Can democracy survive without reading?

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People around the world are reading less. In the United States, the share of people reading for pleasure dropped by 40% over the last 20 years, according to a study from the University of Florida and University College London. And literacy levels are quote declining or stagnating in most developed countries, according to a 2024 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the OECD. Writer James Marriott says this dramatic decline in reading is dangerous for democracy.

His recent essay is called The Dawn of the Post Literate Society. and in it, Marriott writes, quote, Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by Print, Many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants, moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

James Marriott is a columnist at the British newspaper, The Times. He also writes a Substack newsletter called Cultural Capital, and it's there that we found. his recent essay on democracy and literacy. And he joins us now. James Marriott, welcome to On Point.

Thank you very much for having me. When you define the age of print, I presume that is from what the invention of the printing press and thereafter. The case I made in my essay, and you know, this is something that historians could quibble about endlessly, was that the real age of the beginnings of mass literacy began in the middle of the eighteenth century. We we know that literacy has always been an elite skill for basically the whole of human history. And

That was still somewhat true after the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Books were still expensive, education was still expensive, and literacy was still. pretty much limited to a relative social minority of fairly wealthy people. It was in the eighteenth century books began to get a bit cheaper and this infrastructure of knowledge

began to grow up. Things like reading clubs, lending libraries, coffee houses where you could go and read a newspaper, and Suddenly, for the first time in history, it began to be the case that ordinary people have access to literacy and have access to the

I mean the power of knowledge that is contained in books and it's so easy to be blasé about that now. We're surrounded by information. But that world before what's sometimes called the reading revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century, in the middle of the seventeen hundreds.

It's really hard for us to grasp quite how restricted that knowledge environment used to be. If you lived in a village in rural France, your understanding of history, your understanding of political developments, your understanding of geography, all these things were just It's really hard for us to get our our our heads around how limited that that intellectual world was.

Before the eighteenth century, people sometimes talk about an age of European absolutism, autocratic monarchs, that's sometimes referred to as a culture of representation. the monarch relied on very visual, very imagistic propaganda to impose his authority on his people. This was a a world of parades, of magnificent paintings.

of fireworks displays, of Louis the Fourteenth dressed up in thousands of jewels, taking part in a ballet. It was not a political culture that particularly relied on the idea that it needed to be intellectually justified. The feudal hierarchy in Europe was a kind of emotional and visual experience that aimed to persuade through the image and and through feelings. What began to change in

the eighteenth century was that people began to be able to see behind that amazingly impressive visual facade. People began to write accounts of injustice and the way that power was abused that because There was a readership for print that could be circulated through the population. So There's a historian called Robert Darnton who sometimes talks about yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r

That exposed abuses of power. There was a kind of genre of people who would be imprisoned in the Bastille arbitrarily by the state and they would write a memoir about it. So two of the famous memoirs are by uh a writer called Longay and another another writer called Mirabeau. These became huge underground bestsellers and were widely read, and people had access to information about the way that power was being abused. Which in a way, in our world of newspapers and

the internet and tweeting sounds so obvious, but this was really quite unprecedented. Kind of detailed and fairly accurate information about abuses of power by the government had just never really been able to circulate like this like this before.

You know, I'm thinking of what democracy say as it emerged in the age of enlightenment, what actually it meant on the ground, versus how we understand it today. But I do still see some of the connections that you're talking about, James, because

it's not just the rise of literacy itself. I also feel that literacy allowed people who did not have the time uh it was faster to read those those documents if they could get a hold of them than in you know, finding someone who knew someone who knew someone who had spoken to someone that said, perhaps we should look at, say, hereditary monarchy differently. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw.

or songs, but that information was very unreliable and not particularly detailed. And yeah, as as you say, it's the access to

relatively detailed information among a wider and wider portion of the population that can read. The other thing is that the effect of literacy spreading literacy reaches a tipping point where it begins to be the case that you don't have to be literate to read a newspaper because there are enough literate people around that you can gather together and your literate friend will read out the news uh from from from the daily news sheet or w or whatever it is how you're getting that information.

