The west's critical flaw is that it believes its own propaganda.
The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking.
Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.
The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking.
Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.