Good afternoon and welcome. Happy fat tuesday, thank you for spending your tuesday with us. Im the executive director of the institute for human academy, joseph capizzi. We have been here for three years. Ross has been an important member of the institute, our media fellow helps coordinate these events, the more contentious events i have been involved in. The release of the latest book, ross is one of the most important commentators, the opinion page, has written a few books at this point, they became something. I will engage ross in conversation about the book. It is an interesting book, not the sort of typical conservative harangue on the way things are but takes a nice tack to explore what is going on in our culture. Once he and i exhausted each other, we open up to the rest of you. If you have a question please raise your hand and they will approach you, dont be alarmed, make your question and ross will engage you. I implore you to phrase a question. More time ross has to respond better, dont make a speech if you can avoid that if possible, just a nice pointed question. Thank you for coming. [applause] lets begin. The book is called the decadent society with decadence. What is decadence in the book . Guest this is working. Thank you for doing this. It is a pleasure to be back in a situation where i am not modern american conservative. Midway through, we will have a wrestlemania style faceoff. Decadence, basically the conceit is lifted, the definition offered 20 years ago. He wrote a book called from don until decadence. He made the argument we should think of decadence not in terms of catastrophic moral corruption, not in terms of luxury goods, weekends in las vegas, the perks and faculty lounge, that kind of outrageous stuff, a clinical term that describes a civilization that has achieved a certain level of wealth, development and proficiency and finds itself. That is a formal way of putting it, stuck is the oped columnist distillation so in the book, the decadence properly understood refers to stagnation, drift and repetition at a high level of civilizational, the argument is this term reasonably applies to america, the west, the developed world encompassing the pacific rim since the late 1960 numplaps1970s for the sake of convenience to what it even oaks. I start the book with the moon landing as this particular peak of american and western achievement that was expected at the time not to be a peak but a beginning, opening of infinitys phrase a new frontier. Instead it turned out our capacities were more limited than we hoped, and space a tiny bit bigger and colder and less remunerative especially once there wasnt the soviet threat to compete with so the spaceage sort of petered out and that frontier was closed and at that point we entered into what i am describing as decadence. Host you identified four areas, four indicators almost in this period of deference, repetition, stagnation, economic and technological stagnation, political sclerosis is one in sterility. And those who havent read it political sclerosis is the one that everyone in the western world especially the us recognizes and agrees upon. Over the last few generations it has become harder, to effectively reform or transform or build new government programs. The age when it was possible to elect a president has have a Dramatic Program of reform and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson through ronald reagan, and age when president s are lucky if they can pass one major piece of legislation across the presidency, if we succeed as obama did with obamacare they pay a political price that lasts the duration of their presidency. Politics is dominated by various stalemates by polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities. And congressional abdication and increasing form of government that consists of negotiation between the executive branch and the judicial branch, actual american policy gets made. It is a different version in europe where the institution of the European Union which has advanced to the point it is too big to fail and no one except the wild and crazy english take the step, and nationalists of eastern europe, failed to leave the eu, it is an efficient, creates common courtesy, all kinds of economic problems, both forward or back, cant shrink back to a more sensible arrangement, cant move forward to the european superstate many of its architect envisioned so it too has this stalemate. That is what im describing as sclerosis. That is the easy one, people nod along to. The others are a little bit more debatable. Stagnation, economic stake nation. Youd have periods of Economic Growth, a respectable pace of growth, since the Great Recession in 2008, we see a pattern of real deceleration, lower growth rates compared to the norm prior to the 1970s and the growth rates achieved through perpetual borrowing where you can get to 2 growth with massive deficits whereas in the 1950s you have 4. 5 growth with what then were complained about as mass deficits but were not really deficits at all so in effect those deficits may be more sustainable than some conservatives think that sustainable in effect a rich society paying itself to maintain a form of progress that its own fundamentals dont justify. Host talk about stagnation, the technological stagnation. You referred to back to the future which exemplifies it. Give us a walkthrough that. This is an argument i am stealing from a group of economists and noneconomists who over the last we 10 years made the case that in spite of the iphone in your pocket and all the resources of the internet Technological Progress since the apollo era has been pretty disappointing. This is an argument tyler cowan of george mason made and peter teal, famously made with his line about how we expected flying cars, deloreans winging their way to the future and instead we got 140 characters on twitter which is now 280 characters so there is no great stagnation. [laughter] host guest Robert Gordon from the university of chicago has written a sweeping thousand page book the rise and fall of