So the effects really compound and estimates for the numbers of people reading a particular newspaper in the eighteenth century are really high. You know, as many as hundreds of people could read a single copy. So this information really When it crossed that tipping point, a real floodgate opened. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. When a geopolitical crisis hits,

How should a board respond? Perhaps by helping the company find its core values. Who are we? What is our vision? What is our strategy? As an organization, what is our ethos? What are our morals and values? Follow is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast to preview a recent episode.

James, in your essay, you frequently um cite the work of Walter Ong, right? He's a uh Jesuit priest, or now now deceased, but Jesuit priest and professor who studied oral cultures uh and literacy. And we have a little bit of tape here from a nineteen seventy-two. lecture that Aung gave where he explains how he thought writing and literacy changes how people think.

Once you get writing, you can write a thing that we would call a treatise, something like Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. This is a completely new experience for the human mind. No human mind had ever gone through that kind of motion where you show that this

It is due to this and this is due to this and this is due to these three factors and each of those are due to these four others. You can't do that in the neural culture. You can't get'em lined up like that. You can't have this linear or causative development to any extent. James, why do you cite on so much in your book? I think Walter Ong interests people so much because he is such an acute

critic of the way that literate societies, societies whose communication is structured through writing and especially through print, differ from oral societies. And I think people find him particularly interesting because he posited this idea of what he calls secondary orality, which is

the notion that as we move away from the age of print And as our communication is increasingly structured through oral mediums or audiovisual mediums like uh television and the radio and, you know, he didn't live to see it, but things like TikTok and Instagram reels and YouTube. Our society begins to look a lot like the kinds of societies, or at least strikingly like, the kinds of societies that preceded the invention of print. They tend to be somewhat restricted in the complexity of

thought that's available to them. They can't write long philosophical treaties. they tend to be more agonistic in their in their debating style. They don't have that kind of cooling, rationalizing influence on thought that you have when something's written down in a book and taken out of the sphere of human beings talking and arguing and fighting with each other.

So his idea that we might be returning to this more irrational, more conflictual and uh I guess less intellectually complex society, I I think has

chimed with a lot of people and it it certainly chimed with me. Okay. So here's where um this sort of causal chain wobbles for me a a little bit, James, because I think back to, let's say, the ancient Greeks. They had writing, of course. But The concept of a Socratic dialogue

which was oral, is one of the the highest means of the uh deepening of thought and knowledge. And unlike what Ong says, I think you can make an argument that through things like Socratic dialogue you can actually build a logical chain of evidence and uh therefore present a coherent thought in the way that Aung is saying only writing can do, and even to this day.

in US courts and I believe it's the same in in Britain, separate from the uh th the writing the documents that are submitted in evidence, but the actual things that happen in court is almost entirely based on the persuasiveness of an oral argument. So I guess what I'm trying to say here, James, is regarding things like TikTok or social media in general.

Perhaps the problem isn't necessarily that things are coming at people in tiny five second, ten second bites, but it's the type of orality that is favored on social media, meaning the problem is the business model, which favors basically brain rot content, and not a means by which to actually deepen knowledge, even if it comes in smaller chunks.

Yes, I I agree with you. And I d I don't think any wood anyone would mistake uh most TikTok videos for a Socratic dialogue. Although in in uh Well they could I mean this but the point I'm making is that the social media companies could they're terrified of not making money. So you know, it's it's it's that uh it's that capitalism is what's really changing our relationship to democracy and not necessarily a a reduction in resources.

So I think the idea that these Socratic dialogues are a purely verbal form is maybe a little bit misleading because they were written down. It's not surprising, I guess, that Plato wrote in the form of dialogue because Ancient Greece, although writing had arrived, was still a largely oral culture and it had a tradition of

almost to the end of his life he was endlessly revising the first sentence in the first chapter and rewriting it and going back and rewriting it. So although these appear to us like spontaneous verbal, oral conversations that happened in Plato's living room and he just drops into his friends and Socrates starts chatting away. I think that's a bit misleading and I think I think your cautionary notice t is totally correct and

you know, the twenty first century is extremely different to ancient Greece. But we shouldn't be led astray by the fact that written documents ha are presented to us as Uh a spoken dialogue. Yeah, no, your point is well taken actually, and um it reminds me of a phrase that you refer to uh multiple times that many people know.

about the medium is the message. And the m medium of a Socratic dialogue is actually it's not, as you say, a common conversation or argument. It is a slow down, deliberative thinking process. So I do take your point.

