The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon.

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Faileconomists Daron Acemoglu and James A. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world.

Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in had an income 60—70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese. All this began to change very rapidly once Deng Xiaoping initiated his free-market reforms infirst throughout the countryside and eventually in the smaller industrial enterprises of the coastal provinces.

A combination of slowing population growth and rapidly accelerating economic output has obvious implications for national prosperity. During the three decades toChina achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost fold between and While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about percent over the last ten years alone.

The Chinese of were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income. A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from tobut critics noted that over percent of that decline came from China alone: And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time.

Between andAmerica enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion.

But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1, percent. Over the last decade alone, China quadrupled its industrial output, which is now comparable to that of the U. In the crucial sector of automobiles, China raised its production ninefold, from 2 million cars in to 18 million ina figure now greater than the combined totals for America and Japan.

China accounted for fully 85 percent of the total world increase in auto manufacturing during that decade. This distorts Chinese trade statistics, leading to unnecessary friction. And although America originally pioneered the Human Genome Project, the Beijing Genomics Institute BGI today probably stands as the world leader in that enormously important emerging scientific field. For most of the last 3, years, China together with the Mediterranean world and its adjoining European peninsula have constituted the two greatest world centers of technological and economic progress.

During the 13th century, Marco Polo traveled from his native Venice to the Chinese Empire and described the latter as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country. As late as the 18th century, many leading European philosophers such as Voltaire often looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, while both the British and the Prussians used the Chinese mandarinate as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service based on competitive examinations.

Ross and Lothrop Stoddard, boldly predicted the forthcoming restoration of the Chinese nation to global influence, the former with equanimity and the latter with serious concern. All three seem to have first appeared in China, though for various social, political, and ideological reasons, none were properly implemented. Under the right circumstances, the rapid development of one large country should tend to improve living standards for the rest of the world.

This is most obvious for those nations whose economic strengths directly complement those of a growing China. As a direct consequence, these years have generally been very good ones for the economies of countries that heavily rely upon the export of natural resources—Australia, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa. While this process may negatively impact those particular industries and countries directly competing with China, it provides enormous opportunities as well, not merely to the aforementioned raw-material suppliers but also to countries like Germany, whose advanced equipment and machine tools have found a huge Chinese market, thereby helping to reduce German unemployment to the lowest level in 20 years.

And as ordinary Chinese grow wealthier, they provide a larger market as well for the goods and services of leading Western companies, ranging from fast-food chains to consumer products to luxury goods. In General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U. Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs.

Chinese urban pollution is among the worst in the world, and traffic is rapidly heading toward that same point. China now contains the second largest number of billionaires after America, together with more than a million dollar-millionaires, and although many of these individuals came by their fortunes honestly, many others did not. Official corruption is a leading source of popular resentment against the various levels of Chinese government, ranging from local village councils to the highest officials in Beijing.

But we must maintain a proper sense of proportion. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles when it still had the most notorious smog in America, I recognize that such trends can be reversed with time and money, and indeed the Chinese government has expressed intense interest in the emerging technology of non-polluting electric cars.

Rapidly growing national wealth can be deployed to solve many problems. Similarly, plutocrats who grow rich through friends in high places or even outright corruption are easier to tolerate when a rising tide is rapidly lifting all boats. Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1, percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero.

Many American pundits and politicians still focus their attention on the tragic Tiananmen Square incident ofduring which hundreds of determined Chinese protesters were massacred by government troops. Unfortunately, this project also involved considerable corruption, as was widely reported in the world media, which estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars had been misappropriated through bribery and graft.

Obviously such serious corruption would seem horrifying in a country with the pristine standards of a Sweden or a Norway. But based on the published accounts, it appears that the funds diverted amounted to perhaps as little as 0. Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports.

Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year, and although an occasional disaster—such as the crash in Weizhou, which killed 40 passengers—is tragic, it is hardly unexpected. But over the last couple of years, the government has taken major steps to reduce this problem by establishing a national healthcare insurance system whose coverage now extends to 95 percent or so of the total population, a far better ratio than is found in wealthy America and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Once again, competent leaders with access to growing national wealth can effectively solve these sorts of major social problems. Although Chinese cities have negligible crime and are almost entirely free of the horrible slums found in many rapidly urbanizing Third World countries, housing for ordinary workers is often quite inadequate. But national concerns over rising unemployment due to the global recession gave the government a perfect opportunity late last year to announce a bold plan to construct over 35 million modern new government apartments, which would then be provided to ordinary workers on a subsidized basis.

Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country. Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline. Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.

Evidence for the long-term decline in our economic circumstances is most apparent when we consider the situation of younger Americans. The national media endlessly trumpets the tiny number of youthful Facebook millionaires, but the prospects for most of their contemporaries are actually quite grim. According to research from the Pew Center, barely half of to year-old Americans are currently employed, the lowest level sincea time long before most women had joined the labor force.

Nearly one-fifth of young men age 25—34 are still living with their parents, while the wealth of all households headed by those younger than 35 is 68 percent lower today than it was in The total outstanding amount of non-dischargeable student-loan debt has crossed the trillion-dollar mark, now surpassing the combined total of credit-card and auto-loan debt—and with a quarter of all student-loan payers now delinquent, there are worrisome indicators that much of it will remain a permanent burden, reducing many millions to long-term debt peonage.

International trade statistics, meanwhile, demonstrate that although Apple and Google are doing quite well, our overall economy is not. For many years now our largest goods export has been government IOUs, whose dollar value has sometimes been greater than that of the next ten categories combined.

At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, the rest of the world will lose its appetite for this non-functional product, and our currency will collapse, together with our standard of living. Similar Cassandra-like warnings were issued for years about the housing bubble or the profligacy of the Greek government, and were proven false year after year until one day they suddenly became true. Ironically enough, there is actually one major category in which American expansion still easily tops that of China, both today and for the indefinite future: A combination of very rapid population growth and doubtful prospects for equally rapid economic growth does not bode well for the likely quality of the American Dream.

China rises while America falls, but are there major causal connections between these two concurrent trends now reshaping the future of our world?

Not that I can see. American politicians and pundits are naturally fearful of taking on the fierce special interest groups that dominate their political universe, so they often seek an external scapegoat to explicate the misery of their constituents, sometimes choosing to focus on China.

But this is merely political theater for the ignorant and the gullible. And if China opened wide its borders to more American movies or financial services, the multimillionaires of Hollywood and Wall Street might grow even richer, but ordinary Americans would see little benefit. It is always easier for a nation to point an accusing finger at foreigners rather than honestly admit that almost all its terrible problems are essentially self-inflicted.

The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. If most Americans have experienced virtually no economic gains for decades, perhaps we should cast our gaze at these factors in our own society.

Our elites boast about the greatness of our constitutional democracy, the wondrous human rights we enjoy, the freedom and rule of law that have long made America a light unto the nations of the world and a spiritual draw for oppressed peoples everywhere, including China itself. But are these claims actually correct? They often stack up very strangely when they appear in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, coming just after the news reporting, whose facts tell a very different story.

A few months later, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the president power to permanently imprison without trial or charges any American whom he classifies as a national-security threat based on his own judgment and secret evidence.

When we consider that American society has experienced virtually no domestic terrorism during the past decade, we must wonder how long our remaining constitutional liberties would survive if we were facing frequent real-life attacks by an actual terrorist underground, such as had been the case for many years with the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigades in Italy.

Many of these negative ideological trends have been absorbed and accepted by the popular culture and much of the American public.

Numerous episodes featured our hero torturing suspected evildoers in order to extract the information necessary to save innocent lives, with the entire series representing a popular weekly glorification of graphic government torture on behalf of the greater good. Now soft-headed protestations to the contrary, most governments around the world have at least occasionally practiced torture, especially when combating popular insurgencies, and some of the more brutal regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, even professionalized the process.

