Moises Naim Quotes & Sayings

PROPENSITY OF THE YOUNG TO QUESTION AUTHORITY AND challenge power is now amplified by the More and Mobility revolutions. Not only are there more people than ever under thirty, but they have more - prepaid calling-cards, radios, TVs, cellphones, computers, and access to the Internet as well as to travel and communication possibilities with others like them at home and around the world. They are also more mobile than ever. — Moises Naim

But this raises the question of what happens when the mosaic of faith shatters into a thousand, a million jagged pieces. When the quest for common good devolves into bespoke kindness designed to advance a particular cause for a particular person. Or when citizens forsake all the news that's fit to print for only the news they want to hear. All of these amount to a challenge to efforts at collective action. And from climate change to rising inequality, the enormous challenges that we face demand collective action and a new shared way of thinking about the accretion and use of power. — Moises Naim

I see a drift toward authoritarian capitalism that is shared in [the United States], Russia and China," Klein told an audience in New York. "Not to say that we're all at the same stage - but I see a trend toward a very disturbing mix of big corporate power and big state power cooperating in the interests of the elites."31 — Moises Naim

New information technologies are tools - and to have an impact, tools need users, who in turn need goals, direction, and motivation. — Moises Naim

Today, we ask not what we can do for our country but what our country, employer, fast-food purveyor, or favorite airline can do for us. — Moises Naim

In many Latin American countries, the historic ties of Catholic bishops with the political elite rendered them less sensitive to the conditions of the poor and especially of indigenous people. — Moises Naim

The gap between our real power and what people expect from us is the source of the most difficult pressure any head of state has to manage. — Moises Naim

the decay of power has significantly altered the terms of global conflict. — Moises Naim

We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace. — Moises Naim

A world where players have enough power to block everyone else's initiatives but no one has the power to impose its preferred course of action is a world where decisions are not taken, taken too late, or watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. Without — Moises Naim

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. — Moises Naim

the world market for cheap labor exceeds even the market for cheap sex. — Moises Naim

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man. — Moises Naim

Restoring trust, reinventing political parties, finding new ways in which average citizens can meaningfully participate in the political process, creating new mechanisms of effective governance, limiting the worst impacts of checks and balances while averting excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, and enhancing the capacity of nation-states to work together should be the central political goals of our time. — Moises Naim

Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man."23 — Moises Naim

Whether the challenge is getting a raise or a promotion, doing our job in a certain way, pushing an elected official to vote for a bill we favor, planning a vacation with a spouse, or getting a child to eat right, we are always, consciously or not, gauging our power: assessing our capacity to get others to behave as we want. We bridle at the power of others and its irritating and inconveniencing effects: how our boss, the government, the police, the bank, or our telephone or cable provider induces us to behave in a certain way, to do certain things, or to quit doing others. And yet we often seek power, sometimes in very self-conscious ways. — Moises Naim

The decay of power also is one of the forces driving the profusion of myriad criminal, terrorist, or otherwise malevolent nonstate actors. — Moises Naim

Power has a social function. — Moises Naim

Whether the United States is a hegemon, an indispensable power, or an empire at sunset, and whether China or some other rival stands to take its place, may be a debate that consumes international relations. But its terms are not adapted to a world where power is decaying - where unprecedented forms of fracturing are under way within each of these countries and across systems of trade, investment, migration, and culture. Identifying who is up and who is down is less important than understanding what is going on inside those nations, political movements, corporations, and religions that are on the elevator. Who is up and who is down will matter ever less in a world in which those who get to the top don't stay there for long and are able to do less and less with the power they have while there. — Moises Naim

When people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control. — Moises Naim

Specifically it is about how power - the capacity to get others to do, or to stop doing, something - is undergoing a historic and world-changing transformation. — Moises Naim

He believes the world has entered "an era of perpetual irregular warfare. — Moises Naim

In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. "The executive of the state," they wrote, was "nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them. — Moises Naim

