The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.
That is from Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense. It’s #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.
Aint’ the first book ot it’s kind and it won’t
be the last. I would really like to read a book
about why America will continue to lord it
over others for a long, long time.
saying “egad” was the nail in the coffin. We’re Europe.
We haven’t lost the ability to compromise, rather, the world has adapted to the 16 year political cycle over which we compromise.
All nations have instability cycles, a result of being square integrable and quantized. The things on the right have to swap positions now and then because they do not have the number of transactions counts for smooth transitions.
Our 16 years cycle was designed by the founders, and we have never really changed it. But, over time, our foreign traders have learned to be countercyclical, with the exceptions of China and the old British Empire, for a time.
When was this ever true about the American political system? Ever hear the New Deal? Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? The federal government instituted the New Deal to help the economy, and in the end it made things much worse. If Washington just left the economy alone, the Great Depression wouldn’t have been so “great”.
Publius: “In the last 20-odd years, the world has seen the rise of productive sectors from Japan” — that’s a good joke, I’ll remember it to use sometime.
How about this one for those above who love to push their chauvinst views:
The Earth’s political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.
I’m looking forward to a world where the US is not dominant. I’d like us to be just one of hundreds of rich, successful countries exchanging trade, technology, and culture. Kind of like the 50 rich, successful United States.
“Kind of like the 50 rich, successful United States”
Well, except Mississippi.
A Tykhyy, is it the “in the last 20 years” part that you find comical, or the general notion that there are productive sectors in Japan? I know that many who deal with Japan question the latter after experiencing the inefficient bureaucracies, numerous layers of unnecessary management, and the glacial decision-making processes. I am sometimes among them. But surely they are doing something right. Despite the “lost decade” of near-zero growth, Japan is still quite rich – and it became that way surprisingly quickly.
That was an excellent analysis, Prof Gordon.
On my web-site, I have refined and added to the original posting here. Not least, I’ve distinguished between three key concepts mangled by all declinist theoreticians, including (surprisingly) Zakaria, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard:
1) control over a country and its policies — that sort of control requires colonization and imposing a government over the society, which is simultaneously pacified. The government can be directly ruled by the imperial colonizer or through collaborating elites. Think of the ancient Roman and Persian empires, the medieval Chinese empire (or modern one in Tibet and over the Muslim outer layers of China’s territory, the Aztec and Inca empires, the British empire, and the Soviet empire (over non-Russian peoples with the USSR and over East Europeans between 1945 and 1989)
– Since the Mexican war of the 1840s and the Spanish-American war at the end of the 19th century — when the US annexed the Philippines (with a commitment, carried out in 1946, for full independence and home-rule) — the US has never had any territorial demands on other recognized sovereign states. It certainly hasn’t since 1945, awarding full sovereignty to Japan and West Germany in 1949 (in Germany with Britain and France). Its failure to pacify Afghanistan or Iraq in this decade, despite military occupation, is nothing new — either for it or previous official empires, such as Britain’s inability as the imperial power over the Indian sub-continent to occupy and control Afghanistan.
2) dominance: Here a great power has to be able to resist successfully policies carried out by another country’s government that it dislikes or, alternatively, usually get that government to do what the great power wants. The US never had that power even in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, until — with the help of local proxy anti-Sandinista forces (Indians and others) — it was able to pressure the Sandinistas to hold free elections at the end of the 1980s. The Sandinistas lost in every electoral district and fell from power. In Chile, at the end of the 1980s, it did succeed in pressuring Pinochet to hold free elections, and his dictatorship fell too, as did a couple of years earlier the Marcos regime.
Note that here the US didn’t force those regimes out of power, it brought its diplomatic influence to oblige free elections (it did the same with the Paraguayan dictatorship in the late 1980s too.
Otherwise, at no point could the US oblige either allies in NATO or neutrals or hostile pro-Soviet governments to stop doing harmful behavior to the US’s friends by means of prolonged military intervention as in Korea in 1950 or Indochina from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s. The first outcome reflected a stalemate; the second a loss. What exactly is new in 2007?
3) Influence. THe US has mainly economic influence — thanks to its huge rich domestic economy (larger in GDP than the EU-25 and far more open to mfg. imports from Asia, the reserve role of the dollar, and the indifference of its economic policymakers (the Fed, the Treasury — which remains passive on the exchange rate of the $ in currency markets — and the President and Congress) to running current account deficits. Since every other industrial or rising industrial country in the world wants export-led growth — this is true even of the very rich Germans and Japanese — the US has to run a current account global deficit to accommodate their interests.
………….
What follows? US influence mainly shows up as the world’s first non-imperial hegemonial economic power, which serves as the world’s central banker of last resort and the import economy of first and last resort. Its influence, moreover, shows up mainly by upholding the rules of the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, though exactly like all other major economic powers in the world it will occasionally ignore the rules (as Bush did in 2004 with temporary import-limits on steel).
Should the dollar lose its dominant reserve currency status, say to the euro (which could share, say, the role with the dollar), US policymakers could no longer remain indifferent to current account deficits. The US$ would then obviously fall, as it has in currency markets — only more so — much to the benefit of the US economy, itself switching then to export-led growth . . . at any rate to the point of balancing its current account and, more likely, running up surpluses to reduce its debtor obligations to others. The downside? So far, despite a steady decline against the euro since 2002 and more recently against the Yen and Yuan, the US economy has not experienced any inflationary upsurge or seen interest rates fall (on the contrary) as capital flees is supposed to for most economists. There have been only advantages, not disadvantages . . . what with US exports booming and helping to keep the US economy out of recession. Moreover, the longer the dollar stays low relative to other major currencies, the more likely foreign manufacturers like Japanese auto firms will invest more in their multinational outlets in this country . . . just as, similarly, US firms operating abroad are reaping huge profits in dollar terms.
………
Who then will be harmed by all this if it continues?
Not the US. Rather, the rest of the world — especially the EU countries, Japan, the East Asian small dynamos, and China.
One final point. There is a lot of bad journalism that has been alarmist and declinist in the US for decades, mainly because of the kind of simple-minded, non-theoretical, and usually left-wing hokum that underscores it. Or by historians who have no theoretical grasp of the complexities of great power behavior. Or by wishful-thinking Europeans or Japanese or Chinese or what have you. Zakaria’s work is better and more even-handed, but deficient on the scores I’ve set out.
The US, today, is far safer, far richer, far more advanced compared to others in technologies at the frontier, and about 40-45% richer GDP per capita (adjusted for PPP) than Germany, France, Britain, or Japan. In fact, if any of those four countries joined the US Federal Union, each would rank among the poorest 5 US states: Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Montana . . . all sparsely populated and non-industrialized. China’s per capita income is, even in PPP terms, about 20% of the US level, and even then it is probably exaggerated, what with the continued underestimation of real inflation in China . . . a problem criticized by the World Bank back in 1991. In fact, every few years, the World Bank suddenly discovers 200-300 million very poor Chinese that it overlooked in its previous GDP estimates. That happened just two years ago.
Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor: click here: http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
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