The Ends of the Earth

...But when Bob sees such progress (and progress is by definition relative), his upper-middle-class sensibilities are offended...

...In short, Bob thinks resources are purely physical, like gold or copper or fertile soil...

...Grace notes like these usually don't come to...

...I think that was Jesus," he replied...

...Agency for International Development, and their partner aid agencies all believed that if only they threw enough money at Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos the Philippines would become the next Japan...

...He writes when he writes, i.e., when he has something to say and is ready to say it, for opinion journals such as TAS, the New Republic, National Review (where he was my roommate, so to speak, on the back page we alternated), Forbes MediaCritic, and, most recently, the Weekly Standard, where he is a senior editor...

...68 October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator...

...Now I happen to know Bob, slightly...

...the bland Nineties are "a zeit with no geist...

...In the new revised version, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb is replaced by Lester Brown's Who Will Feed China...

...How much it brings to mind Malyina Reynolds and her song about the working-class housing, "little boxes made of ticky-tack...

...He writes nicely and not infrequently happens on the telling insight-such as one of the book's subthemes, that national borders in the Third World are often fictions bearing no relation to real divisions of race, creed, and history...

...The same might be said on a larger scale for the gaudy tourist resorts and boom towns that provide these once-poor peoples with incomes their parents only dreamed about...

...Just using that phrase suggests he wouldn't know a resource if it jumped up and bit him...

...Inside the limo are the airconditioned postindustrial regions of North America, Europe, the Pacific Rim, parts of Latin America, and a few other spots, with their trade summitry and computer information highways...

...mong the noteworthy qualities of Andrew Ferguson's writing is its AR freedom from cliches, bromides, and lazy phrasing...

...Ditto for resources, which Bob takes to be scarce...

...In his own words, "To be completely heartless about Africa, I mean to suggest, is to start down a path that imperils our own nationness...

...At the very top of this new pantheon is Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto...

...most of the time he doesn't even write once a week...

...But The Ends of the Earth pretends to social science, the argument being that if we in the developed world don't pay attention to the author's warnings today we shall all suffer for it tomorrow...

...Over population, resource scarcity, environmental degradation, sustainable development-all have a scientific aura g about them, but they are assumed rather ˆ Just keeping people here afloat will eynire the kind of help and investment the world is not likely to provide in a market- driven, globally linked economy in which West African countries no longer compete only with each other but also with developing states in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Latin America...

...Indeed, there is something Clintonesque about Bob's whole project, which involves not so much testing theory against reality as providing the color to one of Professor Homer-Dixon's many theses...

...The most recent professional expatriate to succumb to Lord Jim fever is Robert Kaplan, whose The Ends o f the Earth takes him through the mostly vile residue of onceglorious empires from the tip of West Africa through the Middle East and Central Asia to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia...

...On the Turkish Mediterranean, he describes one such city "on the brink of becoming one vast Brighton-a toxic holiday camp for the working classes on seven-day package tours...

...Here, for example, is how Bob describes Sierra Leone: In fact, just the oppo site is true: Only integration into the global economywhich means access to capital and know-how from other parts of the world-can do it...

...In many ways it is itself 66 0 c t o b e r r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator another rehash, this of the familiar "Spaceship Earth" so popular back in the 1970's: You know, imagine a spaceship with five passengers, and that one (representing the developed world) is hogging up most of the resources...

...Singapore was a swamp...

...Martin's...

...The problem is not that it doesn't perform...

...My own view inclines to that of the editor of the Ghanian Chronicle, Kwaku Sakyi Addo, who notes that though Ghana and South Korea started with the same GNP in 1957 when Ghana achieved its independence, Korea is now sending aid to Ghana...

...O'Rourke duces zany anecdotes of such invisible Atlantic Monthly Press 1213 pages 1$22 construction and perfect timing that we aren't always prepared for the punchline...

...Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction...

...And sure enough Spaceship Earth makes its appearance in The Ends of the Earth, in the form of a complaint about the disparity between the poor and the rich, who are said to consume 70 percent of the planet's energy, 75 percent of its metals, and 85 percent of its wood...

