道道合击叫什么:US advantage is spiralling towards its close?...[]

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US advantage is spiralling towards its close?

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2011-6-6 09:47


By Christopher Caldwell



The road to an export-led US recovery may run through the bathrooms of the Chinese plutocracy. According to an article by Patti Waldmeir that ran in this newspaper on Tuesday, the Chinese are fussy about toilets the way other nations are fussy about cars. The Kohler company of Wisconsin is eager to serve them. Its new “Numi” toilet, which retails for $6,400, has heated footrests, adjustable seats, variable bidet spray, a custom-lit toilet bowl and a remote control through which one can access Skype. An infomercial for the Numi has got several hundred thousand hits on YouTube. Although Kohler intends to market the Numi worldwide, part of the design was done in China, which accounts for a fifth of the company’s revenues. It is a sign that China, after long fascinating the world’s policymakers, is beginning to exert a pull on the world’s consumers.


And that is a harbinger of trouble for the US. Whereas Germany’s strong suit in exports is the trustworthiness of its products and China’s is its prices, the big selling point of the US is its taste and sensibility. This has even been a comforting mantra to economists and businessmen examining relative US decline. Sure, the US has lost manufacturing capacity, they say, but it more than makes up for it in services and cultural exports.


A stubborn myth, in fact, holds that US creative exports are a more robust foundation for prosperity in the global economy than heavy industry ever was. Anyone can build a car, but Americans’ gift for innovation is ineffable. It is a kind of creative magic that is hard for the country’s sclerotic, overly bureaucratised trading rivals to match. How can you fight what you can’t fathom? Who can compete with a je-ne-sais-quoi?


America’s rivals are much less backward than its cheerleaders assume, however, and the country’s creative dynamism is much less mysterious. Taste tends to follow wealth. It should not surprise us if it turns out that people want US design only so long as the US is perceived as the richest, the best, the hegemon. True, there will always be American products that mix glamour and craftsmanship. But certain US exports are based on glamour alone, and will collapse as US prestige does.


If we focus on the US boom in service exports over the last couple of decades, it is not obvious that it will continue. The US exports $545bn worth of services each year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, almost eight times as much as in 1985. The dollar decline of 1985-87 helped, but even so, service exports increased more quickly than goods. Why was that? A sharp dollar decline helped, but there is another, more important factor. Over the past quarter-century, the global economy was redesigned under US supervision, and the US kept a kind of informal patent on the operator’s manual. If you wanted to make your hotel attractive to businessmen, where were you going to hire your consultants? From US chains, or the European ones that had already “globalised” sufficiently.


If you wanted a corporate boardroom or lobby to convey to visiting bankers that your company was sufficiently up-and-coming to finance, where would you hire the interior decorator? More likely Houston than Rangoon.


This preference reflected US power, not US brilliance, however much Americans may have flattered themselves to the contrary. One exporters’ guide from the 1990s reads: “Management training, technical training and English language training are areas where US expertise remains unchallenged. The export market for this training is almost limitless.” “Expertise”! The US does not have expertise in the English language. You might as well congratulate a Pole on speaking Polish. What US natives have is the good fortune to speak the language that has become the world’s lingua franca. When a Polish executive pays an American to teach him English, he is paying a rent, not a tribute to the American’s superior expertise.


Expertise is hard to acquire, and innovation is much harder than Americans realise. Tyler Cowen’s recent book The Great Stagnation describes the way Americans have picked all the “low-hanging fruit” – the easily attained economic gains – of modernisation. Pentagon scientist Jonathan Huebner has shown that western innovation peaked around 1873. Stanford economist Charles I. Jones calculates that between 1950 and 1993, about 80 per cent of growth came from previously discovered ideas. “Contemporary innovation,” Mr Cowen writes, “often takes the form of expanding positions of economic and political privilege.” For 30 years the US has enjoyed a lucrative near-monopoly in kitting out the world’s economy to behave like its own. The Numi toilet that is wowing the Chinese may not seem like much, but it is a sign that this era of US advantage is spiralling towards its close.




The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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