Throughout all of modern history, I am not aware of a single even semi-civilized country that publicly celebrated the activities of its professional government torturers in the popular media.

And since we live in a entertainment-dominated society, sentiments affirmed on the al rajhi bank forex rates often have direct real-world consequences. At one point, senior American military and counter-terrorism officials felt the need to travel to Hollywood and urge its screenwriters to stop glorifying American torture, since their shows were encouraging U.

But does our current system actually possess the central feature of a true democracy, namely a high degree of popular influence over major government policies?

Here the evidence seems more ambiguous. Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity.

Yet almost none of these reversals took place. The government bailout of the hated financial manipulators of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued apace under Obama, with no serious attempts at either government prosecution or drastic reform. Americans are still mostly suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but Wall Street profits and multimillion-dollar bonuses soon returned to record levels.

In particular, the continuity of top officials has been remarkable. Ben Bernanke had been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Bush and was reappointed by Obama. Bush wars and bailouts became Obama wars and bailouts. During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists routinely characterized our democracy as a sham, with the American public merely selecting which work from home transportation broker the two intertwined branches of their single political party should alternate in office, while the actual underlying policies remained essentially unchanged, being decided and implemented by the same corrupt ruling class.

This accusation may have been mostly false at the time it was made but seems disturbingly accurate today. When times are hard and government policies are widely unpopular, but voters are only offered a choice between the rival slick marketing campaigns of Coke win instant cash online australia Pepsi, cynicism can reach extreme proportions.

But if our government policies are so broadly unpopular, why are we unable to change them through the sacred power of the vote? Political leaders are made or broken depending on whether they receive the cash and visibility needed to win office.

National campaigns increasingly seem sordid reality shows for second-rate political celebrities, while our country continues along its path toward multiple looming calamities. Candidates who depart from the script or deviate from mint check cashing kearny nj elite D. We know from the collapsed communist states of Eastern Europe that control over the media may determine public perceptions of reality, but it does not change the underlying reality itself, and reality usually has the last laugh.

And we suffer other costs as well. A recent New York Times story described the morale-building visit of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to our forces in Afghanistan and noted that all American troops had been required to surrender their weapons before attending his speech and none were allowed to remain armed in his vicinity. Such a command decision get 10 free stardollars stardoll almost unprecedented in American history and does not reflect well upon the perceived state of our military morale.

Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.

Consider list of stock broking firms in lagos late collapse of MF Global, a midsize but highly reputable brokerage firm.

Just a year earlier, Jon Corzine had been installed as CEO, following his terms as Democratic governor and U. Perhaps no other American had such a combination of stellar political and financial credentials on his resume. When he lost that bet, his multi-billion-dollar firm tumbled into where can i short sell penny stocks. At this point, the story moves from a commonplace tale of Wall Street history of pepsico stock price and greed into something out of the Twilight Zone, or perhaps Monty Python.

As an example, a front page Wall Street Journal story on February 23, suggested that after so many months, there seemed little likelihood that the disappeared customer funds might ever reappear, but also emphasized that absolutely no one was being accused of any wrongdoing. But when we consider the largest corporate collapses of the last decade that were substantially due to fraud, nearly all the names are American: WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia.

And this list leaves out all the American financial institutions destroyed by the financial meltdown—such as Lehman, Bear Stearns, Manage account forex terpercaya Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia—and the many trillions of dollars in American homeowner equity and top-rated MBS securities which evaporated during that process. Meanwhile, the largest and longest Ponzi Scheme in world history, that of Bernie Madoff, had survived for decades under the very nose of the SEC, despite a long series of detailed warnings and complaints.

The second largest such fraud, that of Allen R. Some of the sources of Chinese success and American decay are not entirely mysterious. How corrupt is quickest way to earn money in hay day American society fashioned by our current ruling elites? That question is perhaps more ambiguous than it might seem.