Let me bring Adam Garfinkel into the conversation now. He's a senior fellow at the Niskanin Center and author of a substack called The Raspberry Patch. And in 2020, he wrote a piece in the journal National Affairs titled The Erosion of Deep Literacy. Adam, welcome to On Point. Well thank you. It's uh nice to sort of meet you. Nice to sort of meet you as well. I call this meeting. Um

full full stop. But there's something I'd like to start with you with something that uh James wrote in his piece because he accurately described the advent of mass literacy um as a kind of a shock to the powers that be at the time. It was described as James writes it, it was described as a fever, an epidemic, a craze, a madness, and that p the conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted

that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries. And I think, oh, this sounds familiar. So should we just sort of check ourselves a little bit in terms of perhaps the the critics doth protest too much? Let me just say first of all that the the subject that we're trying to get arms around is a capaciously complex subject with many, many layers.

And it uh it tries the imagination even to just talk about it. This is why literacy is so important, because when you can sit down slowly and at your own pace and read about it. I think it's much easier to gain uh the kind of com understanding of this kind of complexity that we're talking about. Can I just jump in here, Adam? Because I really appreciate that you said that'cause I wish I had a five hour long podcast. Essentially sadly I do not.

But uh I'd be down for that. I was sp well when when our producer Claire was working on putting together the show, I thought I told her how ironic is it that we're trying to have this conversation about literacy and democracy, but I still have to answer to the demands of the medium that we're going to be in. Meaning I have to like Yeah, exactly. But but go but go on. Go on.

First of all, we've been talking about democracy. That's the sort of the title of the show. I think that's that's a little bit misleading. I think what James says is true that democracy would be strained very much if the erosion of deep literacy reaches certain thresholds. But we're really not talking just about democracy, or in my opinion, even mainly about democracy. We're talking about classical liberalism. Mm-hmm.

In the United States in particular, when people say democracy, they mean liberal democracy. But this is misleading because if you think about the the the elements of what liberalism was in at the at the cusp of modernity. And you then apply um uh James's kind of analysis, which is which is not just his, of course.

to how deep literacy changed the relationship between an individual sense of agency or conscience on the one hand with what what what had gone on beforehand in in medieval times, earlier times. uh where agency was more communal rather than individual. I mean all the hallmarks of modernity show forth in in liberalism. Only some of them show forth in democracy, which is after all just a way of electing leaders in a popular sovereignty framework. So that's the first point. Second point.

There is a very uh important neurocognitive aspect to this whole subject that we haven't touched on yet. Um Deep literacy. It's the twinning of deep literacy with the coming of the Internet Age. the smartphones and all the distractions, the electronic distractions of of people staring for hours and hours at two dimensional screens.

because the the former operates as an opportunity cost on on on the latter. You you can't be spending a lot of time reading and and doing slow thinking and trying to understand what you're what you're getting at if you're spending four or five hours a day playing video games, steering at screens.

and making yourself crazy with with spectacular kinds of, you know, I mean everything on the screens, a lot of the entertainment is really like it reminds me a lot of, you know, the two headed carnival cat. or what you used to see in Ripleaks, believe it or not. It's designed to essentially uh addict you to distraction, as former Senator Ben Sass y uh put it one time. Well I don't think you'll find any disagreement here amongst James and and I with that point.

Adam, give me your take, if you can, about specifically how you see a reduction in the deep reading, the deep literacy that you talk about, having an impact on the strength of liberal democracy.

If you take a definition of modernity, let's say Daniel Bell's definition of modernity, it really consisted of three things. Individual agency over communal agency. Secularism not just in politics, but also in the art. And it consisted of basically the Whig idea of history, which is the idea of progress. that moral and material progress could walk hand in hand.

