You really have to be careful with countries; they’re very fragile. They are going to be there only as long as the next generation supports the myths that you believe and support. The economy and life sciences and technology are the gasoline that enables you to survive, but they don’t guarantee your survival. There can be very divisive issues, and if you have that gasoline but do not generate wealth, it will be very hard to keep the engine running. We have to quit having these bitter debates about how everyone on the right is nuts and nasty and antiscience, while everybody on the left is against life and religion. The consequence of pushing that debate forward can tear a nation apart.

How many stars were on the American flag when George Washington was born? None. When Ronald Reagan was born, Alaska and Hawaii were not part of the U.S. The last time the flag changed was 1959. Until you get a president born after 1959 and the flag stays stable, you are not going to have a president buried under the same flag that was flying when he was born. We live in a country that has been around only for five lifetimes, which is not very long. What makes us think this flag is going to be stable? Most countries actually get smaller after independence. In Africa, Asia and Europe the number of nations has tripled since the mid-20th century. It has not happened in North or South America. The Americas is a very strange place.

But we have had a good run, from sea to shining sea and all that.

Our country began in the days of the British Empire, when acquiring land was what made a country rich. The way we generate wealth has changed. Most of the wealth that flows from the United States comes from places like Manhattan, and goes into states that are still agricultural or manufacturing states. In an agricultural economy, you could not remove the fields and mines, which were the sources of wealth, from the land. If you didn’t like the government of that land, you were stuck with it. Today you can take an electronic bank account and transfer most of the wealth offshore without having to move anything physically. Everything will look the same the next morning.

If you look at the wealthiest country on the planet in terms of productivity per person, it is not the United States anymore. It’s Luxembourg. It generates about 33 percent more wealth per person per year than the U.S. does. Even in a small landlocked state, you can generate wealth. Luxembourg has no oil or excess water. Instead it has assets that manipulate data that people need and are willing to pay for. They call them trusts, legal agreements, financial services, futures. Today the most successful nations are those that control the financial sector.

Going forward, the dominant nations will be those that control the evolution of life on the planet, the ones that educate their kids in areas like molecular biology, the ones that build industries around medical treatments involving the genome map.