These figures are usually described as a huge vulnerability for the United States. They are also often told as a morality tale of American self-indulgence or (alternatively) American naivety. Either because Americans do not work hard enough or because they have been sold out by globalist elites, America is losing and China is winning.
.. In about 1890, the U.K.-U.S. relationship looked a lot like the U.S.-China relationship today. In 1890, Britain held the world’s largest pool of investible wealth, as the United States does today. In 1890, the U.S. economy was growing much faster than the U.K. economy, much as China’s economy grows faster than America’s today.
.. In 1890, investment capital flowed from Britain (the more mature economy) to the United States—and on a huge scale. In those days, Britain invested something like 6–8 percent of its national income overseas, with the U.S. as the single largest destination.
.. Instead of attracting capital, however, China is repelling it.
.. China’s trade surplus is the flipside of its failure to attract foreign direct investment. It’s an axiom of national accounting that the current account (the trade balance plus earnings on overseas investment) must precisely equal the capital account (net foreign investment in a country).
.. China’s foreign investment is working out exactly as economic theory would predict:China’s foreign investment is working out exactly as economic theory would predict: It is yielding much lower returns than it would if it were invested in productive enterprise at home... A 2008 World Bank study found that the average return on multinational corporations’ investments in China was 22 percent. American multinationals earned even more, an average of 33 percent. China earns less than 3 percent on its immense holdings of U.S. Treasury... In 1890, when the U.S. was fast industrializing, it was not the dream of every candy maker in Cleveland or every furniture maker in Buffalo to gain a French passport for his children and a second home in Germany for himself... not only earned its profits in the U.S., but it saw its future and its security here as well... When Chinese business leaders invest tens of millions of dollars in second homes in Vancouver or send their granddaughters to Los Angeles to give birth to U.S. citizens, what are they saying about their expectations about China?.. She looked at entrepreneurs a rung or two below the ruling oligarchy, people with some money but no political power. Their overwhelming wish was to see their children emigrate to a democratic country: Canada, Australia, the United States. Their overwhelming fear: the democratization of their own country, which they worried would mean their poorer fellow citizens seizing the opportunity to plunder them. .. When the United States was growing fast, in the 1890s, it imported goods on a massive scale from the United Kingdom: locomotives, engineering equipment, and other high-technology items; high-quality consumer goods like Sheffield cutlery and Staffordshire ceramics; and hot-weather commodities grown within the British empire and reexported from London to the U.S., including rubber, chocolate, and palm oil.
.. They were paid for by U.S. food exports—but even more, by selling the British an opportunity to participate in future U.S. growth, which is what a capital account most fundamentally represents.
.. Because China cannot or will not attract foreign capital, it must run a huge trade surplus. That means fewer food imports (and thus a lower standard of living for its people). That means China must finance its future development out of its own savings (which means its people must consume much less of the proceeds of their own development).
.. very visibly, those who have accumulated savings are redeploying them elsewhere.
.. They accept radically lower returns on their investments in order to gain from Canada or Australia or the United States the security of property that their own government cannot provide.
If this is winning, it’s no wonder that so many Chinese every year seek to emigrate to the countries on the “losing” side.
What is a wonder is that so many in the Trump administration want to emulate on this side of the Pacific the Chinese model of economic development that terrifies so many of those who must live under it.
What Men Say About #MeToo in Therapy
“I have something I need to talk about and I’m afraid you’re going to judge me,” he said. He told me that he had been thinking about women he had slept with and that he felt terrible about some of the encounters.
“I didn’t rape anyone or anything like that, but I think I made them pretty uncomfortable.”
I’m a psychotherapist who works largely with men in New York City. Before last fall, I can’t remember hearing a statement like that — a voluntary admission of coercive or manipulative behavior with women. The #MeToo era has changed my work. If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided.
.. But I am also heartened by the private work that men are doing in therapy and how it can help us understand the relationship between what has been called “toxic masculinity” and the reservoirs of shame that fuel these behaviors.
