America’s ‘Oh Sh*t!’ Moment
Newsweek, essay by Niall Ferguson
Civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.
Examples:
- The Incas… The Roman Empire… The Ming dynasty’s in China… The Soviet Union… The postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East…
What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function.
The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications“:
- Competition
- The Scientific Revolution
- The Rule of Law and Representative Governmen
- Modern Medicine
- The Consumer Society
- The Work Ethic
The tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps:
Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here…
The consumer society? Did you know that 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia?…
Modern medicine? Life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China…
The rule of law? The U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad…
What about science? Nobel winners are old men. The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers… more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., ….South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too…
Finally, there’s competition… since adopted in 2004, the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies… Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization… you don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society…
Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy…
- What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.
- Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.
- And finally we need to reboot our whole system.
Source: Newsweek (XXX)
This essay is adapted from Niall Ferguson’s new book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, published by Penguin Press. The accompanying television series will air on PBS in 2012.
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Western Civilization’s Killer Apps:
COMPETITION
- Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
- Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.
THE RULE OF LAW
- Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.
MODERN MEDICINE
- 19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.
THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
- Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.
THE WORK ETHIC
- Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation
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