“Everyone has to focus on what exactly is their value-add…We are in the middle of a big technological change, and when you live in a society that is at the cutting edge of that change [like America], it is hard to predict. It’s easy to predict for someone living in India. In ten years we are going to be doing a lot of the stuff that is being done in America today. We can predict our future. But we are behind you. You are defining the future. America is always on the edge of the next creative wave…” (Jaithirth Rao, quoted in The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman)
Whenever a discussion of globalization and world power begins, it is usual for no more than five sentences to be uttered before somebody inevitably mentions the successes of India and China. Given the popularity of polarization in American culture, once these rising stars are mentioned people tend to either bemoan the failure of Americans to keep up in the sciences, math, and tech industries or else smugly gloat while moralizing on the virtues of sharing toys and power.
Alarmists and quasi-isolationists abound, usually on the political right and will grow long-winded soliloquizing on the value of buying American products (usually Ford or GM), of building walls along our southern border, and enforcing strict discipline standards in our schools so that all those children getting lost in sex and drugs will, presumably, suddenly find themselves passionately in love with computer programming, geology, and higher math.
Counter-balancing the fearful stand the peacenik elite, waxing eloquent about the ideal world in which nobody, or at least no American, is better than anyone else, and there are harmony, peace, and European handbags for all. The way forward is, so they say, by submitting to the will of foreign powers, allowing our hands to be tied, and joining in the collective search for global prosperity—a search that probably involves denouncing capitalism, embracing anything that can be spelled beginning with “co-op”, and laying down arms.
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