Good afternoon, good evening, happy fat tuesday, thank you very muchsd for spending your evening with us. Im joe capizzi, the institute has been here for 3 years, ross has been an important member of the institute. Since our founding, hes been the media fellow and helped coordinate some of the events, some of our contentious events you have seen ross was involved with. [laughter] right. Anyway, we are super pleased that ross is joining us today i think on the day of the release of his latest book. All of you know ross as one of the most important commentators on American Culture today. He writes for the New York Times opinion page and written more than a few books at this point. They seem to all or at least a couple of them have the title how we became something, right. [laughter] right. You might want to steer clear of that or explain that at some point. Anyway, today the format is going to be that i will engage ross in a conversation about the book. I actually had the pleasure of reading it and it really is an interesting book. In my judgment not the sort of typical conservative on the way things are butut takes a nice tk to explore whats going on in our culture. Once he and i have exhausted each other, we will then open up the conversation to the rest of you so there will be people here with microphones, so if you have a question, please raise your hand and theyll approach you and dont be alarmed and then, you know, make your question and ross will engage you. And, of course, as i always do, i implore you to phrase the question to people, the more time ross has to respond the better for everybody, so dont make a speech if you can avoid that as possible, just a nice pointed question, okay . Again, thank you all for coming. [applause] all right. So lets begin. The book is called the decadent society with decadence. Yes, this is working. First thank you all for coming. Joe, thank you so much for doing this. Its a pleasure to be back at cua in a situation where im not moderating between the two embodiments or factions of modern american conservatism. As delightful as that was and i promise add marylandway through promise that midway through we will have faceoff and decadent, definition offered about 20 years ago of the term by the 2 great cultural critic o wrote a book from dawn till decadence and he basically made the argument that we should think of decadence not just in moral corruption, not just in terms of luxury goods and weekends at las vegas, you know, the perks and lounge, the outrageous stuff but clinical term that describes a civilization that has achieved a certain level of wealth, development and proficiency and finds itself in effect stuck without clear lines of advance is his formal way of putting it, stuck is the oped columnist distillation. So in the book my gloss on barzoon to say the decadence refers to stagnation drift and repetition at a high level of civilizational development and the argument then is that this term very reasonably applies to america, the west, the developed amrld encompassing the pacific rim since the 19 late 1960s, early 1970s and for the f sake of convenience, but also i think for the sake of what it evoked i start with book with the moon landing as particular peak of american, western achievement that was expected not to be a peak but a beginning, the open of in kennedys phrase a new frontier and instead it very quickly turned out that our capacities were more limited than we hoped and space, tinny bit bigger and colder especially there wasnt a soviet threat to compete with andea the space age petered out and that frontier was closed and at that point we really entered into what im describing as decadence. You identify four indicators that support the claim that we are in a period of decadence, repetition, stagnation. Economic stagnation, political sclerosis is one and serenity. Sure, so the the easiest one to start with is political sclerosis, thats the one that i think everyone in the western world and especially in the u. S. Recognizes and agrees upon, that over the last few generations its become a lot harder to effectively govern western countries and toot effectively reform or transform or build new or unbuild Government Programs and so an age when it was possible to elect a president and have a Dramatic Program of reform from Franklin Roosevelt and Lynden Johnson all the way through ronald reagan, if they succeed as obama did with obamacare they may pay a political price for it thatba lt the durationth of their presidency, and overall, politics is dominated by various stalemates by polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities, with in the United States sort of congressional advocationjo and increasing form of government that consists of basically negotiation between the executive branch and the Judicial Branch which i think is how a lot of actual american policy now gets made, but i think theres a version of this is somewhat different version in europe where you have the institution of thehe European Union which in a sense is too big to fail, all kinds of problems but no one accepts the wild and crazy english are taking the step of leaving, even the sort of fearsome populist of Eastern Europe dont actually plan to leave the eu but meanwhile its inefficient, creates common currency and common problems that are obvious to everyone and cant move cforward nor back or cant move forward towards the kind of actual european super state that many of its architects envision and so it too it sort of has the stalemate. So thats thats what im describing as sclerosis. Economic stagnation is not as sort of thorough going a reality as sclerosis, you still have periods of Economic Growth. Weve managed a respectable pace of growth under the basically since the Great Recession in 2008, but overall you do see a pattern of real deceleration lower growth rates compared to what was the norm prior to 1970s and you have the growth