The Hopeful View of America's "Advantages"

Here's an article by James Fallows where he claims there are three advantages that will ensure that America will come out of the current economic mess still in the lead:

The public and private research-university network, apart from producing an educated, high-end workforce and drawing talent from around the world, has been the incubator for most high-value technologies. U.S. universities are under intense economic pressure, but the gap between the best of them and those in the rest of the world is still enormous. Unless we thoughtlessly dissipate this asset, it should remain a significant wealth generator.

Another advantage is the continued attractiveness of the United States to people who believe that their energies, education, and ambition will go further here than anywhere else. Throughout American history, immigration has always been controversial and socially disruptive; by historical standards, it is less disturbing now than it was in the 1850s (Germans and Irish on the East Coast, Chinese on the West), the 1910s (Italians and Greeks, as well as Poles and other Eastern Europeans), and many other times, too.

Because 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside U.S. borders, the majority of the world’s talent will also start out residing abroad. But immigration has brought in a disproportionate share of the nation’s creative talent. Half of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are foreign-born. America benefits from attracting more than our “fair” share. China has never won a Nobel Prize in the sciences; the Chinese-born scientists who received prizes were honored for work they did overseas, largely in the United States.

The third U.S. structural advantage is our much-maligned legal and financial framework, which fosters the creation of new enterprises that can put discoveries to productive use. Like the United States of the mid-19th century, China of the early 21st century has taken a shortcut to development through lax intellectual-property laws that permit the copying of others’ ideas. Many other countries have done so to a less flagrant extent. But that puts a low ceiling on a country’s ability to develop its own high-value industries. I have interviewed Chinese entrepreneurs who plan to incorporate their companies in California’s Silicon Valley for fear of intellectual-property theft if they were based in their own country.

I think he is far too optimistic in his assessment of these "advantages". Other countries have a good approximation of these same assets. What Fallows does not focus on are the real negatives of a stagnant political system rife with corruption and a rising tide of anger that can easily boil over and lead to "times of trouble" that will rip the social fabric apart as well as do serious damage to the infrastructure of the nation as well as social institutions.

I must confess I've been pessimistic before and proven wrong. In the early 1970s I thought the US was on a downward spiral from which it would not be able to recover. It did. But I'm not impressed with the "recovery". It was built on an illusion of a trickle down economy and the "there's a better world waiting beyond the grave" ethic of delusional Christians.