Word: 20th
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...This isn't baloney, but it is hardly the whole story - as you would discover if, instead of being mesmerized by the sight of Pudong, you were to turn around and look at the solid, early 20th century buildings of the Bund, just behind you. Modernity did not come to China because Deng Xiaoping said it should. As Rana Mitter of Oxford University argues, there had been modernizing streams in Chinese society long before 1978, and had some of them taken a different course, our view of what China represents for the future would be unrecognizable from the standard text...
...Chinese élites, we often forget, have had economic and cultural links with Europe for 300 years; by the 18th century, the Chinese were producing porcelain for the European market and avidly studying European art and architecture. In particular, says Mitter, the first half of the 20th century - that period when Shanghai was at its peak, but which is routinely dismissed in the thumbnail history - is "really important; the questions about their society that Chinese are asking now are very similar to the ones that they asked in the 1920s and 1930s." (Read "Why China Keeps Picking on Sarkozy...
...didn't lenders better capitalize on our speculative bent sooner? Our banking system was never national. In fact, it wasn't even retail in the 19th or early 20th century. The banks that were capable of doing the most lending to individuals didn't actually do it. We had to wait until Bank of America, for instance, got into business and a lot of the companies like Household Finance that started making consumer loans for this thing to actually warm...
...obviously and critically in how we use energy and pay for health care and educate our citizens, but also in the ways we define contentment, are not immutable givens. Rather, they are the results of choices we made and habits we acquired and systems we built back in the 20th century. Different, 21st century choices are now available to us. Dysfunction and profligacy aren't inevitable, and the American tendency to magical thinking can be kept in check. The diehard opposition of powerful institutions (oil companies, agribusiness, the health-insurance industry, teachers unions and more) to fundamental change is implacable...
Plenty of quintessentially 20th century businesses that have been sickening will now, finally, die. A generation or two of managers in those industries coasted along in denial, behaving as if the dark horizon would remain perpetually a ways off. With this recession, many of them are arriving at the abyss. However, people will still want to buy cars, still need to buy houses, still want to read quality journalism, watch TV series and movies at home, listen to recorded music, and all the rest. And so starting now, as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic...