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Who runs the world?
That’s the subject of my just-released TED Talk. And, believe it or not, it used to be an easy question to answer.
Editor's Note: The following is adapted from this TED Talk. Another version of this appears on the Foreign Policy site.
If you’re over 45, like me, you grew up in a world dominated by two superpowers. The United States and its allies set the rules on one side of the Berlin Wall, while the Soviet Union called the shots on the other. Nearly every other country had to align its political, economic, and security systems with one side or the other. That was a bipolar world.
If you’re under 45, you came of age after the Soviet Union collapsed. The US became the world’s sole superpower, dictating outcomes both through its dominant role in international organizations and also by exerting raw power. That was a unipolar world.
About 15 years ago, the world changed again – and it got a lot more complicated. The United States became less interested in being the world’s policeman, the architect of global trade, and even the cheerleader of global values. And lots of other countries grew powerful enough to ignore rules they didn’t like and, occasionally, to set some themselves. That’s the G-Zero world order I named my media company after and constantly write about – a leaderless world.
Three things happened to cause this “geopolitical recession” – when the global architecture no longer lines up with the underlying balance of power.
First, the US didn’t bring Russia into the US-led international order. Now a former great power in serious decline, Russia has become extremely angry and sees the US as its primary adversary on the global stage. We can argue about who is most to blame for this, but the fact is we are where we are.
Second, the US did bring China into US-led institutions – but on the presumption that as the Chinese grew more integrated, wealthy, and powerful, they would also become American (i.e., a free-market democracy willing to play by the rules without wanting to change them). As it turns out, they’re still Chinese – and the US is not ready to accept that.
And third, the US and its allies ignored the tens of millions of their own citizens who felt left behind by globalization. After decades of benign neglect, most of these citizens have grown fundamentally mistrustful of their governments and of democracy itself, in turn making their leaders less able or willing to lead.
All the geopolitical crises you see in the headlines every day? Over 90% of them trace back directly or indirectly to these three issues.
Yet for better or worse, geopolitical recessions don’t last forever. After all, nature abhors a (power) vacuum. And the coming global order is something very, very different from what we’ve become used to.
Where we are now
We no longer live in a unipolar or bipolar or multipolar world. Why? Because we no longer have superpowers – as in, countries that exert global power in every domain. That’s right, the US and China are not superpowers today. And no superpowers means no single global order. Instead, what we have today is multiple world orders, separate but interconnected.
First, we have a unipolar security order. The US is the only country that can send soldiers, sailors, and military hardware to every corner of the world. Nobody else comes close. America’s role in the security order today is more essential – and indeed more dominant – than it was a decade ago.
China is rapidly growing its military capabilities in Asia, but nowhere else in a significant way. That’s increasingly concerning to America’s Indo-Pacific allies, who now rely on the US security umbrella more than before. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has similarly made Europe the most dependent on US-led NATO it has been in decades. Meanwhile, Russia’s military has been weakened by the loss of over 200,000 troops and much of its critical materiel in Ukraine, all of which it’ll find hard to rebuild in the face of Western sanctions.
Yes, China, Russia, and others have nuclear weapons, but actually using them is still suicide. The US is the world’s sole security superpower – and will remain so for at least the next decade.
We also have a multipolar economic order. There, global power is more widely shared. The US has a robust and dynamic economy, still the world’s largest. But military might doesn’t allow Washington to set the rules for the global economy.
Despite all the talk about a new cold war, the US and China are far too economically interdependent to decouple from each other. Bilateral trade between the two keeps making new highs, and other countries want access to both American muscle and the Chinese market (soon to become the world’s largest). You can’t have an economic cold war if there’s no one willing to fight it.
Meanwhile, the European Union is the world’s largest common market, and it’s able to set rules and standards that the Americans, Chinese, and others have to accept as the price of doing business with it. Japan is still a global economic power, if barely. India’s economy is growing rapidly, and with it, so is its influence on the global stage.
The relative importance of these and other economies will continue to shift over the coming decade, but what’s certain is that the global economic order is and will remain a multipolar order.
