THE PARANOID OPTIMIST:

The future is American: a review of 20:21 Vision: the Lessons of the 20th Century for the 21st by Bill Emmott (Martin Vander Weyer, Daily Telegraph)

[W]hat is perhaps...surprising is that Emmott is so cheerful: he calls his attitude "paranoid optimism", the belief (commonly found, apparently, among wine-makers) that the future will be better than the past, as long as nothing goes horribly wrong.

He boils the big questions down to two: whether the United States will retain its current leadership role in the world, and whether capitalism will continue to be the dominant force in the global economy. His answer is that they probably will, and that both these outcomes will probably be a good thing.

Emmott is a free-marketeer who believes democracy and enterprise go hand in hand with prosperity and freedom. The lesson of the past century for him is that the useful role of government is to provide stability, security, rule of law and an absence of corruption, but no more. Beyond that, human progress is driven by the great trial-and-error process of capitalism, with all its obvious faults and wrong turnings.

That makes it all the more vital, he says, to win the argument for globalisation - the object of such visceral hatred from environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners today - because the poorest nations will always be those that try to keep global economic forces at bay, and simply get left behind.

In 1989, Mr. Emmott wrote The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan's Economic Power, which was then, and pretty much remains, the only sensible look at Japan and the structural weaknesses that made its decline inevitable. He, of course, was writing at a time when the operating assumption of far too many, but especially of the 1988 Democrat Presidential candidates, was that Japan's managed economy was a success story and one that we should emulate here. This sounds like another winner.

MORE:
-TJFR Business News Reporter: Journalist Profile[tm]: Bill Emmott, The Economist
-BOOKNOTES: Japanophobia: The Myth of the invincible Japanese by Bill Emmott (C-SPAN, February 13, 1994)
-REVIEW: of Japanophobia (Oren Grad, Reason)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2003 9:58 PM