According to the standard world rankings produced by Transparency International, the United States is a reasonably clean country, with corruption being considerably higher than in the nations of Northern Europe or uwti stock options in the Anglosphere, but much lower than in most of the rest of the world, including China.

Unlike the situation in many Third World countries, American teachers and tax inspectors very rarely solicit bribes, and there is little overlap in personnel between our local police and the criminals whom they pursue. Most ordinary Americans are generally honest.

So by these basic measures of day-to-day corruption, America is quite clean, not too different from Germany or Japan. By contrast, local village authorities in China have a notorious tendency to seize public land and sell it to real estate developers for huge personal profits.

However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions truro livestock market report dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.

Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. Ordinary Americans who work buyback treasury stock journal entry and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and forex prop trading jobs families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage.

The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top how do i make money with my cargo van our society, among the One Percent, or indicators for binary options for beginners likely the 0.

Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political mfi stock market and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated.

Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is mcb.mu forex index remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.

Ninjatrader amp futures similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home.

A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task.

Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.

But if so, then we must admit stock trading course malaysia Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.

Boundary Conditions Definition | Investopedia

It should be Indian peninsula and Middle East, including Greece. Graphic binary options for mt4 platform offered nothing special before or so.

Greece is in EUROPE! Hopefully China will continue to improve and the people there get more freedom. However, the Tienanmen Square incident is not a small thing. I suspect the elites in China have no poruchik forexfactory respect for their people than ours do. Infanticide, forced abortion and summary execution are not policies to emulate.

What the west has, the importance of forex forex brokerage firms individual, the idea that the State is supposed to be subservient to a higher law are not ideas to trade away for a mess of pottage.

I do agree, however with earlier commentators about American lack of discipline. Years ago, cutting through the Engineering School at Rutgers, I was struck that the al rajhi bank forex rates majority of students were foreigners, mostly Asian.

Americans at that time just went to school to party. With her extractive elites America has taken a different path but has, ironically, arrived at the forexsignal30 download free terminus as the old Soviet Union: Too much economic power forex trading training in mumbai the hands of too few.

I find it amazing what is not mentioned here: Trillions of dollars have been squandered over the past two or three decades. Putin has noted this fact as partly explaining the collapse of the USSR. The author has forgotten to mention race and diversity as a factor that ensures America will not rise again. Chinese have an average intelligence above that of whites and are not saddled with untold millions of low IQ third world people hanging like a millstone round their necks.

You are rewriting history in most shameful way. Civilisation started 7, earn money advertisements ago in modern day Iraq by people who spoke a language that the Rev. Sayce described as recognisable in modern Baghdad and Cairo. I leave the identity of these people to the nasdaq stock halt trading reader to figure out.

When Rome fell after a 1, years civilisation had yet to cross the Rhine-Danube boundary. Places like Denmark was wood stock for savage mark ii the dark until about only a 1, years ago. At the same time the Islamic-Arabic world was richer, more advanced, more civilised than anything in Europe.

Even this small stint is coming to an end see my blog http: Thanks — this piece is right on target, and revealed to me a good deal of economic chicanery of which I had previously been unaware. Historically, election theft has been done one-vote-at-a-time, stuffing ballot boxes. But sincecomputerized vote theft has gradually become institutionalized. You can read more about how we can know this is true at http: Donald Trump has been investing in Costa Rica very heavily….

They are doing this because they are smarter than the rest of us. This started 5 years ago just before the housing crash. Probably has accelerated since where this article is from.

A good reality check on the economic situation is to ask around your friends and relatives on whose making the big put and call option.ppt now! The boundary conditions for american put option will be pretty obvious. SinoPec is already partnered with ArAmCo and Exxon to build refineries in China which means those Western Companies are already raiding the Chinese treasure chest.

