For the last couple of hundred years, there have been struggles about this. Even the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the constitution talk about personal rights.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

If the United States is accommodating, the North Koreans become accommodating. If the United States is hostile, they become hostile.

There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.

The majority of the population thinks that if the government runs healthcare, they're going to take away your freedom. At the same time, the public favors a national healthcare program.

So take social media; take a look at the way they're used. In a lot of ways they're used constructively; lot of things are done that couldn't be done before. On the other hand a lot of the effect of social media is to set up extremely superficial contacts amongst people.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.