In order to make its strategic and economic leadership secure, America must successfully deal with five complex challenges over the next 20 years. A solution to each of these challenges is achievable with sustained effort and, if achieved, they will strongly improve America’s ability to enjoy rising livings standards and continued international leadership. They will also have positive implications for the rest of the world.
The Reform of International Institutions
The United States has a fundamental interest in seeing other nations join it as wealthy, responsible members of the global community. Yet as other nations develop, the relative power of the United States is certain to decline. This makes it imperative to develop international institutions that effectively accommodate and constrain the rising power of other nations.
Americans are much better off in a world where the citizens of China, India, Brazil and similar countries enjoy rising living standards and greater freedoms and where their governments bear a proportionate responsibility for ensuring the maintenance of the Western liberal order that has governed during the last 60 years. This order stressing free trade, human rights, nuclear nonproliferation, and collective security has delivered enormous benefits to the world. As globalization increases the number of problems needing a collective solution, international institutions will gain even more importance.
Yet important international institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have lost much of their relevancy. Decision making needs to be changed to reflect the rising influence of developing countries. Just as important, their operations need to be streamlined and focused on a new mission that better reflects the need’s of today’s international community. Other institutions like the United Nations and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, look increasingly unable to deal with increasingly complex global problems. Both the United Nations General Assembly and its Security Council continue to have difficulty addressing global issues.
Countries such as India and China need to find that the institutional structure surrounding them both furthers their interests and restrains their ability to act unilaterally against the interests of the general community. And the world community needs institutions capable of dealing with collective problems.
Preparing Society for the Impact of Technology
Technology continues to increase at an accelerating rate. In fact, it is likely that the amount of change occurring during the next 30 years will be at least an order of magnitude greater than the changes over the last 30 years. If one remembers the social, economic and political changes that technology forced over the last three decades and then multiplies by 10 or 20, it becomes clear that new technologies will have a tremendous effect on both the wealth and shape of society.
These changes will have dramatic effects on privacy, life expectancies, industrial structure, and ethics. What will happen to entitlements and the work place when people routinely live to be 120? Will parents be allowed to alter their child’s genetics? Who will have access to all of the data on our personal movements and transactions that future information systems will collect? Will everyone be guaranteed access to drugs that eliminate disease or enhance mental performance regardless of cost? We cannot answer these questions now, but we prepare for them. In addition, the government should change policies governing work, health care, and savings to accommodate a world in which workers need to be more mobile and continuously retrain and in which they will live much longer. Second, the government can begin to lead a national dialogue about the responsible use and legal framework that should surround new technologies. It should also begin to enact policies to ensure that the benefits of technology are widely shared.
Competitiveness and Innovation
Globalization will continue to require greater collective decision making by the world’s powers. If in 20 years the United States is not among the world’s leading economic powers these decisions will still be made, but Americans will have less influence over them. Remaining the world’s leader in economic competitiveness and innovation boosts our role in global governance and our ability to protect our vital interests. Concerns about international competitiveness can easily be overdone and other nations face more serious hurdles than we do. Yet there is little doubt that the United States could do a much better job of ensuring that its laws encourage rather than retard greater productivity. Failure to generate additional wealth impacts both our national security and our living standards.
Continued technological change can make a large contribution to national productivity, but only to the extent that organizational changes allow for its full use. Significant reforms to the education, health care, and finance sectors will be necessary before we can see the steady improvement in both performance and price that characterize other sectors of the economy. Additional investments in the nation’s transportation, energy and communications infrastructures will also be necessary but great care will be needed to ensure that the spending generates a high rate of return. Finally, we need broad reforms to taxes, worker training programs, and regulation in order to channel activity away from consumption and into productive activity.
The New Social Contract
To obtain the necessary political support for the above changes, a new social contract is needed that strikes a better balance between individual responsibility and collective security. Workers need to become less dependent on their employers for pensions and health care and individuals need more control over them. Government assistance should be conditioned on responsible behavior, including an affirmative obligation to work. In exchange, workers should be able to count on a higher level of protection against the uncertainties and dislocations that accompany a dynamic society. This includes a fair distribution of the benefits of higher growth, better access to decent education and health care, and tougher enforcement of laws against deceptive and anti-competitive behavior.
The new social contract should provide the minimum level of income needed for a decent standard of living. It should take the form of an income supplement so that individuals have the maximum flexibility to meet their own needs. And it should be accompanied by policy reforms that make it easier for everyone to find decent shelter, save, obtain the training needed to improve their prospects, and gain access to affordable health care.
Fiscal Balance
The achievement of each of these goals requires the government to have a long-term focus. This is unlikely unless it first learns how to balance its commitments with its resources.
The recent fiscal crisis is highlighting the large gap that has developed between America’s commitments to the future in the form of entitlement programs, debt, and infrastructure needs and its present ability to pay for them.
Far too many sectors of society, including all levels of government, are burdened with commitments that they cannot keep. These commitments need to be renegotiated so that resources are devoted to more productive uses and the burden of future investment is more evenly spread. A government that tries to meet every want is unlikely in the end to be able to meet even its most important needs.
In facing these challenges it is important to remember that, not only do other nations face their own challenges, our problems are in many ways less serious and our strengths more solid than those of our major competitors. But the failure of other nations should not give us hope for, until we face up to the challenges before us, we will fall far short of of our potential.
Law, Economics, and Technology 