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05/06/2010

America's Future, Part I

I’ve been meaning to get to a piece that James Fallows wrote for The Atlantic’s January/February 2010 issue for awhile now after skimming through it when I first received the magazine. Fallows had returned from three years in China and he began “asking experts around the country whether America is finally going to hell.” As he noted, this was partly a joke.

[A few excerpts follow...]

“Here is the sort of thing you notice anew after being in India or China, the two rising powers of the day: there is still so much nature, and so much space, available for each person on American soil. Room on the streets and sidewalks, big lawns around the houses, trees to walk under, wildflowers at the edge of town – yes, despite the sprawl and overbuilding. A few days after moving from our apartment in Beijing, I awoke to find a mother deer and two fawns in the front yard of our house in Washington, barely three miles from the White House. I know that deer are a modern pest, but the contrast with blighted urban China, in which even pigeons are scarce, was difficult to ignore.”

---

“At a dinner in Washington this fall, I heard a comment that summed up the combination of satisfaction and concern that ran through many of the interviews I held. The day before the dinner, three U.S. citizens had been named the winners of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. The day after, three more would be named winners of the Nobel Prize for physics. All the more impressive for America’s attractive power, four of the six winners had been born outside the country – in China, Canada, Australia, England – and had taken U.S. citizenship, in some cases jointly with their original country, while they trained and did work at U.S. or other foreign institutions. The dinner discussion topic was the future of America’s scientific-research base – and the prize announcement, rather than a cause for celebration, was taken almost as a knell. ‘This was for work done 10 or 20 years ago, based on research funding that started 30 or 40 years ago,’ the main speaker, the CEO of a famous Silicon Valley firm, said. ‘I don’t know what we’re funding that will pay off 30 years from now.’”

---

“So the question is: Are the fears of this moment our era’s version of the ‘missile gap’? Are they anything more than a combination of the two staple ingredients of doom-and-darkness statements through the whole course of our history? One of those ingredients is exaggerated complaint by whichever group is out of political power – those who thought America should be spelled with a ‘k’ under Nixon or Reagan, those who attend ‘tea bag’ rallies against the Obama administration now. The other is what historians call the bracing ‘jeremiad’ tradition of harsh warnings that reveal a faith that America can be better than it is. Football coaches roar and storm in their locker-room speeches at halftime to fire up the team, and American politicians, editorialists, and activists of various sorts have roared and stormed precisely because they have known this is the way the nation is roused to action….

“Today’s fears combine relative decline – what will happen when China has all the jobs? and all the money? – with domestic concerns about a polarized society of haves and have-nots that has lost its connective core. They include concerns about the institution that have made America strong: widespread education, a financially viable press, religion that can coexist with secularism, government that expresses the nation’s divisions while also addressing its long-term interests and needs. They are topped by the most broadly held alarm about the future of the natural environment since the era of Silent Spring and the original Earth Day movement.

“How should we feel?”
---

[For starters….we’ve been here before…but…]

“Only with America’s emergence as a global power after World War II did the idea of American ‘decline’ routinely involve falling behind someone else. Before that, it meant falling short of expectations – God’s, the Founders’, posterity’s – or of the previous virtues of America in its lost, great days. ‘The new element in the ‘50s was the constant comparison with the Soviets,’ Michael Kazin told me. Since then, external falling-behind comparisons have become not just a staple of American self-assessment but often a crutch. If we are concerned about our schools, it is because children are learning more in Singapore or India; about the development of clean-tech jobs, because it’s happening faster in China.”

[But there is a crucial America advantage…]

“Let’s start with the more modest claim, that China has ample reason to worry about its own future. Will the long-dreaded day of reckoning for Chinese development finally arrive because of environmental disaster? Or via the demographic legacy of the one-child policy, which will leave so many parents and grandparents dependent on so relatively few young workers? Minxin Pei, who grew up in Shanghai and now works at Claremont McKenna College, in California, has predicted in China’s Trapped Transition that within the next few years, tension between an open economy and a closed political system will become unendurable, and an unreformed Communist bureaucracy will finally drag down economic performance.

“America will be better off if China does well than if it flounders. A prospering China will mean a bigger world economy with more opportunities and probably less turmoil – and a China likely to be more cooperative on environmental matters. But whatever happens to China, prospects could soon brighten for America. The American culture’s particular strengths could conceivably be about to assume new importance and give our economy new pep. International networks will matter more with each passing year. As the one truly universal nation, the United States continually refreshes its connections with the rest of the world – through languages, family, education, business – in a way no other nation does, or will. The countries that are comparably open – Canada, Australia – aren’t nearly as large; those whose economies are comparably large – Japan, unified Europe, eventually China or India – aren’t nearly as open. The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it. At the height of the British Empire, colonial subjects from the Raj to Malaya to the Caribbean modeled themselves in part on Englishmen; Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge, Gandhi, to University College, London. Ho Chi Minh wrote in French for magazines in Paris. These days the world is full of businesspeople, bureaucrats, and scientists who have trained in the United States.”