.. I began to feel the effect in my work not long after the stories about Harvey Weinstein broke, with a noticeable uptick after a report on the comedian Aziz Ansari. Though the accusations against famous men were in one sense far from the people I saw, they were relevant to the questions they often brought to therapy. Why did they so misunderstand the women in their lives? Why were they often being accused of hurting them?
.. He’d been experimenting with approaching women in a more “dominant” and assertive way, since he’d heard that’s what women wanted. He had made an aggressive move on a prospective date and was told that his approach was creepy.
.. he had been so focused on performing for dates that he wasn’t really connecting to them, unable to accurately read his date’s reactions.
.. appear either flat and emotionless or superficially engaged but hiding behind impenetrable niceness.
.. Most men have spent little time with their feelings and have very limited vocabulary to describe what is going on in their hearts.
.. has done such a good job of disconnecting from his feelings that he can’t ever really tell if he’s had a good time on a date.
.. Almost always, the men I work with notice a tight tension in their chests and stomachs — anxiety. They often admit that they feel this tension most of the time.
.. underneath the anxiety that is always humming along are layers of shame. Shame at having feelings at all, shame because they believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, shame that they are not men, they are just boys.
.. Shame is the emotional weapon that allows patriarchal behaviors to flourish. The fear of being emasculated leads men to rationalize awful behavior. This kind of toxic shame is in direct contradiction with the healthy shame that we all need to feel in order to acknowledge mistakes and take responsibility.
.. still a 15-year-old boy craving the approval of his peers: “I actually don’t even like the sex that much, but there’s something satisfying about adding a notch in the belt. I imagine other guys would be impressed if they knew.”
.. In their efforts to manage the feeling of shame, some men numb themselves. Others sink under it and slip into depression or chronic underachievement. And others take the pain that they feel and project it back out into the world with violent words and deeds.
.. They begin to heal when we can both embrace them and hold them accountable.
.. “I want you to know that I respect the courage it takes to acknowledge something like that and to share it with me, but I also don’t want you to numb yourself out, because then you’ll just forget about this and move on,” I said.
.. He began to cry and then sob. Waves of sadness emerged as he imagined the hurt that he caused these women. As the tears subsided and we began to process it, more tears came, this time tears of relief — that he’s not a monster, that he’s capable of remorse and empathy.
.. He had been desperate to boost his self-esteem through sexual conquests. He ultimately put his own pleasure before someone else’s discomfort, behavior that was forged in moments in which he had felt worthless
.. He had been thinking about one of the women he had told me about. He reached out, they met for coffee and he apologized.
How, Exactly, Does This Travel Ban Keep Us Safe, Mr. President?
The ostensible purpose of your ban is to keep Americans safe from terrorists by barring visitors, refugees and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. So let’s consider, nonhysterically, what such a ban might have accomplished had it come into force in recent years.
It would not have barred Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwait-born Pakistani who helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, the American perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people were murdered.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Eric Rudolph, the Christian terrorist who killed one person at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and later bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar.
It would not have barred Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Atta was an Egyptian citizen who arrived in the U.S. on a visa issued by the American Embassy in Berlin in May 2000.
It would not have barred Atta’s accomplices, all in the United States on legal visas. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and another from Lebanon.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which five people were killed. The attacks are widely believed (without conclusive proof) to have been the work of the late Bruce Ivins, an American microbiologist.
It would not have barred Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes. Reid was a London-born Briton who converted to Islam as an adult.
Prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award Renamed Over Racial Insensitivity
“Wilder’s books are a product of her life experiences and perspective as a settler in America’s 1800s,” the association’s president, Jim Neal, and the president of the children’s division, Nina Lindsay, said in the statement. “Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.”
.. In the 1935 book “Little House on the Prairie,” for example, multiple characters espoused versions of the view that “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” In one scene, a character describes Native Americans as “wild animals” undeserving of the land they lived on.
.. “There’s this subtle but very clear fear generated throughout the books,”
.. the books could be used to educate high school or college students, but were inappropriate for young children.