What Makes a Power Great
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Highlights
- In the struggle for advantage among world powers, it is not military or economic might that makes the crucial difference but the fundamental qualities of a society: the characteristics of a nation that generate economic productivity, technological innovation, social cohesion, and national will.
- Drawing on historical case studies and research on economic development, technological advancement, and much else, we isolated a number of national characteristics that throughout history have underpinned national competitive success—including a strong national ambition, a culture of learning and adaptation, and significant diversity and pluralism.
- We found that nations that demonstrate both absolute and relative forms of competitive success tend to reflect, either in specific periods of ascendancy or longer-term positions atop the global hierarchy, seven leading characteristics: a driving national ambition, shared opportunity for citizens, a common and coherent national identity, an active state, effective social institutions, an emphasis on learning and adaptation, and significant diversity and pluralism.
- The Renaissance ended because the sets of attitudes and beliefs and self-confidence, that energizing myth that [was] the motive power of the Renaissance mind, simply ceased to function. The Renaissance could not continue in the form that it had. It couldn’t be sustained because ultimately the failure wasn’t military or political or economic, although all of these provided the context of the truly great failure which was psychological: The failure of will, the failure to confront the crises that the Italians knew that they were in, the decision—the hard decision, and the decision that is so natural in human nature—to accept what is known and safe and stable.
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The United States faces a strikingly similar peril today. The primary threat to U.S. dynamism and competitive standing comes not from without but from within: from changes in the character of American society. The next great challenge for the United States will be to stimulate a new era of competitive advantage, one that can revive the qualities that powered the country’s rise in the last century as well as sustain them into the next. As it was for Italy at the end of the Renaissance, the ultimate question for the United States is not one of understanding or of capacity to tackle such an undertaking. The question is one of will: whether the United States has the reservoirs of creative determination, national solidarity, and political resolve to meet this weighty challenge.
New highlights added October 24, 2022 at 11:24 PM
- In addition to having a driving national ambition, highly competitive societies tend to share opportunities widely among their citizens. They offer many routes to success and exclude relatively few segments of their population from productive roles—at least as compared with their main rivals. In so doing, they leverage a high proportion of their available talent and provide real prospects to a broad cross section of their population. Over time, societies that exhibit this trait have become more inclusive in various ways, including in granting full rights and opportunities to all social groups and in providing clear pathways to entrepreneurial and creative advancement. Rome, Meiji Japan, and even industrial-era Great Britain gained powerful advantage from versions of shared opportunity that would look incredibly restrictive to modern eyes. But by the standards of their time, these societies generally developed more ways of drawing productive talent from more people than did their competitors. Throughout history, nations that share opportunity among their citizens have gained an edge over those that do not. Rome’s policy of opening citizenship to conquered peoples and incorporating freed slaves into significant social roles gave it economic and military advantages. Likewise, the social mobility afforded by the United Kingdom and the United States gave these powers an advantage over more socially restrictive powers in continental Europe, contributing to their tremendous economic and scientific advancement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Researchers have also found ample evidence for the importance of shared opportunity in narrower, issue-specific studies: inequality is correlated with slower growth and stunted innovation, for instance, and its absence is associated with creativity, innovation, and thus economic growth.