oe, as an Indian, I resent the analyses made in that article.


India, Historically has never harboured any Imperialistic or expansionist intentions and as far as Im aware there shall be no such intentions even in the future .
so there is no question of India 'stomping' over the rest of the world.

But as far as China is concerned ,
I totally agree with you. ( world dominated by China is fucking terrifying)
they've always had a tendency to expand their influence by covert as well as open measures.

first Tibet,then Hong Kong and their constant eyeing of Myanmar ,Taiwan and Nepal. (and even parts of sovereign India )

They are the ones , the world should be monitoring.

oe, I tend to agree with you on two points: China stomping its way to the top and Americans being too busy buying remote controlled snack serving devices to try to stop them. And in terms of the article, I agree that the US is not doing a good enough job educating its young citizens.

But as far as what factors economists base their predictions on: keep in mind that much of it is based on predicting what will make a sensational "news" story. And it is also true, as you say, big things like climate and other armed conflicts may upset the whole prediction in a matter of six months, anyway.

the usa never harbored imperialistic or expansionits intentions either, until it realized it could...

what??? The usa ALWAYS harbored imperialistic and expansionist intentions. The prohibition of colonial expansion beyond the Appalachians imposed by the Proclamation of 1763 is one the slights against the colonists that eventually lead to the American Revolution. It left a bitter taste in the mouths of many wealth landowners, including George Washington himself, who wished to see the country expand westward.

As for the rising influence of China and/or India, it's not necessarily something that frightens me. Countries like Switzerland, Austrailia, and the Scandinavian nations have not exacly been "stomped on" by US imperialism. If we can be in the position they're in now in 50 years, I would be happy and not much care what was happening in China.

B4A- that 1763 lead to the revolution is a myth that has been debunked several times over. The population of european migrants wasn't big enough to require the rape and pillage of the ohio/tennesee vallies untill after the war. the revolution was lead by the capitalist elites wanting more control over their riches. Our first pres? the richest man in the colonies...

bryan actual history and perceived history are two different things. the latter being the more important.

America has always had manifest destiny in its head, but don't confuse that with imperialism. They saw the endless struggles and internal conflicts in Europe as counter-productive and wanted no more part of it. Plus, in their view, the land into which we were to expand was only sparsely populated by uneducated savages - this is not the same as imperialist expansion. Once we had a unifide (more or less) continent to ourselves, we became pretty isolationist. Hell, we were pretty willing to let Europe sort out their whole Hitler "problem" on their own until we were attacked.

Now China heading the pack is pretty freakin' scary because in an era where mother nature is coming for some serious payback China has a schizophrenic mindset whe it comes to governing its people. Certain things are left up to businesses in the most lazze-faire environment imaginable, and some things are clamped down with impunity by the central government. Adding to such a bizarre environment, the government can change their mind on a day by day basis. Instability leads to instability and 1.3b unstable people chowing down resources like americans is a scary thought indeed.

China's ballooning economy isn't going to change the fact that they are the world's sweatshop and their masses are completely oppressed by the govenment.

I dont think that it wasnt a factor, there was certainly a perceived fear that the british werent doing enough to defend frontier settlements against native american attacks. Obviously not the biggest factor though.

getting distracted.



What really worries me isnt left vs right politics, but top vs bottom. Between Bush, Putin, the rise of China, I think there something very scary about this new resurgence of authoritarianism so early in the century. India is one of the most socially libral societies on earth, and as much as that could be one of their greatest strengths, its incapacity to deal with population growth will likely cost the country its economic autonomy once again. I saw what nevermore was talking about in north india, communists are gaining ground, and china is certainly not uninvolved in that.

As the oil dries up and the scramble for influence and resources becomes even more tenacious will countries require this kind of cut-throat authoritarian control simply to survive?

oe - sidenote: India will not be a liberal country until they figure out how to integrate their untouchable class into their society. While, relative to China's human rights record, they're great - they are hardly perfect, or even as "liberal" as the US.

Well speaking of schizophrenia, I'd like to cast a vote for the new and improved Crowbert incarnation -- calm, rational, factual. Suffice it to say that your other posts I read were, um, not.

I don't India is socially liberal considering their caste system and the enormous gap between their elitist rich and third-world poor.

Crowbert....uneducated. I beg to pardon your statement. The Native American Indians were a society and a culture of high education. However it was not based on the European Model of Christianity. This misrepresentation is still put forth today is offensive to say the least.

Hell if it weren't for those so called savages the Europeans would have most likely failed in every effort on the new world of both South and North America.

I find it odd that Rim Joists agrees with (or at least compliments) me on posts where I misspell...

Oh, and Rimmer, I saw this in the evil, evil new york times and thought of you...

Libral has become a very loaded word, I meant it in the sense that there is very little government control over social issues, and I would agree with you this is perhaps to a fault,

Well I'm not worried about your spelling, and frankly I was losing interest in your semantical outrage. Good thoughts above.

