EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, THE END of America is predicted. The received wisdom these days is that the much-hyped "great power shift" toward Asia will do the trick and turn the United States into a has-been.
Fareed Zakaria begs to differ. Yes, he p
oints out, China's is indeed the most incredible success story in history – a tale of almost 30 years of growth in the 7-to-10-per cent range that seems to defy the laws of economic gravity. The United States, Germany and Japan had similar tales to tell in the late 19th century, but bust was the price of boom, and for Germany as well as Japan (add Russia, too), headlong industrialisation ended in the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism.
But for China it's up, up and away. As Zakaria memorably puts it: "China today exports, in a single day, more than it exported in all of 1978." Authoritarian modernisation just hums along. The Party's message reads "enrich yourselves, but leave the driving to us", and most of the 1.3 billion Chinese seem happy to comply – and to consume. With power safely lodged in the Politburo, China does not conform to the historical pattern of "first rich, then rowdy" which led to Tokyo's and Berlin's imperialist careers.
So why worry? "The problem is size," Zakaria writes. "China operates on so large a scale that it can't help changing the nature of the game." True, but let's play another game, that of compound interest. China's (nominal) GDP is about $3 trillion, while America's is $14 trillion. Assume indefinite Chinese growth of 7 per cent. That will double GDP to $6 trillion in ten years and double it again to $12 trillion by 2028. Assume now that the United States will grow at its historical rate of 3.5 per cent. By 2028, its GDP will measure $28 trillion. A silly game, but no more inane than projections that see China overtaking the United States by 2020. American output would still be about a quarter of the world total, the average for the past 125 years, as Zakaria says.
What about the shifting tides of power? In the affairs of nations, "power" is more complex than in physics. The "hard stuff" – military clout – is certainly central. China's defence budget may be the world's number two, but America spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Hence, might – at least, American might – doesn't just "grow out of the barrel of a gun", as Mao Zedong famously had it; "it's the economy, stupid". Will America stay on top – devaluation, deficits and all?
So, let's look at a related determinant of power: culture. Again, Zakaria proceeds more subtly than the run-of-the-mill declinist by stressing American advantages not captured by growth rates and export surpluses. He rightly takes on the old saw to the effect that China produces 600,000 engineers a year, India 350,000 and the United States only 70,000. This is true if you include "auto mechanics and industrial repairmen" in the Asian totals. Subtract them, and America "actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China does".
The larger point is that "higher education is America's best industry". With 5 per cent of the world's population, the United States "absolutely dominates higher education, having either 42 or 68 per cent of the world's top 50 universities" (depending on who is counting). In India, he adds, "universities graduate between 35 and 50 PhDs in computer science each year; in America the figure is 1,000". Now, Beijing is pouring oodles into its universities, but so did Austin, Texas, in the oil-rich 1970s, and the East Coast Ivy Leaguers are still on top.
In the industrial age, hardware mattered; today it is software, aka "culture". This is a grab bag: skills, openness, innovation, opportunity, competition. "It's brains, stupid," Bill Clinton might exclaim today. And youth. China, Japan and Europe are ageing rapidly; the United States will remain a young country way into the 21st century. And why? Immigration is "America's secret weapon".
The full article contains 706 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