What these things have in common was a a truly truly revolution in thought that was enabled by literacy, which was the end of the zero sum. I mean the idea that uh there could be positive sum arrangements in social orders if institutions were designed with that in mind. We call our social order basically uh our the way we think about our roles in society as sort of modular. And that that's a function of being able to balance and juggle s you know more identities than than just one.

In a much more interdependent kind of society. Before literacy, uh the mate the main social structure that was tribal. And I think we've seen lots of comments recently about how we are returning to a virtual tribal way of thinking about uh who we relate to. But the the nature of authority is is just as important, perhaps more important. Max Weber very famously distinguished between three kinds of authority.

Charismatic authority, traditional authority, and formal legal authority, formal authority. James already mentioned that you know you have to be literate in order to have rule of law because the law is written down. That's exactly right. But so we have been in the third stage of Max Weber's uh forms of authority now uh for many, many years. uh basically since the the end of the divine right of kings and the rise of the rise of democracy

But now we are retreating to charismatic authority. I once wrote an article which I called Donald Trump uh the uh shaman in chief. And I think he relates to his I think he relates to his followers followers like a shaman related to to his to his his accolades. in in pre-literate times. Well Adam Garfingel and James Marriott uh we'll take a quick break and come right back and I have some examples of maybe how literacy and democracy aren't that closely related, but we'll be back. This is on point.

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I just want to let you know about something we're working on for the near future. And that is the fact that in the United States, the nation's largest educational research organization, they have an annual conference.

And some uh analysts recently looked at the kinds of talks that were given in this conference, and they found that overwhelmingly, The talks are about things like resistance, about things like equity, et cetera, et cetera And they're not about the things that teachers themselves say they need more research on, which is Discipline, or how to better teach things like literacy, classroom management. Basically, the argument is that there's a huge gap between what

Uh, but what researchers think educators need to know and what educators want to know. So if you're a teacher out there or an education researcher, What do you think about this gap? And what do you want more education research to go to, to focus on? Let us know at the on point vox pop app. If you don't already have it, go to wherever you get your apps and look for on point vox pop. You can also leave us a voicemail at 617-353-062.

eight three. So really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Okay, back to our conversation today with Adam Garfinkel and James

Marriott. James, let me return to you because um Adam brought up A a good point about him as he as he calls President Trump the shaman in chief, rather than a president of a liberal democracy, or that that's how his relationship to his uh base is. You make a similar point in your uh essay about how a post-literate society really favors populism or populism feeds on a post-literate society. Tell me more about that.

Yeah, totally. I I thought I think it's such a good point and to me he's totally a shaman as well. There was an interesting study that was done, I think, last year in Romania that found uh saturation of TikTok usage in the population correlated with

uh propensity to vote for a far right candidate in the election. And I think It seems to me pretty obvious that the the causes behind that correlation are are that easy, simple, emotionally satisfying messages really work on TikTok and the old fashioned, I guess, more to t maybe to me a new, more more thoughtful and more complex politics that's more prepared to deal with difficulty and more prepared to feel with ideas that sound a bit counterintuitive.

really, really struggles in this in this new medium. You know, I wonder if we're idealizing what we believe a liberal democracy to be. And Adam, I'm gonna turn this one to you. And here's why I ask that.

Because it's within this very uh this liberal democracy that the United States currently still has. that some of the most deeply literate people using this medium of writing to advance very ill liberal policies. And in fact this is something that uh Eric Levitz, who's a senior correspondent at Vox,

that h that he mentioned. Now he uh shares the concern about declining literacy, but he argues that you don't need to be someone with a lower level of literacy to support far left or far right political views. In the United States, some of the most foremost proponents of of right-wing authoritarianism, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, this Silicon Valley blogger who supports monarchy, and you know, the vice president J.D. Vance. Adam what do you think about

Well that's certainly true. There are some new right intellectuals. uh and they are responding to, I think, a sense of discontent with the functioning of democracy in the United States, uh among middle classes and others. Part of the reason is that the Uh the tenured elite, and I'm not talking about the uh the the digital corporate elite that are now inside uh the second Trump administration. I'm talking about

Just you know, the elites, the cognitive elites from the both Democratic and Republican Party and from the universities and from high journalism haven't really done a great job uh in a lot of people's estimation. Um People are pessimistic about the future of the country. The middle class feels as though it's been it's been kind of strung out and taken advantage of. You know, and a lot of that happens to be right. Um populist grievances don't come out of thin air.