---

[Apropos to today’s debate…]

“The American advantage…depends on two specific policies that, in my view, are the absolute pillars of American strength: continued openness to immigration, and a continued concentration of universities that people around the world want to attend.

“Maybe I was biased in how I listened, but in my interviews, I thought I could tell which Americans had spent significant time outside the country or working on international ‘competitiveness’ issues. If they had, they predictably emphasized those same two elements of long-term American advantage. ‘My favorite statistic is that one-quarter of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were born abroad,’ I was told by Harold Varmus, the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and himself an academy member (and Nobel Prize winner). ‘We may not be so good on the pipeline of producing new scientists, but the country is still a very effective magnet.’

“ ‘We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the immigrants, and the universities, we’ll be fine,’ James McGregor, an American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told me.   ‘I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be sure they stay.’ While, indeed, the United States benefits most when the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of thought with them.”

[Ed. But some of China’s students over here rip us off…Fallows doesn’t address this, but offers instead…]

“Americans often fret about the troops of engineers and computer scientists marching out of Chinese universities. They should calm down. 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.”

---

“So what could be the contrary case? It starts with the aspects of relative decline that could actually prove threatening. The main concerns boil down to jobs, debt, military strength, and overall independence. Jobs: Will the rise of other economies mean the decline of opportunities within America, especially for the middle-class jobs that have been the country’s social glue? Debt: Will reliance on borrowed money from abroad further limit the country’s future prosperity, and its freedom of action too? The military: As wealth flows, so inevitably will armed strength. Would an ultimately weaker United States therefore risk a military showdown or intimidation from a rearmed China? And independence in the broadest sense: Would the world respect a threadbare America? Will repressive values rise with an ascendant China – and liberal values sink with a foundering United States? How much will American leaders have to kowtow?”

More next week.

Brian Trumbore


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-05/06/2010-      
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05/06/2010

America's Future, Part I

I’ve been meaning to get to a piece that James Fallows wrote for The Atlantic’s January/February 2010 issue for awhile now after skimming through it when I first received the magazine. Fallows had returned from three years in China and he began “asking experts around the country whether America is finally going to hell.” As he noted, this was partly a joke.

[A few excerpts follow...]

“Here is the sort of thing you notice anew after being in India or China, the two rising powers of the day: there is still so much nature, and so much space, available for each person on American soil. Room on the streets and sidewalks, big lawns around the houses, trees to walk under, wildflowers at the edge of town – yes, despite the sprawl and overbuilding. A few days after moving from our apartment in Beijing, I awoke to find a mother deer and two fawns in the front yard of our house in Washington, barely three miles from the White House. I know that deer are a modern pest, but the contrast with blighted urban China, in which even pigeons are scarce, was difficult to ignore.”

---

“At a dinner in Washington this fall, I heard a comment that summed up the combination of satisfaction and concern that ran through many of the interviews I held. The day before the dinner, three U.S. citizens had been named the winners of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. The day after, three more would be named winners of the Nobel Prize for physics. All the more impressive for America’s attractive power, four of the six winners had been born outside the country – in China, Canada, Australia, England – and had taken U.S. citizenship, in some cases jointly with their original country, while they trained and did work at U.S. or other foreign institutions. The dinner discussion topic was the future of America’s scientific-research base – and the prize announcement, rather than a cause for celebration, was taken almost as a knell. ‘This was for work done 10 or 20 years ago, based on research funding that started 30 or 40 years ago,’ the main speaker, the CEO of a famous Silicon Valley firm, said. ‘I don’t know what we’re funding that will pay off 30 years from now.’”

---

“So the question is: Are the fears of this moment our era’s version of the ‘missile gap’? Are they anything more than a combination of the two staple ingredients of doom-and-darkness statements through the whole course of our history? One of those ingredients is exaggerated complaint by whichever group is out of political power – those who thought America should be spelled with a ‘k’ under Nixon or Reagan, those who attend ‘tea bag’ rallies against the Obama administration now. The other is what historians call the bracing ‘jeremiad’ tradition of harsh warnings that reveal a faith that America can be better than it is. Football coaches roar and storm in their locker-room speeches at halftime to fire up the team, and American politicians, editorialists, and activists of various sorts have roared and stormed precisely because they have known this is the way the nation is roused to action….

