Take a Chill Pill

Tom Friedman would've made a wonderful Cold Warrior. He was born too late. He could've risen right to the top at State, given his preternatural ability to look at the Party parade and from it assess the vitality of the enemy. Dazzled by trains, planes, and cell phones, he seems to be ignorant of the fact that a couple of hundred million Chinese live on less than a dollar a day, and that well over a billion of them live in what to an American would seem to be grinding, impossible poverty. A billion! And when I say ignorant of the fact, I don't mean that he turns a blind eye to it. I don't mean that he ignores it because it doesn't fit his model. I mean, he actually does not know that this is the case.

Now Didion once noted that when the ruling class wishes to dismiss the lived experience of the ruled, it does so by calling their lives and worries "anecdotal." Not everything is best understood as a statistical abstract. A mind that can only look at the numbers is a self-limiting intellect. But still: mere anecdote unmoored from context is just bullshit. China is poor, polluted, and has one of the smallest per capita acreages of arable, cultivated land among all the nations on this earth. They have a way yet to go.

Meanwhile, what was the last major technological or scientific innovation to come out of China? This is a serious question. It would be nice if our airports were shinier, our flights less delayed, and if Amtrak ran like the SNCF. On the other hand, it's just not that hard to get from New York to DC. The notion, now bruited about, that infrastructure is destiny has the mythic undertone of a certain Kevin Costner baseball movie. The bulk of technological, medical, biological, etc. progress still occurs in a few wealthy nations, ours included. The now-popular notion that our "best minds" decided to go into finance instead of research is . . . well, you'll pardon me, anecdotal. Most people who work in finance and banking aren't very bright, and the supposed mathematical complexity of their newfangled investment vehicles is hyped and overblown by an innumerate media. Not all successful con men are geniuses--most are just street-smart and improvisatory.