GEOPOLITICS, FINANCE, AND EDUCATION

In the upcoming weeks, world leaders will meet to begin to consider a new financial architecture for the world.

If they fail to found a cooperative framework, the threat of protectionism, economic decline, and the associated political challenges (which would not be small, and could be frightening) will be our biggest challenges.

If they succeed (as I suspect that they will), we will have taken a noticeable step to a more integrated world in which conflict between large nations becomes somewhat less likely. Challenges would still remain in that regard, to be sure, not least the endurance of petrodictatorships. Still, new issues will, after such a success, begin to come to the fore. I believe that one of the boldest dividing lines in a more stable (I take small group terrorism into account here.), integrated world will be the divide between the information technologically-able and the informational technologically-challenged. The would increase the importance of education, relative to international relations, as a defining issue for geopolitical stability.

What do you think?

The Financial Crisis and Isolationism

A friend today said to me, "Maybe we should be willing to spend extra money to buy American-made products. The Chinese are going to fund our new government intervention in the economy but we should be taking care of ourselves."

I think that this sentiment is exactly misleading. Our weaknesses are tied, in part, to our failure to recognize that we need to market ourselves to the world. Turning inward would be a temporary salve but would actually be the harbinger of gradual economic and political decline.