Adolescent Institutions

It’s easy to forget how young many of our institutions are. Yes, some of our most important governing bodies — the Supreme Court, for example — date from the country’s founding. But some of our most important social institutions are still in their adolescence. Social Security was founded in 1935, for example, while Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965.

When I say they are in their “adolescence,” I mean that we don’t fully understand how they will adapt to trends that take decades to materialize. Social Security and Medicare, for example, were established at the beginning and end, respectively, of the baby boom. As those baby boomers begin to retire, the number of workers remaining to support these two programs is far smaller than initially predicted, thanks to declining birth rates. How these institutions evolve to meet this challenge remains to be seen.

The same is true of international institutions. The United Nations and the IMF were founded in 1945, the European Union in 1993 and the World Trade Organization in 1995. Since the end of the Second World War, there’s been an uninterrupted period of support for an expansion of the international system. Today the tides are changing. Brexit, Trump’s election, and the rise of nationalist candidates across Europe indicate a waning of that support. How these institutions evolve to meet this challenge also remains to be seen.

One of the central questions of this era is what will happen to these institutions. Although they have provided a foundation for the longest period of relative peace and greatest expansion of prosperity the world has ever seen, they are viewed with distaste and distrust by millions of people across the U.S. and Europe. If they are to endure, leaders will need to identify how these institutions have left people behind and move quickly to make them more responsive. Otherwise, they will lose support and wither away.

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