Re: Nuevo bloque
- From: BOLUDOVSKY <boludovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 27 Nov 2007 12:23:48 GMT
November 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Follow the Fundamentals
By DAVID BROOKS
Beijing
Lou Dobbs is winning. He?s not winning personally. He?s not going to
start winning presidential awards or elite respect. But his message is
winning. Month by month the ideas that once prevailed on the angry fringe
enter the mainstream and turn into conventional wisdom.
Once there was a majority in favor of liberal immigration policies, but
apparently that?s not true anymore, at least if you judge by campaign
rhetoric. Once there was a bipartisan consensus behind free trade, but
that?s not true anymore, either. Even Republicans, by a two-to-one
majority, believe free trade is bad for America, according to a Wall
Street Journal/NBC poll.
Once upon a time, the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the
world are rising out of poverty would have been a source of pride and
optimism. But if you listen to the presidential candidates, improvements
in the developing world are menacing. Their speeches constitute a
symphony of woe about lead-painted toys, manipulated currencies and
stolen jobs.
And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how
attractive it?s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that
Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday?s
Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political
climate could shift in ugly ways.
So it?s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is
fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at
heart on a more existential fear ? the fear that America is under assault
and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once
knew is bleeding away.
And that?s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs
of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent
economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International
Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness
indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the
world.
In the World Economic Forum survey, the U.S. comes in just ahead of
Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany (China is 34th). The U.S. gets
poor marks for macroeconomic stability (the long-term federal debt), for
its tax structure and for the low savings rate. But it leads the world in
a range of categories: higher education and training, labor market
flexibility, the ability to attract global talent, the availability of
venture capital, the quality of corporate management and the capacity to
innovate.
William W. Lewis of McKinsey surveyed global competitive in dozens of
business sectors a few years ago, and concluded, ?The United States is
the productivity leader in virtually every industry.?
Second, America?s fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most
stable of assets ? its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing
assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million
legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx
of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are
relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under
40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a
decade older.
The American economy benefits from low levels of corruption. American
culture still transmits some ineffable spirit of adventure. American
students can?t compete with, say, Singaporean students on standardized
tests, but they are innovative and creative throughout their lives. The
U.S. standard of living first surpassed the rest of the world?s in about
1740, and despite dozens of cycles of declinist foreboding, the country
has resolutely refused to decay.
Third, not every economic dislocation has been caused by trade and the
Chinese. Between 1991 and 2007, the U.S. trade deficit exploded to $818
billion from $31 billion. Yet as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, during
that time the U.S. created 28 million jobs and the unemployment rate
dipped to 4.6 percent from 6.8 percent.
That?s because, as Robert Lawrence of Harvard and Martin Baily of
McKinsey have calculated, 90 percent of manufacturing job losses are due
to domestic forces. As companies become more technologically advanced,
they shed workers (the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs between
1994 and 2004).
Meanwhile, the number of jobs actually lost to outsourcing is small, and
recent reports suggest the outsourcing trend is slowing down. They are
swamped by the general churn of creative destruction. Every quarter the
U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more
than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a
dynamic economy.
I?m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see
the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you,
their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United
States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the
foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much
more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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