article appeared January 5, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Let Your Kids Play With Matches.