reports of america's decline exaggerated

James Fallows has a typically well-researched, thoughtful and balanced piece on whether predictions of America's decline are like all the other ones we've heard over the past century (ie exaggerated, albeit sometimes productive) or actually really true this time. He lands, for the most part, on the former interpretation. America's greatest long-term strength is still its openness - that people can come from anywhere and put down roots relatively easily. A modern economy runs on talent, and America is able to draw on a greater global pool than anyone else. As Fallows puts it, the countries that are as open as America (Australia, Canada) aren't as big, and the countries that are as big (India, China, a unified Europe) aren't as open. That won't change for the foreseeable future.

But he warns of the one thing that might screw it all up: America's political system, which is increasingly incapable of dealing with long-term issues. Great at doling out goodies and terrible at confronting problems, it's become something like a comfort eater who is now too obese to move (my metaphor not his).

Read the whole thing. On the "things aren't as bad as they say" side of the ledger, I found this a striking fact:

Each fall, Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University produces a ranking of the world’s universities based mainly on scientific-research papers. All such rankings are imprecise, but the pattern is clear. Of the top 20 on the latest list, 17 are American, the exceptions being Cambridge (No. 4), Oxford (No. 10), and the University of Tokyo (No. 20). Of the top 100 in the world, zero are Chinese.

There's one minor flaw in Fallows's piece. He refers more than once to the "tea bag" movement and at one point implies it's little more than a racist counter-reaction to the election of a black president. First, it's "tea party". Fallows's term is the one used by opponents of the movement to belittle it, though he doesn't appear to realise this. Second, though there are undoubtedly racist elements with the movement, it has much broader and deeper political roots than that. Indeed, its key strain is populist anger at the perceived corruptions of Washington - so you might have thought it would play to Fallows's thesis rather well.

PS: Paul Krugman's column today is on the theme of America's political malaise (by the way, don't you love it when columnists open a paragraph with the words, "A brief history lesson:"?)

Comments

[Hal]

The Fallows piece is excellent, as usual. He stresses the usefulness of the jeremiad in laying the groundwork for a better future, so here goes: Our universities depend on public funding, even the private ones, and the tea-party movement loathes government spending. The University of California, which used to be a model public system, is being hollowed out by an anti-tax mood and procedural statis in Sacramento. This could be a harbinger nationally.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." We have drifted too far away from this idea, and I don't see President Obama changing things yet.