The end of Power
The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What it Used to Be
Moisés Naím
What it’s about
In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs,Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.
The primary thesis of Moisés Naím's book "The End of Power" is that power is decaying in the modern world, becoming easier to gain but harder to use and maintain. Naím argues that traditional power structures are being challenged and disrupted by smaller, more agile actors he calls "micropowers."
To support this thesis, Naím makes several key points:
Three Revolutions Driving Power Decay
1. The More Revolution: There is a proliferation of people, information, wealth, and resources, leading to more potential challengers to established power.
2. The Mobility Revolution: People, ideas, and activities can move and change more easily, making it harder for power holders to maintain control.
3. The Mentality Revolution: People are increasingly questioning traditional sources of authority and are less willing to defer to established power structures.
Changing Nature of Power
4. Power is becoming more accessible to a wider range of actors, including startups, activists, and fringe political groups.
5. Traditional barriers to power, such as size, scope, and history, are no longer as effective in shielding established players from challengers.
6. Power is dispersing among an increasing number of smaller players from diverse and unexpected origins.
Impact Across Various Domains
7. Political institutions face challenges from micropowers like fringe parties and grassroots movements.
8. Large corporations are threatened by agile startups and changing consumer behaviors.
9. Traditional military forces are challenged by non-state actors and asymmetric warfare.
10. Established religious organizations are losing influence to smaller, more dynamic denominations.
Implications for Governance and Decision-Making
11. The decay of power presents challenges to existing governments and institutions, necessitating a reconsideration of how we govern and manage power structures.
12. This shift creates a paradox where increased freedoms coexist with greater unpredictability and potential instability.
By presenting these arguments, Naím challenges conventional notions about the concentration of power and offers a new framework for understanding the changing dynamics of influence and control in the modern world.
Why I like it
Moisés Naím’s recognition that having a government role to ‘develop the economy’ left him feeling powerless to actually develop the economy when he realized anything he would do would be more likely to slow the economy than accelerate the economy. His realization that in a market economy, the voice of the people controls the pace of growth of the economy more than the policies of the government. In short, the policies of the government can slow the growth of the economy but it cannot accelerate it beyond a certain point. Once the government provides the necessary legal, judicial, and other elements of the financial and economic infrastructure necessary for the market to function, then the best policies to ensure maximum sustainable growth in the economy are those that allow the price mechanism to do its job and otherwise stay out of the way.