American Growth in the point they all make, it is not certain logical progress has ceased, the internet era has demonstrated a lot of incredible breakthroughs in communication, information and simulation. It is more Technological Progress has been mono dimensional. And areas like transportation, energy, agriculture, and the built environment. And and and they try to revolutionize realworld industries those are the companies that often end up being the unicorns the turnout to be frauds or failures. To bring big tech to bear on and all fashion. And we were trying to revolutionize office space, a similar story. That is the core of that piece of the stagnation, progress hasnt ceased but it is on a particular dimension that feedback into the larger pattern of decadence because it leaves people to spend more time in Virtual Reality simulations of reality and to retreat from both certain kinds of Economic Activity but also bringing us to another retreat from family formation, romance, sex and childrearing which is the aspect of decadence i cost a reality. Host you have a wonderful comparison of Margaret Atwood and pj jamess book involving a sterile landscape which is really brilliant and really fun. Lets think critically about what you wrote. What is a counter indicator . You provide indicators excuse me. Sorry. Thank you, michael. You provide indicators by which to identify us as a decadent society, what might be counter indicators . Signs of life . Lets give examples. One of the key indicators to suggest that we are not living through a period of immense technological transformation is the fact that productivity growth and economic measurement, how technology is affecting the way it works has been stagnant and pathetic for a long time in the early 21st century. That was not true, the initial flush of the internet revolution there was a surge of productivity growth in the development from 19962001. That suggests, i was alive, a teenager and it really was a brief window where there was a sense of the possibility of dramatic growth returning and had that continued the argument i am making i would be making a different argument, that window was a nondecadent exception that may not have cascading effects. Another example i mentioned, the defining feature of demography in the western world since the baby boom, since the 1960s in 70s is sub replacement fertility, people having too few children to replenish the population and this is true but for a long time america was an exception. Down to the early 2000s american conservatives like to say because america retains a more dynamic economy than western europe, it is not a socialist and sclerotic, and optimism about the future and intense religious practice. That is why our birthrate, we are country oriented toward the future in a way that france or sweden or japan are not. In that sense the United States was not decadence as long as its birthrate was exceptional. The birthrate ceased to be exceptional and were interesting was from sub replacement paternity levels. Those are two examples how it is not under my attempts to create a statistical understanding of decadence, things have happened that would be unpleasant and if they happened again, a shift, a change, the other point i would make is im not trying to examine each of these forces as forces existing on their own. The reason every society has some decadence in it, what is distinctive about our moment is the way these forces are converging. It feeds political unhappiness and distrust in government, makes it harder to pass policy programs which slows Economic Growth further and drives down birthrates, they dont feel they have economic capacity to have kids which make society older and more riskaverse, harder to make political changes, you follow me. There is a convergence of these forces that makes our moment, not fully decadent, then period place in the past, have one of these forces at work. Host talk to me about the week, how we became who is but we here. It is the thing i wondered through the book, at times could be the United States, the west or Something Like that, seemed almost global in terms of your description. Instead of expanding it to include more and more, the victims of success leading to decadence might be exclusive and exclude certain communities who might say we are not in any age of decadence but prosperity or ascendance. Think of the African American community in the United States. And African American president was elected. How inclusive is the point . What extent might you think about the refined analysis. Take the case study of africanamericans. I think, this is a highly debatable proposition. I think there was more progress for africanamericans and the period running from 1940 to the moon lantern 19401980, a period like that, there has been in the period since. Africanamericans have participated to some extent in decadence. This has very little. On implement rate is low at the current moment in the election of the first black president was a dramatic breakthrough. If you look at gaps in racial wealth, household wealth, the blackwhite income gap, test score gaps, all of the things that reformers who are interested in racial equality are interested in changing you get a lot more change in a lot of those cases in the era of the Civil Rights Era in particular but a fool zone from the great migration through the king assassination into the 1970s. In that sense at least in some socioeconomic way there is a participation in decadence there and it is an open question in culture, in certain ways there has been an increase in africanamerican representation in pop culture and cinema. Sometimes that is overstated and there is a little bit of forgetting of the very recent past. If you go to 1980s the biggest stars in america were africanamericans. One of them was bill cosby, not a cause for celebration at the moment but bill cosby, eddie murphy, it was not the case there was no africanamerican representation. The rise of African American pop culture figure dates to the 60s, 70s and 80s and we are getting a