number 1 son just got back from China, saya they hafve much better, American style, Chinese built cars with much better pollution ratings than ours, much better but crowded public transportation, more and larger variety of food, great accommodations, better University level learning, safer streets, even in the slums, better, cheaper cuter younger hookers, very good night club entertainment, good beer, harder workers at school, cleaner most places, inadequate refrigeration in some stores, - mostly a good report indicating that we Americans can relax into a warm glow of oncoming obsolescence and not worry so hard about being number one. The Chinese have us out ranked in almost every field, and because of their massively larger population pool, graduate more top honors students with amazing abilities from Universities than we have grade school graduates with mediocre abilities. Simply put, they have our asses whipped and will pull ahead of us with stunning speed, leaving us fiddling with "Windows" as the sun sets on the American Empire that didn't quite make it into being the greatest super power in the world, only the most corrupt Empire in the world!
- 1
- 2
Is America Losing At Globalization?
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
More troubling are the signs that the United States has lost its capacity to determine the direction of the global economy. In the past, when American motorists cut back on driving, the price of oil would plummet; in 2008, not so much. This summer the Doha round of trade talks, aimed at lowering trade barriers, ended in failure, despite an aggressive U.S. push. Sean Spicer, assistant U.S. trade representative, said the diffusion of economic power is partially to blame. "The World Trade Organization now has 153 members," he said. "Ten years ago it had 80. And China and India obviously now have bigger seats at the table." Russia's recent actions in the Caucasus have revealed that the United States no longer has the ability to use economic power as a tool of statecraft. How can the Bush administration impose economic sanctions on a government that owns hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. debt?
And we ain't seen nothing yet. Jeffrey Garten, professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management, notes that in 2000, the world's wealthiest countries accounted for about 70 percent of the global economy, compared with 30 percent for developing economies. "At the midpoint of the 21st century, those percentages are going to be reversed," he said.
So must 21st-century America adjust to a humbler role in the world's economy, just as 20th-century Britain did in the wake of the collapse of its empire? Not necessarily. Back in 1992, Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas declared that the cold war was over, and that Germany and Japan had won—right on the cusp of a decade of extraordinary growth for the United States. Globalization doesn't have to be a winner-take-all, zero-sum game. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, notes that exports—up 13.2 percent in the second quarter—have created hundreds of thousands of jobs this year. And there are still plenty of economic events in which the United States sweeps the medals: farming, high tech, higher education, branded goods.
The global economy is no longer an individual event. Now it's more like the eight-person crew. That's an event in which several powerful strokers propel the boat forward through choppy waters. It's also an event in which the American women nudged out furious international competition to win gold.
With Daniel Stone in Washington and Barrett Sheridan and Ashley Harris in New York
© 2008
- 1
- 2
Discuss