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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't read Zakaria's "The Post-American World", I highly recommend it.

I agree with his assessment that the landscape is changing rapidly and profoundly, although I don't know if the resultant loss of economic and political weight means that we can't still have our best days ahead of us.

All that's necessary, I think, is the political will to move forward in the right direction. I would argue that large infrastructure projects in telecommunication and energy, and shifting education goals towards an information economy and away from it's Taylorist origins are most important to be able to compete in the future.

Although even with that, we will probably never have the kind of political dominance we've had in the past. I don't think I've ever had a problem with that.

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Your "All that's necessary..." is a big "all." Looking at the political class today on both sides of the aisle, I'm afraid they just aren't capable of taking any sort of necessary actions Zakaria prescribed. In addition, a President who many saw as a savior who would transcend all of the pettiness has proven no better or influential than any other person who could have won.

I understand the cynicism, and in a lot of ways, I share it. And I'm not naive, I think that movements should be built to pressure politicians to move in those directions.

I don't think they will make those big decisions on their own. I think the biggest issue with Obama is that he was a centrist who was elected by a mobilization of progressives who thought their job was done on January 21st, 2009.

I do see things building to push that kind of grassroots pressure, though.

I think until we can get beyond this situation where any sort of modification to the status quo suggested by one side is viewed as an assault on the fundamental way of life by the other, we're in trouble. Right now American politics is essentially a battle of marketing teams, not of ideas, and this is strangling our ability to move forward and to compete.

I mean right now we have people arguing against large infrastructure projects on the basis that they are socialism, or some other vague but evil -ism.

These are matter of regulatory issues, not spending. For example, it is difficult to build nuclear power plants in this country. There is a serious lack of competition in the telcom market probably because of regulations favoring big corporations. On the other hand, it seem that we're seeing competition between wireless operators.

Our education system also suffer from poor incentives. Teachers have little incentives to teach better, and tests are inadequate. Political forces are disallowing us to make the proper changes to the institution so it will be quite difficult to shift toward the information economy.

I would say it's an issue of both regulation, and proper allocation of funding. Along with a series of other concerns.

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