rates achieved basically through a kind of perpetual borrowing, right, where you can get to 2 growth with massive deficits whereas inh 1950s you could have 4 and a half percent growth with what then were sometimes complained abas massive deficits but werent really deficits at all. So in effect i think those deficits may be more sustainable than some conservatives think but they are sustainable in effect rich society paying itself to maintain a form of progress that its own fundamentals dont really justify. Talk a little bit also then in stagnation about the technological stagnation. You refer in the book back to the future, for instance, right, to exemplify this, give us a walkthrough that. So this is my this is an argument that im basically stealing from a group of economists and noneconomists who over the last 10 years have made the case that in spite of the iphone in your pockets and all the resources of the internet, Technological Progress since the apollo era has been disappointing, peter thiel famously made about line about flying cars, delorians winging their way in the future and instead we got 140 characters of twitter which is now 180 characters so in fact, theres no great stagnation. [laughter] and robert gordon, an economist at the university of chicago or north western, excuse me, who has written a sweeping thousand page book the rise and fall of American Growth and the point they all make is that its not the Technological Progress has ceased, obviously the internet era has demonstrated a lot of incredible breakthroughs in communication, information transmission and simulation. C its more that Technological Progress has become mono dimensional and its all tech and nothing else in area like transportation, energy, agricultural, even the built environment dont see the progress that we took for granted between 1840 and 1970, lets say, and then further when Tech Companies sort of leave the world of tech and try to revolutionize realworld industries, you are those are the companies that often denned t being the supposed unicorns that turn out to be frauds or failures, so, you know, theranos , the attempt to bring on an old fashion worth solving problem on how do you conduct easy blood tests and doesnt work and you end up with a multibillion Dollar Company evaporated or wework trying to revolutionize office space. So thats the core of that piece of the stagnation of the puzzle, progress hasnt ceased but progress along a very particular dimension that then feeds back into the larger pattern of decadence because leaves people to spend more times in Virtual Realities and simulations of Virtual Realities and retreat from both kinds of Economic Activity but also to bring us to another force, retreat from family formation, romance, sex, childbearing which is which is the aspect of decadence that i stall sterility, basically. I know that you have books bthat involve the sterile landscape which i thought was brilliant and fun. Lets think critically about what you wrote, so what would count as counterindicater . Youre giving a yo provide indicators, metrics, im sorry. Sorry. Thank you, michael. You provide indicators by which to identify us as decadence society, what kind count of ocounterindicaters, signs of le that you have to engage . Sure, so lets give examples. So one of the key indicators to suggest that we are not, in fact, living through a period of nimmense technological transformation is the fact that productivity growth, right, an economic measurement that tries to get at how technology is affecting the way people work has been stagnant and kind of pathetic for a long period of time in the 21st century. That was not true in the late 1990s, the initialer flush of the internet revolution. There was, in fact, a surge of productivity growth in the developed world from lets says 1996 to 2001 and that suggests, one, i was alive then, i was a teenager and it was this brief window where there was this sense of sort of the possibility of really dramatic growth returning and had that continued i think the argument im making today would i would be making aen different argument, right, that that t window was a nondecadent exception that then didnt have the cascading effects that people expected it to. Or another example, i mention sterility, the defining feature of demography in the western world since again the baby boom, 1960s and 70s is sad replacement fertility. People having too few children to replenish the population and this is true everywhere, but for tia long time america was something of an exception and so down to, you know, the early 2000s american conservatives especially like to say, well, look because american has retained a more dynamic economy than western europe, its not, you know, sort of socialist and sporadic and intense religious practice. Thats why our birthrate is still above replacement, we are estill a country sort of orientd towards the future in a way that france or sweden or increasing japan are not. So in that sense the United States was not decadent by my definition as long as birthrate was exceptional but over the last 10 to 15 years our birthrate is ceased to be deceptional and those are two examples under my attempts to create a statistical understanding of decadence there are things that could happen or have happened that would be undecadent and if they happened again they would count as a shift, at least a change, but the other point i would make is im not trying to examine the each of the forces as sort of forces that are just existing on their own. Every society has some decadence in it. Whats distinctive is the way the forces are converging so that slow Economic Growth feeds political unhappiness and distrust in government which makes it harder to pass, you know, effective political policy programs which in turn slows Economic Growth further and then drives down birthrates because people dont have any, you know, dont feel like they have