world capitalism is like a movie theater - the best seats do not necessarily go to the smartest, bravest, and most skilled, but to those who got their tickets first. That is to say, if everything else being the same as it is now, the US and, say, India or China swapped their places in the "world system" and it was the US trying to get to the markets already dominated by Indian or Chinese firms, US corporations would be a laughing stock of mediocrity and incompetence.
One may also asks how come that the US firms - with all their mediocrity and inefficiency - gained their dominant position? The answer, I believe is that their main competitors, Europeans, decided to obliterate each other in the World War II - which had a twofold effect: (i) it substantially weakened Eurpeans countries individually and collectively and (ii) it created an unprecedented opportunity for US firms to profit from that bloodletting.
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My experience moves me to agree with this. I think the "best seats in the house go to those who arrived early" metaphor is dead on.
When list members come down hard on American elites as "stupid" Doug often points out that they can't be but so dim since they enjoy tremendous wealth and global hegemony.
I believe this wealth and power is 'running on fumes' so to speak and not based upon self regenerating cleverness and innovative approaches to anything but manipulating perceptions.
The 1991 invasion of Iraq, built upon a false (but still, on the surface, to conventional thinking, acceptable) pretext was an example of an older generation's approach. The goals were specific and the war kept within certain bounds that made victory appear both real and clean to American eyes.
In contrast, Gulf War Two has corporate style hubris and incompetence written all over it - the triumph of the 'CEOs know best' approach over all technical advice from skillful people (such as the accurate warnings of various think tankers, military and intelligence anaylsts and Pentagon personnel).
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In my time as a consultant (large scale information systems - mostly *Nix but with Win32 thrown in the mix just because Microsoft is so everywhere) I've worked on assignment for at least 12 fortune 500 firms.
According to our national mythology these are supposed to be the very best of the best, managed by minds that tower above the petty concerns of groundlings.
Because of the highly visible nature of my work (often involving extraordinarily expensive projects) I'm forced to work closely with so-called "senior management" types and even, from time to time, CEOs.
I won't go on about how 'stupid' they are because that's not really the point. Of course, most of these folks went to sterling institutions, can spell large words, give smooth (or smooth enough) speeches and appear to be quite competent.
On the surface.
In truth there's something very interesting going on at many (probably most) American corporations: a reality divorcement is in effect. Executives at engineering firms know nothing about engineering. "Senior managers" at pharmaceuticals haven't a clue about how drugs are really made. CEOs and Senior VPs of power companies are confused and put off when told something can't be done because of the laws of physics.
The other day I sat in a trans-national conference call with a person blessed with the title of "VP of Security Engineering". She made wildly inaccurate statements about the operation of firewalls and related barrier technologies. This wouldn't be at all worth commentating on if she simply deferred to the judgment of her staff on complex tech matters and asked questions about managerial sorts of things. But she decided that she needed to actually engineer the topology.
And so, by following orders, experienced network engineers are creating an incredibly insecure system - one responsible for all sorts of frighteningly necessary things I don't even want to go into.
This may seem like a useless anecdote but there's a meta-lesson: the overriding of knowledge by bureaucracy and petty displays of Bonapartism is very, very common and an indication, to me, of the de-skilling of the American ruling class (who certainly, in earlier incarnations, during the building phases of US history, knew at least enough to pay attention to accurate information).
Surely this kind of thing has happened for many centuries in every culture but now, with all sorts of exquisitely complex and critical bits of the techno infrastructure (owned and managed by corporations) dependent upon the proper application of skill and knowledge there is less and less room for the the kinds of mediocrity I've seen in very environment.
As Chuck Grimes put it in another, related thread, profit and loss are all these men and women know. The details of the actually existing technology/systems that support profit and loss escapes them.
What happens to a ruling class that doesn't understand the material conditions and interlocked systems upon which their rule is built?
What happens to a system of global dominance that makes repeated mistakes based upon a non-understanding of cause and effect?
.d.