Where we’re going
So far, I’ve written about the two world orders we already see. But there’s a third, rapidly emerging order where we find the most uncertainty … and the greatest changes to the world we know: the digital order. There, unlike every other geopolitical order past and present, the dominant actors setting rules and exerting power aren’t governments but technology companies.
You’ve heard how NATO weapons, intelligence, and training have helped Ukrainians defend their land. But if Western tech companies hadn’t quickly come to the rescue in the early days of the invasion – fending off Russian cyberattacks and allowing Ukrainian leaders to communicate with their soldiers on the front lines – Russia would have knocked Ukraine completely offline within weeks, effectively ending (and winning) the war. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say President Zelensky probably wouldn’t be in power today if not for tech companies and their power in the new digital order.
Tech companies decide whether Donald Trump can speak without filters and in real time to hundreds of millions of people as he runs for president again. Without social media and its ability to mass market conspiracy theories, there is no January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, no trucker riots in Ottawa, no January 8 revolt in Brazil.
Tech companies even define our identities. We used to wonder whether human behavior was primarily the result of nature or nurture. No longer – today, it’s nature, nurture, and algorithm. The digital order is becoming a critical determinant of how we live, what we believe in, what we want … and what we’re willing to do to get it.
That’s a staggering amount of power that tech companies have amassed. And it leads to the biggest question for all of us: How will technology companies use their power? The answer depends largely on what they want to be when they grow up. I see three possible scenarios.
If American and Chinese political leaders continue to assert themselves ever more forcefully in the digital space, and if the tech companies then line up with their home governments, then we’ll end up in a technology cold war between the US and China. The digital world will be split in two, other countries will be forced to choose sides, and globalization will fragment to a degree unprecedented in the last several decades.
If the tech companies stick with global growth strategies, refusing to align with governments and preserving the existing divide between the physical and digital fields of competition, then we’ll see a new globalization – a globalized digital order. Tech companies will remain sovereign in the digital space, competing largely with each other for profits – and with governments for geopolitical power much in the same way that major state actors presently jockey for influence in the space where the economic and security orders overlap.
But if the digital space itself becomes the most important arena of great power competition, with the power of governments continuing to erode relative to the power of tech companies, then the digital order itself will become the dominant global order. If that happens, we’ll have a post-Westphalian world – a technopolar order dominated by tech companies as the central players in 21st-century geopolitics.
All three of these scenarios strike me as wholly plausible. Much depends on how the explosive nature of artificial intelligence drives changes in existing power structures, whether or not governments are able and willing to regulate tech companies, and – most critically – how tech leaders decide they want to use their newfound power.
These questions will determine whether we have a brighter future or a world without freedom.
A “techlash” is coming this year
After years of uninhibited expansion into nearly all corners of modern life, consumer internet companies could this year face meaningful action to curb their activities from governments around the world. From Delhi to Dublin, Beijing to Brussels, and Washington to Warsaw, there is real momentum behind unprecedented legislation and stepped-up regulatory enforcement against big tech. In response, these companies will launch forceful advocacy campaigns to try to deflect the most aggressive measures, while modifying their business models and practices in response to the changing environment. We spoke to Eurasia Group expert Alexis Serfaty to get a sense of how the backlash against big tech is likely to play out in three major markets: the EU, China, and the US.
So, what’s in store for these firms in the EU?
A two-pronged strategy is taking shape in Europe. On the one hand, authorities are preparing to ramp up public investment in local technology companies and industries. The Digital Decade 2030 package has committed to spending 150 billion euros ($167 billion) to help reduce the bloc’s dependence on foreign technology by aiming, for example, to double its share of global semiconductor production from 10 percent to 20 percent. The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund is also expected to finance multi-billion-euro investments in areas such as artificial intelligence, 5G, semiconductors, cloud computing, and quantum technologies.
On the other hand, authorities are preparing legislation that will place new restrictions on the activities of US companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon that dominate much of the consumer internet sector. The aim is partly to strengthen user protections and partly to create new space for home-grown alternatives to develop. The Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act will create new obligations for addressing illegal and other harmful content and to stop practices such as targeting ads at users based on sensitive features such as ethnicity or sexual orientation. Consumers would in some instances also have the ability to opt-out of targeted advertising. The legislation will also grant regulators expanded powers to launch investigations and seek remedies for undesired business practices, including breaking up companies in extreme cases.
