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"These books are all linked, no pun intended. Tina Rosenberg had a column for The New York Times called “The Fix”, where she looked at how you fix social problems. One of her answers is that you basically harness peer pressure for good. She would use the example of Alcoholics Anonymous, too. If you want to break your addiction you surround yourself with other people who want to do the same and they will support you. Weight Watchers is another good example. What Rosenberg does in this book is to show that this model can work for everything, from helping kids learn calculus to overthrowing a dictator. She’s gone around the world and examined how the “social cure”, by which she means effectively creating positive peer pressure through small groups, has actually been used to address all these problems. The political example she gives is the group that helped mobilise Serbian society to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic. That group has since held seminars for groups in many, many different countries. This is self-organisation of a particular kind, connecting peers who can support others in very positive behaviours. You’ve got to read the book. In some ways it’s intuitive. Just think about negative peer pressure. When kids get involved in drugs, what’s the explanation we give? We say they’re more responsive to what their peers think than what their parents say. That’s generally true for people across any number of activities. We are social animals; we are highly susceptible to what the people we are closest to think and also what they do. There are all sorts of social cures. If your friends smoke or if your friends’ friends smoke you’re more likely to smoke and the same thing is true of healthy behaviours. What the social cure does is get peers together who support, say, learning calculus in an atmosphere where it’s fine to ask a question, so instead of peer pressure making you feel stupid because you asked a question it makes you feel like you should be asking questions. You’re learning behaviour through different social clues. Not specifically, but yes in a sense. Think about microfinance and how that works. Circles of women support each other in repaying the loans. Or think about one of the things the State Department has done a lot: Fostering entrepreneurship by connecting young entrepreneurs to each other and then to a larger entrepreneurial ecosystem, including investors and mentors. What we’re trying to do is create groups of people who will be very supportive of a young person who has an economic idea and wants to turn it into a business. The State Department is creating youth councils at different embassies, partially to suggest to the ambassador good things for the US embassy to do, but these youth councils are also creating a positive environment in which it’s acceptable for young people in anti-American societies to engage with the United States. It’s more likely that people will do that in a group of their peers than on their own. Let’s look at a situation in which we negotiate with other governments. Secretary Clinton goes to China for an economic dialogue. That’s just what we’ve always done, state-to-state interaction. But she took with her health officials, education officials, environmental officials and border security officials. The issues these officials handle were once purely domestic affairs, but now we are connected to the Chinese and many other nations in how we fight disease, protect the environment, guard against terrorism and promote energy conservation. That’s one part. The second part is look at what happens when she goes. A Chinese dissident who is connected to other human rights dissidents around the world suddenly creates a major crisis in China. The way we address H1N1 and avian flu, problems that are created as a function of our interconnectedness, is not by negotiating treaties with governments. We address problems without borders by actively engaging with both governments and their societies. Look at our outreach to women during the Arab Spring, our efforts to build finance in the Middle East, look at the countless public-private partnerships we are fostering to address health problems and resource scarcity. All of that is foreign policy in a network world. I would say it’s half of what the State Department does and growing. The best evidence is that this is the world in which everybody under 35 lives. The 21st century world is completely interconnected. The cutting-edge businesses in the global economy – Google , Amazon, Facebook , Apple and countless others – are all embodiments of deep network interdependence. Since Robert Wright wrote that a global economic crisis rocked the world, but we know if we try to cut ourselves off from the rest of the globe we will miss all the dynamism and the power of being able to connect with others. So there is no question that interdependence is real. The real question is how to get less of the bad interdependence and more of the good interdependence. The world is moving toward greater interdependence. You can call it soft and ignore it but then you’re going to be left behind."