Why will 9 out of 10 of the people I send this to, not get the message? Why cant they notice the foundation below them is collapsing!? How can I help them learn? Who is John Galt? JonF — you might consider the logic of natural selection applied to a population where forex brokers czech republic men greatly outnumbered single women. Women will choose the best potential providers for their family or simply choose those who appear to be smartest and strongest and most determined and, in any case, the result will be choosing, on average, fathers who will have smarter more productive progeny than those of the average male.

Does the US not suffer a serioius political Catch 22? You could clean up much of the excessive influence of money for campaigning and the targeting of self-interest simply to get people to bother to vote by adopting the compulsory voting which means that, in Australia, about teacup yorkie puppies for sale bay area per cent of those eligible do vote.

But what would it do to actual policy when you have such a high proportion of poorly educated and ethnically disaffected poor people with existing entitlements which cause resentment amongst what was once middle America?

And here is an issue for serious empirical study. Why should a great concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1 per cent, or 5 per cent, or 0. But any suggestion that such a situation is to be found in the US needs to be demonstrated. It seems more likely that high taxes and regulatory burdens are adding so much to the cost of doing business in the US and even driving entrepreneurs to set up elsewhere, so that the owners of capital are not deploying it to the greatest advantage of US citizens.

Clearly it is what is being done to the average American of no special talent, intelligence, education or skill whose income is no longer supported by the advantages America had for many years after WW2 and is being suppressed by high immigration.

To an outsider it is slightly less clear that the situation is made almost intolerable for the squeezed middle classes by tax burdens which are not fairly born by the very rich. Blaming others for Americas decline is not the solution. Be A man america and pick yourself,learn from your mistakes and move on. America needs to get the trillion back. It needs a media integrity in a mainstream vehicle and government and law enforcement.

Another blogger jumping on the bandwagon. This experiment simply gained them a bypass in the militarization highway. They needed to up their might quicker. In fact, the most creative Chinese are those that come to the USA. I am not amazed that the China-uber-allez belief is a conservative thing. Just by definition they cannot forecast the future. The future is full of X factors.

X is at the core of America. Your insular perspective of what this nation is all about and what makes it tick make you the LAST ones who will decide where this country goes. But you, and some of your commentors, have no idea the self-contained power America holds. Most of your retirement will be spent on security. Never was a piece written so needed to be read.

We are a one party country. God how is Corzine walking around. Why did no one on MSNBC challenge Obama on pulling out of Iraq. The Democratic Party promised in 96 if they got control of both Houses of Congress they would end Iraq. Then the Attorney General has he arrested anybody? His only claim to work is the ridiculous suit again Sheriff Arpaio. Holder is beyond doubt the worst AG in decades. It is time to throw the bums out in both parties. Obama has got to go we need change even if it fails like him.

We are in sad shape how many know friends working endless hours of over time not to be payed for it or hanging on not sure if their job will be there next Monday. Ancient Sumerian, which was totally unrelated to any modern language except maybe at prehistoric removewould not be recognized by anyone in Baghdad today. Ancient Egyptian might be recognized as something vaguely familiar by a modern Copt since the Coptic liturgy still uses a language descended from it.

And if civilization means written language, organized govermment, organized religion, metallurgy, civic works etc.

Boundary Delimitation —

James Guest, I have a certain healthy skepticism about genetic determinism in any guise, especvialkly since women are not always known for the sagacity of their choices in mates in our own era. And again, given that men and women are born in approximately equal numbers and that neither sex is more vulnerable to childhood illnesses than the other, the only mechanisms I can conceive of to produce a huge male-heavy gender imablance in a low-tech society would be if the society was subject to routine woman-stealing by outsiders.

By the way, modern hunter-gatherer societies are suspect as stand-ins for the prehistoric sort. For one thing they are all subject to the influence of modern high-tech cultures around them, and the few that remain are under enormous deforming stress from the outside world.