How about China?
As European regulators move to crack down primarily on US-owned consumer internet companies, their counterparts in China are seeking to rein in the country’s own internet giants. Authorities last year grew concerned that e-commerce firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu had grown too big and powerful after years of laissez-faire regulation and sought to force them into alignment with the government’s own economic priorities. In May 2021, Xi Jinping made a speech on digital economy development calling on tech companies to support the Chinese Communist Party’s plans to invest in areas such as semiconductors, critical infrastructure, and high-end manufacturing.
In a sharp shift, authorities have begun punishing internet firms for anti-competitive practices with unprecedented fines and imposing new restrictions on firms seeking to hold IPOs overseas. They have also launched a series of new laws and regulations, many of which were modeled on tough European data protection and competition rules. These combined actions have signaled that the Gilded Age of online economy growth in China has come to an end. Internet behemoths will have to adjust to a new normal in which they face a regulatory environment comparable to that of traditional industries.
And the US?
The techlash is coming even in the US, where there is bipartisan momentum behind several bills in Congress that threaten large technology companies with significant new regulation. This includes overarching federal privacy legislation, more robust content moderation requirements, and a prohibition on e-commerce companies promoting their own products and services over those of smaller competitors using their platforms. The SAFE Act would expand digital privacy rights and place new obligations on companies regarding data portability and consent. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act would require merging companies to prove that their transactions are good for competition, instead of requiring regulators to prove the opposite as is currently the case.
It is possible that November’s midterm elections will delay much of this legislation in Congress, but federal regulators are poised to step into the breach. The Federal Trade Commission may soon be led by a long-time privacy advocate and embark on an ambitious agenda to regulate privacy and data security using existing legal authorities. Both the Department of Justice and the FTC have filed lawsuits against major tech firms for their alleged anti-competitive practices. The FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, for example, alleges that the tech giant’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp are intended to protect what amounts to an illegal monopoly. These legal cases, however, will take years to play out and will not likely have a direct impact on tech companies in 2022.
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Democrats and Republicans unite! At least against China.
This week, the US Senate passed the so-called Endless Frontier Act, a $250 billion investment in development of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the manufacture of semiconductors, and other tech-related sectors. The goal is to harness the combined power of America's public and private sectors to meet the tech challenges posed by China.
In its current form, this is the biggest diversion of public funds into the private sector to achieve strategic goals in many decades. The details of this package, and of the Senate vote, say a lot about US foreign-policy priorities and this bill's chances of becoming law.
Why did Democrats and Republicans agree to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars? The high-stakes tech competition with China is a threat both parties take seriously. Beijing is directing historic amounts of money toward development of AI and quantum computing technologies that experts say will determine the 21st century's balance of economic, political, and military power.
Just as the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, spurred a surge in US spending and new strategic thinking, Washington is now finally heeding warnings that China has taken a great tech leap forward. Democrats and Republicans may not agree on what aspect of China's rise worries them most, but leaders of both parties see a threat to US competitiveness and national security.
What's in the bill? It focuses mainly on tech, with $120 billion for research and development funding, $52 billion for domestic semiconductor production, and $20 billion for space programs. But it also promotes new strategies to counter China's global influence and punish its abuses at home. For example, it authorizes new sanctions in response to China's crackdown in Hong Kong, its use of forced labor in Xinjiang, its skill in cyber espionage, and its theft of intellectual property. The bill also commissions a new study about the origin of the pandemic and calls for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing by US officials -- though not by US athletes.
What does this bill say about the domestic politics of competition with China? President Biden heralded the news of the Senate passage with a warning for the future: "As other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind. America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth." It's safe to assume that "other countries" mainly means China since the bill explicitly labels that country's government the "greatest geopolitical and geoeconomic threat" to US foreign policy.
But it also makes clear there is strong bipartisan support for the Biden administration's position that the era of engagement with China is over. China's growing power has Washington's attention, and its military expansion, human rights abuses, and tech capabilities, and trade practices ensure there is something for everyone on Capitol Hill to oppose.