The decay of power is changing the world. — Moises Naim

the spread of consumer technology has given the traffickers a boost and helped them keep the edge over their pursuers. — Moises Naim

conversations each year with fellow participants confirmed my hunch: the powerful are experiencing increasingly greater limits on their power. The reactions to my probing always pointed in the same direction: power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained. — Moises Naim

AL QAEDA SPENT ABOUT $500,000 TO PRODUCE 9/11, WHEREAS THE direct losses of that day's destruction plus the costs of the American response to the attacks were $3.3 trillion. In other words, for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks, the United States spent $7 million.1 The costs of 9/11 equal one-fifth of the US national debt. In 2006, Hezbollah fired a precision-guided cruise missile at an Israeli ship — Moises Naim

Power is the ability to direct or privent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals. — Moises Naim

A US firm with a large "government affairs" division dedicated to lobbying politicians in Washington, a Russian company founded by an oligarch with personal friendships in the Kremlin, and an Indian company finding its way through the tangle of decades-old licensing and bureaucratic requirements face drastically different regulatory environments from one another, let alone from a start-up seeking to enter an industry for the first time. — Moises Naim

power is easier to obtain and harder to use or even to keep. — Moises Naim

And California, long a bellwether for national trends in the United States, has tilted the balance further in favor of voter over party preferences: it agreed by popular referendum in 2011 to have all primary candidates appear on a single ballot, with the top two vote-getters moving on to the general election regardless of party. — Moises Naim

It's virtually an axiom that teamwork across divisions of a ministry or police force is complicated by rivalries, turf battles, and competing personal and institutional interests. — Moises Naim

during transitions to democracy, nations often undergo political convulsions that make them hard to govern, thus feeding nostalgia for their old authoritarian order. — Moises Naim

Economist Peter Orszag witnessed the workings of vetocracy and its nefarious consequences. Writing in 2011, he reflected on what he had just witnessed as one of the top economic policymakers in the United States: "During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse - harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. . . . Radical as it sounds we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic. I know that such ideas carry risk. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: they come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way out of it. — Moises Naim

For instance, the need of large corporations to analyze market opportunities according to established metrics prevented them from grasping the contours of nascent markets emerging around new technologies. Lower short-term profits from these new markets go against the culture of maximizing quarterly share prices. And the dilemma replicates itself with each wave of innovation: as the first companies to exploit disruptive technologies gain and grow, "it becomes progressively more difficult for them to enter the even newer smaller markets destined to become the large ones of the future."47 — Moises Naim

The world's socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes - indeed, of achievements - is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world's population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down - by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population. — Moises Naim

Established politicians are also bumping into a new cast of characters within corridors of legislative power. In 2010 parliamentary elections in Brazil, for example, the candidate who won the most votes anywhere in the country (and the second-most-voted congressman in the country's history) was a clown - an actual clown who went by the name of Tiririca and wore his clown costume while he campaigned. His platform was as anti-politician as it gets. "I don't know what a representative in congress does," he told voters in YouTube video that attracted millions of voters, "but if you send me there I will tell you". He also explained that his goal was "to help needy people in this country, but especially my family". — Moises Naim

He who is active in politics strives for power, either as a means in serving other ends, ideal or egoistic, or as 'power for power's sake,' that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives. — Moises Naim

Short-term travel has quadrupled: in 1980, the number of international tourist arrivals accounted for just 3.5 percent of the world's population, compared to almost 14 percent in 2010.16 Every year, an estimated 320 million people fly to attend professional meetings, conventions, and international gatherings - and their numbers are steadily growing.17 — Moises Naim

For if nature abhors a vacuum, and greed is part of human nature, then greed too abhors a vacuum. — Moises Naim

Power is spreading, and long-established, big players are increasingly being challenged by newer and smaller ones. And those who have power are more constrained in the ways they can use it. — Moises Naim