False Economy - Alan Beattie [22]
The crisis presented the United States with the biggest threat to its financial system and economy since the Great Depression, a challenge that will take years to right. If America fails to recognize the flaws and correct them, as it slowly and painfully learned to do on that earlier occasion, the trajectory of its future wealth and power will be lowered.
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," particularly in one as resilient and flexible as the United States. But its rise was not preordained, and neither is its continued preeminence.
Argentina, meanwhile, remained true to form in its own response to the crisis. Having initially announced, with familiar hubris, that the country would remain unaffected, its government decided that a good way to deal with the loss of investor confidence would be to appropriate the country's private pensions. Thus came another novel twist in the century-long story of the Argentine government seizing its people's savings whenever it got in trouble.
All in all, it would be wise to keep betting on the United States' eventually finding the right way out of the financial crisis and Argentina continuing energetically to march deeper into the quagmire. Out of the two great hopes of the Western Hemisphere in the late nineteenth century, one succeeded and the other stalled in the twentieth. It was history and choice, not fate, that determined which did what. It is history and choice that will determine which is which in a century's time.
Chapter 2. Cities: Why Didn't Washington, D.C., Get the Vote?
Countries pushing off from the same starting blocks can go in very different directions. For another study in similarities and differences, take two cities that look a lot like each other. Each is a proud capital of a republic with a mission to spread its civilization abroad, dominated by gleaming white marble buildings with columns, domes, and friezes, home to a self-regarding bunch of pompous senators and the epicenter of a mighty sphere of imperial influence backed by crushing military power. Yet one, by far the biggest settlement the world has ever seen, is full of fractious, impatient inhabitants continually bought off with handouts by nervous city bosses. The other is a small, quiet town, the only one in the country whose citizens are denied the franchise to elect voting representatives to the national legislature.
The first is ancient Rome; the second, modern Washington, D.C. The architecture of the second is even modeled on the first. Yet because Washington, D.C., is the capital of a stable democracy and not a volatile imperial oligarchy, it has turned out entirely different from its prototype. Like countries, cities are shaped not just by impersonal economic forces and geography (although those have a big influence) but also by choices made by governments and their people.
The earth has become a predominantly urban planet. Each day, around 180,000 people worldwide leave the countryside to move to a city. For the first time in history, at some unknowable moment in 2007 or 2008, a majority of the world's human population live in towns and cities. And Homo sapiens is becoming an urban species at an astonishing and accelerating speed. Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of global population growth since 1950. London's population took 130 years to grow from one to eight million. Thailand's Bangkok took forty-five years to make the same increase; Dhaka, in Bangladesh, thirty-seven; and Seoul, South Korea, just twenty-five. The London of 1910 was seven times bigger than the London of 1800, but Dhaka now is forty times bigger than it was in 1950.
Barring a cataclysmic and unprecedented change in the flow of history, cities are the future. But not all towns and cities, and not all urbanizations, have looked the same. Countries have urbanized well and badly, some for mainly the right reasons and some for the wrong reasons.