China has responded. An official statement says this bill is "full of Cold War thinking and ideological prejudice." It will now be easier for Xi to make the case at home that the US intends to stunt China's growth as a great power. US officials counter that years of unfair Chinese trade practices and President Xi Jinping's newly aggressive foreign policy are responsible for the sharp downturn in relations.
What happens next? The bill now heads for the House of Representatives where its fate is TBD. News coverage rightly focuses on the rarity of 68 Senate votes for any bill of this cost and ambition, but 32 senators voted against it, and their reasoning highlights partisan differences lurking beneath the bipartisan consensus which might force a rework in the lower house.
Thirty-one Republican senators opposed it. Some said it costs too much. Others said it should include funding for border security. Former Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders voted no to protest the amount of money the bill would move from US taxpayers to private-sector companies without enough accountability for how the money is spent. Other Democrats warn that its aggressiveness can make Cold War fears a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We won't know until autumn just how ambitious the final legislation will be, but the bipartisan Senate bill makes clear that the US-China rivalry will only become more intense.
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Is the US military investing in the wrong kinds of weapons?
In comparing the American military defense spending to China's, former US admiral and best-selling author James Stavridis is concerned that the US is too focused on legacy systems. In a conversation with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, he discusses the role of the private sector in the development of US defense capabilities and the need to move towards higher end technologies, which he says China has already done. "They get to make decisions and move out with big land armies, tanks, aircraft carriers in ways we are retarded from doing by the messiness, as wonderful as it is, of our democratic system," Stavridis points out.
Watch the episode: What could spark a US-China war?
Taiwan’s outsize importance in manufacturing semiconductor chips
A big reason the Chinese leader is pushing harder than ever to annex Taiwan is actually quite small. The self-governing island has an outsize manufacturing capacity for semiconductors – the little chips that bind the electrical circuits we use in our daily lives. Cell phones, laptops, modern cars, and even airplanes all rely on these tiny computer wafers. Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC alone makes more than half of the chips outsourced by all foreign companies, which means your iPhone likely runs on Taiwanese-made semiconductors. What would happen to the world's semiconductor chips if China were to take control of Taiwan?
Watch the episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: What could spark a US-China war?
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Xi Jinping expects China to be treated as equal of US
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics on World In 60 Seconds (aka Around the World in 180 Seconds) and discusses Xi Jinping's message to the US, Russia's buildup at the Ukraine border, and Cuba's new leader.
What did you make of Xi Jinping's message to the US at China's annual Boao Forum?
Well, he didn't mention the United States directly, but he basically said that we don't accept hegemonic powers, we don't accept people that are setting the rules for other countries. Basically, consistently Xi Jinping saying that the Chinese want to be treated as equals with the United States. They're going to be rule makers for themselves. The Chinese political and economic system, every bit as legitimate as that of the United States. This is going to be a real fight. The American perspective is that the relationship between the two is going to be very competitive, whether it's a happy competition or an unhealthy competition depends on the Chinese. Xi Jinping's perspective is the Americans are not treating the Chinese with due respect. And that's going to play out on security, it's going to play out in climate, on the economy. I mean, you name it.
Is Russia's increased troop presence at the Ukrainian border really only a military exercise?
No, nothing is ever only a military exercise when the Russians are engaging in this kind of territorial bluster. What they're saying is that they will not be cowed by the Americans. The Ukrainian government acting more independently than had been expected by Putin, putting sanctions under oligarchs that Putin likes and is close to, asking for a membership action plan from NATO. All of that is something that Putin wants to show that Biden doesn't have his back, he's angry at the Ukrainians, and the only way forward is the Minsk Process, and that means tens of thousands of troops. The Ukrainians are not going to provoke by engaging in conflict. I would be very surprised if the Russians actually engaged in any further intervention, actually went across the border. I suspect we'll see a climb down at the end of this two week period, as the Ministry of Defense in Russia said. But they have made it very clear to the Americans that this conflict is not getting resolved easily.
A Castro no longer leads Cuba. Who is the new leader and how will the country change?