Thanks for thinking of me, I think, but what does that article have to do with me?

snooker - "Plus, in their view, the land into which we were to expand was only sparsely populated by uneducated savages..." - Please realize that stating what other's views are does not make them your own.

Rim - though this really belongs in another thread, the article is in regards to progressive taxation and how Ben Stein and Warren Buffet both think its fair. You could refresh that thread (or send Mr. Stein an email) if you want to discuss it further.

To try and get this back on track, the government of India seems to be sponsoring architecture which is more in context and responsible (I am thinking of the library in AR last year, but don't have time to find it at the moment) though much less flashy versus China's new breed of architecture, which seems to be the other way around. Do you guys think this is representative of how these governments will handle the future?

'sparsely populated' - thanks to the rampant european plagues and diseases introduced by early european explorerers. The pre-colombain population of the new world was equal if not greater then europe at the time of columbus's voyages. Mexico City was the biggest city in the world before Cortez sneezed on the maya.

As to savagery- look at what happened in europe following the black death and other plagues. what the aborigine americans went through was total collapse of their culture/civilation caused by 90%+ mortality, so savages? post-apocolyptical survivors is a more apt term.

Will china's internal corruption and self-serving government survive much longer? I've heard that there is significant unrest and protesting by lots of different segments of their society.

Suffised to say, the founding fathers of the USA were wise in many ways - but the life of the native americans was not one of them.

And really, the only thing more scary than a capriciously autocratic China with 1.3b people is 1.3b Chinese with no real central government...

China has a negative replacement rate and has already peaked. We made China, and we can take it back too. Remember 60 yrs ago Japan was kicking China's but all over. Dont worry so much. We're Krafty with a capital K.

Evil, The last two countries we've remade is taking a little off our batting average though - lets hope thats a blip and not a trend.

I think your refering to the mideast, and that said I think remade should be replaced with the phrase divide and conquer. Or simply divide. So quick everyone on this website to judge America negatively. Sure we are sneaky and have our hands in everything but would you rather it was someone else?

We excel at the dividing, fair to poor with the conquering, and definitely off our game when it comes to the remaking - at least as of late. I think the old system of "America cooks the dinner, Europe washes the dishes." works better than the current model.

This is weird. On this thread I agree with Crowie.

Crow....I was never really intune to the contributions of the Mesa American Culture, as I grew up with the stero typical booze drinking, gutter crawling American Indian. It wasn't until I ventured out into the world and saw a much more important civilization of people, which have contributed to medicine, astronomy, agriculture, philosophy that I began to learn of what they have had to overcome in the last one hundred and fifty years. It is a stigma which is easily clothed in history, but an inaccurate history.

I recall one of my special studies classes at the University level when a fellow student of mexico who was working on his masters degree in architecture gave a presentation on the Maya Observatories of Central America. His masters thesis was the design of an observatory.
He did have a double undergraduate major in Architecture and mathmatics, so his presentation went way beyond the pretty slide show. It went to the heart of the subject, the complex mathmatics
it takes to layout an observatory in a fashion where certain sun and moon relationships occur at specific places within the ordering of structures and buildings. Ya and these guys were doing it all long hand, with out calculators or computers.

Um, Snooker -- Crowbert did not make the statement to which you are responding with the world cultures lesson.

dont forget the number zero snookers -

I think we can all agree that the benevolent nabob is a myth long overdue for disposal. None of these places need our 'influence'. We shouldnt harbor any illusions then that anyone has any real motivation for anything but competitive kleptocracy. My question for this thread is, what then? How does Africa keep itself from being carved up and cannibalized by national interests that have nothing to do with the wellbeing of anyone? How does India avert the negligent genocide of millions in the lower class without a brutal maoist autocracy to enforce population reduction and wealth redistribution? Will the demands of the next fifty years require us to relinquish social freedoms to survive?

seems relevant..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6201792.stm

I think it's important to note that China and India as true global economic superpowers, say, 50 years from now, will not be the China and India of the past, or even the transitional countries we know today. Plurality and civil society (in, say, China) and equity (in, say, India) and all those other nice things tend to come with the rise of an educated middle class. We are already starting to see plenty of dialogue in that direction in both countries.. China restructuring it's internal criminal justice system and imposing some pretty impressive environmental standards, for example. Recently, the regional wealth discrepancies in China are starting to show signs of reversing themselves, as industrialization reaches the central heartland, driven by the quest for lower wages. In India, persistent caste and ethnic divisions are, I think, starting to weaken, and educational and welfare gains are starting to penetrate to the poorest, and there's also a growing consensus that measures have to be taken to cut down on corruption.

My bet is that by the time China or India rival the US and EU as economic powers, they will have political systems and levels of civic participation indistinguishable from our own. If they don't, they will never reach that level.. the manufacturing jobs will simply go elsewhere as wages increase, and the "next big thing" will be Africa or Latin America or SE Asia.

the question is whether the development of a middle class will happen in china and india. it took generations for an educated middle class to happen in the usa(arguable about the educated part) the burgeoning middle class in asia may not have this time to develop as the jobs that would contribute to a middle class are already beginning to be outsourced to even less expensive countries.

