A Brief History…

This essay by Fareed Zakaria is interesting although some of his suggestions for solutions are weak. His analysis of the decline of the British Empire is incomplete. He blames the Boer War for the beginning of the decline.

Britain’s exalted position, however, was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when British power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours while losing only 48 soldiers of its own. Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was “the British Empire against 30,000 farmers.”

In fact, as pointed out in several books on the history of technology, Britain did not absorb the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by Louis XIV in 1685, sent the Protestant tradesmen and technicians of France to England for refuge and they took with them the Industrial Revolution. The inventions of the early 19th century were a result of that diaspora from France. By mid-19th century, however, England was failing to adopt the new science of chemistry. In France, now recovered from the convulsions of the Revolution and Napoleon, Louis Pasteur studied wine chemistry and from there moved on to bacteriology and the revolutionary advances in medicine. In Germany, newly united, the Kaiser supported science education as a way to catch up to the great rivals of Germany in Europe. Organic chemistry took off from its origins in Germany and the other nations did not catch up until after the Second World War.

Individual genius still was prominent in England as the discoveries of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were fundamental in the new science of electromagnetism and electric power. Still, the tradition of the “gentleman amateur” held back British science finally and Germany built the great chemical industry that brought the second Industrial Revolution.

He does make a good point that Britain would have been far better off to have stayed out of the First World War, although the building of the German High Seas Fleet made that very difficult. Had they, and we, stayed out, it would have been another Franco-Prussian War. As a practical matter, however, the Kaiser was determined to be a rival to his British family. He was Queen Victoria’s grandson and had a pathological inferiority complex that led to disaster.

Some of Zakaria’s conclusions are reassuring for America.

No statistic seems to capture this anxiety better than those showing the decline of engineering in the United States. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that the United States could soon lose its privileged position as the world’s science leader. The report said that in 2004 China graduated 600,000 engineers, India 350,000, and the United States 70,000 — numbers that were repeated in countless articles, books, and speeches. And indeed, these figures do seem to be cause for despair. What hope does the United States have if for every one qualified American engineer there are more than a dozen Chinese and Indian ones? For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the United States, the report pointed out, a company could hire five Chinese chemists or 11 Indian engineers.

The numbers, however, are wrong. Several academics and journalists investigated the matter and quickly realized that the Asian totals included graduates of two- or three-year programs training students in simple technical tasks. The National Science Foundation, which tracks these statistics in the United States and other nations, puts the Chinese number at about 200,000 engineering degrees per year, and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira puts the number of Indian engineering graduates at about 125,000 a year. This means that the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either China or India does.

Others have questioned his focus on education, pointing out that 40% of the population, the “left side of the bell curve” are not likely to benefit by advances in nanotechnology and biotechnology industries except as consumers. This makes Zakaria’s emphasis on the benefits of unlimited illegal immigration less logical. He writes:

Immigration also gives the United States a quality rare for a rich country — dynamism. The country has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are eager to make a new life in a new world. Some Americans have always worried about such immigrants — whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. The United States has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other past great economic powers that have grown fat and lazy and slipped behind as they faced the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.

That is all very well for the hundreds of thousands who are educated and are waiting for the sclerotic legal immigration system to process their applications. The illegals who flood the border states, however, are mostly illiterate and uneducated and unlikely to contribute anything but competition for low-wage jobs for that “left end of the bell curve.” He needs to get out of his ivory tower at Newsweek to see the reality.

His political prescriptions are also unlikely to be helpful as he is blind to the regressive politics of the Democratic party which favors dead end education in “Women’s Studies” and “African-American studies” while attacking free trade and favoring high capital gains taxes even if they lose money for the tax system.

It’s worth reading even if I disagree with some of his points.