How the World Works
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Highlights
- Rather, the ultimate critique is that laissez-faire failed to comprehend Britain’s economic future—a future in which, confronted by far more powerful systems of national capitalism, the British economy would enter into a long-run relative decline from which it has yet to recover.
- Then, after about a forty-year transition, the U.S. came out of World War II on top of the pyramid. Now we are in a similar period of transition from which it is likely, after another two decades, that Japan will emerge as the leading industrial power.
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- Individuals versus the nation. The Anglo-American view focuses on how individuals fare as consumers and on how the whole world fares as a trading system. But it does not really care about the intermediate levels between one specific human being and all five billion—that is, about communities and nations.
- In the Friedrich List view, this logic leads to false conclusions. In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy but by what it can make. This is the corollary of the familiar argument about foreign aid: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for his life.
- Societies may work best, Lee and others have said, if they pay less attention to the individual and more to the welfare of the group.
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The Anglo-American system of politics and economics, like any system, rests on certain principles and beliefs. But rather than acting as if these are the best principles, or the ones their societies prefer, Britons and Americans often act as if these were the only possible principles and no one, except in error, could choose any others. Political economics becomes an essentially religious question, subject to the standard drawback of any religion—the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do.
- the dominance of the English language lets them ignore what is being said and thought overseas—and just how isolated they have become.