The new leader is Miguel Díaz-Canel. He is the first non-Castro to run communist Cuba. This is half a century we're talking about. He's not a former military guy. He's mostly a technocrat, bureaucrat that focuses on the economy. That having been said, still communist Cuba and the United States is not engaging in policies of economic and political opening right now. I do think that's the way forward. I think that if the United States were to go back to the policies that we saw started under President Obama, where you engage in trade, the power asymmetry is so great that as the Cuban economy starts getting more influence and more dependence on American tourists and on remittances and on all of the things that the dominant American economy would provide, the pressure on the Cuban communist government to collapse would be very high. That's the way forward, but there's no political support for that right now. It's not high on the agenda for the Biden administration, so you don't expect it. But with Castro out, makes it easier for some of the members of Congress that have had challenges.
China, US flags
So, are we in a new Cold War or not?
Top diplomats from the US and China will sit down on Thursday for their first face-to-face since Joe Biden took office as US president. Amid deepening tensions over trade, human rights, and technology, the encounter is certain to be a frosty one — and not only because it's in Alaska. Each side will size up the other, make clear its positions, and leave, perhaps without even so much as a closing joint statement.
You'll probably hear and see lots in the next few days about whether the US and China are slipping into a new "Cold War." Well, are they?
The growing rivalry does have a certain 20th-century vibe to it. It's a competition between two nuclear-armed powers with incompatible political systems, playing out across the globe in commerce, technology, and strategic influence.
But this is also very different. For one thing, interdependence is much, much greater. The United States and the Soviet Union had almost no economic ties to speak of. By contrast, the US and China exchange more than half a trillion dollars in goods and services annually, making for one of the top three bilateral trade relationships. China, moreover, owns as much as a trillion dollars in US sovereign debt, and is the largest market for many US firms.
If either economy trips — or is pushed — the repercussions are not only bilateral but global. These are the two largest economies in the world, accounting for 30 percent of global GDP. If US-Soviet mutually assured destruction was a matter of nuclear weapons, the US-China version is that plus the risk of global economic catastrophe.
What's more, this isn't the same zero-sum ideological competition. China and the US have very different political systems. The US is an imperfect liberal democracy, while China is a repressive one party state conducting a massive experiment in techno-authoritarianism. (That's not Daft Punk doing show in a gulag, it's using AI and data not only to keep the trains running, but to shape the behavior of the population.)
Each country is trying to set an example to others — and at the moment democracy is having a tough moment, as journalist Anne Applebaum recently told us. But unlike in the Cold War, neither side is actively — much less violently — exporting a specific kind of governance model that forces third countries to choose sides in ways that imply hard choices about the economic or political system. China, for example, does lots of business with countries that are democratic US allies, and accepting trade and investment from China hardly means renouncing US ties.
The one place where the "Cold War" tag maybe does work? Technology. The United States and China are steadily "decoupling" in the technology sphere — shutting each other out of their technology industries, cutting supply chains, and adopting very different standards for privacy.
And things here really are becoming more zero-sum. Beijing and Washington are pressuring third countries to choose whether to use, say, Chinese-made equipment for their 5G networks or not. There is a danger of the internet and the global tech industry eventually splitting into two rival and incompatible spheres altogether.
And one where it's definitely not helpful. Climate change. There's no serious effort to reduce emissions unless Beijing and Washington, the top two largest polluters in the world sign on. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR's main task was to avoid a conflict that would incinerate the planet. The US and China now have to cooperate broadly to avoid a different, slower burning of the Earth.
And that's the trick for both sides in Alaska and beyond. To figure how to manage potentially unresolvable disagreements on issues like governance, human rights, technology, and trade without rupturing cooperation on broader issues that affect not only China and the US, but the whole planet.
Bill Maher is wrong on China
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Happy Monday, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, I've got your Quick Take to start off the week. And today I thought I would address the question, has China won? My friend Bill Maher made news in his always fun and entertaining and quite enjoyable show with a serious rant this past Friday, saying that "we're not a serious people in the United States, we can't do anything, we can't build anything, while China builds their economy and takes over the world. We lost. We just don't know it yet." Here, take a look.
Bill Maher: In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch. Moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. It's got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do, and a representative government that can't do anything at all.
Now I got to say this, lots of good stuff in there and it's worth a watch, but I don't agree. And yes, I will say so next time I'm on the show.