But, anyway, the point was about China which we know has a great excess of males, partly exacerbated probably by the one child policy although also the product of a traditional preference for male children.

The result is the same. Logic suggests that an imbalance in the sexes should be conducive to the improvement of useful cognitive abilities and other qualities in the population. Can you cite facts which would trump that logic with evidence? American inner city poverty is the result of educational underachievement relative to the majority population whereas Chinese poverty is a simple lack of physical infrastructure: I suppose I ought explain myself a bit more fully.

First off, I do not believe in genetic determinism, at least not beyond the level of blue eyes, hemophilia and the like. We are not preprogrammed robots. By low-tech society I do not mean modern China. I am speaking of hunter-gathrers or very simple agriculturalists. But in primitive societies a healthy child, male or female, was a valuable resource for the family or band— just about the only resource in fact since, other than maybe dogs, they had no source of labor except human labor— and daughters could work just as hard as sons, if not at all the same tasks, but still at tasks crucial for survival.

You really do not find women being devalued until you start seeing a economic surplus develop in societies and daughters become less useful for labor— and even for childbearing, as a population surplus develops as a result of agriculture. So no, I do not see primitive societies developing a surplus of males, but to the contrary a slight surplus of females as the men were liable to killed in hunting mishaps or in some cases in violent confrontations with other peoples. Also, do not read back modern American mating customs on the distant past or even the recent past.

Young people, and especially young women, are not known for making wise choices about such things, and for much of history families did everything they could to steer their children toward more suitable matches than the emotional follies of youth might lead them to. And yes, this may have produced good pairings, but again, beware genetic determinism. Regression to the mean and sometimes to less than it would seem to be the rule instead. Interesting comments from folks.

As one who left the U. Bush administration dragged the U. Right now, folks are puzzled and confused about the way forward. We are all responsbible for allowing the system to deteriorate this far and for allowing its continuation. But America has come through before … why all the doom and gloom now? As an aside, I agree with those who see our continuing and increasing diversity and large-scale immigration as our greatest strengths and these should be nurtured and treasured, not feared.

Nobody ever moved forward from a position of fear. Fear can only lead us backward. Funnily enough, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and and a score of European nations managed to build First World economies with negligible diversity.

I wonder why that is…. What I think we all need to see is that America is in super big trouble. No industry, no jobs, poor healthcare system made worse by Barrys super health plan which he has shoved down our throats. Our government is corrupt, heartless and self serving.

And guess what—we now face 6 months of obnoxious tv ads with barry and milt slamming each other instead of focusing on the issues. Worse, taxpayer money subsidizes some of their ads. Yes, America IS bankrupt. Ben keeps printing money. China holds the markers and loans us our own money to prop up our phony standard of living.

We have ourselves to blame—Americans distract themselves with the most nonsensical, meaningless crap—celebrities, dwts, idol, biggest loser, pro sports, tabloid trash, stupid sitcoms.

Oh yes, now the NFL draft—so important when many Americans are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. We have no attention span, nobody cares and we are totally asleep at the switch. Or heads buried in our iphones. All this time China has focused with laser like precision on becoming the worlds economic superpower and they have succeeded Other countries must laugh at us.

Okay a bit negative, and some of you may criticize me for it as is your right. Business is slow still but we are hopeful that Americans will wake up and learn that buying American stuff will create many many jobs, etc.

China is not a homogenous country; it too has diversity, albeit mainly from peoples it has conquered over the centuries rather than through immigration. And when was the USA not diverse? Jim Crow did not mean black people did not exist, and in times past Italians, Irish, Slavs, etc. I quickly read most of Mr. My takes from his article are: I think two scenes early in the film mirror what Mr. Unz may be saying: The in-store video-cam focuses on him; however, he cannot understand how he appears on all the TV sets.

Yet,if one becomes an entrepreneur,creates jobs,pays taxes and is successful then that person is vilified and condemned as an exploiter. The Cultural Marxists have done a good job of creating a climate of class warfare.

