Pusillanimity

Just finished reading  "Civilization - The West and the Rest" by Niall Ferguson. I heard of the book while watching the author being interviewed on the Colbert Report. I'm a fan of non-fiction, I enjoy comparing different cultures, and I found the author to be an entertaining guest/speaker so I decided to give the book a try and bought it on Amazon.com.

Civilization was the author's attempt to describe why western cultures appeared to dominate world culture/economics/politics during the last 400 years and if/how this might change.

It took me months to finish it partly because parts of the book dragged on forever. I felt the author could have shared the same message (with depth and meaning) in less than half the time it took for him to do it. On the up side, there was a very interesting chapter describing colonial development in North American and South American by comparing George Washington to Simon Bolivar.

Bottom line...there are six inventions or "killer apps" that allowed western civilizations to prosper and succeed:

1. Competition - European nations were fragmented and this resulted in multiple competing economies and corporations
2. The Scientific Revolution - breakthroughs in math and science
3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government - laws were based upon property rights and land owners had a say in their government
4. Modern Medicine - increased length and quality of living
5. The Consumer Society - allowed economies to grow - connected to the Industrial Revolution
6. Work Ethic - western society combined intensive labour with higher savings rates

Today China has four basic goals they want to accomplish:

1. Consume more
2. Import more
3. Invest abroad more
4. Innovate more

Will China take the lead in world government/economy/influence/prosperity or will they follow Japan, who showed promise but has recently stagnated? The author claims there are four pitfalls China needs to look out for:

1. Are there economy/real estate/stock markets truly competitive?
2. Will they fall to internal social unrest - will the one child policy create a generation of older people who cannot be sustained by the younger generation?
3. Will the rising middle class demand more political say then they currently have?
4. Will they upset their neighbors to the point other nations decide to form alliances with the west?

Ferguson has faith in western civilization and believes success is tied to the ability for its citizens to believe in it

"Today....the biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity - and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

I had to look up "pusillanimity". Follow this link for the definition.