James Poulos Fears the Black Helicopters

He does not want to see Fareed Zakaria ascend to the Secretary-Generalship:

James Poulos » Deconstructing Globalization: The United States has already succeeded in globalizing the world — by globalizing American culture. What Zakaria wants, I think, is for the United States to succeed at the new task of globalizing itself.... Not a single proponent of globalizing America is against maximizing migrant labor among the lower classes and maximizing math and science among the upper classes. My distaste for migrant labor and the hegemony of engineers, each taken separately, is already almost incalculable because of my judgments about what ruins a healthy republic. Taken together, these two great prescriptions for globalizing America fill me with something I must quickly laugh off as paranoid rage.

Everywhere I turn some bold-faced name is guzzling this kool-aid.... I’m content for America to continue in its capacity as globalizer. I’m much less sanguine about America becoming a globalizee. This isn’t just because I’m a nationalist; it’s because I’m convinced that the United States has, and depends upon, a globally unique system of government which is itself dependent upon America’s unique geopolitical, cultural, and religious heritage. The maintenance of that heritage demands a conscious effort not to regularize the American workforce into a system of migrant drones at the bottom and civil engineers at the top....

Probably the most grievous error of the pro-globalization crowd is its intransigent comprehensiveness fetish: globalizing America hasn’t meant making foreign countries ‘more like the US’ in some kind of holistic, across-the-board fashion; it’s meant exporting the things about America that work, that can travel, that are fungible and useful and beneficial in different cultural contexts. (Yes, this is an incomplete and too-happy picture of what’s happened. But I’m identifying the good so I can contrast it better with the bad.) Globalization, in its natural, uncontrolled diversity, will be and should be an irregular process in which countries pragmatically adopt and appropriate a la carte things from elsewhere that work for them...

Comments

[jsalvati]

Couldn't we also work on opening up the US markets for skilled labor (like engineering). There must be something that can be done to let more skilled laborers in. And I say this as an Engineer.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/books/06kaku.html

May 6, 2008

A Challenge for the U.S.: Sun Rising on the East
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD
By Fareed Zakaria

What a difference five years — and one war — make!

In a 2003 article in Newsweek, written on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Fareed Zakaria — a columnist for the magazine and the editor of its international edition — wrote: "It is now clear that the current era can really have only one name, the unipolar world — an age with only one global power. America's position today is unprecedented." He went on to declare that "American dominance is not simply military. The U.S. economy is as large as the next three — Japan, Germany and Britain — put together," adding that "it is more dynamic economically, more youthful demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of the world." What worries people around the world above all else, he wrote, "is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country — the United States."

In his new book, "The Post-American World," Mr. Zakaria writes that America remains a politico-military superpower, but "in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance." With the rise of China, India and other emerging markets, with economic growth sweeping much of the planet, and the world becoming increasingly decentralized and interconnected, he contends, "we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people."

For that matter, Mr. Zakaria argues that we are now in the midst of the third great tectonic power shift to occur over the last 500 years: the first was the rise of the West, which produced "modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions"; the second was the rise of the United States in the 20th century; and the third is what he calls "the rise of the rest," with China and India "becoming bigger players in their neighborhoods and beyond," Russia becoming more aggressive, and Europe acting with "immense strength and purpose" on matters of trade and economics.

Many of this volume's more acute arguments echo those that have been made by other analysts and writers, most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on globalization, and Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on America's growing isolation in an increasingly adversarial world. But Mr. Zakaria uses his wide-ranging fluency in economics, foreign policy and cultural politics to give the lay reader a lucid picture of a globalized world (and America's role in it) that is changing at light speed, even as he provides a host of historical analogies to examine the possible fallout of these changes.

The irony of the "rise of the rest," Mr. Zakaria notes, is that it is largely a result of American ideas and actions: "For 60 years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism."

But at the same time, he goes on, America is "becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated — free markets, trade, immigration and technological change": witness Democratic candidates' dissing of Nafta, Republican calls for tighter immigration control, and studies showing that American students are falling behind students from other developed countries in science and math.

While readers might take recent signs like recession at home, a falling dollar abroad and a huge trade deficit as suggesting that the American economy is in trouble, Mr. Zakaria asserts that the United States (unlike Britain, which was undone as a world power because of "irreversible economic deterioration") can maintain "a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology, and industry — as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it." ...

[Matt]

There is a measure of global trade we need to monitor, though, as usual I have lost the link.

But, look at the rate of change of the dispersal of global trade. Global trade was dispersed originally with a sharp peak, but was otherwise Gaussian. As time progresses, the dispersion has remained Gaussian but has lowered ans spread.

What is happening is that global trade is offering a greater variety of products, and has become much more accurate in measuring value, that is, opportunities for new traded products are filling in and causing dispersal.

As accuracy, or quantization error (back to Brad's production function on the effect of monopolies) decreases, then opportunities for aggregation look more promising because the cost of getting the extra precision from product differentiation rise very sharply . That is, we will see combinations of trading partners try to reorganize to obtain better measures of opportunity.

We need to be in a position to respond, objectively, to our foreign partners who occasionally seek to assert a global financial aggregation. Watch the dispersion. When the variance of the dispersion is about equal to the variance in international money markets, then work with the partners to help them find Jensen opportunities for aggregation.

[Doctor Jay]

"Not a single proponent of globalizing America is against maximizing migrant labor among the lower classes and maximizing math and science among the upper classes."

In my experience, mastery of math and science is a ticket out of the lower classes, mucn more so than mastery of humanistic studies.

I think one of the most critical factors shaping America was the vast emptiness that was America, and its rural character. The empty spaces are filling up, and nobody wants to live in the ones that are left.

[MaryCh]

"Globalization, in its natural, uncontrolled diversity, will be and should be an irregular process in which countries pragmatically adopt and appropriate a la carte things from elsewhere that work for them..."

This sounds suspiciously like a libertarian utopia to me, except that it doesn't condemn outright the existence of "countries."

[howard]

i read the first paragraph and couldn't for the life of me figure out what in the world poulos is talking about, yet apparently others can, so possibly someone could tell me: what in the world is that first paragraph supposed to mean? and why should i read any further?

[sm]

What America is he talking about? Having civil engineers at the top would be better than the current situation where the top layer is made up of crooks and torturers. Real civil engineers are honest -- have to be.