I Chinese middle class of only a fraction of the population could already translate into something larger than the United States.

At the same time, China is built on cost cutting, export, and what amounts to slave labor. Even with a sizable middle class, there will still continue to be about a billion living in poverty and with little or no civil rights.

The world simply can't support another several hundred million people living a 'middle class' lifestyle. Imposing "impressive environmental standards", if that's true, is probably a last ditch effort to save one of the most toxic and polluted environments on earth. Olympics in that environment will be interesting to see...

People seem to forget that this is a country where Mao Zedong let tens of millions of people die of starvation in order to sell their food to the Soviets for weapons during the cold war. Things have changed, yes, but not as much as one might like to believe.

I've had quite a bit of exposure to/experience in China for both work and study approach. They're not as different as you seem to think they are. If you start taking a historically deterministic view, and start invoking the legacy of Mao, etc, then you fall into exactly the trap Wolfensohn warned against in his speech (referenced above).

If Vado is right, and this vast middle class doesn't emerge, then we have nothing to worry about. China will stay a third world country, and it will never pose a real competitive challenge to the US (although it may very well be a military challenge). If Wolfsensohn is right (which I believe he is), then we also have nothing to worry (politically speaking) about because they will, at that point, be plural and democratic.. although we had better start working a lot harder and studying a lot more...

As to Firetruck's point of the world not being able to support a large middle class in China, well... that's zero sum nonsense IMO. You can't tell the Indians or the Chinese that they have no right to prosperity because we've already hogged all the resources. That attitude IS a sure path to global conflict, so I certainly hope that we're smart enough not to embrace it. We just have to live greener and do as the Chinese are doing now (quite successfully according to the numbers I've seen), decreasing their urban per capita energy footprint by 61% over the last decade-and-a-half. We can to do that too. If we can't or don't, then we deserve to be left int he dust... but, being smart people, we will.

Look on the bright side.. millions of people are, as we speak, coming out of poverty and oppression. That's good news... not bad. Cheer up!

um.. typo.. I meant study abroad, not approach

By mentioning Mao I wasn't suggesting anything near historical determinism. The fact is that Mao continues to be revered in China, and even abroad, despite his atrocious and vicious record. As is evidenced by the government's whole sale disregard for people's rights in China (i.e. Falun Gong, land reclamation, etc.), the Chinese Communist Party has no intention of becoming a "pluralist democracy".

A large Chinese middle class, in my view, can never result in democracy. China would crumble with a democracy. This is not a 'country' in the sense of a US or UK. The southern part of China is practically autonomous, according to some. Orders given in Beijing at times barely leave government buildings. What China is experiencing is an incredible drive to gain wealth and produce that was initiated by foreign capital and foreign manufacturing.

At this point China is becoming a center of intellectual property theft and a huge problem for country's like Italy. Italian furniture and textile based cities have literally been driven out of business by Chinese competition - which, I might add, includes "borrowing" Italian design and manufacturing techniques. At the recent Shanghai auto show cars literally identical to Toyota's and Honda's were being placed on show. Korea's LG electronics recently found to their dismay that their "Chocolate" brand phone had already been copied and was widely in use even *before* they tried to introduce that model into the Chinese market... and this sort of thing is rampant.

You seem to have misinterpreted my comments. I did not claim that the Chinese or Indians "have not right to prosperity" - I simply pointed out the fact that this planet cannot sustain people living and consuming like Americans x 10.

If you have any faith in Chinese environmentalism or Chinese efforts to clean up the environment I suggest you ask the Koreans and the Japanese. South Korean cities are routinely plagued by the sand blowing from the ever rapidly expanding Gobi Desert. This desert is basically encroaching and devouring China due to thoughtless agricultural exploitation. Japan is experiencing Chinese dumping of toxic materials in the sea - just recently large quantities of used syringes and medical waste was washing up on the shores of southern Japanese islands.

China is scary.

if you were leading a nation that was behind the rest of the "modern" world, how many deaths are suitable to bring your nation to the level of the "modern" countries? zero, one, five, ten, twenty million?

Vado,

Use the American benchmark... how many slaughtered to make a mighty empire great. say 25 million native Americans over the generations and however many Blacks died in the middle passage and under slavery (I think about a 100-150 million prematurely)... a few million of everybody else who got in the way. 'tis how empires are made ;)

Treekiller, what about America's internal corruption and self-serving government then ?

(As much as I am enjoying posting here ) I feel there's no real point to this discussion.

Power equations never remain the same,They keep changing .Its the cycle of Nature.
at one time The greek empire ruled the world..today they are a cipher ..likewise there is no trace of the mighty Mongolian empire.

Maybe 50 Years hence , the Chinese Dragon or The Indian Tiger may rule the world....maybe after 1000 years, It could be the Tonga Islands ! who knows ? and there's no point speculating !