Chinese to Dominate Future Olympics, Mirrors Larger State of World?
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=dw-medalcount082208&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
I found this article while I was going to check my email the other day, and found it incredibly interesting. It’s basically about the fact that we we’re starting to lose our domination on the olympics, and the Chinese are taking our throne. They do this by being strategic about how the allocate their talent, going for maximum gold medals, as opposed to us, where we just let each of our athletes choose where they want to go all by themselves. Also, they have so much MORE talent than we do, simply because of their massive population.
Now, I figure, is this some kind of literary-scale forshadowing for the future state of the world? Even now, the Olympics isn’t the only thing that the Chinese are kicking our asses in. For example, I recall reading in The Economist an article regarding the state of Chinese Infrastructure (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10697210). I don’t think that the US has done much large scale infrastructure building since the Eisenhower adminstration in the 50’s. I mean, we’ve still been building the interstates as recently as the 90’s, but nothing NEW has really been put into action. In addition, despite the fact that oil is killing most of the world’s economies, especially ours, China’s is still booming.
Really, subtitle of the Economist article says it all: Democracy can be inefficient. In order to get a major bill passed, you need to get people from both sides of aisle to talk and work it out, and that could take years, possibly even longer than most term lengths. Most congressmen don’t even bother.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not an advocate of introducing Maoism to America. I’m just pointing out that, when put up against a smartly organized totalitarian rival, there are some pros and cons. Of course, the fact that China is faced with all sorts of human rights abuses that practically come standard with any sort of centrally-planned-economy-style government, is the ultimate con, which is why I definitely don’t advocate it.
On the bright side, due to the lack of control the government has, and our large (if recessed) economy, we’re free to do pretty much whatever research we want to. This means we’re on the forefront for exploring alternative fuels, which (I hope) will no longer be “alternative,” but the mainstream. Because (I think) we will popularize alternative fuels on a massive scale more quickly, we’ll (hopefully) be ahead of the curve against China economically.
Now, I’m no economist, and I hope my parenthetical statements have expressed the wishful/speculative nature of this entry, but I think that’s our last hope to get on top: Innovation. It’s gotta be, because we’re not going to win in sheer manpower and centrally planned strategy. The Chinese got us beat on that.
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