Economic Growth

Generations of kids have grown up forbidden to taste chocolate cake batter. The rationale for this quasi- torture: fear of salmonella poisoning.

And at the current rate of food technology, the kids of 2040 may be eating healthier cookie dough, too—gooey hunks infused with nano-sized nutrients, with chocolate chips engineered to be less fattening.

But future children may never know what salmonella is: A Dutch company is currently developing a consumer spray to kill the bacteria on contact. Salmonelex may sit next to Windex on future kitchen counters.

Recently, the city of Chongqing has become the center of media attention caused by the political scandal surrounding prominent party leader Bo Xilai – the former top official in the Chinese province of Chongqing. Even before the scandal, Mr. Xilai received both praise and opprobrium for his policies and his role in the region’s rapid economic growth.

It’s a cliché that the Pacific Ocean is displacing the Atlantic, that China will replace America at the top of the world’s hierarchy of power, and the East will surpass the West. The cliché is also wrong. The multipolar world we are entering will have no single winner, and the three-pillared West of the European Union, North America, and Latin America remains a triangular zone of peace and foundation of global stability.

Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is famous for, in the recent words of a high-ranking State Department official, “showing that technological innovation was responsible for over 80 percent of economic growth in the United States between 1909 and 1949.” Or as Frank Lichtenberg of Columbia University’s business school has written, “In his seminal 1956 paper, Robert Solow showed that technical progress is necessary for there to be sustained growth in output per hour worked.”

When the New York Times reported last month that Wal-Mart had brazenly been bribing government officials in Mexico, the public responded with anger. According to the Washington Post, the outcry forced the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to slow its campaign to water down the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the 1977 law that bars payoffs to foreign decision-makers in exchange for business. The agitation also led to a 5 percent drop in the price of Wal-Mart stock.

In the spring of 2001 Andrew Grove, the chairman of Intel, made a remarkable statement. Any conflict in or around the Taiwan Strait that resulted in a break in trade, he said, would result in the “computing equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction.” The implication, at least for the vitally important electronics industry, was that the production systems of the United States and China had become entirely in- tertwined and interdependent. equally remarkable is how little attention this statement, by one of the world’s most well-known industrialists, has received in the four years since.

By Alejandra Montes Saenz, Save the Children Colombia

Cross-posted on YouthSave.org

Millennials are the first downwardly mobile generation in decades, staring down a host of economic challenges--student debt, the rise of low-wage jobs, and the ballooning cost of tuition, food, and rent. Media regularly serve up sobering statistics about twentysomethings, while Occupy Wall Street struggles to stay on message. How will the Great Recession affect Millennials longterm? And do they have what it takes to fight back?

In the first days after towering tsunamis smashed Japan’s north coast last March, many economists believed that the disaster would have little effect on growth around the world. The region is much less industrialized than southern Japan, so the thinking went, hence the disruptions would likely be smaller than those caused by the massive Kobe earthquake of 1995. Such hopes did not last.

Americans have never felt at ease with empire, and with good reason. Running an empire often demands that we betray our republican ideals, at least for periods of time. It can also be costly in gold and in blood. So it was no surprise that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the American people leapt at the opportunity to lay down the imperial burdens we had carried since World War II. Politicians in both parties assured us that we could off-load our responsibilities onto a “global” market mechanism, overseen by a new institution created in 1995 called the World Trade Organization (WTO).