Back to Work - Bill Clinton [5]
Doing this work in America and around the world, after eight years as president and twelve years as governor of Arkansas, has given me a lot of exposure to how the twenty-first-century world functions, the challenges America faces in making the most of it, and the barriers to meeting these challenges that the current debate in Washington has created.
We live in the most interdependent age in history. People are increasingly likely to be affected by actions beyond their borders, and their borders are increasingly open to both positive and negative crossings: travelers, immigrants, money, goods, services, information, communication, and culture; disease, trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people, and acts of terrorism and violent crime.
The modern world has many attractions—scientific advances, technological breakthroughs, instant information-sharing, greater social diversity, and the empowerment of people everywhere through cell phones and the Internet. But as we all know, people everywhere also face severe challenges, most of which can be grouped into three categories. The modern world is too unequal in incomes and in access to jobs, health, and education. It is too unstable, as evidenced by the rapid spreading of the financial crisis, economic insecurity, political upheavals, and our shared vulnerability to terrorism. And the world’s growth pattern is unsustainable, because the way we produce and use energy and deplete natural resources is causing climate change and other environmental problems.
No matter what the naysayers claim, the evidence is overwhelming that the climate is changing because of human activity, and if we don’t change course quickly and sharply, the consequences are going to be terrible. The signs are all around us, in rising temperatures (nine of the hottest ten years on record occurred in the last thirteen years), melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more droughts, fires, floods, and severe storms. My native state of Arkansas is in America’s tornado alley just south of Joplin, Missouri, which was recently devastated by an especially powerful tornado. But in 2010 and 2011, tornadoes also hit in Queens in New York City and in Massachusetts, areas in the Northeast where they’re all but unheard of.
Though these problems are affecting the lives of people in every nation, responding to them effectively presents very different challenges to poor and rich nations. Poor nations have to build systems that those of us in wealthy nations take for granted—economic, financial, education, health-care, energy, environmental, government service, and other systems that make prosperity and security possible and provide predictable rewards to citizens for hard work and honest dealing. Haiti is now trying to build such systems. When poor countries succeed in doing that, their citizens are able to rapidly increase their incomes, as Vietnam, Rwanda, and other developing nations have proven over the last fifteen years.
Wealthy countries have such systems; they were built on the road to prosperity. The challenge is to keep them working, and improving, as times and conditions change, because at some point the people who run them and those who benefit from them inevitably become resistant to change: more committed to holding on to their positions than to advancing the purposes for which they were established in the first place; more interested in holding on to or increasing present advantages than in creating greater opportunities for others and a brighter future for our children. You can see these forces at work in the politics of Washington: The status quo is represented by much more powerful lobbying groups than the future is.
Because the world