...This is because Ferguson is a writer who makes haste slowly...

...67 The American Spectator . October r 9 9 6 than proved...

...at another point he blithely declares that crop yields have already reached their "attainable limit...

...Today's story is very different...

...I believe in progress: not in the re-molding of human nature embraced by so many social engineers but the small, incremental steps, especially in economic life, that can make a real difference between generations in terms of opportunity, choice, and living conditions...

...Barbra Streisand's signature song is "People Who Read People...

...FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...

...True enough, he hedges his bets somewhat, citing Julian Simon and Barton Biggs, the chairman of Mor gan Stanley Asset Management, who argues that "in almost any way you care to measure, life is getting better for people in developing nations...

...the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth yields to Jessica Mathews and "Gaia" theory...

...The reason is that in today's economy, in which even the simplest of products has a complicated process behind it (offshore production, multinational components, increasingly sophisticated design), the value comes less and less from the physical inputs than from the overall process (design, production, shipping, marketing) and how these factors are put together...

...Now it may seem unfair to blame someone who has traveled to one place for not writing about another, and if this were only a travelogue it would be...

...The problem is that it performs all too well, allowing people who had previously been confined to Mao jackets the wherewithal to express themselves, which helps explain why faux Venus de Milos are popping up in front of restaurants all over Shanghai and Guangzhou, Good taste always lags good fortune...

...More recently, I stumbled across a Cambodia-based American who had submitted a serious proposal to persuade the country's ministers to forsake manufacturing altogether and instead turn the entire country into a gigantic theme park for Western eco-tourists...

...The book's dust jacket compares his chronicle to the works of Rebecca West, Freya Stark, and "the great explorer-writers of the last century," but the tone is more missionary than exploratory...

...But this is simply an aside...

...Only twenty years ago the World Bank, the U.S...

...BOOKS I N R E V I E W Doomsday Globaloney...

...Now, a wooden shack with a corrugated tin rooftop and (worst of all) a TV antenna on top is a sad sight to a visiting American...

...The • ' P • real tragedy of Africa is again just the ') opposite: that so long as these • V nations remain large' o ly outside the world • • s economy and otherwise have no compelling strategic value, they can slaughter themselves and it won't really matter to the rest of humanity...

...The point is that if you want to know how to do something right, you don't learn much from the losers...

...only a generation ago, they would have been out on the potholed streets with Africa...

...Unfortunately, none of these ever rises to a sophistication greater than the Lonely Planet travel guides because Bob insists on viewing them all through the gray-colored glasses imposed by his ideological assumptions: that modern development is inherently unsustainable, that catastrophe lurks just around the corner, that Third Worlders threaten everything by continuing to breed like rabbits...

...In the zero-sum dynamic favored by Kaplan & Co., prosperity is static and fixed...

...Those who believe in the market and man's ability to improve his lot wonder how much richer we'd all be if the other four astronauts were ever moved from the non-productive to the productive side of the ledger...

...Only this time what is being peddled is not Christianity but all the enthusiasms of the day: population control, the rain forest, women's education, the village farm, sustainable development...

...The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21 st Century Robert D. Kaplan Random House /4.76 pages / $275o REVIEWED BY William McGurn Plop an educated man in the middle of some Third World nation, and suddenly he begins to find plausible schemes that would have him locked up were he ever to promote them in his homeland...

...Asia circa 1955 was as wretched as any nation Bob gives us today...

...Early in his book, in Danane in the Ivory Coast, Bob explains his methodology, which is to forsake the air-conditioned comfort of a car for a stroll around town...

...Andrew Ferguson His attention to craftsmanship also proIntroduction by P .J...

...In this way we learn about the cheap office buildings of Tehran, the leaky toilets of Karachi, the Intourist Hotel in Bukhara, all somehow freighted with significance and all taken as dark omens of an even darker future...

...WILLIAM McGURN is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review...

...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...

...So what do they worry about today...

...This collection of thirty-two previously published columns and essays is rich with those distinctive freshets of prose that I have come to think of as "Andyisms": former NOW president Molly Yard is "the Mammy Yokurn of the choice people...

