The End of Power by Moises Naim Page A

religion, and culture. In fact, I have been lucky enough to attend and speak at almost all of the most exclusive power-fests in the world, including the Bilderberg Conference, the annual meeting of media and entertainment tycoons in Sun Valley, and the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund. My 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.
    But this is not a call to feel sorry for those in power. Powerful people bemoaning their powerlessness is certainly no reason for hand-wringing in our winner-take-all world. Rather, my aim is to delineate the impact of the decay of power. In the pages ahead I explore this process of decay—its causes, manifestations, and consequences—in terms of the ways it affects not just the 1 percent at the top but, more importantly, the vast and growing middle class as well as those who seek merely to make it through another day.
    Moisés Naím
March 2013

C HAPTER T WO
M AKING S ENSE OF P OWER
How It Works and How to Keep It
    YOUR ALARM GOES OFF AT 6:45 A.M., A HALF-HOUR EARLIER THAN normal, because your boss insisted that you attend a meeting you think is worthless. You would have argued, but next week is your annual review, and you didn’t want to jeopardize your promotion. An ad plays on your clock radio for the new Toyota Prius: “It gets the best mileage of any car in America.” You’re sick of paying so much every week to fill up your tank. The Joneses next door have a Prius; why not you? Except that you don’t have the money for a down payment. At breakfast with your daughter, you notice that she—despite your offer last week to allow her to listen to music on her headphones if she would eat granola instead of Cocoa Puffs—is sitting there with headphones on and eating . . . Cocoa Puffs. You and your wife argue over who will leave work early and pick up your daughter from school. You win. But you feel guilty and agree to walk the dog as a conciliatory concession. You go outside with the dog. It’s raining. He refuses to move. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to budge him.
    As we make the many big and small decisions that come up in daily life, as citizens, employees, consumers, investors, or members of a household or family, we must constantly bear in mind the scope—and the limits—of our own power. 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, thepolice, 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.
    Sometimes, the exercise of power is so brutal and definitive that it has an enduring half-life. Even though Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi are gone, their victims doubtless still shudder at the mention of their names—an experience commonly shared by survivors of brutal crimes long after the perpetrators have been caught. Past or present, we feel the presence of power, even when it is subtly used or merely displayed.
    Yet whatever the extent to which power is part of our daily lives and on our minds, it eludes our understanding. Except in extreme cases when we are crudely compelled by the menace of handcuffs, fines, demotions, shaming, beatings, or other penalties, we tend to experience power more as emotional coercion than as corporeal force. Precisely