Saturday, June 04, 2005
Gotta Link...
...to this Gerard Baker piece from the Times of London. He is reflecting on the resounding defeats handed the EU this last week.
But I'm scared. A world economy is just a litle too apocolyptic for me. I have never been one to see the "end times" just around the bend, in fact I think we are supposed to avoid such thinking, but sometimes...
Under its expensive welfare programmes, paid for by a high level of productivity in traditional manufacturing industries, Europeans enjoyed a pampered life. With the Soviet threat gone, this accelerating prosperity further encouraged them to renounce the idea of war and military coercion, and they settled down to enjoy an assured future ascendancy.There is no question that globaization is an economic boon, as current events seem to be demonstrating. I really like this piece by Baker.
By the beginning of the 1990s, with America in apparent decline, it seemed a reasonable bet that this extraordinary model of economic and political success would become an example to the world. But external and internal forces were already undermining this paradise.
In economics, the forces of globalisation unleashed by an emergent Asia and an information technology revolution were reviving the American eco-nomy and giving birth to new, dynamic competitors. This speed-of-light competitive world of the microchip and flexible capital markets would require nimbleness, and an end to the protections that seemed to have helped Europe to become the success story of the 1980s. The Anglo-Saxon economies, in response to their own economic crises of the 1970s, had prepared themselves for this new world with painful but necessary reforms.
But Europe looked inward, not outward. Instead of focusing on what was needed ? American and British-style labour reforms, tax cuts and deregulation ? Europe embarked on a quix- otic exercise. It sought to weld a dozen or more disparate countries into an unbreakable economic union, all settled snug and warm under the fraying comfort blanket of expensive welfare systems.
But I'm scared. A world economy is just a litle too apocolyptic for me. I have never been one to see the "end times" just around the bend, in fact I think we are supposed to avoid such thinking, but sometimes...
