The Long View

I recently made a consulting visit to a respected university school of nursing where I found a useful research framework employed by the school and its faculty, a taxonomy of “transitions,” including not only health/illness transitions but also developmental (life stage), organizational, and situational (in the life or career of an individual). In this schema, successful transitions are marked by subjective well-being, relational well-being, and role mastery.

This analytical tool sheds light on two articles in The New York Times Magazinefor Sunday, January 27, 2008 on the state of the United States: “Old-School Economics” by Christopher Caldwell and “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” by Parag Khanna. Both writers demonstrate that our current presidential debaters are clueless about changes that have occurred over the past 20 years.

Caldwell points out that the transition to the “new economy” is for all intents and purposes, done. The U.S. has more choreographers than metal casters, more dealers at casinos than lathe technicians, and nearly three times as many security guards as machinists. In the past 55 years, manufacturing workers have declined from 30% of the U.S. population to 15%. In this decade alone the numbers of umps, refs, and other sports officials has nearly doubled, fashion designers have increased by half, as have landscape architects. At your service. (And what was the Clinton machine thinking when it tried to block caucuses of hospitality workers at their work sites in Nevada?)

Khanna offers an analysis of a geopolitical transition: American dominance has ended and its recent efforts at geopolitical hegemony have exacted a huge price. However, American pols keep partying like it’s 1989. The U.S. diplomatic corps has been gutted. We have lost many international students since we became less hospitable after September 11. The reality is that there are three spheres of influence: While there is still a U.S. sphere of influence (the “coalition of the willing”), it now competes (not always successfully) with the parliamentarian values of a European sphere, and a statist Sino-Asian sphere.

The North American “patient” still exhibits delusional thoughts about the past and needs nursing through this transition.