Ideias producentes

Eis um projecto que, implementado, a largo prazo, tem tudo para colher bons frutos. Nada tem a ver com a tremeluzente sandice do «rendimento básico incondicional». Nesta, e desconheço uma série de importantes detalhes, mas, ainda assim, encontro-lhe virtudes dificilmente mensuráveis. É, por exemplo, mensurar o efeito demolidor para a noção de 'vítimas da sociedade'; é, outro exemplo, o efeito 'pedagógico' ao nível da literacia financeira ou da importância da poupança em gerações futuras.

How to prevent a third world war

America and China must learn to live together. They have less than ten years.

IN BEIJING THEY have concluded that America will do anything to keep China down. In Washington they are adamant that China is scheming to supplant the United States as the world’s leading power. For a sobering analysis of this growing antagonism — and a plan to prevent it causing a superpower war — visit the 33rd floor of an Art Deco building in midtown Manhattan, the office of Henry Kissinger.
On May 27th Mr Kissinger will turn 100. Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs, first as a scholar of 19thcentury diplomacy, later as America’s national security adviser and secretary of state, and for the past 46 years as a consultant and emissary to monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. Mr Kissinger is worried.

“Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. “We are on the path to great-power confrontation.”

At the end of April The Economist spoke to Mr Kissinger for over eight hours about how to prevent the contest between China and America from descending into war. These days he is stooped and walks with difficulty, but his mind is needle-sharp. As he contemplates his next two books, on artificial intelligence (AI) and the nature of alliances, he remains more interested in looking forward than raking over the past.

Mr Kissinger is alarmed by China’s and America’s intensifying competition for technological and economic pre-eminence. Even as Russia tumbles into China’s orbit and war overshadows Europe’s eastern flank, he fears that AI is about to supercharge the Sino-American rivalry. Around the world, the balance of power and the technological basis of warfare are shifting so fast and in so many ways that countries lack any settled principle on which they can establish order. If they cannot find one, they may resort to force.

“We're in the classic pre-world war one situation,” he says, “where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”