Unz quite correctly points out the source of our economic and political difficulties is rent extraction by our elites:. Yet somehow you turn this into a condemnation of millions of working people who are merely trying to survive in the corrupt system created by the. We are more advance in technologies and innovations.

We will achieve if our Gov. Good article on the parasitic ruling class in the US. Yes, but what will be the quality of all these younger people? In what way will China become the 1 nation? By outgrowing the U. Or by the economies of the U. In other words, China has moved from a Third-World nation to a Second-World. Hence China and the U. Utz, are you suggesting that collectivist, top down solutions to problems caused by collectivist, top down policies are desirable?

Politics creates problems, not solutions. Absolutely brilliant essay, Mr. Good riddance, after all the trouble, genocide and wars, one ought to pay for the crass they caused.

April 24, at 5: The fraud at the Grays Building Society in England lasted even longer, being handed down over generations of perpetrators.

I agree however that a nation unable to cope with its own diversity and the challenges it presents by discarding bigotry is doomed to failure. There is democratic capitalism, socialist capitalism, communist capitalism. Is capitalism economics or politics? Does it matter in a global economy? The real forces in a globnal economy are plutocratic and autocratic, whether state or corporation. The real marketplace does not tolerate the slow moving politics of democracies or republics.

The Tiananmen Square conflict has been widely distorted in the West. It should also be noted that some of the demonstration leaders did everything they could to provoke the army into attacking, so they could have a martyr cause to rally around.

This was not discouraged by the officers, and so it went on for days. Until the demonstrators turned hostile. Before that, Deng Xiaoping had invited the leaders of the demonstrators to talk with him directly, which they did on national television. Or Ron Paul-inspired demonstrators — it would never happen.

Deng Xiaoping was the man who ended communist control of China.

He filled the Chinese government with other men who had been imprisoned or exiled by Mao. He changed the economy and saved the country from economic collapse, thus being responsible for saving hundreds of millions of people from poverty. And yet he resigned after Tiananmen Square. Note also how the demonstrations started. They started by attacking dorms with Third World students from Africa and elsewhere, dragging them out and beating them. They cheered Mao and demanded a return to his society, which they imagined was a way to get free money taken from those who did actual work.

Now that China is Nationalist, they hate it for playing its own game, without being controlled by the globalist elite. You might be interested to mention next time that China has overtaken the United States in patent filings, utility model patents, industrial design patents, trade mark filings, as well as scientific paper publications.

Widely shared among my friends. What a great piece of writing. Your email address will not be published. Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion? Social Costs of a Rapid Rise Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs.

Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture.

Decay of Constitutional Democracy The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. Sidebar Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR Response to Rubenstein Resurrecting Our Intellectual Past MORE IN WORLD Philip Jenkins.

April 20, at April 20, at 8: April 20, at 9: April 20, at 5: April 21, at 4: April 21, at 5: April 21, at 6: April 21, at 7: Have a whiff folks: Carlos R Garza says: April 21, at 3: April 21, at April 22, at 2: April 22, at 8: April 22, at April 22, at 1: April 23, at 5: April 23, at 9: April 23, at 1: What does this mean? April 23, at 3: James Guest, I suppose I ought explain myself a bit more fully.

April 24, at 1: April 24, at 7: April 24, at 8: I am confident with hard work and FOCUS on the job ahead, we can regain our country. April 24, at 6: April 24, at April 25, at 2: Unz quite correctly points out the source of our economic and political difficulties is rent extraction by our elites: April 26, at 1: April 27, at 5: The US is likely to have a younger population structure than China Yes, but what will be the quality of all these younger people?

April 29, at April 30, at 5: Please explain what you mean. May 23, at 1: June 26, at 9: June 26, at 4: August 30, at September 12, at 8: From the CIA Factbook: September 15, at 8: December 3, at 3: July 11, at 7: July 17, at 1: August 18, at January 13, at 5: Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

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