The Fall of the Rest
5 05 2008Look 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.
Yeah, so? I don’t judge a civilization based on its landmarks, its gargantuan monuments, its Ferris wheels and the size of its shopping malls. I judge it by the standard of living of its typical everyday people, and even considering the recent declining trend thereof in America, it’s still far better than most of the rest of the world. After all, the world’s tallest building might be in Dubai, but would you rather take a chance being the average citizen of the UAE, or the average American? Would you want to live in Macao, China rather than Las Vegas simply because its casinos are bigger?
As far as Bollywood, yes, there might be a bigger movie industry in India, but are you going to pay $9 to watch two hours worth of Bollywood or Hollywood? Bollywood is great at mass producing flicks with simple plotlines that are favored by denizens of the third world with their simple mentalities, but not movies with a complicated storyline, multiple storylines, and dialogue emblematic of an advanced vocabulary.