Uh but what uh what pi someone like Russell Watt and the Vice President and Curtis Yarvin and and those folks do is they have megaphoned this using new kinds of technology as well as old kinds of technology to create a kind of a conflict entrepreneurship. in order to use it politically to gain to gain audiences. Uh and and by the way, you know, the sort of level of irrationality and and uh the appeal of spectacle.

and the uh the emotional visual emphasis of the kind of media that most people are looking at now, it doesn't only have effects, deranging effects on the right, it also has had plenty of deranging effects on the left. I mean the moderates in the middle in a situation like that effectively disappear. And this is not good for the country. This is not good for the idea of a loyal opposition. This is not good for deliberative discourse.

This is not good for actual policy making as opposed to just screaming at each other. Yeah. So this is not good. Well, so James, let me turn back to you and I want to continue to stress test this theory, all right? Um, because I'm thinking that even after the advent of mass literacy, It in fact was that mass literacy and the fact that um people could shape a message that could r reach many more folks than it did before um, you know, m more human beings knew how to read.

That actually allowed some aspects of repression and suppression to endure. And here's what I mean. It was, you know, frequently the Bible that misogynists and that racist look to to find justification for denying women the vote, denying them the chance to own property, for, you know, denying black Americans their basic human right. And they were able to get that message across by writing, et cetera, et cetera, that look, God says

Okay, and that couldn't have happened without m many people ha many of them having ha learned how to read because they were told they needed to read the Bible. Okay. So w w you you can reject that in a second, but I just wanna add one more thing.'Cause this is this is where Eric Levitz, who we talked to, i is heading to. He actually makes the argument That it was non-literary technologies that, in a sense, actually helped expand.

The benefits of liberal democracy to these very groups I'm talking about, to women and black and brown Americans. And here's what he said. The nineteen sixties is when television is is really penetrating throughout the entire society. And it's it's also when we have the triumphs of the civil rights movement, which were directly aided by news coverage of Bloody Sunday, these protests, and that helped to galvanize the sense in in DC that that something needed to be done. Go ahead, James.

I guess the first thing to say is that when I talk about the benefits of literacy, my argument is not that every single book is better than every single TikTok video or that every single newspaper article is better than every single youth video. That's clearly not the case at all. And there have been many

uh you know disastrous and depraved very well read people in history. The argument is more about general biases and culture. And the argument is only that a literate culture is more generally biased towards ymwneud â ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd

Th the second point about uh literacy as an instrument of oppression, I've no doubt that you could find uh historical instances of that that that would be convincing. I I have to say I think probably

the overall effect of literacy has been in the other direction. Uh there's a great book by a historian called Lynn H Hunt, uh Inventing Human Rights. And sh the point that she makes is that uh novels and the growth of the novel in the late eighteenth century was a really important opportunity in history whereby ordinary people, sitting alone in their living rooms, could insert themselves into the consciousnesses of people quite unlike them.

and rather than being restricted to your uh immediate personal environment that your family, your town, your tribe, you suddenly have this opportunity to kind of uh s time travel or space travel into other minds. And she said this was a really important

uh part of a really important m m m means of expanding empathy. And I think you n you mentioned slavery. We we know that a really important uh tool of ymwneud â phobl yn ymwneud â phobl yn ymwneud â phobl yn ymwneud â phobl oedd ymwneud â phobl oedd ymwneud â phobl oedd ymwneud â phobl oedd ymwneud â phobl oedd ymwneud â phobl. of people they could never have met in their ordinary lives and suddenly were able to put themselves in their shoes.

to be clear, I'm not at all advocating that we return to a a time where where reading is something that we all barely d barely do. I mean, I think literacy is one one of the greatest advancements in uh human thought and eventually uh human equality that we've had. I'm just trying to temper my own skepticism about the medium, right? Because, you know, Eric's example of, well, once people master all the different kinds of potentials of a new technology.

