Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2012

choi

(1) Ruchir Sharma, Broken BRICs; Why the rest stopped rising.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ar ... sharma/broken-brics

(a) Quote:

" Chinese growth is slowing sharply, from double digits down to seven percent or even less. And the rest of the BRICs are tumbling, too: since 2008, Brazil's annual growth has dropped from 4.5 percent to two percent; Russia's, from seven percent to 3.5 percent; and India's, from nine percent to six percent. None of this should be surprising, because it is hard to sustain rapid growth for more than a decade. The unusual circumstances of the last decade made it look easy. * * * By 2007, when only three countries in the world suffered negative growth, recessions had all but disappeared from the international scene.

"The notion of wide-ranging convergence between the developing and the developed worlds is a myth. * * * as of 2011, the difference in per capita incomes between the rich and the developing nations was back to where it was in the 1950s.

"Over the course of any given decade since 1950, on average, only a third of the emerging markets have been able to grow at an annual rate of five percent or more. Less than one-fourth have kept up that pace for two decades, and one-tenth, for three decades. Only Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong have maintained this growth rate for four decades. So even before the current signs of a slowdown in the BRICs, the odds were against Brazil experiencing a full decade of growth above five percent, or Russia, its second in a row.

(b) Note:
(i) The Indian surname Sharma is a "Hindu (Brahman) name from Sanskrit šarma ‘joy,' ‘shelter.'"
(ii)
(A) Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/drodrik/
(B) Dani Rodrik, The Future of Economic Convergence. Kansas City Fed, August 2011.
www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2011/2011.Rodrik.paper.pdf

Read only the following:
* Figure 4 Convergence gaps by region, 1950-2008 (at page 11) and the text beneath the figure on the same page ("For the developing countries as a group, this gap has steadily increased since the 1950s until 20000, and has precipitously dropped over the lst decade, bringing it back to levels that prevailed in the early 1950s (Figure 4). Asia has been closing the gap steadily since the late 1970s, while Africa and Latin America have only recently experienced what appeared to be, over a long horizon, a comparatively small tur in the same direction").
* Table 1 Countries that have grown at 4.5 per annum per capita.

Take notice that France, Germany, United States, and United Kingdom were not among them. (For reasons Economists still still do not understand, economy (both national and global) grew very slowly until after World War II.)

choi

(2) Neil Gershenfeld, How to Make Almost Anything; The digital fabrication revolution.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ar ... ake-almost-anything

(a) Quote:

(i) "The first Industrial Revolution can be traced back to 1761, when the Bridgewater Canal opened in Manchester, England. Commissioned by the Duke of Bridgewater to bring coal from his mines in Worsley to Manchester and to ship products made with that coal out to the world, it was the first canal that did not follow an existing waterway. Thanks to the new canal, Manchester boomed. In 1783, the town had one cotton mill; in 1853, it had 108. But the boom was followed by a bust. The canal was rendered obsolete by railroads, then trucks, and finally containerized shipping. Today, industrial production is a race to the bottom, with manufacturers moving to the lowest-cost locations to feed global supply chains.

(ii) "Why might one want to own a digital fabrication machine? * * * It [personal computing] isn’t there for inventory and payroll; it is for doing what makes you yourself: listening to music, talking to friends, shopping. Likewise, the goal of personal fabrication is not to make what you can buy in stores but to make what you cannot buy.

(iii) "A key difference between existing 3-D printers and these assemblers [to be invented by the author] is that the assemblers will be able to create cmplete functional systems in a single process.


(b) Note:
(i) The Jewish surname Gershen or Gershon is "from the Hebrew personal name Gershon, Gershom, of uncertain origin."
(ii) This article is about 3-D printers (and, hopefully for the author, 3-D assemblers).
(iii) The author's insight (starting 2001) is as follows. Computer-controlled machine tools can do much better, finer work than manual machine tools. The former is getting smaller, powerful and cheaper--in the same way of computing, which migrates from mainframe computers to minicomputers to personal computers.
(iv) Bridgewater Canal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgewater_Canal
("commissioned by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, to transport coal from his mines in Worsley [5.75 miles (9.25 km) west of Manchester] to Manchester. It was opened in 1761 from Worsley to Manchester, and later extended from Manchester to Runcorn, and then from Worsley to Leigh"/ Often considered to be the first "true" canal, it required the construction of an aqueduct to cross the River Irwell, one of the first of its kind)

choi

(3) Donald R Hickey, Small War, Big Consequences; Why 1812 Still matters.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ar ... ar-big-consequences

(a) Quote:

(i) "A SECOND WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

"When the United States declared war on the United Kingdom in 1812, it cited a long lit of grievances as justifications. The nain America complaints were the British navy's enforcement of 'orders in council,' which restricted US trade with Europe, and the British practice of impressment, the forcible removal of sailors from American merchant ships to fill out the crew of British warships. Although both policies harmed US interests, that was not their [British policies'] primary aim. Rather, they were part of the United Kingdom's effort to win its war with Napoleonic France. The British could defeat Napoleon only by maximizing the use of their naval power. That meant shutting off French trade and keeping the sea-lanes open to their own vessels, both of which required astrong navy.

"The United Kingdom contended that a significant number of its sailors were deserting their posts and essentially hiding out on American civilian vessels. Impressment, from the British point ofview, was a deterrent against such behavior, without which the Royal Navy would suffer wholesale desertions, leading to the collapse of British sea power. To the British, the US declaration of war was a stab inthe backat a time when the united Kingdom was waging war against French tyranny and barbarism on behalf of the entire civilized world.

* * *

"Over such [domestic] objections, the United States went to war. Since the Americans could not challenge the British on the high seas, they targeted Canada, which was still a British territory at the time, launching invasions in 1812 and 1813. But except in the remote west, the Americans were defeated everywhere. The US Army was ill prepared for war, the logistic challenges were nearly insuperable, and the for--a small but veteran British army aided by capable Native American allies--was formidable. Nevertheless, in 1814, when the end of the war in Europe allowed the British to take the offensive, they faced some of the same obstacles that the Americans had encountered earlier, such as the difficulty of keeping their frontlines reinforced and supplied. Except for successfully occupying Washington, DC, and a hundred miles of the Maine coast, the British counter-offensive was no more successful than the Americans' initial strikes, and in 1814, the fighting
ended in a battlefield draw, pushing both countries to a settlement in the peace negotiations in Ghent.

(ii) "An overly generous appraisal of its own strength might have led the united States to misculate its way into declaring war on a genuine great power.


(b) Note:
(i) The Irish surname Hickey is "Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hÍceadh ‘descendant of Ícidhe’, a byname meaning ‘doctor,' ‘healer.’"
(ii) "Donald R Hickey is Professor of History at Wayne State University, in Nebraska, and the author of The War of 1812: A forgotten conflict."