“Today’s fears combine relative decline – what will happen when China has all the jobs? and all the money? – with domestic concerns about a polarized society of haves and have-nots that has lost its connective core. They include concerns about the institution that have made America strong: widespread education, a financially viable press, religion that can coexist with secularism, government that expresses the nation’s divisions while also addressing its long-term interests and needs. They are topped by the most broadly held alarm about the future of the natural environment since the era of Silent Spring and the original Earth Day movement.

“How should we feel?”
---

[For starters….we’ve been here before…but…]

“Only with America’s emergence as a global power after World War II did the idea of American ‘decline’ routinely involve falling behind someone else. Before that, it meant falling short of expectations – God’s, the Founders’, posterity’s – or of the previous virtues of America in its lost, great days. ‘The new element in the ‘50s was the constant comparison with the Soviets,’ Michael Kazin told me. Since then, external falling-behind comparisons have become not just a staple of American self-assessment but often a crutch. If we are concerned about our schools, it is because children are learning more in Singapore or India; about the development of clean-tech jobs, because it’s happening faster in China.”

[But there is a crucial America advantage…]

“Let’s start with the more modest claim, that China has ample reason to worry about its own future. Will the long-dreaded day of reckoning for Chinese development finally arrive because of environmental disaster? Or via the demographic legacy of the one-child policy, which will leave so many parents and grandparents dependent on so relatively few young workers? Minxin Pei, who grew up in Shanghai and now works at Claremont McKenna College, in California, has predicted in China’s Trapped Transition that within the next few years, tension between an open economy and a closed political system will become unendurable, and an unreformed Communist bureaucracy will finally drag down economic performance.

“America will be better off if China does well than if it flounders. A prospering China will mean a bigger world economy with more opportunities and probably less turmoil – and a China likely to be more cooperative on environmental matters. But whatever happens to China, prospects could soon brighten for America. The American culture’s particular strengths could conceivably be about to assume new importance and give our economy new pep. International networks will matter more with each passing year. As the one truly universal nation, the United States continually refreshes its connections with the rest of the world – through languages, family, education, business – in a way no other nation does, or will. The countries that are comparably open – Canada, Australia – aren’t nearly as large; those whose economies are comparably large – Japan, unified Europe, eventually China or India – aren’t nearly as open. The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it. At the height of the British Empire, colonial subjects from the Raj to Malaya to the Caribbean modeled themselves in part on Englishmen; Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge, Gandhi, to University College, London. Ho Chi Minh wrote in French for magazines in Paris. These days the world is full of businesspeople, bureaucrats, and scientists who have trained in the United States.”

---

[Apropos to today’s debate…]

“The American advantage…depends on two specific policies that, in my view, are the absolute pillars of American strength: continued openness to immigration, and a continued concentration of universities that people around the world want to attend.

“Maybe I was biased in how I listened, but in my interviews, I thought I could tell which Americans had spent significant time outside the country or working on international ‘competitiveness’ issues. If they had, they predictably emphasized those same two elements of long-term American advantage. ‘My favorite statistic is that one-quarter of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were born abroad,’ I was told by Harold Varmus, the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and himself an academy member (and Nobel Prize winner). ‘We may not be so good on the pipeline of producing new scientists, but the country is still a very effective magnet.’

“ ‘We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the immigrants, and the universities, we’ll be fine,’ James McGregor, an American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told me.   ‘I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be sure they stay.’ While, indeed, the United States benefits most when the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of thought with them.”

[Ed. But some of China’s students over here rip us off…Fallows doesn’t address this, but offers instead…]

“Americans often fret about the troops of engineers and computer scientists marching out of Chinese universities. They should calm down. 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.”

---

“So what could be the contrary case? It starts with the aspects of relative decline that could actually prove threatening. The main concerns boil down to jobs, debt, military strength, and overall independence. Jobs: Will the rise of other economies mean the decline of opportunities within America, especially for the middle-class jobs that have been the country’s social glue? Debt: Will reliance on borrowed money from abroad further limit the country’s future prosperity, and its freedom of action too? The military: As wealth flows, so inevitably will armed strength. Would an ultimately weaker United States therefore risk a military showdown or intimidation from a rearmed China? And independence in the broadest sense: Would the world respect a threadbare America? Will repressive values rise with an ascendant China – and liberal values sink with a foundering United States? How much will American leaders have to kowtow?”

More next week.

Brian Trumbore