IP: WORTH THINKING ABOUT: AS THE WORLD SHRINKS

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: AS THE WORLD SHRINKS

       Author Robert Kaplan writes about America's new place in the world's
shrinking geography:
       "According to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, at the turn of
the twentieth century the western frontier--and free land in
particular--was the guarantor of American democracy, since each westward
migration produced an encounter with a new landscape that allowed the
settlers to re-create local government, as continual economic opportunity
drew newcomers. And because taming the land was an eminently practical
task, ideology had a marginal effect on this emerging American life,
compared to that of Europe. When the last interior tracts of the western
frontier closed in the 1890s with the settling of Oklahoma and the Dakotas,
Turner told a July 1893 Chicago symposium that there was nothing left to
ensure America's dynamism.
       "Turner's warning about decline was premature. Much frontier land
remained cheap and underdeveloped, even if it had already been officially
'settled.' Through most of the twentieth century, oceanic distances were
formidable enough to secure America's virtual monopoly over its large
internal market in an age of industrial expansion and economies of scale.
Oceans also protected the United States from the devastations of the First
and Second World Wars, giving us a relative advantage over Europe and Asia
that allowed for the 'American Century.' Our protected landmass with its
abundance of natural resources was an ideal setting for the Industrial Age,
whose passing has only recently begun. From the end of the Civil War to
1973, the U.S. economy, largely insulated from foreign competition, grew at
an average rate of 3.4 percent annually, excluding inflation. The real wage
nearly doubled from one generation to the next, so that the American Dream
in these years came true and optimism was the official American religion.
       "But now we face the loss of the protection that geography once
provided. Because the United States has been so overwhelmingly a creature
of geography, in the twenty-first century shrinking distances will affect
us more than they will our competitors, whose economic development never
depended on continental isolation."

Look for Robert D. Kaplan's "An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's
Future" at your local bookstore or in your favorite library.



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