Zakaria II: Am I Crazy?
Here is the paragraph that has one of the competing lists that Ross mentions in his post on Fareed Zakaria:
Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.
One of these facts struck me as surprising. I was pretty sure that the biggest oil refinery in the world has not been in the US for some time. I looked into it, and I don’t think it was. Then I started to look more of these facts. In about an hour on Google, I found that US did not top the list by 1998 or earlier in lots of these categories.
Iran already had the world’s largest oil refinery by 1980.
Russia had already built the world’s tallest Ferris wheel in 1995, topped by Japan in 1997.
Canada had already built the world’s largest mall by 1986.
Malaysia had already built the world’s tallest building in 1998.
I couldn’t find any data on Bollywood in 1998. Using this data for 2001 and estimating back three years, it looks like Bollywood was already larger than Hollywood in 1998 in terms of films produced and total number of tickets sold. Hollywood remains much, much larger than Bollywood in 2008 in terms of revenues (which seems like it would be the default metric for “bigger”). So it’s hard to find the metric by which Hollywood was bigger ten years ago, but has now been overtaken by Bollywood.
This was using quick-and-dirty sources like Wikipedia, so somebody please tell me if I’m wrong. But this seems crazy – surely the guy has fact-checkers for something this high-profile?
And doesn’t it seem kind of weird to produce a list like this and say that ten years ago the US “would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories”? [itlaics added] I mean, if you made the list, wouldn’t have you checked to make sure it was true for every category?
Can anybody expert on any of these topics let me know where I’m wrong?
Is the Bollywood / Hollywood comparison adjusted for economy? Hollywood probably makes more money, but Bollywood films are big in many countries where the equivalent of one or two US dollars a day can be enough to live relatively well on. So someone producing Bollywood films would not need to gross anything close to what an American would need to support a similar lifestyle.
— sharkdog · May 8, 10:13 AM · #
I think you need to read the book, Jim. The point you made in your last post was fully covered by Zakaria in the book — he makes precisely the same point you did. On the list, I thik he says “many” in the book and many of those categories were dominated by the United States until recently. You’re nitpicking.
— Jack Jones · May 8, 07:15 PM · #
Jim et. al.,
the list itself is really tangential to the point of the article/book. Playing gotcha with these silly metrics is a waste of your time. How about a critique of the substance?
— nicestrategy · May 8, 07:42 PM · #
nicestrategy: find Jim’s “critique of the substance” here, a big inch and a half below this current post:
http://theamericanscene.com/2008/05/07/a-post-american-world
— Matt Frost · May 8, 07:57 PM · #
Jack:
I agree that this list is tangential to anything of any significance. (Although, I’ll note that I wasn’t the one to use it to motivate my high-profile article in a major national magazine.) It was just shocking to me that he didn’t even bother to cherry-pick accurate factoids. Really, what was the guy thinking?
I haven’t read his book, so I can’t comment on it. I think that it’s one thing to say that “he expands a lot on point X in the book” and another to say that “well, he says X in the article, but he says not-X in the book”. (Obviously, I accept that there are many shadings of gray between these two extremes, mostly determined by how abstract X is.) But the guy had what seemed like ~3,000 words, it’s not like they jammed him up on space. If he somehow wrote in his summary article that the US is now going through the loss of absolute leadership, and in his book that, no, this actually happened more than 30 years ago and our political process has had trouble accepting that (my thesis), well that sounds like a pretty poor summary to me.
nicestrategy:
I have a prior post on the substance here at TAS.
— Jim Manzi · May 8, 08:09 PM · #
Jim—
Trust me, read the book and you’ll see why I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Zakaria and you agree more than you disagree.
I’ve read the Newsweek piece. He never says that the US has declined economically. (That’s why the editor, Meacham, descirbes it as optimistic in his note and why the WSJ calls the book “sunny.”) In the book Zakaria cites all the data you do (though he points out that PPP is a weird measure.) In fact he says exactly what you say that in recent years, Asia’s rise has come at the expense of Europe and Japan. He does say that if the rise of the rest continues then the US will face some “small slippage” in relative economic weight but not significant.
His concern is mostly to explain the “rise of the rest” and to argue that we should not be scared by it, that it’s potential “win-win.” His anxiety is over our political and diplomatic loss of influence and our ability to adjust and regain it, though he does point out that the economic realm is becoming much more competitive. The one item on his list that he elaborates on is London’s rise versus New York and it’s a very smart point about the inability of the US government to see New York as a strategic asset. His section on the US economy is actually very bullish on it; he’s bearish on US politics, which again I agree with. You’ve created a straw man in you’re head and your demolishing it — but if you read the book — or the Foreign Affairs excerpt — you’ll find most of the arguments you make in his book.
— Jack Jones · May 8, 09:57 PM · #
Jack:
Thanks, those are very helpful comments.
I don’t think I’m reacting to a straw man, just to the article that he wrote in Newsweek. I fully prepared to accept that his book and FA article, neither of which I have read, are a lot different and better.
— Jim Manzi · May 9, 02:33 PM · #