I have found a new Guru. He name is Fareed Zakaria. He wrote a book called "The Post American World". I am going to run out and get a copy of it, and highly recommend that you do as well.
From the KUOW web page:
Nowadays, the biggest movies, tallest buildings and many of the world's richest moguls are found outside of the U.S. Fareed Zakaria says that doesn't mean we've reached the decline of America. Instead it's the rise of everybody else. Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International. His latest book is The Post-American World. He spoke at Seattle's Town Hall on May 21, 2008. You can here his presentation here:
http://kuow.org/programs/speakers_forum.asp
You may need to select the date of the broadcast: 6/12/2008 at 8:00 p.m.
Here is how he ended his presentation:
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Fareed: What people want is a path to modernity, and that is what we have been selling for the past 75 years. My great hope is that when some historian looks back 200 years from now they will not write "The irony here is that the United States fulfilled its great historical global mission. It globalized the world. It just forgot along the way to globalize itself."
Question: So when we had the industrial revolution and the farms in the industrialized countries were turned into capitalist enterprises and the people moved to the cities, and they were hungry, and we've advanced, so we look at the developing countries now and the same thing is happening. And I know you talk about these macro-economic numbers, OK people are doubling their incomes, going from a dollar a month (chuckle) to two dollars. But I have this sense as people are moving to the cities that life is harsher, life is more miserable. Can you address that?
Fareed: You look at these cities in the third work, Lagos, Karachi, Calcutta and you think to yourself, God this looks like a grim life. They are living in these hovels, these little kind of corrugated sheets, um, they don't have plumbing in many cases. But you know what? This is the age old story of what has happened with development. Rural poverty looks better. But it kills a lot more people. My father was a politician so I would travel a lot in rural India. His constituency was largely rural. And what you would see there was the kind of heartbreaking effects of rural poverty. This was 35 years ago. People were living on the land in way that was not particularly different than the sixteenth century, probably the fourteenth century. The big change that happens when you move to the city is two things for a family. You get enough food to feed your family, and you get medicine so your children don't die. And you're right; it's a pretty grim existence in some ways. But whenever somebody has in their mind a kind of bucolic vision of the English countryside, that's not really what rural poverty in China or India or Africa looks like. What it really looks like is, more than anything else, like death and disease. Because when you are on one dollar a day (and Jeff Sachs talks about this very eloquently, he calls it extreme poverty) what it means is that you are one cold from somebody in your family dieing. Because if you as the breadwinner get a cold and can't work for three or four days, that means somebody in your family will probably either go through malnutrition, severe illness, or actually die.
Dickensian London was not a pretty place. That's why Dickens wrote about it in those grim ways that he did. But, you know, if you look at life expectancy and you do look at things like income and the food that that can buy there IS an upward shift. It doesn't mean that one shouldn't do things, there are things to ameliorate those conditions, but I think it would be mistake to romanticize the place that those people came from. After all these are rational, intelligent human beings. They may be very poor and yet they leave those bucolic villages by the busload every minute of every day to go to the cities. They must be seeing something, and acting in their own self interest.
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I have never, ever, ever, EVER heard someone on public radio with whom I was in such total agreement. This guy is both brilliant and right. He acknowledges the POSITIVE things that America and corporations have done to help the world, while maintaining an awareness of the challenges they bring. He is absolutely right. The US has brought prosperity to the world, and the next 50 years will be amazing.
I note that the questioner was a typical, snide, whiny, latte drinking liberal who audibly sneered at the thought of industrialization and corporations bringing any good to people. All he could see were the slums and the sweatshops, blithely unaware of how important it really is to raise your income from a dollar a day to two dollars a day.
Listen to the speech. Go buy the book. This stuff is important.
Hairy
Posted by HairyBuddah at June 14, 2008 06:14 PM | Email This