Chapter 20

IAN BREMMER

Founded global political risk research and consulting firm Eurasia Group

Created first global political risk index

Author of several books, including The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and Corporations?

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Bremmer looks young for his age of 40. But he has always looked young compared to those around him. Like when he went to Tulane University on an academic scholarship. Of course, he was only 15 then. And he was younger than the other teachers at Stanford University when he got his PhD at 24.

But what strikes you about Ian is not how young he looks, but how wise he sounds, and how easily he can talk about world issues, whether it’s on NPR, CNBC, or across the table at brunch at one of his favorite quaint restaurants in Washington, D.C., where I last saw him in person.

As he talks about the most complicated financial issues, drawing from his travels around the world and his one-on-one discussions with top global political and business leaders, the course of conversation flows as breezily as if he’s talking about who’s going to win the next U.S. Open tennis tournament.

But you suddenly realize he’s talking about something like the political shifts going on in Uzbekistan, or the undercurrent of generational unease in Saudi Arabia. He makes you feel smart simply because you can digest what he’s saying so readily. But don’t be fooled. This is someone who not only knows from personal experience what’s going on around the world, but also has the book learning that would put you to shame all by itself.

In fact, he gave up a bright, cushy future as a professor at Stanford University in order to start his own private-sector political consulting company, Eurasia Group. He explains:

I was too young. The idea of sitting in a beautiful office and thinking glorious thoughts is fine when you’ve had a great life and you’re 60. But when you’re 24 and you’re entrepreneurial, if you want to accomplish something, if you think that you can actually make a difference in the world, you can’t sit. You’ve got too much wound-up energy.

Eurasia Group now has research analysts throughout the world in order to assess the political and financial risk of investing in roughly 80 countries. He provides the research to Wall Street and inside the Beltway, and to multinational corporations. (He maintains homes in New York and Washington, with offices in both of those locations as well as in London.) Through his company he feels he has more of an effect on the world than if he had stayed in the comfortable confines of academia.

“Without wanting to criticize 90 percent of the people who are actually teaching, the fact was when I was 24, I felt like a fraud. If I were going to go and declare my unabashed expertise and be able to mold young minds, I’d better teach them about the way the world really works. But I don’t think I knew very much about how the world really works, but you can pretend that you do when you’re in that milieu.”

Ian Bremmer’s Best Mistake, in His Own Words

When you get a full scholarship to go to one of the best schools to get your PhD, you’re told that you’re a success only if you become an academic. You become an academic at the best school and you teach—you devote your life to the academy.

I think that’s a mistake. I didn’t know it at the time. And the best mistake I ever made is that I listened to those people. So when I finished my PhD I was convinced I should be an academic.

I got into that and I did the research and I started doing the teaching. And you really hole yourself up. You go into the stacks and you do your research and you take all your book knowledge and you pass it on to the students.

Being in front of a classroom of people that are very smart, roughly your age—frankly, some of them are older—when you have no experience, when you’ve done nothing, you’ve not seen the world, then you can’t have pride in your knowledge.

I may have been entertaining, but I don’t think I had much to offer. And I think it gave me a great sense of how important it was to apply knowledge.

Their parents were paying $30,000 a year to send them to Stanford to hear from somebody—a lot of somebodies, frankly—that had never really done anything in the real world.

After you finish a lecture, after you finish the course, you see what’s happening in the world. These things actually matter to people’s lives. I mean, these things are happening in the real world. You’re talking about political context. The realization comes over a period of time that you don’t really have the ability to make a connection with that.

For instance, you have genocide in Darfur, but you have no way of describing that because you haven’t been there; you haven’t lived through it. You have high-level negotiations in a summit, but you haven’t been to a summit, so you don’t know what a summit’s like.

Whether it’s talks on proliferation, whether it’s ethnic conflict, whether it’s European Union accession talks, you’ve never been involved in any of those things.

And also you’ve never been responsible for analyzing them and then being accountable for whether you’re right or wrong.

What the PhD learns is how to hedge, because you have to be right all the time. And the only way to be right all the time is if you can never really be wrong.

So typically when you’re asked what’s going to happen, you hedge. You don’t really want to say, because you don’t really want accountability of that research being wrong.

If you’re in the markets, if you’re a businessman, you don’t have the luxury of being able to hedge. You can do it when you’re giving a speech, but you can’t do it when you’re making a decision. And in the real world, decisions have to be made.

I guess the real thing is when you’re an academic you don’t have to make decisions. But when you want to teach people about how decisions are made, you have to have made decisions yourself. I think it’s critical.

 

Q. So you started Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm. Do you feel like you’re making a difference now?

Yes. The world is changing too fast for me to try making a difference one person at a time. Because the best academics, that’s what they do. They make a major difference in individual students’ lives. And over time, that has a trickle-down effect and before you know it it’s been a generation and it makes a big difference.

But if you want to understand international politics, it strikes me that you’re going to learn the most from people who have in some way been practitioners. There aren’t many policy people who have actually been in the private sector. I like to think I’m now one of them.

About Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm.

In 1998, Bremmer founded Eurasia Group with just $25,000. Today, the company has offices in New York, Washington, and London, as well as a network of experts and resources around the world. Eurasia Group provides financial, corporate, and government clients with information and insight on how political developments move markets.

Bremmer created Wall Street’s first global political risk index, and is the author of several books, including The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which was selected by the Economist as one of the best books of 2006, and The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing (Oxford University Press, 2009). His latest book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and Corporations? (Portfolio, May 2010), details the new global phenomenon of state capitalism and its geopolitical implications. Bremmer is also a frequent writer and commentator in the media. He writes “The Call” blog on ForeignPolicy .com and is a contributor for the Wall Street Journal; he has also published articles in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. He is a panelist for CNN International’s Connect the World and appears regularly on CNBC, Fox News Channel, National Public Radio, and other networks.

Bremmer has a PhD in political science from Stanford University (1994), and was the youngest-ever national fellow at the Hoover Institution. At present he teaches at Columbia University, and he has held faculty positions at the EastWest Institute and the World Policy Institute. In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. His analysis focuses on global macro political trends and emerging markets, which he defines as “those countries where politics matter at least as much as economics for market outcomes.”