further cycle that is not a complete novelty. That is the point. In the larger sense, one of the questions the book raises and doesnt answer is is it a western developed world phenomena nor is a global phenomenon and i think i feel very confident in arguing his deceleration and stagnation the japan, south korea, United States and western europe share in common. The harder question is what is happening with the countries we still call developing . The rising powers in the world, china, india and so on and you could make a case the decadence of the west will enable the nondecadent developing world to develop past us. When we talk about a Pacific Century when asian century that is implicit. At the same time there are ways in which if you look at demographics, the demographics of china is in the same low fertility travel developed world is in and there are ways in which you can say china is converging with the west, as our government a convergence in oligarchy, billionaires compete to be president , not the same thing as the politburo in beijing but theres a convergence in stratified low fertility oligarchy and higher rates of wealth, it isnt a case of china leapfrogging past us and what is happening with the coronavirus raises a further host of questions the we can talk about in the apocalyptic portion of the evening. Host i had a question about that but we can save that. Another thing i enjoyed about your book is it wasnt the end of book. It is a book that doesnt say we are in this decadent society and its only a matter of time before it is over. It described the kind of sustainable decadence. Guest that is the bumper sticker. Host you get insurance on it. Describe what would make this a sustainable decadence . It leads into what wouldnt make it sustainable decadence. One of the claims, people hear the word decadence and heavy idea of iron logic of history, once you become decadent you are doomed and the absolute cliche version of this is the writing on the wall of the babylonian palace or orgies in rome, the barbarians sweeping in and so on. In fact i make the argument and i think it is true that decadence is a very normal condition for a successful society, empires and civilizations to fall into and once they do it can lead to collapse if they have a rival who can exploit the decadence but it can also lead to a kind of sustainable stasis that can last a very long time. However you want to chart roman decadence it is 400 years from the nero caligula moment to the actual fall of rome. However you chart ottoman decadence or the decadence of the chinese empire down through the eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century these are long historical periods, prosperous and societies in hindsight look decadent without them being tipped over into crisis and collapse and in certain ways that is a more pessimistic vision for our future in that there is an appeal to the idea that once your decadent you are also doomed. There is a sense at some level people want history to follow a kind of morality play arc even if they dont actually caught up in the sacking of rome themselves. I quote w h oddin, i am going to mangle the quote, the book is right here. That is so convenient. He says what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not that it finally went smash but that it managed to last four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope. That is the dark version of sustainable decadence but lets qualify by saying those four centuries that rome lasted under decadence were, especially from the point of view of the face that founded this university, a period of dynamic change from within as there was the developers of a very much nondecadent religious faith that did not in the end save the roman empire from ruin but did preserve and Carry Forward roman element into the future down to the present day and was there when the empire finally went smash as a powerful force. You can imagine versions of that, renewal under decadence that reinvigorate our civilization or a renewal that when our civilization falls, create something new to carry on the best of our own legacy and that is the optimistic case that in fact decadence has its virtues. There are alternatives that are worse than the lives we have now and we should regard life under decadence not necessarily is a horrible burden but as something that is not ideal but potentially a gift because it still leaves room for creativity, renewal and passed back to dynamism and flourishing. Path back to dynamism and flourishing i did not anticipate encountering Cardinal Sarah in the book and even less anticipated encountering what condon exceptionalism. If you havent read it i apologize for spoiling but what condon exceptionalism and Cardinal Sarah, possible ways of envisioning or imagining some sort of replenishment. Guest my basic view is if youre thinking of the vulnerability of a decadent civilization, the vulnerabilities of europe are in some ways starker than ours and in part that is because europe is more advanced on some of my statistical decadence indicators, lower birth rates, for a longer period of time, they have had relatively stagnant growth compared to was for a longer period of time but they are more vulnerable in the sense that europe sits in the middle of the world whereas the United States has always had its splendid isolation and europe is in a deeply unstable equilibrium not only as people often think with islam in the middle east but also with the current exception to demographic decadence which is the continent of africa so were headed for a scenario where europe which used to have more people than africa will buy 2075 have 500 million odd people and africa could have 3. 5 billion and one way or another it doesnt seem that kind of equilibrium will hold so you can tell a pessimistic story that a lot of conservative and reactionary types can tell where europe will try to build a fortress against mass migration and the fortress will fail in their will be migrant driven chaos as far as the eye can see that you can tell an optimistic st