the economic capacity to have kids which in turn makes society older and risk averse which makes it harder to make political changes. Anyway, youis follow me. Convergence that make our moment more decadent, not fully decadent, only one of the forces at work. Great, great. Talk to me about the we, how we became the victims of our success in this . Who is the we here because it is something that i wondered as i proceeded through the book that at times it could be the United States, at times it could seem like it would be the west or Something Like that and at im sorry sometimes global in in terms of your description. Aside from expanding out to include more and more, you know, people who might be the we, the victims off success that now is leading to decadence, it might be exclusive the finer grain you go, exclude certain communities, we are not in an age of decadence of prosperity, think of thehe Africanamerican Community in the United States, an africanamerican president was elected. More representation, how inclusive is the we here i guess is the point and to what extent might thinking about that refine your analysis at all . So i guess i will work backwards, right, so take the case study of African Americans. I think and this is, of course, highly debatable proposition but i think that there was more progress for African Americans in American Life in the period running from 1940 to the moon landing or 1940 to 1980 or pick a period like that than there has been in the period since and rein that sense i think African Americans have participated to some in decadence as im describing. Africanamerican unemployment rates are low and obviously thee election of the first black president was dramatic breakthrough, but if you look at gaps in racial wealth, household wealth, you know, the blackwhite income gap, test score gaps, all of the things that sort of reformers who are thinking interesting in racialha equality are interestig in changing, you get a lot more change in a lot of those cases in the you know, the era of the civil rights in particular but really the whole zone from the great migration through the king assassination into the 1970s. So in that sense at least in some socioeconomic way theres a kind of participation in decadence there and i think its a little more of an open question in culture. Obviously in certain ways theres been big increase in africanamerican representation in pop culture and cinema but i also think sometimes that too is overstated and theres a little bit ofhi forgetting of the very recent past that, you know, if you go back to 1980s, the biggest stars in america at the moment were African Americans. Now, one of them is bill cosby. Not something thats a cause for celebration at the moment, but bill cosby and eddy murphy, but not the case that there wasnt africanamerican representation and the rise of pop culture figure really dates to the 60s, 70s and 80s and we are getting a sort of further cycle now but its not a complete novelty, so thats to the last point. Developing world to develop past us when we talk about a specific century. That is implicit. At the same time i think there are ways in which if you look at demographics of china it is in the same low fertility track that the developed world is in and there are ways in which china is converging with the west. As our government decays a bit the emergence of oligarchy. Is not the same thing in beijing but there is a convergence and in stratified low fertility at higher rates of wealth and in the past. Obviously whats happening with the coronavirus raises a further host of questions that we can talk about in the apocalyptics portion of the evening. S t i did have a question about that. Another thing i enjoyed aboutk your book was that it was not an end of book. It doesnt say we are in this decadent society in its only a matter of time before its over. Its actually described as a sustainable amount is the bumper sticker. What would make this a sustainable decadence. One of the claims the book makes is that people hear the word decadence and they have the idea that there is a iron logic. The absolute cliche version of this is the writing on the wall. The babylonian palace or all the big barbarians were sweeping and for orgies in rome. I make the argument and i i think its true that it is a very normal condition for successful societies in empires and civilizations to fall into. And once they do can lead to collapse. If you have out rivaled that can exploit it. Ap it can last a very long time. However you want to chart roman decadencean from the actual fall of rome. However you want to chart ottoman decadence or the chinese empire. Prosperous and powerful societies in hindsight look decadent without them being tipped over into crisis and collapse. In certain waysin that is a more pessimistic vision for our future in the sense that there is an appeal to the idea thatt once you are decadent you are also doomed. At some level people want history to follow a morality play even if they dont want to beeo caught up. I quote them at the start of the book seen Something Like im going to mangle the quote. The book is right here. That is so convenient. They said what fascinates and terrifies us about the roman empire is not that it finally went smash but that itth managed to last for four centuries. Lets qualify it that it is actual four centuries it was especially from the point of view of the face that founded this university a time of dynamic change from within as there was a development of a non decadent religious face that did not in the end save the roman empire from ruin the dead preserve and Carry Forward roman elements into the future down to the present day and was there when it finally went smash as awa powerful force. I think you can imagine versions of that. You can imagine a renewal under decadence. That it creates something new to carry on the best of our own legacy. Is the optimistic case. In