FIGURE 2.1 INCOME INEQUALITY
SOURCE: CIA World Factbook
FIGURE 2.2 SHARE OF TOTAL NATIONAL WEALTH
SOURCE: UN University, 2/2008 report
America’s fourth liability is its decaying national infrastructure. While China is building new airports and highways, and Europe, Japan, and now China possess advanced high-speed rail, America’s equivalents are sliding back into the twentieth century. China alone has bullet trains on almost 5,000 kilometers of rails, while the United States has none. Beijing and Shanghai airports are decades ahead in efficiency as well as elegance of their equivalents in Washington and in New York, both of which increasingly smack embarrassingly of the third world. On a symbolic level, the fact that China—in rural and small-town respects still a premodern society—is now moving ahead of the United States in such highly visible examples of twenty-first-century structural innovation speaks volumes.
The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its 2009 report card of America’s infrastructure, put America’s overall grade at an abysmal D; this included a D in aviation, a C–in rail, a D–in roads, and a D+ in energy. Urban renewal has been slow, with slums and deteriorating public housing in numerous cities—including even the nation’s capital—a testimonial to social neglect. A mere train ride from New York City to Washington, DC (on the slow- moving and shaking Acela, America’s “high-speed” train) offers from its railcar windows a depressing spectacle of America’s infrastructural stagnation, in contrast to the societal innovation that characterized America during much of the twentieth century.
Reliable infrastructure is essential to economic efficiency and economic growth and simultaneously symbolic of a nation’s overall dynamism. Historically, the systemic success of leading nations has been judged, in part, on the condition and ingenuity of national infrastructure—from the roads and aqueducts of the Romans to the railroads of the British. The state of American infrastructure, as indicated above, is now more representative of a deteriorating power than of the world’s most innovative economy. And, as America’s infrastructure continues to decay it will inevitably impact its economic output, probably at a time of even greater competition with emerging powers. In a world where systemic rivalry between the United States and China is likely to intensify, decaying infrastructure will be both symbolic and symptomatic of the American malaise.
America’s fifth major vulnerability is a public that is highly ignorant about the world. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States’ public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events, and even pivotal moments in world history—a reality certainly derived in part from its deficient public education system. A 2002 National Geographic survey found that a higher percentage of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in Canada, France, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden could identify the United States on a map than their American counterparts. A 2006 survey of young American adults found that 63% could not point out Iraq on a map of the Middle East, 75% could not find Iran, and 88% could not locate Afghanistan—at a time of America’s costly military involvement in the region. Regarding history, recent polls have shown that less than half of college seniors knew that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion and over 30% of American adults could not name two countries that America fought in World War II. Moreover, the United States lags behind other developed countries in these categories of public awareness. A 2002 National Geographic survey comparing current events and geography knowledge of young adults in Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, the UK, Canada, the United States, and Mexico found that the United States ranked second to last—barely beating out its less-developed neighbor, Mexico.
That level of ignorance is compounded by the absence of informative international reporting readily accessible to the public. With the exception of perhaps five major newspapers, local press and American TV provides very limited news coverage about world affairs, except for ad hoc coverage of sensational or catastrophic events. What passes for news tends to be trivia or human-interest stories. The cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance makes the public more susceptible to demagogically stimulated fear, especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. That, in turn, increases the probability of self-destructive foreign policy initiatives. In general, public ignorance creates an American political environment more hospitable to extremist simplifications—abetted by interested lobbies—than to nuanced views of the inherently more complex global realities of the post–Cold War era.
The sixth liability, related to the fifth, is America’s increasingly gridlocked and highly partisan political system. Political compromise has become more elusive, in part because the media, especially TV, talk radio, and political blogs, are increasingly dominated by vitriolic partisan discourse while the relatively uninformed public is vulnerable to Manichean demagogy. As a result, political paralysis often precludes the adoption of needed remedies, as in the case of deficit reduction. This, in turn, fuels the global impression of American impotence in the face of pressing social needs. Furthermore, America’s existing political system—highly dependent on financial contributions to political campaigns—is increasingly vulnerable to the power of well-endowed but narrowly motivated domestic and foreign lobbies that are able to exploit the existing political structure in order to advance their agendas at the expense of the national interest. Worst of all, according to a careful RAND Corporation study, “a process with roots as large and as deep as political polarization is unlikely to be reversed easily, if at all.... Our nation is in for an extended period of political warfare between the left and the right.”[4]
The foregoing six conditions currently provide ammunition for those already convinced of America’s inevitable decline. They also prompt negative comparisons with the cradle-to-the-grave paternalism of the relatively prosperous Europe. The European model—endowed in recent decades with higher international standing thanks to the combined financial-trading might of the European Union—has in recent years come to be seen by many as socially more just than the American model. However, on closer scrutiny, it has become more apparent that the European system writ large shares some of the above-mentioned negatives of its American counterpart, with potentially serious vulnerabilities for its long-term vitality. In particular, the Greek and later the Irish debt crises of 2010 and their contagion effects suggested that the paternalism and social generosity of the European economic system are potentially unsustainable and could eventually threaten Europe’s financial solvency, a realization taken recently to heart by the conservative leadership in the UK, leading to austerity measures forcing dramatic cuts in social welfare programs.
At the same time, as mentioned earlier, it is a fact that Europe has higher rates of social equality and mobility than America, despite America’s traditional reputation as “the land of opportunity.” Its infrastructure, especially in environmentally prudent public transport such as high-speed rail, is superior to America’s dilapidated airports, train stations, roads, and bridges. It also has a more geographically literate and internationally informed population that is less vulnerable to fear-mongering (despite the existence of fringe nationalist/racist parties on the right) and thus also to international manipulation.
Alternatively, China is often considered the wave of the future. However, given its social retardation and political authoritarianism, it is not America’s competitor as a model for the relatively more prosperous, more modern, and more democratically governed states. But, if China continues on its current trajectory and averts a major economic or social disruption, it could become America’s principal competitor in global political influence, and even eventually in economic and military might. The nonegalitarian and materialistically motivated dynamism of Chinese modernization already offers an appealing model to those parts of the world in which underdevelopment, demographics, ethnic tension, and in some cases negative colonial legacy have conspired to perpetuate social backwardness and poverty. For that portion of humanity, democracy vs. authoritarianism tends to be a secondary issue. Conceivably, a democratic and developing India could be China’s more relevant rival—but in overcoming such key social liabilities as illiteracy, malnutrition, poverty, and infrastructural decay, India is not yet competitive with China.
AMERICA’S BALANCE SHEET
