Better Learn Mandarin!
The middle class can never compete with those who want to be middle class. Once you have something you are reluctant to give it up, but if you don't have it in the first place you'll do anything to get it. How can you compete with skilled labor trained by western schools who will work for peanuts?
Chinese cars are right around the bend and your neighbor will buy one.
Without a doubt. What makes China and India spectacular players is the depth and breadth of their respective cultures, and the quality of their populations. Spanning several thousand years of nearly contiguous cultural homogeneity and with very bright, very motivated, very assertive populations that border on being numberless!!! Legions of Engineers with several specialties and hard won academic excellence rarely equaled anymore in the West willing to work to the death for a fraction of the compensation that Western workers will accept. By 2030 the Indians will surpass even the multitudes of Chinese in sheer numbers to boot. Over two BILLION of these alpha-people!!! It boggles the mind! And these are not uneducated Hispanics sneaking under our fences with hopes of working at Burger King, or roofing by day and selling meth at night. The Asians, by stark contrast, set a high premium on empirical education and focus on hard natural science and mathematics. Their work ethic typically puts ours to shame. Hell, their kids are doing calculus by middle school on average...while our kids hang their pants half way down their skinny asses and blithely plug in to their Chinese made I-Pods
. Pathetic. Achievement means everything to the Asians; failure is not an option.
SOON THE WESTERN EMPIRE (currently dominated by the U.S.) WILL CRUMBLE as the forces of entropy and self delusion cloud our vision. Sheer competition from these unscrupulous and unstoppable Chinese and Indians will subsume and outflank us at every turn...it's already happening...while we run and hide in silly, fatuous fundamentalism, parochialism and conservatism; as if these dodges will shield us from the inexorable tsunami thundering our way from the East!
Many of us are akin to Ostriches with heads poked firmly into the sand while the devastating, massive, peaking Asian wave rushes landward. And this is merely the beginning.
The future will be fashioned in Asia while the West steadily fades from significance. Certainly enclaves of creativity will continue to flourish in the West (and everywhere) and gifted, creative minds can yet find purchase in this rapidly morphing world, but certainly the major economic impetus and the juggernaut-like emergence of these mighty techno-cultures cannot be denied. Their stupendous potential dwarfs that of the West by several orders of magnitude. By mid century I'm sure Asia (in some form or another) will be firmly in control of the world's destiny...for good or ill...it is nevertheless as inevitable as tomorrows sunrise