...But Bob is not interested in South Korea, so the remark remains only an anecdote...

...No wonder President Clinton has found Bob's message so appealing...

...The graying of Asia...

...The implication here is that ours is a rigidly segregated world, and that people are more or less condemned to their respective spheres...

...Two decades ago the developed parts of Asia (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea) all took overpopulation very seriously and some resorted to brutal measures to suppress it...

...But to the people who live in them these homes almost always represent a vast improvement over the leaky thatch roof or muddy floors they left behind...

...As for Hong Kong, it had no natural resources, a population that had been doubled in less than a decade by the influx of refugees, was dependent on outsiders for food and water, and saw its main market-China---taken from it overnight through a U.N...

...We shouldn't compare ourselves to those in the gutter but to those on the balcony," he tells Bob...

...South Korea was recovering from a devastating civil war, and Taiwan was expecting an invasion from the mainland...

...But that is of small comfort to Australians, who have seen their standard of Iiving decline from number one in the world at the turn of the century to tenth place in 1970 to eighteenth and still dropping today...

...What this means is that the future will see fewer workers on the bottom supporting more elderly at the top, with awesome implications for growth and taxes...

...It starts from the very first pages, where Bob takes as his paradigm the world as seen by Homer-Dixon: Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live...

...In a report entitled The EastAsian Miracle, the World Bank notes that between 1g6o and 1985, real income per capita "increased more than four times in Japan and the Four Tigers," to the point where Hong Kong's is larger than Mother England's...

...Unlike syndicated columnists, he does not write three times a week...

...The one astronaut who is rich will always be rich, and the poor astronauts will never get anything unless the rich guy is more generous with what he has...

...the greening of America gives way to the paving of the Third World...

...i The Un-Alchemist: Suffering Fools Deliciously a writer the first time around, but emerge Fools' Names, Fools' Faces in the fine-tuning of a second or third draft...

...By that definition Australia would be the wealthiest country in the world (as indeed the World Bank found, using that measure...

...What makes Asia valuable is that it changed the equation and escaped the kind of scenario Bob now lays out for Africa and other parts of the Third World...

...What those who invoked the figures failed to point out was that this one astronaut was producing 85 percent of the wealth while the others did almost nothing...

...The absurd part is that Bob thinks he's giving us something new, when what he is really providing is a rehash of all the scaremongers so popular in the I96o's and 1970's...

...Indeed, Japan is graying faster than Europe did, and China is hot on its heels...

...But I am a pessimist, not a masochist...

...An American reporter described it as a "dying city" and "a microcosm for all Asia...

...it is never applied to the places he visits in his book, and in any case in the very next paragraph Bob is right back onto Thomas Homer-Dixon and his "socialsocial" theory and "physical-social" theory...

...It is another one of these well-sounding phras es full of sympathy and yet 0 si• gnifying nothing...

...This is where I had to mop up coffee, REVIEWED B Y A Florence King...

...To return to Mr...

...This is how you learn...

...embargo imposed during the Korean War...

...Be forewarned: reading Ferguson at the table can he fatal, or at least messy...

...This is the kind of progress you see in Asia...

...No state-of-the-art this or that, no devils in the details, no rocketscientist analogies, no Yogi Berra-isnms, no calls for "more education," and no interminable quotations from punditry's favorite pony, Alexis de'Ibcqueville...

...As an Irish Catholic I have a soft spot for gloom myself...

...etc...

...The sweat pours from you, and your shirt sticks to your body...

...His account of his talk-show appearance with Gennifer Flowers initially makes the reader expect some sort of ultimate pronouncement on the character of Bill Clinton, but instead lie suddenly makes us privy to an off-air exchange between Flowers and himself: "I'll tell you," she hissed, "whoever said the truth will set you free was full of s...

...Not least of the rea sons Bob falls into these traps is that he never defines any of the obsessions that drive this book...

...Not always, Bob, not always...

...On top of that, he manages to include the most ridiculous explanation of a Graham Greene passage I have ever read...

...HomerDixon, it's worth noting how he slips the Pacific Rim countries into his stretch limo without explaining how they got there...