Word: 20th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...present chastening can't mean turning into a nation of overcautious, unambitious scaredy-cats. This is the moment for business to think different and think big. The great dying off of quintessentially 20th century businesses presents vast opportunity for entrepreneurs. People will still need (greener) cars, still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings - that is, the people burning to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and media in new, economic ways...
...rhymed, China would be the new us - feverish with individual and national drive, manufacturer to the world, growing like crazy, bigger and much more populous than the reigning superpower. And our next half-century would, according to the analogy, unfold like Britain's in the first half of the 20th century, requiring a downsizing of our national ambitions and self-conception...
...develop in fast motion, cramming 100 years of development into 30. But I'm reminded of Philip Johnson's apt, bitchy description of Frank Lloyd Wright during the forward looking 1930s "as the greatest architect of the 19th century." Twenty-first century China is the greatest country of the 20th century. Muscular industrialism gets you only so far. Further increases in productivity and prosperity require ingenuity and enterprise applied at the micro scale - digital devices and networked systems, biotechnology, subatomic nanotechnology. As China and other developing countries finally achieve the industrial plenty that we enjoyed 50 years...
...sooner we can agree on a coherent national policy to encourage as many as possible of the world's smartest and most ambitious people to become Americans, the better our chances of forestalling national decline. The waves of exotic foreigners who arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries were unsettling, but previous generations got over it, luckily, since those newcomers were instrumental in forging the American Century...
...response to Beijing's suppression of political dissent before and during the Olympic Games - the jailing and intimidation of dissidents like Hu Jia, for example - makes even more stringent repression now the government's best option. Sinologists say a series of sensitive anniversaries that fall this year - including the 20th anniversary of the crushing of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic - will likely contribute to the chill. Even political jockeying at the Party's top levels is stifling openings for reform, with leaders reluctant to make any bold move that...