Cited in today’s FM newswire: “Keeping America’s Edge“, Jim Manzi, National Affairs, Winter 2010. I described this as “Powerful insights from a bright guy.”
I read this quckly (aka sloppy work). His description of the inherent conflict between cohesion and innovation was interesting {update: and important}, and I skipped over the rest. Readers have pointed out that much of the rest is absurd. Here are three examples (this is a dashed off correction).
(1) America’s military power
“Yet the strategy of giving up and opting out of this international economic competition in order to focus on quality of life is simply not feasible for the United States. Europeans can get away with it only because they benefit from the external military protection America provides; we, however, have no similar guardian to turn to.”
Our armored legions are protecting Europe from … what? If we’re protecting them, let’s charge them for it. That will show what value the EU places on our military support. I’ll bet their bid would be tiny.
(2) Average living standards
” First, average living standards have continued to rise since 1980.”
The mean has risen. The median has risen far less (or even fallen, depending on the metric used), because the growth has been concentrated at the top. Manzi knows this , at some level, as seen in his discussion about rising inequality. {Update: this was poorly expressed. Manzi’s statement IMO is not accurate, for reasons Manzi himself explains in his article’s discussion of rising inequality — IMO the central part of the article).
(3) US manufacturing
I missed this, somehow. Manzi shows this graph, which is misleading.
Manufacturing output is best measured by using value-added, not gross output. The BEA shows that manufacturing was 20% of GDP in 1980 — and 11.5% in 2008.