They turn out to be sort of less expressly bad than they were before, right? I mean literacy is one example. Uh television, another. Obviously radio has its own colorful history. But even with social media, we're already we saw years ago, well, the Arab Spring. That w happened effectively because of the speed with which social media was able to connect.

people. And I'm just wondering as we get further on in the digital age, could we look back and say, well, okay, we learned how to best use the technology and so therefore it wasn't as catastrophic as Oh such a such a qu well the you picked the Arab Spring that's quite an example because

Uh after the Arab Spring from two thousand eleven ever since there still isn't a single Arab democracy. So I'm not sure that's the best example. Yeah, good point. It caused a lot of civil war and a lot of a lot of mass last lot of mass murder. I'm not sure but that's a good that's a good point that you raise. I mean you look

Um, television and even l uh just literacy before just the newspaper, especially the uh the increasing r l rates of literacy among women in the United States in the eighteen forties and the eighteen fifties corresponding to the second great awakening. uh uh all the great advances in social in so social justice in the United States the abolition movement, women's suffrage, the labor movement, all of that was propelled largely by by female literacy.

Uh uh so there uh and it's th there's lots of examples of of terrible people using using literacy to do terrible things. My favorite example uh comes not that long after Gutenberg, you know, starts printing all those Bibles in 1455. And this is a guy named Heinrich Kramer. who writes a book called Um Malius Malefactorum about witchcraft and he starts a trend that that in that gets hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women lynched for witchcraft all across Europe.

That was a use of literacy, but not a very positive one. So this is a very mixed bag. And it will always be a mixed bag. Well, Adam Garfinkel, I'm gonna have to take it back from you there. Adam is a senior fellow at the Niscainen Center and author of The Erosion of Deep Literacy. Adam, thank you so much. My pleasure. James, let me give you the the last word here because of course I want to ask you what can be done about this. And here is where my skepticism runs very deep.

I don't know if this is true in the UK, but in the United States in schools right now, teachers are redo are less and less using whole texts to teach because they report that children don't even or young people don't have the endurance to even read an entire book. So what can we do about this?

Yeah, I I have to say I I'm pretty pessimistic. I I think we really are living through a civilizational inflection point. And I think we may discover that just as uh the feudal autocratic Europe was a function of an information environment that was highly visual and pre-literate, Rydyn ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd.

will very likely take democracy with it. My personal kind of call to arms is that I've got rid of my smartphone. I find it quite sinister that these addictive personal entertainment devices are increasingly I you know, I think almost virtually compulsory and everybody has to have one. I I don't think by any means that everyone will give up their smartphone. I would say there are good options for dumb phones out there, dumb phones that have

WhatsApp and Google Maps, for instance, as mine does. And I think if you can opt out of the dawning age of the screen, we can create a little band of people who perhaps can be a bit of a resistance to this and perhaps can stand up for

you know, I I think a more a better and more deeply thoughtful way of doing things. But you know, I I I think in historical terms we're probably not going in a good direction. James Marriott's substack is called Cultural Capital. James, thank you so much. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. This is on point. Psychologist David D'Steno studies gratitude. In one experiment about money, he found that people lied about Anywhere between thirty and seventy percent of people will lie.

Then he asked for one tiny change. He asked them to feel grateful about something. It drops cheating down to like 2%. How gratitude makes you a better person. That's on the next on point. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode that asks how boards are. how boards should navigate geopolitical tensions.

Kurt, I think that your intuition about board dynamic dynamics being stressed is exactly the point. I think that in two thousand twenty five the biggest problem is board bandwidth because we ask boards so much. We ask them to deal with those geopolitical tensions and we ask them to cyber security. Cybersecurity and the climate and or by the way, also the normal things of financial reporting and succession planning and hire the CEO and executive pay.

And even if the directors are really, really great and they're independent and they expert and they have all the information. You you need like the perfect dynamics, the perfect processes, the perfect pre-reading, pre-meeting materials. You need everything to be perfect. just in order for you to fit all those huge issues into one agenda.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Mayrotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at IBMS.bu.edu.