China's rise is extraordinary. It's now the second largest economy in the world. China is on track to surpass the US economy now in 2028. Though, that's going to push back by at least a couple of years after this year, when the United States grows by probably 8% and China grows by 5% or a little bit less. They're a tech superpower, in relatively short order in some areas of technology, even on parity with that of the United States. But they're still a poor country, quite a poor country. The average income in China just over $10,000, in the United States it's over $50,000. The Chinese market is closed. They don't allow people to get capital out. And the reason for that is because there would be a lot of capital flight for Chinese investors and Chinese people with cash, that understand that the level of uncertainty of what happens to your money in a country like China, a closed economy, is vastly greater, and therefore unsafe, for you for your children for your future, than in an open economy like the United States.
Now, it's certainly true that China builds faster. They invest massively in infrastructure. Anyone that's been to China, and has been there repeatedly, sees how incredibly the landscape has been changing. Top-down, state directed investment. Yes, it's inefficient, but it moves. And it moves on the back of Chinese labor. It moves on the back of the Chinese government driving that strategy. I'd also note that the average building in China, life expectancy of that building before it falls apart, needs to be destroyed and you need to build another one, is about 35 years on average. It's more than double that in the United States. Quality of build, intrinsic corruption, mismanagement, matters a lot in a country that continues to be, yeah, that poor.
Now also keep in mind that after decades of not spending enough in the United States on our own infrastructure, that is about to change. I would make a very strong call that this year, on the back of the $1.9 trillion of relief and stimulus that we've just approved in the United States, on the back of $4 trillion last year responding to coronavirus. Put that together, it's by far the most effective wide reaching economic response of any major economy in the world. The US will also do another $2 or $3 trillion later this year. And if you're worried about the deficit, look, the fact that the United States has been under investing in human capital and infrastructure means we should do that with the world's reserve currency and with low interest rates and with human capital that's very well-educated on average, but has been under invested in. That's going to make a difference.
Further, coming out of coronavirus, best vaccines in the world, most effective new technologies, Moderna and Pfizer. The Chinese also have vaccines that they're rolling out. If you had to take them and you didn't have access to Moderna and Pfizer, you would take them. It looks like they are safe, but they are not as good. And the fact that the Chinese are now saying that they will expedite Hong Kong travel to the mainland if you've taken Chinese vaccines, but not if you've taken the more effective Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, that's not the kind of thing a country does when it's winning.
The Americans have by far the best universities in the world, dominate the league tables. Tsinghua in Beijing will soon enter the world leagues in terms of top universities in the world. And that's really impressive for a country that is as poor as China, but that's it. No other Chinese universities are close. And that's why Chinese families are willing to pay absolutely top rate to send their kids to second and third and fourth tier American universities, because it gives them a shot. Those are the best places to create opportunity in the future. China produces a lot more AI scientists than the United States, and the best of them desperately want to work in American technology companies. They'll make more, the entrepreneurship is there, that's where they can best assure their future.
I mean, I look at even something as simple as air quality. Beijing today, bringing in at 999 air quality index is like through the charts, staggering. Unhealthy to raise your kids in an urban environment like that. New York city today is 26. Because China, a poor country, still has to rely on so much dirty coal to produce their electricity. The United States, we don't. I mean, are there any Americans trying to get out of the US and desperate to live in China? No. While if you're Chinese and you had the opportunity to come to the United States, even though the American political system is deeply flawed, you still really want to be able to come to the US.
I can go on and on. Look, the United States is not the poster child for good governance these days. I've said it before, I will say it again, no one outside the US is looking at the US and saying, "My God, that is the ideal for the way I would want my government, my political system to work." No one's saying that. And in 1989, when the wall came down, a lot of people said that, and that is an embarrassment for the United States. It's something that is deeply flawed, and we need to spend a lot of time working on before we tell other countries how to run themselves. Our political divisions are horrific. The system has sclerosis. The regulatory environment is frequently captured by special interests, against the interest of average American citizens. We need to fix this. We're not fixing this. And as I said, China will become the largest economy in the world. They have 1.4 billion people compared to 400 million in the United States. I mean, it's not all that surprising, but to say that China has won, is emotional. It's not reality. USA.
That's it for this week, be safe and increasingly avoid fewer people. We're getting there.